In B2B organizations, moving from a focus on individual leads in the demand process to a focus on buying groups and demand units represents a major change. Modifying current processes and systems to adopt the new buying group perspective can be difficult, especially if the organization attempts to change everything at once by treating the switch as a single milestone event. Taking a gradual, phased approach can make the transition easier and more practical. In this report, we explain how to leverage the teleservices team as the first step in an incremental evolution from individual leads to buying groups.

Terry Flaherty

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Kerry Cunningham

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Vicki Brown

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Amy Hawthorne

A service-level agreement (SLA) defines opportunities and outlines the requirements for passing an opportunity, with one or more buying group member attached, from one team to another in the context of the B2B Revenue Waterfall™. Buying group SLAs, like lead-based SLAs, must be endorsed by both teams and should be clearly documented to ensure clarity, accountability, and alignment. Organizations should have multiple SLAs — one for every handoff that moves opportunities downstream toward close. SLAs also govern how and when to pass back stalled opportunities. In this report, we outline the basic elements of SLAs with a focus on buying group opportunities.

Amy Hawthorne

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Vicki Brown

B2B pipelines are not built with either leads or accounts; pipeline and revenue are generated by identifying and converting opportunities. Organizations encounter a variety of opportunity types, including opportunities to win first-time customers, retentions, and cross-sell and upsell opportunities (see Figure 1). Virtually all B2B revenue plans contain a mix of these distinct opportunity types — each with its own characteristic conversion and velocity rate as the opportunity moves from being targeted to closed/won. As a result, the mix of opportunity types in an organization’s revenue plan strongly influences revenue engine performance. In this report, we examine B2B opportunity types, their main variants, and the characteristics of each that impact how revenue engines perform.

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Kerry Cunningham

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Amy Bills

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Vicki Brown

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Cristina De Martini

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Terry Flaherty

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Lisa Nakano

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Mike Pregler

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Steve Silver

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Anne Slough

Organizations should use the Forrester B2B Revenue Waterfall and demand programs together to ensure long-term success. These two concepts are not replacements for each other, but instead complement and rely on each other. In the B2B Revenue Waterfall, opportunities with associated buying group members move together, which enables the flow of revenue to be tracked from cold to close. The waterfall needs demand programs to attract and engage buying group members so that opportunities can progress. Demand programs need the waterfall to determine where each opportunity is and how to address buying group members appropriately. In this report, we examine how the B2B Revenue Waterfall and demand programs combine to drive revenue engine performance.

Laura Cross

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Vicki Brown

Most B2B organizations today use individual lead scoring rather than capture scores at account, solution, or opportunity levels because most demand processes focus on individual leads. Even revenue development teams direct all their qualification efforts to specific individuals. By focusing on the entire buying group, sales, revenue development and marketing can better understand the true interest in an organization’s solutions at an opportunity level. In this report, we explore how B2B marketers can move from the world of individuals to a buying group world by paying attention to three types of buying signals.

Vicki Brown