For retailers Black Friday generally refers to the point in the year when their balance sheets go from “in the red” to a positive “in the black” due to the huge increase in sales from holiday shoppers. (For a larger context on the origins of the term, History.com has a nice summary).
For B2B companies–whether you’re in the SaaS space, B2B product sales, or some form of professional services–the holiday season means something a little different. Not every brand will benefit from a cheeky holiday themed promotion (in fact, most won’t). Sure, you can run a culture-focused holiday themed newsletter, or some fun and spritely social media plays featuring the office dog wearing reindeer antlers, but when push comes to shove these will do little to impact your end of year performance.
With all that said, Q4 is still a critical moment for B2B brands to be thinking about their sales and marketing approach. Let’s look at a few B2B Q4 optimization strategies.
B2B Sales in Q4
While the period between Thanksgiving and the new year is typically slow for B2B brands, early September through Thanksgiving offers some of the hottest selling and closing months of the year. With January 1st fast approaching, sales reps push hard to make their end of year numbers before the holiday season begins and they run out of runway to close.
Why Is This the Best B2B Sales Period?
- Budgets are expiring at the end of the year, so your customer has some “use it or lose it” cash to spend. (Tip: Think about how your product or service fits into your audience’s end of year spending story. Give them ideas as to how they might use that budget effectively.)
- Decision-makers are planning for next year (just look at your marketing team), so they’ll be identifying the tools to help them become more effective in the new year.
- As you get closer and closer to the holidays you may have less active competition in your space – making it easier to be heard.
Two End of Year Sales Tips:
- If your top of funnel efforts have been driving real qualified opportunities to the plate, the end of the year is a critical time for sales reps to be laser focused on closing business.
- For those sales people with a less active pipeline and longer sales cycles, spend this time setting up meetings for early in the new year. With the craziness of the holiday season, and the rude awakening that often comes with going back to work January 2nd, it’s easy to lose momentum in your pipeline. Having a meeting already on the books is a great way to ensure you get back in front of your prospects as soon as their head is back in the game.
Top 5 B2B End of Year Marketing Strategies
For B2B marketers, the end of the year tends to be more reflective and strategic. While the sales team is trying their hardest to close out their pipelines and bump their yearly numbers, marketers are busy evaluating the effectiveness of the past year’s marketing campaigns and plotting to enter the new year with a cohesive marketing and media plan. Don’t overlook some of the less pressing but important planning tasks below.
1. Draft YOUR MARKETING PLAN
The most obvious end of year activity is building your annual marketing plan for the coming year. Before presenting your B2B marketing plan to leadership:
- Reflect on the past year’s performance
- Identify your most (and least) successful campaigns
- Lay out your goals for the new year
- Map out a path to success
- Seek the budget required to execute the plan
Building your annual marketing plan can be time consuming and stressful. It’s common for marketing teams to halt progress on everything else while building it out.
2. RE-PRIORITIZE YOUR KPIS
The new year is a logical time to change how you quantify your marketing success. Especially with the advanced metrics and custom reporting features available in GA4.
Over the last 10 years the phrase “data driven decision making” has lost a lot of its meaning, and the mindset behind it has caused a lot of marketing leaders to only execute on KPIs that are easy to measure. It feels good to report to leadership that “MQLs increased 45% year over year” – but often these metrics aren’t linearly correlated with an increase in proposals, subscriptions, sales, or revenue. Tailor your campaigns to maximize your bottom line, not your KPIs.
It can feel risky to invest heavily in channels and media types that aren’t begging for leads or can’t be measured as easily as your performance channels. Since you’re already working on your annual plan and setting goals for the new year, this is a great time to ask yourself: Is how you measure marketing effectiveness right now truly representative of the value it brings to your company’s bottom line?
3. CLEAN UP YOUR DATA
Over the course of a year, a lot of useless contact and account data can make its way into your CRM. Now is a great time to clean up your marketing data to ensure it isn’t bogging down your automation, sending unnecessary messages, and mis-identifying your contacts when you start next year’s campaigns.
Here are a few ways to clean up your marketing data:
- Find and delete duplicate contacts
- Validate your contact list
- Unify formatting across your database (Are you using title case on all names? Do you have first and last names broken into two fields for every contact?)
- Set up rules and automation to maintain a clean contact database
4. GET FEEDBACK FROM YOUR SALES TEAM
Sometimes the most efficient way to get feedback on your performance is to go straight to the people it impacts most, your sales team. As we mentioned, all of those MQLs don’t mean anything if none of them turn into real opportunities or closed deals. Oftentimes, salespeople have valuable subjective feedback that gets swept aside in our quest to be “data-driven”.
So, while your sales and marketing teams may be focused in different areas this time of year, it’s important for sales and marketing leadership to set aside time to review this year’s performance and align their teams toward next year’s goals.
5. THANK YOUR CUSTOMERS
In the craziness that comes with the end of the year it’s easy to forget that you already have paying customers. Customers that you worked hard to get, who PAY YOU MONEY. Marketing isn’t just about new business, it’s about relationships.
If you have a dedicated client success team that lives outside of your marketing org, they should already have this covered. If not, take time to reach out to your valued customers with a thoughtful and authentic message of thanks.
Start the New Year with a Clear Marketing Vision
Looking for support and guidance with your marketing strategy in the new year? Technology changes the landscape daily and having a responsive digital marketing agency that provides holistic support across all your B2B marketing channels can be key to meeting your goals. Contact Gemini for help with planning, AI automation, campaign creation, and reporting. We want to help your business grow in the new year!
