During the most recent recession, a subset of companies grew in excess of 100% per year. We are not talking about social media companies like Twitter, Facebook et. al. We are talking about B2B companies with real recurring revenue streams and high customer retention.

After a fair amount of research, I took a few moments to distill how the sales and marketing organizations of these companies function.

Ratio of Marketing & Sales Headcount:

The ratio of sales and marketing people was at least 1:1

KPI for Adding Salespeople:

The KPI for adding salespeople was based on the effectiveness of the company to create demand. The tipping point for adding sales people was triggered when the existing sales staff could not keep up with the leads produced by marketing.

Detailed Description of the Ideal Customer:

These companies did not try to be all things to all people. At a minimum, they defined the customer by persona and developed empathy maps. Marketing content was further segmented by the type of buyer (Decision Maker,Influencer, Advocate, End User) and their stage in the buying process.

Marketing Ratios:

These companies invested  a significantly higher percentage of their marketing budget on non-traditional (inbound) marketing vehicles in comparison to traditional marketing vehicles (outbound). 

Furthermore, these companies hyper-focused on becoming the hunted and not the hunter; deploying marketing strategies that attracted customers vs. pushing prospective customers to their doors. They used a wider array of lower cost content creation channels like blogging, social media, free e-books/whitepapers, SEO, Web 2.0, et. al.

SMarketing Department Presence:

Sales and marketing often worked in tandem and were aligned. In many cases, they were aligned to the point where sales and marketing shared the companies’ revenue goal. Whereby marketing was responsible for producing sales ready leads, and sales’ job was to to close the sales ready leads. This model allowed these companies to maintain a much lower customer acquisition cost than companies that had unremarkable sales growth.

CRM:

These companies all used marketing automation and ran a closed-loop customer acquisition system. While some had more sophisticated systems, each had solid systems and tools in place to prevent prospects from slipping through the cracks; especially the contacts that weren't ready to buy now but were prime targets for future customers.

Sales Enablement:

These companies invested heavily to insure the sales teams followed a consultative/collaborative sales process. They also used technology like Hubspot and VisibleGains to modernize the sales team and provide in depth insights about prospective and existing customers’ digital behavior.

Inverted Sales Funnel:

Once a customer was acquired, they had proactive strategies in place to up-sell, cross-sell and drive referrals to other customers.

In the end, SMarketing is how fast-growing B2B companies made it happen during the recession. If you look at the bold headings above, how would you score yourself in each?

Download our SMarketing Infographic to use as a checklist for making progress towards the habits of fast-growing companies.