In doing so, you and your marketing organization will deliver:

• Critical granularity around the multiple steps that it takes to get a lead from prospect to sales opportunity — introducing four stages of qualification where other models offer only one stage;
• Complete — but simplified — definitions of the objectives for lead qualification and for progressive profiling that must occur at each stage of qualification; and
• Insights into how to rationalize using demographic versus behavioral scoring inputs to better engage with buyers ‘in the right place, at the right time,’ thus improving the opportunity for successful sales conversions.

B2B marketers are becoming increasingly aware they must build and manage complex, iterative, multi-step nurturing programs with the combined goals of educating the buyer and better delivering ‘qualified leads’ to sales. Many B2B marketing organizations have adopted marketing automation, like Eloqua, to assist them in this effort. Yet, a significant number of B2B marketers today are still stumbling. How do they move from ‘one-and-done,’ traditional, mass-marketing tactics to truly engaging a buyer in an interactive process? Furthermore, how does the process serve as a mechanism to qualify him/her as a potential lead for sales?

We implement our own proprietary Left Brain Model™ when working with enterprise clients. Our model provides marketers with a framework to comprehensively measure a B2B marketing organization’s contribution to revenue and a structure for the nurturing and lead scoring activities that support this process. The Left Brain Model™ is focused on deepening marketers’ insights into how to succeed with demand generation and on extending the dialogue around the keys to successful demand generation, which uniquely fills gaps not addressed by other models. The model was derived from the experiences of the Left Brain DGA team with our own clients and we continue to leverage this model at the core of all of our client engagements.

B2B Marketers can download a free whitepaper that fully details the Left Brain Model and begin using it as the basis for building their own demand generation programs.

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.

My first stop was listening to Salesforce.com’s latest announcements and analyzing their impact and implications for buyer-centric B2B demand generation.

Welcome to the Social Enterprise.

“Welcome to the social enterprise,” said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (Twitter: Benioff), using his opening keynote to frame his own company’s approach to this changing sales and marketing environment and to place context around Salesforce.com’s numerous announcements and acquisitions over the past year.  In fact, to be honest, this was really the ‘big news’ at Dreamforce.  There were certainly a number of product-feature-level and infrastructure-level announcements, but the big news was that Salesforce.com now has a vision for how CRM, together with its Chatter product, together with a bunch of social media product developments and acquisitions (including Radian6) all work together.

Benioff’s take is that the Web 2.0 buyer has changed priorities for corporations.  He said today’s CEO must ask, “Am I doing enough to listen to the customer,” and he intimated that not doing this would one day lead to some CEO’s downfall.

“It’s more important to listen than ever before.  It is,” said Benioff.  “That’s the social revolution.”

Yet for a company that has spawned an ecosystem of marketing automation vendors and for an event that is probably the largest annual marketing automation conclave, Benioff’s angle on the ‘social enterprise’ has little to do with marketing or demand generation.  He is focused more on sales, customer service and on employee collaboration.  “It’s a social revolution, and it’s not just about consumers. It’s also about the Enterprise.  …  Our customers are social, our employees are social … what about our enterprises?”  (What about our marketing … but I’ll come back to this.)

Benioff explained his belief that there is a ‘social divide’ today between those enterprises that ‘get it,’ and those that don’t.  “How do we bridge this social divide?” asked Benioff, who used this as a jumping off point for weaving together a story of how Salesforce.com is addressing this ‘social divide’ with a three-step formula.

Benioff explained the Salesforce.com formula includes:

• Storing social data in the customer database
• Creating an employee social network
• Tapping customer and product social networks

What about driving and managing demand?

Benioff’s always-entertaining keynote was interesting.  (PT Barnum would be proud.)  But my appetite for B2B demand generation insights was completely unquenched, two-plus hours into his keynote.

My two takeaways from his keynote:

• One, clearly Benioff and Salesforce.com are not interested in moving the bar on marketing automation – a point that David Raab, who commented in his own post-event blog post, “Salesforce.com will leave marketing automation alone,” seems to agree with me on.
• Two, clearly I needed to sit down with the major marketing automation vendors and find out what they have been up to over the past year if I was going to garner any B2B demand generation insights from this year’s Dreamforce.

Buyer-centric Marketing Automation?

