Revenue Marketing, the future of B2B marketing
Revenue Marketer, Chief Revenue Officer, Revenue Operations. There’s no hiding that the ‘revenue’ prefix is all the rage in the B2B space - and it should be!
As pioneers of ‘Revenue Attribution’, we at Dreamdata are elated to be playing our part in this B2B revenue revolution.
But what does it mean? What does it actually mean to do Revenue marketing? And what does it take to be a Revenue Marketer?
At the most fundamental level, the revenue marketing revolution is about B2C-ing the B2B marketing function. Where the B2B marketing function is brought into step with Sales and completely aligned with business goals in a way B2Bs haven’t previously been able to.
In this post, I’m delving into the heart of Revenue Marketing, uncovering what it is, why it matters, and how you can transform your marketing org into a revenue marketing one.
What is Revenue Marketing?
Revenue Marketing is a B2B marketing approach focused on driving measurable business value. It moves marketing away from a siloed ‘upper funnel’ function focused on lead or demand generation to a holistic one, working in step with Sales and Customer Success as part of a singular revenue generation and retention ecosystem.
In this way, revenue marketing revolves around understanding the impact of marketing efforts on the entire customer lifecycle, from awareness and acquisition to growth and retention.
In essence, this represents a shift towards B2C-ing the B2B marketing approach, where Marketing is a core component of revenue generation rather than a cost centre, as has long been perceived in B2B boardrooms.
Critical to the revenue marketing revolution is data. The capacity to collect, combine and transform data from across the whole B2B go-to-market tech stack - Sales and CS inclusive - to connect marketing efforts with customer acquisition further down the pipeline. In fact, data has been one of the biggest impediments to rolling out revenue marketing any sooner.
How does Revenue Marketing differ from other marketing approaches?
Is Revenue Marketing not just lead or demand gen marketing with ‘revenue’ slapped on in front?
Well, kind of.
Perhaps it’s easiest to think of revenue marketing as upgrading lead and demand gen activities by tying these to concrete business outcomes.
That is, the marketing activities themselves aren’t necessarily different from what you’re running in your lead or demand gen plays - it’s still about driving people to your brand by using an array of channels - it’s just you’re now measuring success in a drastically different way.
As we’ve already covered, revenue marketing puts revenue outcomes front and centre in measuring success. In doing so it connects with the rest of the revenue organisation in a way that no previous marketing approach (demand gen, lead gen, or branding) does.
This distinguishes revenue marketing from traditional lead or demand gen in three ways:
1. Revenue marketing operates as part of the ‘revenue function’.
In revenue marketing, objectives are not distinct from those of Sales, CS and sometimes even Product. Instead, all these teams are operating as one revenue function focused on delivering measurable business outcomes.
In this sense “revenue” means “holistic” or “unsiloed”.
As Lars Grønnegaard, CEO Dreamdata puts it,
“the revenue movement sees one end-to-end process of driving revenue, from the moment a prospect considers a purchase (marketing), to when you close the deal (Sales), to their renewal and upsell (Customer Service). None of the three can individually claim revenue. And all three will underperform if they do not collaborate on the goal of revenue.”
2. Works on the whole customer journey - with data from across the B2B go-to-market tech stack.
Because of this holistic approach, revenue marketing, by definition, works with data from across the B2B customer journey.
Unlike a traditional lead or demand gen setup, it’s not enough to link a paid ad campaign to a demo conversion or sign-up. Instead, revenue marketing works with a singular continuous customer journey, linking marketing touches (wherever they take place in the buying journey) to revenue.
To do this, the revenue marketing function connects data from every tool across the revenue tech stack (more on this below).
3. Revenue metrics track performance and optimisation efforts.
Unlike traditional marketing approaches, the revenue marketer uses metrics that measure performance against business outcomes. From the premise that generating leads that don’t buy is not valuable to the business.
So in revenue marketing it’s less about traffic, clicks and conversions and more about ROI, ROAS, CLV, CPA, CAC, and of course, revenue impact.
What are the benefits of Revenue Marketing?
So what benefits does this revenue marketing modus operandi actually bring to the B2B marketing organisation?
Complete Marketing and Sales alignment
Firstly, you are going to achieve the ultimate marketing-sales alignment. In fact, your whole revenue team will now be marching in step.
You’ll not only be aligned in goals and targets, which themselves are aligned to business objectives, but you’re also aligned in the strategies for achieving this. I.e. what does a quality lead that ends up buying actually look like? How many of these need to be generated by Marketing and closed by Sales in order to hit revenue targets? Do these deals then retain their subscription and likely to upsell?
