How financial services firms can deliver modern B2B experiences
When it comes to acquiring high-value B2B accounts, marketers are challenged to align their efforts with the sales team to ensure that every interaction builds on previous engagements. This focus not only deepens relationships with prospects but also engages members of the buying committee and other stakeholders who may influence purchases — to ultimately drive more effective deal closure.
This new approach demands personalisation for every buying group and contact to keep prospects engaged. This is especially important in an industry as regulated and complex as financial services.
In this article, we’ll cover four essential strategies to help you navigate these challenges and optimise your approach:
- Consolidating account buying group members such as CFO, treasury manager, controller and more in a single unified profile
- Speaking directly to B2B buying committee members
- Gaining a clear view into your B2B customer journey
- Getting started with Adobe tools for the financial services industry
Consolidate account buying group members such as CFO, treasury manager, controller and more in a single unified profile
B2B buying journeys are complex and involve many stakeholders. While a B2C prospect can open a checking or savings account in just a few minutes, a company applying for a loan for a large real estate development project may have a sales cycle of six to 12 months.
To improve experiences for your B2B prospects and clients, you need a way to manage your person and account data in a single platform. If that data remains in separate, siloed systems, activating it to deliver better experiences is fragmented, manual and slow.
A customer data platform (CDP) streamlines your customer data management to help you to discover who your customers and prospects are, what they need, what services they already use or are evaluating and who the key decision-makers are. A CDP that captures behavioural data in real time can help you to get a complete view of an account’s readiness to purchase while keeping individual contacts engaged. With insights into which pages on your website specific contacts have visited and which ads they’re clicking most, you can deliver content and messages that speak directly to individual concerns across the account. This can help you to get a complete view of an account’s readiness to purchase while keeping individual contacts engaged.
Leading CDPs can integrate data from all the platforms your sales and marketing teams use to build out complete client and prospect profiles including your CRM, marketing automation platforms, web analytics tools, email marketing systems and social media channels. The profiles also allow you to trigger upsell campaigns for small and medium business (SMB) services in a timely manner. So, when an authenticated individual SMB user signs up for a business checking account for a given client account, you want to know whether that account qualifies for certain offers — based on their product ownership, business credit classification and Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) or North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code — and deliver them at the right time.
How to speak directly to B2B buying committee members
Once your data is unified you can clearly understand each client or prospect and place them in buying groups based on their product interests or stage in the buying journey. This will help you to determine which groups are high value and which members have the highest intent. Marketers can then precisely target buying group members with the content that will be most relevant and engaging for their point and role in the buying process using a journey management solution.
For example, let’s say someone visits your website. Using your CRM data, you identify this user as the CFO of a company you’ve been targeting for your services. Your marketing automation system can then orchestrate a multi-channel campaign to reach that CFO with content that addresses their specific questions about your service. This could include case studies, webinars and white papers that speak to the CFO’s needs. You can then target that CFO with social media ads and customise their website experience with features related to the services they’re considering. Behavioural triggers can also let the sales team know when it’s time to keep in touch.
Before the sales call, the salesperson can access a dashboard that shows all recent interactions with the CFO and other buying committee members, highlighting their key pain points and the competitive solutions they’ve been researching. By tracking which interactions helped move prospects along in the funnel, you can optimise your engagement strategies as you go and ensure your sales and marketing teams are able to co-ordinate their efforts. You can repeat this process with every member of a company’s buying committee and speak to their individual needs and concerns.
How to gain a clear view into the B2B customer journey
To understand your customers’ journeys, you need to be able to track every interaction in real time — whether it’s a website visit, ad click, email open or in-person conversation. This begins with a cross-channel customer analytics tool that helps create clarity within complex B2B buying journeys. You can see where prospects are coming into the funnel, which touchpoints move them closer to purchasing and where they’re falling off. This supports data-driven decision-making on channel investments, prospect communication and customer experience enhancement..
You can also use your engagement data generated from lead-based campaigns to further qualify potential buying group members in order to deepen engagement with newly acquired contacts as they progress through your journeys.
For example, customer analytics could identify that prospects who received a service recommendation based on their existing product usage were twice as likely to use additional services. You could then test putting more emphasis on those recommendations or sending them earlier in the sales process to further improve your conversion rates.
How to get started with Adobe tools for the financial services industry
In the complex B2B financial services landscape, delivering personalised, account-based experiences is crucial for success. By consolidating data into a unified customer profile, speaking directly to buying committee members and gaining clear visibility into the customer journey, financial services firms can significantly enhance their marketing and sales efforts. Using customer data platforms (CDPs) and analytics tools helps companies create tailored experiences, optimise engagement strategies and ultimately drive more effective deal closures. As the industry continues to evolve, adopting these approaches will be essential for financial services firms looking to stay competitive and meet the unique needs of their B2B clients.
Adobe offers a unified platform for understanding your customers, managing that data in one place and using it to deliver engaging, relevant experiences across the account as they progress through your sales cycle.
Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform is a CDP that helps build the profiles that power real-time experiences. It unifies data from many sources into customer and account profiles that are ready for activation anywhere.
Adobe Marketo Engage is a B2B marketing automation tool that helps align your sales and marketing teams. It can orchestrate and execute cross-channel campaigns for acquiring, nurturing, expanding and retaining customers.
Adobe Customer Journey Analytics is a customer analytics solution that helps you quickly understand your customers’ journeys, both online and off-line, giving you the insights to meet them with incredible real-time experiences at scale.
Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition is an AI-powered customer journey tool that lets marketing and sales teams collaborate to engage buying groups within target accounts with personalised journeys more precise demand generation.
Learn more about how Adobe helps businesses in the financial services industry.
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