Editorial Team When Marathon Petroleum sold its Speedway retail business to 7-Eleven for $21 billion back in 2021, it wasn’t just a massive deal, it completely changed the company’s DNA. Their focus snapped from a mix of consumer and commercial to pure-play B2B, which put their marketing tech strategy under a microscope. When you suddenly shed your entire retail arm, you have to seriously rethink your digital tools and how you go after your remaining industrial customers. So what happens to your B2B marketing toolkit and strategy when your whole company gets restructured?
Key Takeaways
- Check if your CRM, like Salesforce Sales Cloud, is still fit for purpose, it needs to work with new B2B data streams, not just old retail leads.
- Invest in predictive analytics with something like Tableau CRM to get a handle on industrial demand forecasting now that you’re out of the consumer game.
- Bring in an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) platform like Terminus to zero in on the specific industrial clients that matter after a big portfolio change.
- Overhaul your marketing automation workflows in platforms like Pardot to match the new industrial customer segments and product lines you’re selling.
1. Reassess Your CRM for Evolving B2B Relationships
After a big divestment, a company like Marathon Petroleum finds its relationships have completely changed. The consumer side is gone. You’re left with a laser focus on industrial partners, distributors, and huge commercial accounts. That means your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is probably due for a serious audit. Too many companies just keep using the CRM they have without asking if it’s still the right tool for the job. If your CRM was built out with custom modules for tracking retail leads and consumer data, all of that is now just clutter.
Get into the guts of your current CRM, whether it’s Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365, and look at the custom objects, fields, and workflows. Do they actually reflect the long sales cycles and data points of big B2B contracts? Those fields tracking daily fuel sales to one person are useless now. What you need are strong fields for tracking long-term contract talks, volume commitments from industrial partners, and the specific compliance documents that come with commercial energy deals. I’ve watched companies fight for years to make a retail-focused CRM work for B2B, and it just leads to broken data and a sales team that wants to tear its hair out. A general-purpose CRM won’t magically conform to a new business model without a ton of configuration. Looking ahead to 2026, the demand is for hyper-specialized CRM systems, not one-size-fits-all solutions.
Pro Tip: Focus on Integration Capabilities
As you’re re-evaluating your setup, the absolute priority should be how well a CRM integrates with your other big platforms like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM). You need a smooth data flow between these systems to get a complete picture of the B2B customer lifecycle. It’s not just a nice-to-have. A Gartner report from late 2025 showed that companies with tightly integrated CRM-ERP systems improved their sales forecasting accuracy by 15% compared to companies running siloed tech. That’s a huge difference.
2. Invest in Advanced Predictive Analytics for Demand Forecasting
Selling off the retail side means you’re no longer predicting consumer behavior at the gas pump. You’re forecasting industrial demand for things like refined products, lubricants, or petrochemical feedstocks. This is a totally different kind of analytics problem. Your historical sales data is a good starting point, but it’s not nearly enough to go on. You have to start pulling in external factors, global economic indicators, commodity price swings, regulatory changes, and even geopolitical events. This is why tools like SAS Analytics or IBM SPSS Modeler, especially when plugged into a visualization platform like Tableau, become so important. They let you build complex models that can actually give you a more accurate read on demand shifts.
Imagine one of your major manufacturing clients announces a production expansion. A good predictive analytics model will immediately ingest that news, cross-reference it with their historical consumption, check your current inventory levels, and maybe even factor in weather forecasts to give you a sharp, updated forecast of their future fuel or feedstock needs. This capability feeds directly into optimizing your supply chain and production schedules, which is a straight line to profitability. If you lack these predictive tools, you’re flying blind in a market defined by long lead times and massive contracts. I’ve personally seen companies relying on gut instinct and spreadsheets completely miss out on multi-million dollar deals because they couldn’t anticipate what their clients needed or where the market was headed.