This also brings the benefit of mutual accountability.
Through revenue marketing, Marketing becomes fully accountable to Sales for the quality of leads, and Sales accountable to Marketing for closing these.
That is, once a lead is accepted as Sales Qualified, i.e. they are approved by Sales as ICP and ready to buy, Marketing can no longer be blamed for generating bad quality leads. It is for Sales now to close these - with support from marketing through BOFU content or even retargeting ads.
Singular, end-to-end customer journey
With a revenue marketing mindset, organisations prioritise the customer's journey. This means guiding potential clients smoothly through each phase of the funnel, ensuring they have a consistent and engaging experience from initial contact to closing a deal.
Even after a lead transitions to the sales team, the role of marketing doesn't end. Revenue marketing champions the idea of continuous engagement, ensuring that leads are nurtured, informed, and primed for conversion throughout the sales process.
All teams are looking at and working off a singular customer journey - which means marketing is not only involved in awareness and acquisition but also in nurturing and even retention.
Clean, unified, account-based go-to-market data
All of this of course involves a clean, unsiloed, account-based data set.
Revenue marketing - by definition - requires collecting, joining and cleaning all the relevant data sources in the B2B go-to-market tech stack.
So, by implementing a solution to do this data crunching, whether through an off-the-shelf tool like Dreamdata, or in-house, the B2B revenue org as a whole ends up with a large, reliable data set for running any and every go-to-market report imaginable; a RevOps dream come true.
Measure the impact of efforts against pipeline and revenue
By leveraging this data with analytics and attribution, revenue marketing allows for pinpoint accuracy in attributing sales to specific campaigns or initiatives. This granular insight is invaluable, plus the plethora of revenue metrics you’re now able to track (more on this below) enables teams to understand which tactics are most effective and deserving of further investment, which need further optimising, and which should be scrapped altogether.
Improved boardroom perception of Marketing
At the executive level, revenue marketing represents a shxift in how marketing is viewed—from a traditional cost centre to a revenue-generating function of the business.
Revenue marketing catalyses this paradigm shift. Gone are the days when marketing was simply seen as an expense column on the balance sheet. Now, Marketing is armed with dollars and deals, making it much easier to recognise Marketing as a direct driver of business growth.
How to become a Revenue Marketing organisation
In this previous post, we developed the Revenue Feedback Loop, as the effective process for becoming a revenue-driven marketing org.
The Loop is rooted in four key stages: analysis, planning, action, and revenue, all of which are linked together in a cycle that constantly feeds back into itself.
But the essence revolves around two principles: solving the data problem and tracking relevant metrics. Once you’re doing these two, the rest will fall into place.
Solve the data problem
The primary challenge that needs to be solved to become revenue marketers is the data problem.
As already mentioned, the main obstacle to doing revenue marketing has been connecting data from across the B2B revenue tech stack. What’s worse, the average number of tools on the B2B go-to-market tech stack is still growing.
To see the efforts that helped bring deals over the line, B2Bs need to break the data siloed in these tools and map every touch on the customer journey.
This requires either spending time and resources to integrate, clean, join and model this data in-house, or going for a tool like Dreamdata.
Only with this solution can you finally attribute marketing effort to pipeline and revenue, and so adopt a revenue marketing approach.
Track and analyse relevant metrics
Once your data is flowing you need to be able to track and analyse relevant metrics. It is these which are going to enable your revenue marketing team to optimise efforts according to impact on pipeline, revenue (and retention).
So, out with traffic, clicks and conversions and in with:
Marketing sourced revenue: To track the revenue generated from leads that originate specifically from marketing channels, such as content campaigns, digital advertising, or events. From this, you can ensure that resources are optimally allocated to strategies and channels that demonstrably drive growth.
Marketing sourced Sales Qualified Leads: SQLs are those leads that the sales team deems ready for selling. Tracking this reveals the quality of leads marketing is passing on, ensuring that alignment between sales and marketing I’ve been discussing in this post.
(Learn more about setting up a go-to-market funnel, here →)Return on Investment (ROI): To help evaluate the profitability of your marketing investments, relative to their costs. This can be either at the channel (including field marketing), campaign, or function level and enables teams to understand the direct financial impact of their efforts and adjust strategies based on what provides the best return.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): To measure the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. It's essential for evaluating the effectiveness of specific advertising campaigns and determining where to allocate advertising budget.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): To measure the cost-effectiveness of converting leads into customers, considering both marketing and sales expenses. See how you can automatically measure CAC here.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): Enables you to predict the net profit from the entire future relationship with a customer. When juxtaposed with CAC, it provides insights into the long-term value and profitability of acquired customers.
