Post-Dreamforce 2011: Has Marketing Automation Moved Us Any Closer to Enabling Buyer-centric B2B Demand Generation?

The central theme in my evangelism over the last few years has been stressing the importance of B2B marketers’ adopting a more ‘buyer-centric’ approach in their demand generation efforts – or as I often term it, ‘putting the buyer back at the center of B2B demand generation.’  It’s at the core of the approach we take with our clients at Left Brain DGA.  And it’s the central theme of my new book, Balancing the Demand Equation, which releases on Amazon on September 19 (this coming Monday).

The core of the issue is simple:  In a social, Web 2.0 world, sellers have little, direct control over the information consumed by a buyer during his/her buyer education process.  Instant online access to product information and reviews and to peer input via Web search and social media applications has more than ever shifted power from sellers to buyers.  Thus the ‘content consumption’ journey, as we term it at Left Brain DGA, that each B2B buyer goes through in making a purchase decision is very personal … very one-to-one.  This has led to the rise of a distinctly-new B2B buyer – one I term ‘Buyer 2.0’ in my upcoming book – for whom legacy, product-centric, one-size-fits-all, mass-marketing approaches to B2B demand generation don’t work like they used to.  Success with Buyer 2.0 requires that our demand generation be built bottoms-up – i.e., centered on the buyer, triggered by the buyer and one-to-one in the timing and scope of content delivered to that buyer – not top-down.

Buyer-centricity, thus, is the new strategy in B2B demand generation.

Fortunately, this changing dynamic in B2B marketing is conveniently occurring in tandem with significant innovation around marketing technology – particularly customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation.  And adoption of these technologies is growing at a significant pace.  Dreamforce – the annual user conference for Salesforce.com – had a record attendance of 45,000 people this year; meanwhile, growth in the marketing automation space, while it has slowed a bit, still clocked in at 55% year-over-year over the past year, according to analyst David Raab.  Clearly CRM and marketing automation technology adoption is in its heyday.

Yet these technologies – while they have the buyer/customer in mind – were not originally designed to perpetuate ‘buyer-centricity,’ per se.  Instead, they were originally designed to improve the operational efficiency of collecting buyer/customer insights in one place, of campaign execution and of the qualification of leads, while still leveraging the legacy, mass-marketing models I highlighted above.  The truth is that the majority of B2B marketing organizations that adopt CRM and/or marketing automation continue to operate in a mass, ‘batch-and-blast’ mindset, and in fact, it is only in the last 2-3 years that marketing technology and B2B demand generation processes, together, have really begun to turn the corner toward buyer-centricity.

So when I look at a CRM or marketing automation platform and/or review a vendor’s news, this is what I’m looking for – evidence that we’re moving the bar.  My critical lens?  ‘How does this platform and/or update to the platform improve my ability as a B2B marketer to be more buyer-centric in my demand generation?’  Plain and simple.

And so it was through ‘lens’ – really looking for glimpses into how CRM and marketing automation infrastructure is enabling buyer-centricity – that I took in three days straight of Dreamforce 2011.

21 Ways to Distribute Content

This week I had the pleasure of presenting at the very first Content Marketing World! It was very exciting, a lot of great content marketing, social media experts and authors attended and spoke about the industry and how it’s evolving. There was a good combination of motivational (get out there and do it!) speaking as well as plenty of how-to, practical advice to get your content marketing efforts in order, and aligned with revenue goals.

One of the presentations I gave was on more of the tactical side. I spoke about 21 ways to distribute content. Originally it was from the perspective of “I have all this content, now what?” but I really felt strongly about emphasizing the fact that content distribution is really a discipline that needs to be considered much earlier on, when you’re in the content strategy phase. If it’s something you think of after the fact, the success of your content marketing programs may be at risk.

The Real Cost of Retaining a Legacy Approach to B2B Demand Generation … And What You Can Do About It

On September 19, I am releasing my new book, Balancing the Demand Equation:  The Elements of a Successful, Modern B2B Demand Generation Model.  (As a note, it will be available in hardcover via Amazon, and also will be on iBook, Kindle and Nook.  Details to come.)

At the heart of the book is a sophisticated framework that is designed to help B2B marketers understand and succeed in the modern demand generation environment … and to help them move away from the persistent, legacy, top-of-funnel, mass-marketing approaches that are ill-suited to today’s B2B marketing challenges.

What are these challenges?

B2B marketers find themselves more challenged than ever in connecting with the modern buyer – i.e., Buyer 2.0 – at the right place and the right time in the buying cycle.  B2B marketers also find it challenging to scale marketing operations that drive perpetual, one-to-one engagement, acquisition and nurturing of prospective buyers.  Complicating things, technology is both problem and solution in this equation – i.e., technology is in part to blame for our challenges, as Web 2.0 has resulted in a more-empowered buyer, but it’s also a key piece of the new equation via marketing automation and customer relationship management technology.

Thus the B2B demand generation ‘formula’ has never been more out of alignment.

Sounds like a problem that needs solving, right?

Yet you might react to what I’ve written so far by saying, “Isn’t this really just an operational challenge for B2B marketers?  Why should the rest of the company care?”

B2B Demand Generation Takeaways from SiriusDecisions Summit 2011

Once a year the demand generation ‘glitterati’ – i.e., the major thought leaders, the vendors and the packs of in-the-trenches B2B marketing and sales practitioners … a lot of them – all descend upon Scottsdale, Arizona, to talk B2B demand generation for two-and-a-half days.

The catalyst?  The annual SiriusDecisions Summit, put on by an analyst firm that has emerged as a leader when it comes to covering strategic and technological innovation in the B2B marketing and sales arena.

