We asked 5 B2B marketing and sales experts from very diverse backgrounds what predictions they have for B2B marketing & sales in 2020 and what will be the focus for them in the new year.

1. Building a Marketing Data Lake

"At Pozyx, we are now looking into building our own marketing data lake. Unlike the conventional methods of storing and analyzing data in B2B context such as data warehouses, a data lake stores all kinds of data in raw form.  That includes unstructured data from social media, web server logs, mobile devices or perhaps the text note fields in the Hubspot CRM.

The proliferation of martech makes marketing data lakes a necessity and the use cases are many: personalizing the sales experience, getting a more holistic view of all decision-makers in a B2B sales process, deep segmentation, better B2B marketing attribution and even social sentiment analysis. Luckily technologies like AWS S3 have drastically lowered the cost of implementation of these concepts."

Michael Van de Velde - VP Sales and Marketing, Pozyx

2. Gating the Content

"In B2B circles, some are still skeptical about asking for someone’s e-mail address (or other contact details) in order to get access to content related to your business. Regardless of it being rather low in value, like a one-page data sheet, a pricing list or just a regular brochure, in 2020 you should make sure your content gets gated and you ask for the e-mail address. One extreme example in this strategy is Proof. Considered by Hubspot as one of the best digital marketing tools in 2019, this company even gated the intro video on their homepage.

There is one exception, blog posts. Typically, I identify how I would like to get compensated for the effort done by the marketing team. Blog posts will boost your SEO, which results in Google paying with organic traffic, hence no need for additional compensation. So my rule for 2020: don’t work for free, make sure your marketing team gets 'paid' for it efforts and if that is with an e-mail address, it's a reimbursement I’m more than happy to accept."

Ruben Gees, Director of Marketing, THEO Technologies

3. The Hero's Journey

"Purchasing products is a journey, and if you can make the customers the hero of that journey, it allows for a personalized experience. Brands will cast them / their sales person as the mentor (the Gandalf, if you will) and the opponents as tricksters and shapeshifters. What does this have to do with marketing, you ask?

Achieving this requires a marketing funnel that allows for a personalized, multi-channel, sales-play driven experience. Successful companies will identify a dozen sales plays and “journeys” and will tailor the experience across channels to get their customers there. What I call “front door” apps covering each part of the consumer experience will be critical to succeeding at this, and tracking where they are both in the buying journey as well as the overall messaging journey.

Finally, advocacy — the sequel — and referrals are massive. HubSpot derives 60% of new leads from free trials. Top digital banks are getting 60% of their new, LTV-positive customers from referrals. We can’t forget that the hero’s journey doesn’t stop at the purchase, but goes right the way through the sequel."

Christina Tubbs, B2B Tech Executive and Director of Closerr.co

4. Blurred Lines Between B2B Marketing and Sales

"There’s no doubt that more communication across teams is beneficial for any business, but with all the technological advances in the last few years we’ve seen more collaboration and less silo mentality than ever.

Now that CRMs and cloud-based everything makes information that much more readily available, I believe 2020 will be the start of an era where lines become blurred as to when and where the roles in Marketing and Sales start and end.

Companies who can master this ebb and flow will be the ones to flourish and pull ahead of their competitors."

Jun Song, Content Marketing Lead at Proxyclick

5. Marketing Attribution

"Competition for online attention keeps heating up. Prices for ads are going up everywhere. All tools are generating increasing amounts of data. Each tool and platform claim to be telling the truth. 

My prediction for B2B growth in 2020 is that more and more business will start to put focus on owning their own data. B2Bs will start to drive their own 1st party data graph. This will enable them to make their own analysis of what’s going on and understand how they make revenue.

You can’t trust ad platforms to tell the objective truth. You can’t trust search engines to tell the truth. The only sustainable way forward is to start gathering all the data yourself and start making sense of it.

With more clarity into what’s really going on, B2B growth will go from vanity metrics like volume of leads, social followers, clicks etc. to tangibly connecting the attribution-dots between actions and actual revenue generated."

Steffen Hedebrandt, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-founder, Dreamdata.io

6.  The End of Martech Fetishization

"From building marketing data lakes to constructing a hero's journey to owning your own data, it's clear that this year's predictions revolve around the customer as the center and their many touch points. B2B companies that optimize for growth will more than ever want sacrifice what's sexy and 'fun' in short-term for what will bring results in the long term.

The key will be to start from high-level business-level goals in terms of revenue and customer acquisition and then translate them into marketing objectives that are ambitious, but realistic; achievable, but relevant. Proper marketing attribution from first to last click will play a bigger role than ever as businesses keep waking up to the fact that the value ladder in B2B has many detours as well as multiple 'climbers' within a single business.

Finally, the fetishizing of martech as a magic bullet will reach its pinnacle, and we'll start seeing a consolidation, as executives (again) realize that tech stacks lacking the human touch and a seamless customer journey still do not guarantee success."

Filip Galetic, Chief Growth Officer at Filip Galetic Digital

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Now read the second part of our 2020 B2B marketing predictions, and get in touch if you'd like to be featured in another blog post via hi@filipgaletic.com.