How to Build a B2B Marketing Plan That Drives Results
Where to start with B2B Marketing Plans
We asked Steven Manifold, founder of B2B Planr and a two-time CMO, for his guidance on building effective B2B marketing plans. Drawing on 25 years of practical experience, including at some of the world’s largest and most respected brands such as IBM and Pegasystems, he shares a roadmap to building better B2B marketing plans.
The framework that follows provides structure to those starting on a planning journey. Whilst it isn’t a paint-by-numbers template, it does offer tips, potential gotchas, and best practice shaped by real-world experiences.
Conduct research to understand gaps, opportunities, and risks
Before defining any plans, start by expanding your understanding of your business’ context.
Externally, that means identifying the key industry trends, the buyer persona, their pains, challenges, and desires. Which markets are already buyers of your category of products? Which markets are emerging? How does your competition stack up and perform across these markets? What strengths or weaknesses do they have?
Using AI can greatly help in this research. Make sure to validate and question the data or summaries it produces, but combing through entire competitor or client review websites, or finding market data or targets that fit your ICP, can be hugely accelerated with good AI practice.
Side tip: don’t obsess too much about competitors. Sure, it’s important to know who they are, what choices your customers have, and why they may select an alternative. But there are two truths about competitive marketing:
Showing up is half the battle.
Google found after extensive research that even when a consumer has a favourite brand, introducing an alternative second brand will take roughly 25% of sales (from people that state they have a preference and that preference is available!).
Source: Google Think – The Messy Middle.
You can’t control your competitors.
They will have different-sized budgets and teams, different goals, and different histories. Their product is different, and their users will experience it in different ways. These are all outside of your control. Sure, be aware and well versed on their capabilities, their strengths, and possibly most importantly any potential weaknesses or gaps, but don’t worry about things you can’t control.
Internally, that means an honest appraisal of what is working, and what isn’t. How effective are current systems and processes at identifying, acquiring, and retaining customers at an affordable price and in a scalable, repeatable manner? What is the strength of the existing content, messages, and activities?
It also means looking beyond marketing – where are sales hitting their quota? Where are they falling short? What is the price elasticity of your offer – at what price point do customers transition from a ‘yes’ to a ‘maybe not’? Which accounts buy the most from you – how does that shape your definition of the ideal customer profile (ICP)?
Key questions to ask at this stage are: where are my best leads coming from? How much are they costing? Which channels aren’t delivering and why? You should be able to articulate the current system of building potential business.
Ultimately, after the research, you should have a clearer understanding of product-market fit. That is to say, are there customers out there that need or desire the thing you sell? If so, can you identify them, and can you acquire them profitably?
Set objectives and align goals between marketing and the business
Next up – set some goals. What do you want your B2B marketing plan to achieve? There are two pitfalls to watch out for here.
Firstly, remember that marketing is about long-term brand building as much as it is about short-term performance. Focus on only one or the other at your peril. Don’t take my word for it – plenty of empirical studies have been performed to show a balanced approach is necessary, something like 60/40 should be considered (you could choose to shift focus more to long-term brand if you're a start-up, or short-term performance for more established businesses, but avoid getting to 80/20 in either direction) . My favourite study on this topic is Binet & Field (worth a read or AI synopsis): IPA - Les Binet & Peter Field.
Focus too much on brand building and you’ll quickly have spent lots of money with not much to show for it. Focus on performance marketing (activity that can be directly linked back to revenue), and you’ll end up in an arms race without the flywheel effect of a compelling, sustainable brand doing some of the heavy lifting for you. Think: would you rather still be spending 6-figures on ad campaigns a year from now, or would you prefer more of your business to come from organic sources?
Secondly, not aligning your goals back to revenue. Remember: businesses have only one purpose – make money. Any marketer with some leadership experience will have no doubt encountered the incredulous faces of colleagues on the broader management team after self-congratulating themselves on the massive increase in website session times only to realise revenues are declining and profits at risk.
Whatever is in the marketing plan must support the growth of revenue for the business. That might be next month or next quarter from rolling out a new campaign, or three years from now after growing your brand presence in a new market. Sometimes the linkage is difficult, intangible, or opaque. But everything ultimately leads back to revenue – even if you need some sensible KPIs in the middle to bridge the gap.
