B2B marketing automation is software that sends planned emails and content to a business buyer, scores how ready that buyer is to purchase, and hands the buyer to a salesperson at the right moment. B2B means business-to-business: the customer is a company, not a person shopping for themselves. Software companies, machine makers and consultancies use it.
A business purchase is slow. A company may take three to nine months to choose new software, and several people take part in the decision. A salesperson cannot call everyone who downloads a brochure, because most of them are only reading. So the software nurtures each possible buyer, called a lead, with useful content. Nurturing means sending the right information at the right time, until the lead is ready to talk.
The software tracks what each lead does: emails opened, pages read on the website, webinars attended. It adds points for each action. This is called lead scoring. When a lead crosses a set score, the software marks it as a marketing qualified lead, or MQL. Then it passes the lead to the CRM, the system in which the sales team records every account, contact and deal. A salesperson then calls.
Consider a Pune company that sells attendance and shift software to factories. An HR manager at a car-parts factory in Hosur downloads its guide to India's new labour codes. That download earns her 10 points. Over the next three weeks, she receives one email a week: a checklist on overtime rules, a case study from a similar factory, and an invitation to a webinar. She attends the webinar, which adds 20 points, and visits the pricing page twice, which adds 25 points each time. Her score reaches 80, above the threshold of 60. The software sends her details, and everything she read, to the CRM. A salesperson calls her the next day, already knowing what she cares about.
The software also learns about whole companies, not only people. Intent data shows which companies are researching a topic across the web, even before anyone fills in a form. An account-based marketing (ABM) platform picks a few hundred target companies, and the software sends extra content to people who work there. Webinar sign-ups arrive from an event management platform.
How is this different from a customer engagement platform? An engagement platform sends short messages to millions of consumers, and success means a purchase within days. B2B marketing automation handles thousands of leads at most. Its success is a sales conversation, and the sale itself may come months later. It ends where the CRM begins.