Cost per acquisition (CPA): Similar to CAC, CPA helps businesses evaluate the efficiency of specific marketing campaigns in relation to the value customers bring. This ensures resources are allocated to campaign strategies that provide a favourable return on investment.
Time to Revenue: By tracking the average duration from lead acquisition to deal closure, teams can identify bottlenecks, areas for process optimisation and better predict revenue generation. Learn more about this powerful metric here →)
Revenue Marketing team structure
What does embracing Revenue Marketing mean for your team structure?
Of course, this will depend somewhat on your existing setup and approach - remember Revenue Marketing is more an upgrade to lead and demand gen than a replacement.
But here’s a template for a B2B Revenue Marketing team:
Chief Revenue Officer/ VP/ Director of Revenue Marketing:
Provides strategic direction, oversees the entire revenue marketing process, and ensures alignment with broader business objectives. Communicates with leadership and allocates resources.
Key Responsibilities: Strategy development, budgeting, team leadership, performance tracking, and cross-departmental collaboration.
Revenue/ Marketing Operations:
Oversees marketing technologies and analyses data to optimise performance across the entire customer lifecycle, from lead or demand gen to retention.
Key Responsibilities: Marketing automation, CRM management, funnel analysis, and KPI tracking.
Content Marketing:
Crafts compelling content to engage target audiences and drive them down the sales funnel.
Key Responsibilities: Content creation (blog posts, whitepapers, case studies), content strategy, SEO optimisation, and content calendar management.
Digital Marketing:
Manages online advertising campaigns and digital channels to generate qualified leads.
Key Responsibilities: PPC advertising, social media marketing, email marketing, and analytics tracking.
Product Marketing:
Serves as the critical bridge between the product development team and various marketing, sales, and customer-facing teams.
Key Responsibilities: Crafting product positioning and messaging that differentiates the product in the market, developing go-to-market strategies, creating sales collateral and tools that assist in driving the sales process, gathering customer insights to inform product development, and collaborating closely with product managers to align marketing strategies with product features and benefits.
Event Marketing:
Spearheads the strategy and execution of events to promote a product, service, or brand, ensuring that the company's presence at events aligns with its broader marketing and business objectives. Event marketing is a great way to get a competive advantage due to its personal interaction.
Check out this guide on how to run succesful B2B marketing events.
Key Responsibilities: Selecting appropriate events (trade shows, webinars, conferences, or proprietary events) to attend or host, coordinating logistics, designing event materials and promotional assets, setting and tracking event KPIs, collaborating with sales and product teams to showcase offerings, and post-event lead follow-up and analysis.
Business Development Representative (BDR)/ Sales Liaison:
Acts as a bridge between marketing-generated leads and the sales team, qualifying these leads for further engagement and ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and optimised throughout the buying journey.
Key Responsibilities: coordinating with both sales and marketing for seamless transitions, lead outreach, qualification, appointment setting, and feedback to the marketing team.
Crucially though, while each team member (or team function, if you are a larger organisation) has a distinct role, as revenue marketers they collaborate closely with each other and with the wider revenue organisation (Sales, CS and Product).
They also need to be working out of the same analytics/ attribution platform, to ensure that marketing strategies translate into revenue as set out in the article.
Revenue Marketing Conclusion
In this post, we’ve learned that revenue marketing operates at the intersection of marketing and sales; leveraging data, technology, and strategy to drive measurable revenue outcomes.
In this way, revenue marketing repositions the role and impact of marketing within B2B organisations. By fostering closer ties with Sales and focusing on measurable outcomes, it ensures that marketing efforts directly correlate with tangible business growth and keeps all teams accountable to revenue.
However, arriving at ‘revenue marketing’ isn’t altogether easy. It requires first and foremost the de-siloing of the revenue tech stack.
That is, any B2B marketing team looking to transition towards the revenue marketing approach needs to collect, process and model the account-based B2B customer journey data, from anonymous first touch to closed-won.
From this data set you’re then able to run the necessary analytics to track and measure metrics tied directly to revenue generation, such as marketing-sourced revenue, customer lifetime value, ROI, ROAS, and CAC.
Once this is in place, it’s a question of adjusting the team’s mindset to one that’s revenue-focused, adapting your reporting, calibrating your optimisation towards revenue metrics, and collaborating with the rest of the revenue function.
Start your Revenue Marketing journey today with Dreamdata!