Build a revenue bridge to make performance goals attainable
I often use a revenue bridge to help make that alignment to wider corporate goals. Starting with current expected revenue. That might be Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) from product or service subscriptions that will be pretty well known in advance.
Remember to account for expected churn – so a business with $10m ARR but a 5% churn rate can reasonably expect baseline revenues for next year to be $9.5m. This baseline revenue might be made up of previously booked business that has yet to be delivered (typical in services organisations), or even an expected level of repeat custom. It takes some confidence to say ‘we’ll likely get $1m next year without changing anything’, but for established businesses, the data may be available to make this a solid starting point.
Next, you need to get the corporate goals – what will revenues be 12 months from now? Are you expecting 10% growth, 30% growth? Whatever the goal (hopefully grounded in some logic based on the research step), that creates your gap to bridge: desired revenue – expected ‘do nothing’ revenue. As a marketing leader, it’s your job to formulate the plan to bridge that gap.
Prepare to get chunky
Let’s say there is $1m in revenue between what you expect next year, and what you want. Now we need to figure out where that $1m comes from. Bridging the revenue gap typically involves breaking down the size of the challenges into more manageable chunks. Sometimes it may be one chunk – new product into a new market = $1m. Possibly. But likely quite risky. More likely it will come from a combination of the following strategies:
Price increase – raising prices 2% may have close to zero effect on customers’ willingness to pay, but on a base revenue of $10m ARR, it closes the $1m gap by $200k without much energy or effort. It’s easy to overlook this growth lever, and can feel bad to ask for more money for the same thing. Remember, prices go up. It’s highly likely your customers are expecting to pay more in the future than they do now. Don’t undersell your value and always be clear in any price increases the rationale for doing so.
Reduction of churn – perhaps a program can be executed that will reduce churn. Proactive outreach to users nearing the end of an agreement period. Additional services or support to ensure clients are getting the most possible value and your products or services are as ‘sticky’ as possible. Reducing that churn from 5% to 4% may be the equivalent of $100k per annum. Great, only $700k left to bridge now from our original $1m gap and we haven't even got to spending marketing budgets yet.
New markets – expanding your existing offering into new markets can build additional revenue streams. This may be new geographic markets, a new adjacent industry or sub-industry vertical, or new client segments (e.g. from enterprise to midmarket or vice versa). With some research from step one, it should be clear what the potential prize could be, but also the likely investment and effort needed to build revenues from new markets.
New products – either using your existing products to solve new challenges for your existing clients, or adding features and functions that have value. Perhaps a new version with more or fewer capabilities that offer new entry points or pricing structures for your existing market.
Marketing programs – for marketers, the focus here will be on what programs can be executed that will drive demand either in a highly predictable, scalable way, or by optimising execution to allow more marketing to reach intended audiences. These could be competitive offers, introductory offers, additional or different channels to market, or perhaps a shift to account-based marketing (ABM).
At the end of this exercise, you will have identified the strategies (with revenue goals assigned) that will help you bridge the gap between current performance and desired performance. Strategies, by definition, are choices. You are explicitly deciding to do A, at the expense of not doing B because you believe the return is greater or more certain. If your revenue bridge is a wish list of everything you could possibly do to grow revenues, you’ve missed the point. Time to circle back and ask those tough questions. Not ‘what are we going to do’ so much as ‘what are we not going to do’.
Next up – let’s document the decisions made so everyone is clear on the direction of travel.
Write this step down: document your plan
It’s surprising to me (both from empirical research studies and personal experience) how many companies don’t have a documented plan. Sure, someone knows (in their head) what they want to do. They might even have an idea of what the outcome could be. But they haven’t written it down, and they more than likely haven’t shared it with anyone else.
The importance of having a plan is clear. Many studies show that those organisations that have a documented marketing plan have higher revenue growth rates than those that don’t. Sometimes as much as 90% faster growth! Read an article on the link between planning and success here: CMSWire Article.
One of the challenges of planning is where do you write it down? Do you put it in a spreadsheet, text document, or slide deck? Document the detail, send it around, then forget which file(s) have the latest version. Often these plans get out of sync, are hard to share with stakeholders, and difficult to visualise what’s happening and what the results are.