There are definitely other firms doing great work around the broader marketing arena.  One of those is Forrester, whose Forrester Marketing Forum is an event I attended about a month ago in San Francisco, and whose new analyst covering the B2B marketing space, Jeff Ernst (Twitter: @JeffErnst), is one smart guy.  Richard Fouts (Twitter: @Richard_Fouts) at Gartner also has some tremendous insights around the evolution of marketing strategy.  And Aberdeen has produced some thoughtful research around B2B lead management over the past two years.

But if you have any question about who’s leading when it comes specifically to B2B demand generation research and benchmarking in the marketplace today, 800+ attendees at SiriusDecisions Summit 2011 – a number that is easily 2X the number of 2010 Summit attendees – can’t be wrong.

Revenue Performance Management and B2B Demand Generation: Connecting the Dots

One of the things I find exciting about modern B2B marketing is that not a day goes by without rapid change and new thinking. It’s a great time to be a B2B marketer, but it’s also a quite challenging time. For example, over the past year, marketing automation vendors have shifted much of their messaging from a focus on automating marketing and powering demand generation to that of managing ‘revenue performance.’ Seems like a good thing–revenue is good; however, for some B2B marketers this is probably a bit confusing, and so the obvious question is whether we’re still talking about the same technology and capabilities. The answer is yes and no.

B2B Demand Generation Insights from OMS 2011

This past week I spoke at and attended the annual Online Marketing Summit event (Twitter: #oms11, @OMSummit), which was held February 7-11 in San Diego, along with a number of others from the Left Brain team.  (Full disclosure:  Left Brain also was a sponsor of the event.)

Continuing a trend I saw at Dreamforce in December, I got a strong glimpse of a real maturation that is starting to occur in online marketing, and particularly in B2B demand generation. And I saw the next wave of marketers – beyond the early adopters – in attendance and starting to absorb new techniques and practices.  All good signs that B2B marketers are increasingly understanding and responding to the modern challenges of engaging with the an empowered B2B buyer in a Web 2.0 world.

5 Ways to Use Social Media for B2B Demand Generation

I‘m excited to announce that Barbra Gago — formerly with Genius.com and Cloud9 Analytics — is joining Left Brain as a key member of our demand generation strategy team.  Barbra brings great expertise around inbound marketing, content marketing, Website information architecture design, social media and how to leverage all of these elements for integrated, buyer-centric, buyer-driven demand generation.  So welcome Barbra … and read on for her first blog post on leveraging social media in B2B demand generation.  ~ABN

Social media – alone – cannot drive the type of scale B2B demand generation results that most enterprises need.  But when social media is combined with other buyer-targeted content and programs – especially as part of an inbound engagement model – it can serve as a critical multiplier of your efforts.  Moreover, it can enable you to engage with your buyer at phases of his/her decision-making process that other mediums cannot reach.

Why Do (Well-intentioned) B2B Demand Generation Efforts Fail?

David Raab outlined in a recent blog post his current research around the state of the B2B marketing automation marketplace.  Raab estimates total spending on B2B marketing automation platforms in 2010 reached approximately $200 million in revenue in 2010.  He further notes “… that the industry nearly doubled last year, so the current run rate is much higher.”  I had a couple of reactions to this number.

First, it made me think of another number.  $129 billion.  That’s the amount research firm Outsell estimated in a BtoB Magazine article in March last year would be spent in 2010 on all B2B marketing and advertising in the US.  Closely behind that number is the $26 billion Outsell further estimated (in the same report) would be spent on B2B company websites in 2010.  It subsequently strikes me that the $200 million spent on systems that are designed to orchestrate and run intelligent B2B demand generation programs still pales in comparison to what seems to be spent on brute-force execution.

Dreamforce 2010: Demand Generation Insights ‘from the Cloud’

I spent last week in San Francisco attending Dreamforce 2010 (Twitter:  @dreamforce).  The event was nothing short of impressive.  With 87,200 customers and $1.7+ billion in annual revenue, Salesforce.com is a major leader in the CRM marketplace, but Dreamforce is more than merely Salesforce.com’s annual CRM user conference.  Dreamforce increasingly has grown into the annual host of two critical, interdependent and growing ecosystems – and consequently was an event filled with great demand generation insights.

On one hand, Salesforce.com serves as the cornerstone for a growing software ecosystem around buyer-centric, demand management software.  This is a critical evolution – very much the doppelganger to supply-chain management – that is fundamental to businesses increasingly being able get control of and being able to predict and deliver revenue on a consistent and repeatable basis.  CRM is a backbone of this ecosystem, but marketing automation technology and related components, such as inbound marketing and analytics, increasingly are expanding the scope and capability of this ecosystem.  And this infrastructure is critical to supporting your holistic demand generation strategy and programs.

Enhancing the SiriusDecisions ‘Waterfall’ Model via The Left Brain Model

Two weeks ago, Left Brain Marketing unveiled The Left Brain Model (TLBM) – our firm’s take on how to approach structuring and building a modern demand generation program.  One of the questions I’ve been getting since our announcement is, “What is the difference between TLBM and the SiriusDecisions Demand Metrics Waterfall (SDW)?”  Good question.

Let me start by saying I am a HUGE fan of the high quality work that SiriusDecisions consistently contributes to our community.  The firm has unquestionably established itself as a perennial thought leader – the real stand-out for demand generation insights among the analyst world – and our team considers the annual SiriusDecisions Summit a ‘must attend’ event within the demand generation and B2B marketing worlds.