We’re excited to announce the launch of the Enterprise Growth Alliance, a one-of-a-kind collaboration created to help B2B companies grow by changing the way they market and sell.
We all know the B2B buyer’s journey has changed. But let’s be honest. Even though we’re all aware of this shift, businesses continue to market and sell in the same siloed, old-school way. Marketing and Sales keep investing more hoping for better results. Instead, we see enterprises struggling to use their technology in an integrated way and scrambling to adapt to the ever-changing ways customers discover brands and make purchase decisions.
Iron Horse founded the Enterprise Growth Alliance to address this problem.
We’re super excited to be working with our founding partners—Demandbase, TechTarget, Uberflip, Drift, Goldcast and Sales Hacker—to help enterprises end this cycle and adopt new practices that result in sustainable growth.
Our mission is simple:
- Inspire and inform marketing and sales professionals with thought leadership, original research and examples of successful customer-focused approaches
- Showcase customer-led strategies that drive growth using best-in-class technologies in an integrated way
- Be a single destination where growth-minded leaders can find resources, share best practices, and build connections
We’ve just released our first research report of 2023: The 2023 Buyers Insight Report—and have plenty more exciting activities planned for the upcoming months!
The need for an alliance.
As a growth marketing agency, Iron Horse works with growth-minded B2B companies across multiple industries, including tech, financial services, and professional services. Working with marketing and sales leaders at these organizations, we’ve seen two consistent themes to the challenges they face with sustainable growth.
Buyers want control of their journey, but need an easier way to decide and buy.
B2B buyers want to be able to discover, learn and buy on their own time and in their own way. But finding all the information they need to evaluate and decide on a solution can be incredibly difficult. We’re inundated with emails and ads for new products and services—many of which are totally irrelevant to our needs or role. When we do see something interesting, it’s often difficult to find the answers to even our most basic questions. The process can leave us feeling overwhelmed. Add in that this experience is happening simultaneously for multiple people in an organization, all of whom will eventually need to agree on one solution, and it’s a wonder that opportunities ever become wins.
With more than half of buyers saying they spend 75% or more of the buying journey in self-serve activities, it’s clear that companies must create a unified experience from the moment prospects learn about your solution through their purchase and use of it. This means replacing the marketing-to-sales handoff with marketing + sales collaboration, supported by integrated technology.
B2B organizations are not reaping the benefits of their technology.
The current state of growth for B2B marketing and sales is more, more, more. Sales down this quarter? Hire more salespeople. Marketing not driving enough leads? Buy the newest tech. (In our 2023 Buyer Insights survey, marketing leaders identified investing in new technology as their #2 priority for 2023.) But accumulating more stuff can quickly equate to noise and clutter that slows your growth. The average enterprise has roughly 90 tools in its martech stack and only uses an abysmal 42% of that functionality.
These tools are extremely powerful and can help you win, but not if you’re using them in a silo. Before investing in the next shiny technology object, marketing and sales professionals need help understanding how to tap the full capabilities of their existing stack. And how to put them to use to create better buyer experiences.
How we’ll be better together.
These silos are hurting growth—for everyone. But businesses need more guidance in how to break them down. Providing that guidance is not something that any one company can do alone.
The Enterprise Growth Alliance brings together tech providers across the pipeline to co-develop original research reports, participate in innovation labs, and collaborate on use cases and best practices to help marketing and sales leaders:
- Understand and reach audiences the way they like to buy
- Use martech and salestech together to create better experiences that drive toward better outcomes
- Adapt to evolving market conditions and the increasingly digital buyers journey
Here are a few things that make us different.
Invested in Marketing + Sales.
One of the key things that makes the Enterprise Growth Alliance different from the other industry associations we’re part of is our cross-functional focus. We’re not here to help marketers triple their leads or sales to get more appointments. Okay we are—but only if those outcomes support actual growth for the company. (3x the leads doesn’t help anyone if they don’t match your ICP, aren’t ready to buy, don’t get to sales in a timely manner, or get turned off by a one-size-fits-all sales process.)
EGA will help marketing and sales collectively bring in more revenue for the organization by providing growth minded leaders with the resources they need to champion and implement this mindshift in their organization.
Focused on breaking down technology silos.
For revenue teams to truly work together toward joint outcomes, the tech stack needs to be integrated across the entire pipeline. Our partners get it: Technology silos are hurting their growth and yours. One of the most important activities of the Enterprise Growth Alliance is to develop and showcase best practices for using martech and salestech solutions together to deliver end-to-end buyer experiences.
Research-backed recommendations that center the customer experience.
It’s not just technology silos that are the problem. B2B marketers are struggling to move from a highly product-focused strategy that centers what they’re selling to a customer-centered strategy that begins with understanding how their solutions help real customers do their jobs better. Enterprise Growth Alliance partners discuss, develop and share strategies that center the customer experience to drive sustainable growth. We rely heavily on primary research so you can rest assured that our advice and best practices stem from data, not just our opinions. We’re releasing two major research reports in 2023 and have lots of other activities planned to make sure you can put these insights to work.
Together means all of us—EGA partners, and the marketing and sales community we serve.
The Enterprise Growth Alliance is not just an alliance of partners thinking about how to help growth teams work better. It’s a place where B2B sales and marketing folks can come together themselves to learn, engage, bounce ideas off of each other, and redefine the status quo. Check out what we’re doing at www.enterprisegrowthalliance.com. While you’re there, make sure to download our first research report of 2023 and sign up for our newsletter so you can stay in the loop about our upcoming activities and ways to connect. We can’t wait to hear what you think.