Common Mistake: Over-reliance on Lagging Indicators
Way too many organizations are still driving their strategy by looking in the rearview mirror. Past performance is useful, but it’s a lagging indicator. In a volatile B2B sector like oil & gas, you need to be looking for leading indicators. This means integrating data feeds from industry reports, economic forecasts, and even things like satellite imagery analysis (to track industrial activity) directly into your predictive models. Taking this forward-looking approach helps you allocate resources and target your marketing campaigns before your competition even senses a shift in the market.
3. Implement Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Platforms
Now that you have a purely B2B focus, the old “spray and pray” style of mass marketing is just a waste of money. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) becomes a flat-out necessity. With ABM platforms like Terminus or Demandbase, you can identify your most valuable potential accounts and then target them with highly personalized campaigns. It’s about orchestrating a whole series of touchpoints across different channels, aimed at the entire buying committee within that one target company.
Take Marathon after the divestment. Their B2B marketing team might decide that regional utility companies or big logistics providers are their ideal customers. An ABM platform lets them build out a complete profile on each of those target accounts, mapping out the key decision-makers, their roles, and what keeps them up at night. From there, the platform helps deploy tailored content, specific digital ads, and even direct mail that hits on those exact pain points. This kind of surgical precision means your marketing budget is spent on accounts that can actually move the needle. We’ve seen this in practice. ABM strategies deliver much higher conversion rates, and HubSpot’s 2025 State of Marketing Report found they can cut the sales cycle by 20% to 30%.
Pro Tip: Align Sales and Marketing Teams
Here’s a hard truth: your ABM program is doomed to fail if your sales and marketing teams aren’t joined at the hip. The ABM platform needs to be their shared command center, the place where they build account strategies, develop content, and plan out outreach sequences together. You have to mandate weekly sync-ups where they review account progress and tweak their tactics. If that teamwork isn’t there, the most expensive ABM platform on the market won’t deliver results.
4. Optimize Marketing Automation Workflows for B2B Journeys
That marketing automation platform (MAP) you’re using, whether it’s Pardot (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement), Marketo Engage, or Adobe Marketo Engage, must be completely reconfigured for the B2B buyer. The B2B journey is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a long process involving multiple stakeholders and is all about building trust through education before you ever get to a sale. Your content strategy has to follow suit, shifting away from broad awareness campaigns and toward meaty content like technical specifications and detailed case studies showing ROI.
You need to go through your existing email sequences, lead scoring models, and content delivery triggers with a fine-tooth comb. Ask yourself: is this built to nurture a prospect through a six-month sales cycle that touches procurement, engineering, and finance? A proper B2B lead scoring model should give major points for engagement with whitepapers or attending a technical webinar, not just for a casual website visit. You can then automate follow-up sequences that deliver genuinely useful industry insights or offer to connect a prospect with one of your subject matter experts, making every interaction count. I always tell clients to physically map out the entire B2B buyer journey on a whiteboard before they even log into their MAP. You have to identify every touchpoint and the content required for each stage to prevent your automation from becoming a fragmented mess.
Common Mistake: Neglecting Post-Sale Nurturing
A lot of B2B companies turn off their automation efforts the second a contract is signed which is a massive mistake. The post-sale period is your golden opportunity for retention, upselling, and cross-selling. You can use your MAP to automate the entire onboarding process, deliver helpful product tips, send out relevant industry news, and periodically ask for feedback from your clients. A solid post-sale automation plan directly boosts customer lifetime value, and in the high-stakes B2B oil & gas world, that’s everything.
5. Embrace Data Cleanliness and Governance
Big corporate shakeups like a divestment always create a giant data mess. Your customer lists, purchase histories, and contact info are suddenly fragmented and filled with irrelevant entries from the business unit you just sold. You absolutely cannot implement new B2B marketing tech effectively until you make data cleanliness and governance your top priority. This means hunting down all the redundant, outdated, and inaccurate data and putting strict protocols in place for keeping it clean. Paying for data cleansing tools or services is a foundational expense. While tools like Informatica Data Quality or Talend Data Quality can automate a huge chunk of this, you’ll always need a human to give it the final once-over.