I subsequently spent a good portion of the next two days doing briefings with many of the leading marketing automation vendors.

I framed my conversations around the core question:  ‘Has marketing automation moved us any closer to succeeding with buyer-centric B2B demand generation?’

Really.  I wanted to see examples of new innovation from the leading marketing automation vendors that actually will make a difference in what I call ‘mass one-to-one’ interactions with B2B buyers.  This means engaging, acquiring and nurturing buyers at a one-to-one, buyer-driven, automated level, but also scaling and optimizing this operation – the very ‘balance’ I talk about in my new book.

My other filter:  I’m primarily focused on the enterprise use case – as is Left Brain DGA.  This is our focus as a digital demand generation agency, so I was wanted to see capabilities that would make an appreciable difference in an enterprise environment.

So what did I hear?  Three themes emerged.

> Theme #1:  Connecting the dots between marketing program touches and revenue outcomes:

I highlight in Balancing the Demand Equation that a critical insight for modern demand generation is understanding the connection between our pattern of content offers as B2B marketers and the resultant revenue outcomes – something I refer to as “content elasticity of revenue.”  B2B demand generation is driven by content offers; it’s the filament of all of our programs.  So it’s critical that we know which offers – and in what sequence – are best suited to optimize a given revenue outcome.  This is really the key to understanding what makes for a ‘marketing qualified’ or ‘sales ready’ lead.  We obviously also want to understand what volume of these offers (as a function of list/database size and growth) and at what cost that we’re able to optimize our revenue results.

Enabling this insight is an area where many of the B2B marketing automation vendors are making signficant progress – albeit not yet delivering on what I might say is my full vision for content elasticity of revenue.

I spent some time with the Eloqua team taking a look at their Revenue Suite at Dreamforce.  It’s software that leverages the platform’s ‘program builder’ and helps keep track of the revenue impact of marketing activities at various stages of a given demand generation program – so it helps a B2B marketer start to see the near-real-time revenue impact of marketing programs.

At the core of the Eloqua Revenue Suite are five key Revenue Performance Indicators – i.e., marketing program performance ‘snapshots’ at any given point in time – that Eloqua believes are critical to monitoring and managing revenue performance:

• Conversion: “For period X, what is my conversion rate through the funnel?”
• Reach: “For period X, what is my average database and funnel growth rate?”
• Return: “For period X, what is the average return on my campaign spend?”
• Value: “For period X, how has my total funnel value changed?”
• Velocity: “For period X, what is the average time to close?”

Of these five, there were two that I thought were the most aligned with buyer-centric demand generation and that most caught my attention.

The Reach Indicator is very interesting because it speaks to the relationship between our nurturing base of buyers and how that population – and the size and make-up of that population at different lead-qualification stages – impacts our revenue outcomes.  So literally, how many buyers do I need to be nurturing at different stages of my lead qualification process at any given point in time to predictably meet or exceed my numbers?

Source: Eloqua

I also like the concept of the Value statistic – an insight most B2B marketers are likely not fully considering.  For a given period, as B2B marketing programs come and go, what is the resultant revenue value of marketing programs?  I.e., for what a B2B marketer is doing today, what amount of revenue is that activity likely to yield?  It’s a different way to think about ROI because it gets to the total result (more of an NPV-like result than an ROI ratio or percentage-type result).

Source: Eloqua

For all five of these indicators Eloqua has been aggregating data across customers over time, so it is also able to provide benchmarks to show how a given organization is doing relative to its peers.  This speaks both to Eloqua’s considerable experience and footprint with enterprises and their B2B demand generation programs over a number of years – which is a real value-add to any Eloqua customer.

One challenge I see with the benchmarking, though:  It assumes that B2B marketing organizations all want to adopt the same (or a similar) funnel model, and this will not be the case over time, particularly as pre-MQL/SRL funnel models become more sophisticated.  So depending on how an organization defines its funnel or ‘waterfall’ model, as SiriusDecisions refers to it, this data may or may not provide relevant benchmarks.

I also spent some time sitting down with Jon Miller at Marketo talking about his company’s own approach to ‘connecting the dots.’  One capability in Marketo I found most interesting – and in line with buyer-centric analysis – is the platform’s Program Analyzer.