Many organisations are switching to online project management tools. Better for collaborating and keeping up to date, but not built with marketers in mind and often lacking the ability to see results in real time alongside the plan. Storing it in CRM, automation, or digital asset management platforms can solve the ‘what were the results’ question, but are too limited or fail the collaboration and visualisation test, especially if plans include activity types outside the scope of the tool being used.
Increasingly, marketers are turning to dedicated marketing resource management platforms (MRM). They help you store your plans, track your budgets, and measure results from lots of different systems all in one place. For large enterprises, there are some good options (Uptempo, Hive9, Marmind, Planful to name a few). These are comprehensive tools ideal for large teams and large marketing spend. For smaller teams with smaller budgets, the options are more limited, which is why we built B2B Planr—to cater for teams that want a centralised planning tool with integrations to data, but without the lengthy set-up, onboarding, and enterprise pricing.
Now, just having a documented plan does not guarantee success, but it sure makes it easier. It also increases the accountability between teams. Here’s another top planning tip: successful marketing leaders are those that have a seat at the table. Having a clear plan with up-to-date details of activity and outcomes helps improve communication and collaboration with the extended team (from the CEO to the finance director)—all of whom will have a role to play in the plan.
Track results (with least amount of effort)
Ok, so you have a plan and you’re off to the races. What happens next? We need to know if the plan is working. Is it on course to deliver the outcomes we need? Does it need supercharging or fuelling with more budget or content? Do we need to stop something that isn’t working or implement a fundamental course correction?
It is only possible to know the answers to these questions if you’re tracking the outcomes.
Using a centralised tool, data warehouse, business intelligence, or judicious use of APIs to aggregate data in one place is often a smart move. Find ways to automate reporting with the least amount of regular effort—time invested up front in building reports and dashboards that automatically update can pay dividends later. It reduces time spent on finding the problem and increases time spent on solving the problem. And there will undoubtedly be problems or things that need changing.
Prepare for change
An often-quoted mantra for planning is that "no plan survives the first contact with the enemy". Meaning: knowing what you want to do on paper can be very different from what happens in the real world.
Be prepared to monitor and adjust plans regularly. Try not to change your goals if you can help it (unless absolutely necessary in the face of big changes or disruptions to your business or market), but adapting your plans is both inevitable and necessary.
Use the data you collect on performance or spend to help guide where these changes might be necessary. Consider shifting budgets from less well-performing tactics to more high-impact channels. As new influencers or partners for your client base emerge, think about how they may be incorporated into existing plans or how you might extend plans into new areas.
Bonus: consistency in execution, habits, and marginal gains
A final thought about plans. Often the difficulty in planning is not the planning—it’s the doing.
There is a much-quoted (if ambiguously sourced) mantra in business communities that: "I could leave our strategy on a plane seat and it wouldn't matter. Unless someone had our people, culture, and resources, they couldn't execute it."
This sentiment underscores the idea that the true competitive advantage lies not just in the strategy itself, but in the unique capabilities and culture of the organization that executes it. In my experience, there are two considerations this throws up:
Firstly, if your plan is not aligned to your business and its situation (see Step 1: Research), you are almost certain to fail. Any plan must be relevant and achievable in the context of your business.
Secondly, execution really matters. Those organisations that don’t have a plan (and experience less good results than those that do), aren’t failing because of the lack of a plan per se. It’s because they don’t know what they should be doing day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month to achieve the goals. Investment and focus get diluted, and teams chase the next shiny thing without asking—are we meant to be doing this, does it get us closer to our goals?
Good execution is about being consistent and forming good habits. If your plan is to grow organic traffic to increase inbound leads that will convert at a high rate to business… well, you have to produce quality content, ask for backlinks, and engage audiences—every day, week, and month.
Often, results are not seen until months 6–12, when they ‘hockey-stick’ due to the compounding effects of all those smaller actions consistently executed in months 1–6. Having a plan helps give you the confidence in those early months that you’re on the right track and that continuing to execute will build towards the goals set.
Where to start and useful resources
There are some great resources available to understand the nuances of planning—a lot from academic studies, but also from the active business community.
My top three tips to get started:
Find appropriate reading from trusted sources - many links in the article or other B2B Planr blogs
Ask for expert help—often free of charge if you approach the right companies
Invest in useful tools to help minimise effort and maximise results