The Revenue Tower^® is Pepper Group’s proven system to help high-growth organizations acquire more customers, retain and grow business with current customers and build a scalable marketing machine that adds business value.

It helps ensure an integrated and comprehensive approach by identifying the priority tactics for each level of the tower. In addition, there are four performance-enhancing elements: 1) Content generation to make the tower more attractive. 2) Data visibility to create windows to see what’s happening in the marketplace. 3) Talent marketing to develop a more productive and effective staff. And 4) A core MarTech stack to streamline sales and marketing operations, enhance customer experiences and drive data-driven decision making.

Marketing Technology

Technology continues to become more and more important to effective B2B marketing. According to eMarketer, MarTech spending is increasing 15% per year, and there are currently more than 11,000 different MarTech tools available. We recommend focusing on securing the basics first and then testing and piloting various additional tools as desired. Here are the core technology platforms to have in place for a high-performance MarTech stack, broken out based on the Revenue Tower framework.

Strategy

Any tower must rest on a solid foundation. In the strategy section of the Revenue Tower, you’re developing or refining your target audiences, offering structure, value propositions, positioning, channel strategy and overall messaging. You’re also drawing up the blueprints for the rest of the tower. MarTech here can be highly valuable in supporting your research and strategy initiatives. Core tech includes:

• A way to collect measurable insights from customers and evaluate interest in new opportunities. Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey or Google Forms are some we recommend.
• A tool to uncover and analyze your competitors’ digital advertising activities, such as SpyFu.
• A tool to analyze the search landscape and identify the best organic and paid search opportunities to pursue. Our favorite here is Semrush.
• Website analytics tools to understand your current website visitors and what content is resonating. GA4 and Hotjar, for example, work great in combination with each other.

Showroom

Here, you want to ensure your digital and physical presence are top-notch. This includes your graphic identity, your physical environment and your website. It also includes social media platforms, third-party endorsements and any other content you’ve distributed or made available for search engines to index. At this level, the goal is creditability and brand image. Core tech here includes:

• An easy-to-use website content management system so you can make regular content updates to keep your website up-to-date and help it rank higher in search. There are multiple CMS tools, and we’ll review the pros and cons of various tools in a future article. We prefer a CMS that doesn’t limit a website’s capabilities, is easy for anyone to update, and has a wide community of developers. That’s why WordPress is generally our recommendation.
• A press release wire service can be helpful to get news content out to a broad audience. Although there are many choices, we typically recommend PR Newswire.
• Finally, social media platforms should be part of your tech stack. This includes having accounts on LinkedIn, Meta (FB & Instagram) and X. Depending on your frequency of posting, you can also consider a tool like Hootsuite or HubSpot to schedule these posts.

Initial Engagement

The tactics at this level are focused on finding and engaging with new prospects and making new connections. They include digital channels, such as search advertising, as well as physical channels, such as trade shows. Core tech to power this level includes:

• A prospecting tool to help you identify the names, phone numbers and email addresses of your targets. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is highly accurate but can be less effective with some audiences. Other solutions, such as ZoomInfo or Data Axle, can have a little less accuracy but can deliver great value. Finally, don’t overlook industry-specific data sources, such as associations or trade media, as these can often be the best overall.
• The ability to generate automated 1:1 sales outreach email sequences can deliver tremendous value in targeting that list. This technology can help magnify a salesperson’s reach and results. HubSpot Sales Pro is our favorite solution here.
• Inbound-focused digital advertising (AdTech) platforms are critical at this stage, as well. These platforms can home in on detailed audience characteristics, geo-target your ads, remarket your organization, or place your ads directly in front of everyone on your prospect list. The simplest and most effective baseline platforms for B2B are Google Ads and LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
• Lastly, organic search, or SEO, can sometimes drive your most valuable leads. An organic search effort involves multiple elements, but tools such as Google Search Console, Google My Business and Yoast SEO can help you be more efficient. And Semrush will help you continually optimize your efforts.

Ongoing Engagement

Once a connection is made, ongoing engagement tactics ensure you stay in touch with those prospects until they are ready to have a sales conversation. There are various tactics and methods, and the key tech that supports them includes these categories:

• A marketing platform that stores your universe of prospects, automates email outreach, tracks and scores engagement, logs interactions and identifies leads ready for sales follow-up is critical at this level. We’ve worked with many of these, and to us, the clear winner here is HubSpot Marketing Pro.
• Email isn’t the only way to stay connected digitally. Frequent social media posts can keep you top-of-mind. For most of our B2B clients, LinkedIn is the top platform. And don’t just post on your company’s LinkedIn page; make sure as many people in your organization as possible are visiting that post and liking, commenting or resharing it with their personal networks.
• Finally, a webinar platform can be valuable in executing thought leadership events. We like Zoom as a very easy-to-use tool that has everything you’ll need to succeed.

Sales Enablement

At this level, you have direct engagement with your prospect, so it’s important to ensure your sales teams have the tools they need to be most effective. The critical technology to support this includes:

• A CRM platform to keep track of opportunities throughout the sales cycle, providing sales teams with valuable prospect insights, engagement data and automated reminders. This also provides management with a view of the current pipeline. Our pick here is HubSpot Sales Pro.
• A system to store sales collateral, including case studies, presentations and specification sheets, helps ensure consistency and efficiency. There are a number of tools available, but we find that a shared drive of some type is usually sufficient. We like Egnyte because it also enables the team to share links to files, but there are many options here.

Customer Retention

Finally, at the top of the Revenue Tower are marketing tactics designed to help you maintain your customer relationships. Technology platforms to support customer retention are general tools like the Microsoft Office suite, or are likely more specific to your business, such as your ERP system. Some other tools can include:

• Digital signature software to help expedite proposal approvals. We typically recommend Adobe Sign.
• Project management tools can also help ensure you and your customer stay aligned on deliverables, dates and deadlines. This will vary greatly depending on the customer and your type of business, but we find Asana to have broad capabilities and flexibility to support many of these needs.

Your MarTech Stack

This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list, but it highlights some of the core tools to help maximize the performance of your Revenue Tower. The good news also is that many of the tools above are free to use, and many others are included in the value you receive when hiring Pepper Group.

Do you have any that you use and love? We’d love to hear. Feel free to email us at pepper@peppergroup.com.