Jon positioned Marketo’s approach by asking, “For any given program, what is success?”  He highlighted that one challenge in B2B demand generation is that many of the acquisition sources that feed our nurturing programs play different roles in prospect nurturing and thus have different benchmarks and indicators of success, relative to the buyer.  For example, you might analyze program performance of an event differently than a PPC program.  But ultimately as B2B demand generators we want to normalize this performance – fitting it into our funnel model and breaking down its contribution to moving buyers forward in their processes at a one-to-one level – and we want to compare it against our entire marketing mix to find out what it takes to optimize our programs.

From what I saw, Marketo’s Program Analyzer is well-positioned to do this, and it ties back to the company’s overall Revenue Cycle Analytics vision.  As Jon highlighted, not only can it help break down, “how many participated in the program, were acquired, were successes, then what’s my cost per X, ” but it can also address direct or indirect impact on revenue, as well as multiple attribution of content offers.  Most importantly, the Program Analyzer can do this visually and with real-time, ‘mashed-up’ data, which helps a B2B marketer improve his/her analysis of programs and their impact.

One gap is that the Program Analyzer cannot today do the type of ‘critical path analysis’ necessary for truly analyzing and identifying the optimal path of content nurturing for a given buyer persona.  So it’s still not yet going to help you construct a better multi-step nurturing-dialogue thread; however, it’s a good step in the right direction.

I finally spent some time sitting down with Bryan Brown at Silverpop, who showed me the latest B2B enhancements to the Engage platform – particularly around the revenue impact of marketing activities.

Brown framed Silverpop’s philosophy to closing the loop by saying, “That’s what really marketing automation is meant to do – tell me where to make my spend.”  He continued, “How do you accelerate them through the stages of the cycle.  …  Tell me what’s turning into revenue for me.”  And so he explained how Silverpop is evolving its analytics – beyond its linear, email marketing roots – to analyze the multitude of engagements with a buyer across inbound and outbound nurturing programs and to identify the revenue impact of specific programs.

Source: Silverpop

On this, Brown picked up on a theme also noted by Miller at Marketo, and that is the fact that successful B2B demand generation programs are multi-touch, not one and done; thus, our analytics – particularly our sense of a given program’s contribution to revenue – must take this into account.

Silverpop is able to show analytics both in its platform, as well as in Salesforce.com, but in an interesting twist, Brown also showcased the new ability of Silverpop to export data into pre-formatted Excel Pivot Charts and Tables.  Although I’m a big proponent of real-time reporting, the truth is that in-system dashboards in Eloqua, Marketo and Silverpop typically have a lot of limitations.  (Which is why we typically use platforms such as Tableau to display demand generation performance results to our clients.)  That’s why I must admit that as a B2B marketer I enjoy being able to analyze and manipulate data in Excel – especially ‘Pivoting’ the data – and to do really targeted dives into the impact of specific programs on specific buyers in the overall demand generation program, sometimes this is necessary.  So it was great to see

One challenge I saw in what Brown showed me:  The Silverpop analytics interface in Salesforce.com still seems to show rather rudimentary metrics – versus the very cool, buyer-centric metrics Brown showed me in our session and in the Excel Pivot Tables/Charts.  The buyer-centric, multi-touch view of demand generation needs to catch up with the view that is shown in Salesforce.com.

> Theme #2:  Tapping into the power in B2B buying of peer recommendation and influence via social media:

The number-one factor in most B2B purchases – highlighted in survey after survey – is peer interaction, and there’s increasing evidence that B2B buyers today are going to social media as a proxy for this type of insight.  For example, TechTarget’s 2010 study of ‘hyper-active’ IT buyers noted that the number-one reason IT buyers visit “online IT communities (i.e., forums, blogs, wikis) and social networking websites” – cited by 67% of respondents – is to “hear opinions from peers.”  It’s also important to point out that this type of peer/social activity tends to dominate much of the upstream, top-of-funnel engagement in B2B demand generation.    Yet the first step in many nurturing programs is our asking B2B buyers to take a leap from this activity to being ready to be nurtured via email – a disconnect that needs remedying.

Silverpop wants to change this – introducing Social Sign In for B2B demand generation programs.  Instead of asking for an email address as the first step in a progressive profiling effort, B2B marketers can allow a prospect to sign in with his/her handle from any of twenty different social media networks, including LinkedIn and Twitter – two networks that are important in B2B marketing.

