For marketing teams focused on complex B2B sales, improving ROI often isn’t about being super strategic or really smart with budget, it’s about fixing things when deals get stuck or lost. There is a real problem in B2B marketing that’s inherently about overcoming the challenge of long sales cycles.
With long timelines and multiple decision makers, touchpoints are often disconnected, which leads to lost interest or confusion on the part of even the hottest leads. A worrying 43% of B2B marketers report that their companies have lost sales as a consequence of not having necessary content at the right time for a specific customer. In high-stakes deals, every touchpoint should justify its place, but audience fatigue, marketing misalignment and long gaps can simply kill momentum.
Generally, a B2B sales cycle can range from a few weeks to several months. However, for high-value or complex solutions, the sales cycle can extend to six months or more. In industries like manufacturing, enterprise software, or large-scale service agreements, cycles can even extend up to a year.
It’s just a fact of B2B that complex products or services require more time for evaluation and decision-making. And with multiple stakeholders in the buying group, extended approval process and layers of industry-specific regulation, it’s not surprising that the sales cycle can go on for months.
Why long sales cycles break down
Sometimes long sales cycles break down on the buyer side because of unexpected personnel changes, shifting business goals or economic and geo-political factors. But from a marketing perspective, just keeping up awareness and relevance in long cycles, can seem like a herculean challenge. And even if that side of things runs smoothly, it can all so easily fall down with the hand-off and drop-offs:
- Great ad, but it goes to a vague landing page
- Awesome whitepaper download, but no follow-up
- Beautifully timed sales call, but it’s totally generic.
Each missed moment in the sales cycle adds friction and erodes trust and credibility, which are paramount in sales as they form the foundation for a strong customer relationship.
ABM: overcome the challenges of long sales cycles
To overcome all the challenges of long sales cycles, where there might be multiple stakeholders, more B2B marketers are investing in account-based marketing (ABM). Unlike traditional lead generation, ABM treats high-priority accounts as individual markets, enabling marketing and sales teams to deliver tailored messaging at each stage of the buying journey. There are three different approaches with ABM:
One to one. Focusing on one account: going in deep, personalizing the messaging and custom crafting the content. This can build great relationships.
One to a few. Broadening out to a small number of companies, but still personalizing to a quite deep level. It offers targeted scalability.
One to many The broadest ABM approach: you can’t customize in the same way as the two other approaches, but you can still personalize using tools to deliver true scalability.
If you want to overcome the challenges of long sales cycles and achieve effective ABM campaigns, you need really smart touchpoints and highly targeted activation
With long sales cycles, B2B marketing – particularly ABM – lives (or dies) at every touchpoint. Each one is a test of relevance:
- Is your production education really showing prospects how you can help them overcome their challenges and achieve their goals?
- Are you really listening to your prospects’ needs so that your nurturing is truly targeted and personalized?
- And are you providing the right evidence from customers and experts to deliver high value social proof?
What do smart touchpoints look like in complex sales?
The first rule of smart touchpoints for long sales cycles is to understand your audience – it’s essential to map content to all the specific buying roles. This means creating tailored content that resonates with each key player's unique needs and concerns. This approach enhances engagement, improves alignment between sales and marketing, and ultimately increases the likelihood of conversions.
Within a buying committee, each person will have a different role – user, influencer, decision-maker and champion – and so will have specific interests, pain points and priorities. So, crafting content for a CFO might be focused on efficiencies and savings, whereas it’s about technical capabilities for a CTO. You need real insights and understanding to properly match, for example:
A Champion: Case studies proving successful outcomes in their specific area
A Decision-maker: ROI examples highlighting the business value of your solution.
A User: Product demonstrations and user cases
A Budget Holder: Cost comparisons and budgetary analysis
Design your touchpoints for stage-specific needs
Your touchpoints and content are not just tailored to the specific buying roles, but also to their different needs at each stage of the journey. Getting this right requires deep understanding of when each person needs business case details, validation, reassurance etc. Need states map the funnel journey:
Awareness: Problem identification
Touchpoints: Programmatic, targeted paid social, content syndication, industry reports, blogs, thought leadership content, and case studies.
