We introduce the factors important in creating a marketing message. You'll learn why knowledge about the sales cycle is crucial in developing content for B2B customers. Shortly, we uncover stages in the B2B purchase process to provide a brief guideline on where to conduct research in your industry to better match customer expectations. What comes out of this is to create a more relevant message for your customers, which gives you the chance to create more personalized content and benefit from being a market leader.

Developing highly relevant communication that cuts through the clutter is one of the greatest challenges for B2B marketing. The reason for this is the vague differences in competitors' products. For companies in industries such as IT, heavy industry, logistics, and technology, it's difficult to outperform competitors in the market. When a new technological product is introduced by a small company, it's likely very easy for large companies to replicate. The fact that B2B company offerings are significantly replicated proves that there is no such thing as "stealth marketing," as sales objectives constantly change.

The frequency of changes depends on industry to industry and the nature of the product or service being sold. Therefore, there's no one-size-fits-all solution. Companies must create a strong offering tailored to the specific characteristics of the market. Likely, a better offering to generate inquiries depends on the product or service, as well as understanding the key elements that drive customer behavior. If companies know these elements, they can better understand which marketing elements are important to the target audience.

• Lead qualification - in this stage, general marketing activities are briefly evaluated based on the quality of leads, as inquiries are qualified to the point where sales managers can approach or reject them. Within that element, the role of marketing is to acquire the right data and support sales based on lead nurturing and other activities.

• Proposal/quote - once leads are qualified, sales managers approach prospects with company presentations that should result in quotes and planning potential Proof of Concept (PoC) and other actions that help close the deal. In that case, marketing continually drives sales with the right materials to better present the company's products and services.

• Purchase - the moment when companies can finalize their marketing efforts and define sales results. Yet, the role of marketing is not over. At this point, marketing begins a long journey to create substantial value from the recent deal for future customers. This is the moment to determine how much of the total revenue comes from marketing efforts.

Understanding the stages of the sales cycle can uncover segments that perform better than others. It can better shape offerings for generating inquiries that can precisely hit the right spot in market demand. With that said, companies can attract better customers with marketing materials like credible whitepapers, more customized case studies, and better-tailored B2B blogs. Marketing can encourage newsletter subscriptions with more suitable content.

Digital marketing can be involved in creating a product or service showcase that presents their solution on the website in a more concrete way (mobile app builder). Even brochures, which are increasingly squeezed, can be better developed based on knowledge of customer sales cycles. That knowledge gives companies a different definition of segments and creates perspective with opportunities to develop more adequate content and win more customers.