If you feed your expensive CRM, predictive analytics, and ABM platforms dirty data, you will get useless insights and run terrible campaigns. It’s garbage-in, garbage-out. Can you imagine your system sending a personalized offer for retail gasoline to a major industrial client? That’s the kind of mortifying error that stems from poor data governance, and it can torch a critical B2B relationship. You have to establish clear data ownership in your company, define non-negotiable data entry standards for every team, and schedule regular data audits. This becomes an ongoing part of how you operate. The money you spend maintaining clean data will always be a fraction of the money you’ll lose making bad decisions based on dirty data, a recent Nielsen report estimated that poor data quality costs energy sector businesses an average of 12% of their annual revenue.
Pro Tip: Implement a Master Data Management (MDM) Strategy
If you’re in a big, complex organization, it might be time to look at a full Master Data Management (MDM) strategy. An MDM system’s whole job is to create a single source of truth for your most important data, like customer records and product information. When every department and every system is pulling from the same playbook, your entire marketing tech stack becomes far more reliable. It’s a big lift, I won’t lie, but for any company with a serious B2B footprint, the investment pays for itself through better efficiency and data you can actually trust.
The Marathon Petroleum divestment is a perfect case study: when your business model changes this drastically, your B2B marketing tech strategy has to change with it, and fast. You have to be willing to adapt your CRM, analytics, ABM, and automation platforms, all while being obsessed with data governance. In the oil & gas sector, this ability to pivot your technology quickly is going to define who wins. For some more ideas on how to sharpen your approach, you can read up on Social Ad Optimization: 5 Steps for 2026.
How does a divestment specifically alter B2B lead generation strategies?
After a divestment, you shift from casting a wide net for consumers to spear-fishing for specific large accounts. Your strategy becomes less about broad advertising and more about targeted outreach. This means dedicating more resources to industry-specific trade shows, creating in-depth thought leadership content, and using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to directly engage decision-makers at high-value companies.
What role do content management systems (CMS) play in a post-divestment B2B marketing tech stack?
Your CMS essentially becomes your B2B technical library. It needs to be rock-solid for housing and delivering the heavy-duty content B2B buyers demand, such as detailed whitepapers, product spec sheets, complex case studies, and compliance documents. The right CMS, like Adobe Experience Manager or Drupal, will also let you personalize what content gets delivered based on the visitor’s industry or where they are in the buying process.
How can existing marketing tech investments be repurposed rather than replaced after a major business shift?
You can often retool the tech you already pay for. A marketing automation platform that was sending B2C email blasts can be reconfigured to run long-term B2B lead nurturing campaigns that drip out technical content. Your CRM can be overhauled by gutting the old consumer-focused fields and building new objects and fields designed to track complex B2B contract details and multi-stage sales pipelines. It just requires a deep dive into the platform’s settings and a very clear roadmap for the new B2B process.
What are the key metrics for success in B2B marketing tech post-divestment?
Your dashboard changes completely. You’re no longer watching consumer metrics like foot traffic. The new measures of success are B2B-focused, including Account Engagement Score (tracking all interactions from a single target company), Marketing-Originated Revenue, Sales Cycle Length, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), and the Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate. These numbers tell the real story of how marketing is helping to land and grow large accounts.
How does data privacy and compliance change for B2B marketing tech after a divestment?
The privacy focus shifts from the individual to the enterprise. While consumer regulations like GDPR still have their place, the emphasis for B2B becomes corporate data security and contractual obligations. Your marketing tech stack must comply with the specific data handling clauses in your B2B contracts, adhere to industry-specific security standards (like NIST frameworks in the energy industry), and maintain powerful defenses to protect sensitive client business information. It’s less about individual consent and more about corporate governance.
