How to Effectively Implement Demand Generation Process

With all the B2B marketers these days focusing on revenue, customer centricity, content marketing and marketing automation as part of their strategies, it seems that they have the perfect mix of components to build and administer modern demand generation programs. However, in spite of all the efforts, modern B2B demand generation tends to fall apart in execution. It’s been estimated that nearly 70% of the demand-generation efforts fail to target the ideal customer, and technology marketers also report an average opportunity pipeline contribution at mere 27%. Successful demand generation execution needs bringing together of human resources, process, content and technology and getting these elements to work in harmony. This will align the buyer education with the different stages of lead qualification process. This will help coordinate the efforts of the marketing and sales team members while facilitating seamless tracking and hand-offs between the technologies systems.

Now, if you want to provide a value added first rated buyer experience while at the same time optimize the lead to revenue conversion you need to approach the entire concept as a clinical process and adopt a new design ethic referred to as demand process stewardship. So now the question arises that despite all the right intentions and efforts why we often fail to make the best use of the demand generation process. There are few fundamental barriers that stand in the way of optimizing the process to achieve maximum success.

Lack of organization in demand generation process

The objective of B2B demand generation should be to enable and augment the lead to revenue process. Yet most of the sales and marketing people fail to organize around this goal due to lack of coordination. Instead of rationalizing marketing and sales roles in terms of how they should contribute to the process jointly, it is more important to organize according to communication channels, such as email marketing or PR, or to the other activities such as events or campaigns.

In most of the cases, companies focus on campaign structure that is promotional and short-term,and fail to consider the perpetual nature of buying processes. Instead they should re-devise their marketing efforts, consider their role in lead engagement, nurturing and converse on and identify the team that will lead the demand process stewardship efforts.

Lack of proper understanding of demand generation process and inadequate training

In order to run a process successfully, one needs to understand and manage the operational dynamics of the process and deliver leadership that is completely goal B2B marketers are not sufficiently trained to perform these tasks satisfactorily. Most marketers’ experiences are communication facing and center around messaging and sales enablement. Also, failure to address the revenue performance and metrics required to optimize demand-process flows can render the entire process ineffective.

Evaluating the performance of demand generation procedure

Assessing the performance of the managed process on regular basis is vital. You should be aware of whether you have been able to achieve the desired outcome or not. Any marketing executive in the consumer arena will agree that finding success with marketing programs means achieving the target, that making the desired amount of sales. Yet B2B marketing and sales people continue to use activity based metrics to evaluate the demand generation process, rarely mulling over the flexibility of and correlation between the programs and their revenue outcomes. And more often than not companies are found to be reluctant to risk the compensation on the revenue performance of the efforts.

Conclusion

Therefore B2B marketers should step up to facilitate efficient demand generation process. Before over investing in new technology and content, they should take a moment to examine their efforts and channelise them properly to remove these fundamental barriers and attain their goals.