How to increase margins and grow revenues in 2023

With tighter budgets, higher demands, and harder-to-meet sales quotas, organisations must learn to sell smarter if they want to continue growing in 2023.

2022 has been a year of transition and uncertainty for businesses throughout the world.

On the one hand, the pandemic has led to long-lasting shifts in consumer behaviour and organisations had to implement new strategies to navigate a digital-first marketplace.

On the other, talks of an impending recession are now pushing B2B organisations to be more cautious– an attitude that can prevent bold decision-making or timely action to overcome business challenges and continue driving growth.

Considering this situation, durhamlane’s co-founder and CCO Richard Lane highlighted how it has never been more important for Sales and Marketing leaders to work together as one unified team:

“With the global slowdown expected to continue through 2023, it is critical that brands stay visible to maintain brand advocacy and businesses should now, more than ever, be looking to integrate their marketing and sales strategies.

“Sales and marketing teams must work hand in hand, not compete as they have historically – sales teams have the networking capability and key contacts, whilst marketing professionals know how to execute campaigns to appeal to these audiences.

“Working together will give a more seamless, multi-threaded approach to help companies achieve their KPIs. It will be those brands that adopt a cross-channel approach to drive more ROI that will continue their growth trajectory.”

Less leeway for extra costs and frozen incremental headcounts means that businesses need to use their resources and budgets more efficiently to fix gaps in pipeline generation and build a closer alignment between Sales and Marketing. Failure to do so may cause both short- and long-term problems, indeed:

• Without the help of high-quality marketing leads (MQLs), Sales may struggle to build pipeline with outbound tactics alone. Less pipeline means less revenue and with resources spread thin, the whole organisation will struggle to hit sales and growth targets amid the impending economic downturn. 
• Without high conversions from MQL to SQL (Sales Qualified Leads), Marketing will not meet their KPIs, now increasingly connected to revenue. Failing to do so, CMOs will struggle to justify spending, budgets will shrink and the overall impact of the brand will suffer. 

In a nutshell, a misalignment between the two functions seizes a business’ revenue-generating engine. During a recession, this challenge can be destructive. An often-overlooked solution is to implement an effective MQL-to-SQL conversion process.

The industry standard for this conversion sits between 1% and 10%. Yet, over the past year, durhamlane has delivered a steady increase on the average MQL-to-SQL conversion rate we provide our clients, reaching 27.44% across all verticals.

Throughout 2022, we have helped our customers overcome these obstacles by selling their products and services in more than 50 countries. Working as an extension of our clients’ teams, while identifying and analysing the challenges, needs, and expectations of over 1600 international businesses. What we have learned will further inform how we help our clients increase margins and grow revenues in 2023 and beyond.

The end of the year is a good occasion to review our activity, strategies and successes. For this reason, we have collected and analysed our activity data across all our clients and compiled a report that shows the value of our unique selling approach against the key challenges confronted by B2B organisations in 2022, and those they will face in 2023.

The choices businesses make today will determine how they perform in the next 12-18 months and the changes you implement will shape what your business will look like on the other side of it.

Our year in numbers reflects the concrete results produced by our unique approach to selling. To find out what you can achieve by partnering with us, download our annual 2022 Demand Generation Performance Report.