Content: The problem/pain points and the potential for a solution.
Consideration: Solution evaluation
Touchpoints: Website, Webinars, case studies, free trials, product demos, white papers, testimonials and retargeting ads.
Content: Information to help buyers evaluate the solutions.
Decision: Purchase
Touchpoints: Nurturing emails, social selling, sales sequencing, sales interactions, product demos, trials proposal and pricing.
Content: Facts, examples and validation to influence the purchase decision.
When it comes to targeting, it’s important to build and validate your target account list (TAL), prioritizing accounts based on their value: 1to1 = high value, 1to a few = mid-value, and 1 to many = scalable. Here are some simple steps to get the right account target list:
- Work with sales to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) using the scoring system
- Segment your TAL using data-driven Insights
- Prioritize accounts with shared characteristics
- Measure engagement and continue to optimize your TAL
Think: personalization, personalization, personalization
Personalization is the key thread that runs across smart touchpoints. It’s the backbone of ABM and B2B marketing that effectively navigates long sales cycles – 88% of B2B marketers report measurable campaign improvements thanks to personalization.
Customizing your communication to suit each B2B customer has to start with data. You need lots of it and the right tools and platforms to make sense of it. Smart data fuels the personalized content that delivers smart touchpoints. Personalized content and experiences will lead to stronger relationships, more leads, and better results.
This is an example of effective personalization:
Website: Display content based on browsing history, industry, role, or other data points.
Tailor pricing and product recommendations. Search results optimized to individual needs.
Email marketing: Personalized subject lines and content based on interests, behaviors and past interactions. Sequence content to their buyer journey.
Paid media: Targeted ads based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. Link to content that addresses specific needs, including white papers, webinars, blogs and cases.
Sales interactions: All pitches, nurturing and communication tailored to specific needs and need states. Fully aligned with cross-channel orchestrated marketing.
Customer support: Personalized support based on individual customer history and needs. Tailored resources and documentation to help customers resolve issues efficiently.
Cross-channel orchestration: where campaigns fall short
So, you have the data (and the right platform and tools), a truly personalized approach to content and engagement, and all the right touchpoints – you’re there, right? Unfortunately, not. In a long sales cycle, even the best planned campaign will fall over if it’s siloed across channels and functions. Cross-channel orchestration is the solution, whereby you coordinate all your channel activities to provide a seamless experience for all your leads. The effectiveness of cross-channel orchestration lies in its holistic view of the buyer journeys, ensuring consistent messaging across all touchpoints.
To ensure effective cross-channel orchestration across paid media, email nurturing, SDR outreach, event follow-ups etc, you need the right technology. This could involve customer data management, analytics, segmentation and workflow tools to enable you to design, execute and measure your campaign.
Long sale metrics: track the journey, not just the lead
And when it comes to measurement and metrics, you also need to be in it for the long game. This means tracking the full journey, not just the lead. By doing this you will benefit from a more holistic view of the buyer’s journey and experience, from initial engagement to purchase and beyond. To effectively track this journey, you to focus on the time between meaningful engagements, funnel velocity and multi-touch attribution:
Smarter touchpoints and targeted activation drive ABM success
How to overcome the challenges of a long sales cycle is an issue facing many of today’s B2B marketers. ABM is perfectly designed for enterprises with complex sales cycles and large and diverse buying committees. However, ROI in ABM is often determined by the smartness of your touchpoint planning and the precise targeting and personalization of your activation. If you get this right, you will enable the true strategic alignment between sales and marketing teams required to focus on high-value accounts. This will deliver stronger customer relationships, increased conversion rates and sustainable growth. If you are experiencing challenges with long sales cycles and want to invest in ABM, then talk with an expert at Luxid.
