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For companies deeply embedded in a partner ecosystem like Microsoft's, the 'qualified lead' is often an internal partner employee who can unlock business. BlueVoyant focuses heavily on marketing to these internal champions, treating them as a primary audience to influence and enable.
A crucial but often overlooked B2B marketing goal is to build "buyability." This means establishing enough brand trust and authority that your internal champion can confidently defend their decision to purchase your product to the rest of the buying committee. It's about arming the champion.
Research shows half the buying committee consists of "invisible buyers" (e.g., C-suite, procurement) that sales can't access but who hold veto power. Marketing's primary ABM role is to build brand trust and familiarity with this hidden cohort to prevent them from killing a deal due to unfamiliarity with your solution.
The most effective partner marketing focuses on internal orchestration before external activation. The primary role is to align internal teams—sales, product, events—around a joint value proposition with the partner. Success hinges on making everyone's job easier and uniting them towards a shared 'North Star.'
To win enterprise deals, Bland maps a prospect's org chart and subscribes everyone to a custom newsletter with deal updates. This creates org-wide visibility and builds broad political capital, making it too politically expensive for a single anti-champion to kill the deal.
A powerful LinkedIn advertising strategy is to create content aimed at a target company's employees, designed to be forwarded internally to the actual decision-maker. Ads can directly ask, "Does your CFO know…?" This leverages internal networks to bypass gatekeepers and reach the ultimate buyer.
Avoid pursuing prosumer and enterprise motions simultaneously. The optimal sequence is to first build massive bottoms-up love and brand trust with individual users. This creates internal champions within target companies, providing crucial momentum and turning a cold B2B sale into a pull-based motion.
For a $175M company like BlueVoyant, the MQL isn't dead; its definition is just highly specific. An 'MQL' is strictly defined as a qualified engagement signal from a person at a company on their ideal customer profile (ICP) list, effectively making it an account-based metric.
Rather than approaching executives first, prospect the individual contributors who will actually use your solution. By creating internal champions at the user level, you generate a 'gravitational pull' that brings you into executive conversations with pre-built support, making decision-makers more receptive to your message.
Founders whose startups were acquired by large enterprises can become your most powerful internal champions. They understand the startup mentality, know how to navigate internal politics and procurement, and are often motivated to bring in better technology. Actively seek them out.
Your ideal champion inside a large company is often someone who secretly wishes they'd founded a startup but is too risk-averse. They are drawn to the founders' ambition and will advocate for you because they want to feel part of the startup journey vicariously.