Source: Silverpop

The company claims that social sign-in as an option can boost form conversion rates by 10-50%.  It also sees this as an opportunity to better capture – and be able to score/route around – behavioral interactions with social media content.  It lowers the bar, offers a different mechanism for contact and it allows the B2B vendor to begin to collect the very social data that Benioff advocates must today also become a part of our marketing data sets.

This is a nice addition to some of Silverpop’s existing social/peer-recommendation-enabling features, such as Share to Social and Forward to a Friend.  The only gap I see is that while Silverpop aspires to be a behavioral marketing engine, according to channel VP Will Schnabel, the company has not yet really thought through how this social behavioral data should impact real/live scoring for B2B demand generation programs.  So this is an area where they will need to close the gap at a best practice level.

Eloqua also announced new social features the week of Dreamforce in the form of its new Social Suite – news that was so popular on the floor of Dreamforce that Eloqua’s PR person had a hard time fitting me in for a demo!

Eloqua’s stated goal in a press release is to empower influencers to drive word-of-mouth marketing.  “In today’s revenue cycle ‘the message is the messenger,’” noted their release, “making purchase influencers as important as the prospect’s title or behavior.  Eloqua’s new features allow B2B marketers to consider an entirely new dimension – the individual’s social persona – when capturing, tracking and scoring leads.”

Among the key features of Social Suite that were announced (and that I felt were particularly compelling to buyer-centric demand generation) are:

• Klout segmentation, which “adds each prospect’s level of influence into the database and enables Eloqua to score leads based on their social activity,” according to Eloqua
• Social sign-on, which is similar to the Silverpop announcement
• Social sharing tools, which “facilitates the spread of promotions by allowing recipients to share relevant campaigns across their social graph, according to Eloqua

These are all very exciting additions to an already-robust, enterprise-grade Eloqua portfolio.  The only drawback is that it’s not clear which is available on Eloqua 9 versus 10, and while Eloqua 10 has the stronger interface, it is not yet at full parity with Eloqua 9’s features.  So – as is the case with any marketing automation vendor (and why I don’t want to single out Eloqua on this issue, per se) – it’s important that these features be available across all currently-sold platforms so that all customers can take full advantage of the capabilities.

> Theme #3:  Buyer-centricity:  Not Just for Enterprises

In addition to my conversations with Eloqua, Silverpop and Marketo, I also spent some time catching up with Pardot and Hubspot.  (BTW:  I also tried to connect with Neolane at Dreamforce, but was not able to do so, which is the only reason they’re not included here.)

Let’s be clear:  Both Pardot and Hubspot are very open about the fact that they do not target (or pretend to target) enterprises.  But both deliver some pretty robust and enterprise-grade capabilities that can help SMBs be more buyer-centric – which explains why both have seen explosive growth over the past two years.

And both – as the real leaders in the SMB segment – have been on opposite but complementary paths – with Pardot taking an outbound/marketing automation platform and layering in inbound capabilities, meanwhile with Hubspot taking an inbound marketing platform and layering in outbound/automation capabilities.

Adam Blitzer at Pardot sat down with me one evening and shared some of their recent focus and growth, and I was impressed – especially with their nearly doubling in size over the past year.

A major focus of Pardot with its clients is migrating them from viewing batch-and-blast email offers as the primary method of lead acquisition to getting SMBs to operate in a more iterative, nurturing fashion and to communicate across both inbound and outbound channels.  For example, Pardot has integrated social directly into the platform, and Pardot customers can literally schedule and send Tweets directly from the platform.  Pardot also can help build a social profile for a prospect and push that into CRM – rounding out the picture of engagement with a prospect.

I also sat down with Kirsten Knipp at Hubspot on the show floor at Dreamforce and she walked me through Hubspot’s announcements over the past year.

The major shift for Hubspot on the ‘buyer-centricity’ front is taking an inbound marketing platform and beginning to layer in classic outbound, marketing automation functions.  “Inbound marketing and marketing automation go hand in hand,” commented Knipp to me.  And she characterized the complement of the two as making the entire, integrated demand generation activity “more personalized.”

