Being forward-thinking and prepared for the future is crucial to success. In this episode of B2B Marketing Agency Insights, Austin LaRoche, CEO of ATAK Interactive, gives a glimpse of what B2B marketing will be like in 10 years and how you can start to get ahead now.
Video transcription below:
Welcome back to B2B Marketing Agency Insights. I’m your host, Austin Laroche, CEO at ATAK Interactive. Today, I want to look into the future, 10 years from now. It’s 2030 (hoping that the coronavirus is gone or at least somewhat under control), and we are looking at what a B2B marketing agency will look like.
What’s funny is the B2B marketing agency of 2030 will solely be a sales enablement agency. Over the next decade, we are going to watch technology, like HubSpot and Salesforce, take the silos of sales and marketing and bring them together. We are going to see the rise of a “smarketing” department or a growth department. People in the B2B marketing space who are going to get paid will be the ones who simply put their value on how much they can help you grow, how their services support your growth, how their KPIs are conversion-focused – well beyond something like an MQL – and are all about “How will our work and our support help you sell more?”
I don’t really know anybody who thinks differently. If you look at HubSpot and how they have changed some of their education, they started to back off from the inbound methodology a lot. The reason why is because marketing agencies are increasingly transforming into these great sales partners. We went over what a sales enablement agency will do in the Sales Enablement video, but it is only going to get more and more intense on this side.
The big difference is that expectation, in my opinion. What are you looking for in your marketing agency? I have been in so many different meetings with companies who talked about past agencies they have worked with and being really excited about things such as ranking high and relevant searches. But when they captured those keywords, it didn’t lead to more business. Maybe it was because their landing pages weren’t converting. Maybe it wasn’t because their product was that good. But the marketing agency didn’t have an answer; all they would say is “Well, we brought you the traffic. You didn’t convert it.”
The thing that I can’t wait to see with marketing agencies is eliminating the excuses – every excuse that salespeople have hated for so long. These excuses are all going to go out of the window because really great marketing agencies are going to help enable those sales and they are going to get those results. They will not blame the lack of results on a sales team or some service they could be offering.
It is going to be really cool to watch the B2B marketing agency landscape change because in 2030, every great agency is going to be a sales enablement agency. Every great agency is going to plant their flag in the ground, in the fact that they can help you grow. They can show you exactly how to do it and if something doesn’t work along the way, there is no way out for them. What they do has to succeed.
That is what a great sales enablement agency is going to do and that is what 2030’s B2B marketing agency is going to look like. All right, thank you guys again for listening today. I’m Austin LaRoche saying, “Good luck growing.”
