The B2B Marketers’ Dilemma in the Echoverse: New Rules for Marketing and Sales Alignment

October 28, 2024 | 4 minute read
Ling Zhang
Product Marketing Manager – Oracle Advertising and CX
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In today’s B2B landscape, marketers face an evolving and increasingly complex challenge—one that goes far beyond traditional marketing models. We’re operating in the “echoverse,” where communication flows in every direction, creating an intricate web of feedback loops between corporate communications, consumers, the media, user-generated content, AI agents, and more. Every touchpoint influences and amplifies the next, making the buyer journey more fragmented and nonlinear than ever.

The result? Buyers have become empowered to hop between channels seamlessly, often bypassing traditional brand-controlled touchpoints altogether. In this environment, B2B marketers are being asked to do more with less, as pressure for growth intensifies.

Register now to discover how Eloqua Guided Campaigns empowers non-technical users to easily create brand-approved, personalized email campaigns that engage high-potential buying groups and generate conversation-ready opportunities.

The Lead-Centric Model Is Outdated

Despite this new complexity, many B2B organizations are still solely relying on marketing automation platforms designed primarily for lead generation—a model that no longer fits the realities of today’s buying behaviors. In a 2024 survey, 62% of CEOs named growth as their top priority, yet 47% of CMOs said their marketing organizations are still perceived as cost centers rather than profit generators.1,2

This misalignment highlights a fundamental issue: the traditional focus on lead-centric or account-centric marketing doesn't reflect the true dynamics of the B2B buying process, where decisions are made by entire buying groups, not individuals.

Unifying marketing and sales helps ensure efforts are tuned to acquiring more customers, not just filling the funnel with leads.

To bridge this gap, marketing and sales teams need to shift from lead-centric strategies to opportunity-centric marketing, where the focus is on addressing the needs of the entire buying group—collectively, not as fragmented accounts or leads.

Marketing to Existing Customers: A Different Game

Another key challenge lies in how we approach marketing to existing customers. Traditional marketing automation platforms excel at creating sophisticated, multistep, cross-channel customer journeys. While this works well for attracting new customers, it often falls short when applied to existing ones. Marketing to your existing base demands micro-moment orchestration—the ability to respond in real-time to critical moments of need or opportunity, rather than following over-engineered, pre-set journeys.

Sell to the customers you know and can proactively engage at critical moments.

Think about today’s B2B buyers: they jump between brand-owned and non-brand-owned channels, consuming content independently and making decisions outside the traditional funnel. Designing intricate customer journeys is increasingly difficult when buyers dictate their own path. Instead, marketers need to lean into first-party customer data and intelligence, adopt agile, flexible strategies that allow them to respond to customer actions in real time, particularly when it comes to existing customers.

The Power of Distributed and Democratized Marketing

Growth at all costs is no longer an option. The pressure to drive precision revenue is higher than ever. B2B marketers are being asked to think—and act—more like sales teams to drive growth together. But here’s the truth: most marketing teams, especially in B2B, are too small to scale personalized interactions the way sales teams do.

This is where distributed marketing comes in. By empowering non-technical users, such as field marketers or sales teams, to engage with customers and prospects without needing deep technical expertise, marketing teams can extend their reach. Tools like Oracle Eloqua’s Guided Campaigns is built to democratize the marketing process, allowing distributed teams to execute campaigns and generate sales-ready opportunities while maintaining brand consistency.

With step-by-step guided workflows, Eloqua Guided Campaigns empowers non-technical users to create on-brand marketing experiences at a fraction of the time—scaling personalization and engagement efforts without overwhelming central marketing teams.

The Future of Sales and Marketing Alignment is Not Alignment

To succeed in this complex echoverse, B2B marketing and sales teams must work together seamlessly toward shared goals. Yet, A whopping 65% of sales and marketing professionals believe there is a lack of alignment between the sales and marketing, which poses a major obstacle to realizing full growth potential.3

The key to solving this issue is unifying around the customer, rather than trying to align with each other. It’s time to move beyond the idea of alignment as merging two separate functions. Instead, both teams must operate from a shared, opportunity-centric understanding of the customer. This requires breaking down silos and collaborating based on a unified view of customer data, shared objectives, and the needs of the entire buying group. Oracle Unity Customer Data Platform makes this possible by transforming enterprise-wide customer data into actionable, trusted, and AI-powered customer profiles.

The Path Forward: Embrace Flexibility, Scale with Precision

B2B marketers need to adapt to this new reality by shifting their focus from traditional lead generation to opportunity-driven engagement. Flexibility and real-time responsiveness will become the pillars of successful marketing strategies. To achieve this, first-party customer data will be critical, along with distributed marketing that allows for scalable, precise engagement with prospects and customers alike.

At Oracle, we understand the magnitude of this shift and have invested heavily in building solutions that empower B2B marketers to thrive in this environment. With tools like Unity Customer Data Platform and Eloqua Guided Campaigns, we enable marketers to harness first-party data, respond to micro-moments, and create deeper engagement across every stage of the customer journey. By democratizing the marketing process, we can help your team deliver personalized experiences at scale and drive growth with greater efficiency.

The echoverse may be complex, but the future belongs to B2B marketers who can navigate it with agility, opportunity-centric focus, and real-time responsiveness. It’s time to embrace the new rules of marketing and sales alignment: unification centered around the customer.

1. Gartner CEO Survey, 2024

2. Gartner CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, 2024

3. Forrester’s Q2 2024 Sales And Marketing Alignment Survey

Ling Zhang

Product Marketing Manager – Oracle Advertising and CX

Ling Zhang is the product marketing manager for Eloqua Marketing Automation Platform and B2B marketing technologies at Oracle. She leads analyst report marketing, go-to-market strategies, and sales enablement at Oracle CX Marketing.


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