The new buyer journey: Is marketing the new sales?

Estimated reading time
4 minutes
4th December 2019
Author: Nick Mason
Posted in: Education & Upskilling

A huge surge in all things digital has transformed sales and marketing teams. In the old days, a good salesforce could make up for a bad marketing team. Now, marketing must step up to the plate. They must equip buyers with all the knowledge they need before sales can make their move.

Technology has empowered consumers to travel much of the buyer journey on their own. As a result, marketing, sales, and the wider business must readjust. This raises two questions: Are salespeople an endangered species? Is marketing prepared for its new responsibilities?

The new buyer journey

If we look back to when sales did the brunt of the persuasive work, we can see how much things have changed. Sales used to be a valued source of information from beginning to end. There were limitations to the level of research a buyer could do. This meant that potential buyers relied on sales and wanted to engage with sales early in the process.

Meanwhile, marketing raised enough brand awareness to drive buyers to seek out salespeople. After that, it was all up to sales to drive revenue. 

The digital boom of the last couple of decades has drastically changed this. Everyone has virtually unlimited access to online content, reviews, testimonials and other materials that have replaced face-to-face interactions.

Buyers now prefer to independently research brands and products from the safety of their computer screens before they make a purchase. The likes of Amazon and Google have transformed marketing, sales, and the entire buyer journey in B2C, forcing traditional brands to keep up.

The B2B world increasingly faces similar changes. Sales are still involved in the buyer journey, but their involvement is pushed further and further along the funnel. Their relationship with buyers has changed. Marketing meanwhile picks up the slack that this change has created, giving them more responsibility than ever before.

What happened to sales?

The vast majority of transactional selling is now completely automated. This forces salespeople to reevaluate their role. 

The exception would be some B2B products and services. Some products are complex and expensive, requiring a knowledgeable salesperson. However, even that is evolving. In fact, in a survey that gave buyers a list of 10 resources to solve their business problems, talking with salespeople was ranked 9th in preference:

That’s not to say people don’t want anything to do with salespeople. CSO Insights found that about 70% of buyers said they preferred to wait until after they already had a clear understanding of their needs before they engage a seller. The seller still has value, but it comes later in the process.

When people identify problems, they take to the internet to research solutions. Here, they find content created by marketing. The sales function is no longer required as much in these situations. However, when it comes to offering solutions to problems people don’t know they have, the salesperson is still important.

While research shows that people are “too busy” to talk with salespeople who are selling a product, they’re much more likely to speak with salespeople who offer new insight to their business. The sales role retains its value by evolving into a more consultative role, offering guidance and advice to buyers on issues that they weren’t aware of. Sometimes you have to create a need before you can fulfill it.

Is marketing ready?

With the buyer journey now driven by self-education, sales has been pushed back in the engagement phase. A salesperson is ineffective unless you can successfully get someone far enough through the journey to speak with them. If marketing can’t get prospects to this stage, they will be playing a huge role in the failure of their business. This shift has moved the spotlight firmly on marketing.

But how is marketing coping with this? A recent report by Deloitte found that less than a third of CMOs feel very confident about their ability to demonstrate the financial impact of their team, while only 5% agree that they can make a significant impact on strategic decision making within their companies.

A study by Forrester, commissioned by us at Turtl, found that marketing can improve their position within their companies by offering the right kind of insights that help close business. But, they found that 94% of B2B firms struggle with generating insights from marketing activities that could help sales close deals.

Marketing has the potential to drive business growth with these insights, but clearly the majority of marketing teams haven’t been able to do that just yet. Why?

The study found that there is a marketing-sales disconnect between what insights are considered the most useful, which could suggest that marketing is focusing on areas that sales do not think helps them close deals and therefore drive business growth:

If you’re interested in learning more about the different priorities of sales and marketing, you can get your hands on the full study here.

Bringing sales and marketing together

Before, marketing functioned at the very top of the sales funnel and sales took care of the rest. Now, sales and marketing must work together in the middle of the funnel to get leads through to those final stages.

Is marketing the new sales? Yes, and no.

Consumers are continuously researching throughout the decision-making process. During this time, marketing has to keep them engaged with impactful content and messaging that maintains interest in the product. Meanwhile, sales needs to be the human presence in all of this. They need to educate, offer insights, and build the relationships that take their prospects over the finish line. How effectively they can do this depends largely upon the data offered by marketing, into how their content is engaged with.

Both functions have evolved to match the shift in the buyer journey. As a result, sales and marketing are closer than ever before. However, research suggests that there’s still a long way to go to align the two teams.