Hubspot acquired a company called Performable in June of this year.  Performable has brought semantic, intelligent marketing automation logic and processing to the Hubspot platform.  This enables Hubspot – which before was a collection of inbound tools but had limited capabilities to automate and/or trigger marketing (beyond auto-responders and drip nurturing) – to operate as a true marketing automation platform.  “The Performable technology is really the brain, it’s the logic,” commented Knipp.

Hubspot hopes that the collection of their inbound capabilities, together with true marketing automation via Performable, will enable their customers to do truly one-to-one marketing.  “We don’t want that someone at the end of the day feels like they’ve been spammed,” explained Knipp.

So buyer-centricity doesn’t require a multi-million-dollar annual B2B demand generation budget.  SMBs can get sophisticated too, and Pardot and Hubspot are helping make this a reality – which is great.

Closing Thoughts.

So the truth is that despite its muddled roots, every year marketing automation technology is in fact moving us closer to buyer-centric B2B demand generation.  Some still believe marketing automation is a tactical capability, but I believe opinion is shifting … helped along now that Eloqua has filed its IPO (read more here from David Raab and here from DemandGen Report).

And much of this movement is along the lines of connecting the dots between content offers and revenue outcomes, as well as tying our one-to-one engagement and nurturing of buyers together across both inbound and outbound channels (and well beyond mere email).

This is why I believe marketing automation remains the core of successful, buyer-centric B2B demand generation.  And this is why – as buyer-centric B2B demand generation becomes a more strategic activity inside companies –marketing automation technology infrastructure also is becoming strategic.

Dreamforce 2011 reminded me that this evolution is a reality.

Yet all the features in the world are for naught without B2B marketers that have the skillset and knowledge to successfully leverage these capabilities and to build perpetual, buyer-driven demand generation programs.  Choosing the right marketing automation platform is critical, but this is why succeeding with B2B demand generation continues to be primarily about non-technology elements – particularly people, process and technology.  This is the next battleground.

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 number one thing to consider about content distribution, is whether or not your getting the right content, to the right person, at the right time. And this take more thought then, “okay now what?” When you think about success in your content marketing programs, you really need to look at how engaged people are with the content, the more engaged, the more likely they are to share, or come back to that content, or reference you again for more content, and all of those factors depend on whether or not you did a good job realizing how different buyers behave online, and how the prefer to consume their content (where they get it, and in what format).

We look at this as the “buyers journey.” As they engage with your brand, and as they move through their unique purchase processes, they prefer to engage with and consume content in different formats, and from different resource. To map your distribution effectively, you need to look at the difference between how a CEO consumes content and how an end-user, or an IT purchaser might consume content. All of these different personas have different habits, and there can be even more differences when you look at different industries.

Content marketing will only be successful if you are delivering the content in the right way, and at the right time. Here is an example of a “buyers journey” notice that they use different pieces content from different sources all along their process. These are the things you need to be aware of, and that’s how you need to be thinking about your content distribution.

To get you started, here are some content distribution ideas. Just remember, some of these ways are generic, others may work better for specific groups of people, ultimately, you need to find the distribution channels and formats more appropriate for your varied audiences.

21 Content Distribution Ideas: (I’ll comment on some of the less obvious ways)..

1. Your website
2. Your blog
3. Social media
4. Email (database)
5. Email signature – Your email signature can be a really easy way to share new content. Every time you have a new piece, add the link to your signature and that will be an easy way to share will colleagues, customers and partners.
6. Comment threads
7. Discussion forums
8. Events
9. Document sharing sites – Slideshare.net and Scribd are both great ways to share company collateral or presentations. They also offer vary active sub-communities of their own.
10. Multimedia sites – YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr
11. Mobile applications – Tablets are becoming increasingly popular, how are you addressing that as a content delivery mechanism?
12. Company newsflash – I have had great results sending out an email, company-wide with a list of new content, brief descriptions of it, and varied tweet-like, status update long, comments that can be shared by your entire staff. Your sales guys will be all over this, and you can help to quality-control the message a little.
13. Influencers/bloggers - This works really well if you stay engaged with the bloggers overtime. Share there content, comment on their blogs, and when you have stuff that’s relevant to their audience, they’ll likely be inclined to share it.
14. Social PR
15. Social bookmarking - Social bookmarking is a really easy way to let other people share your content with their network and that bookmarking community. Many of these communities will also send out an email with links that have been bookmarked that may interest users, so there are various ways that these sites can be leveraged.
16. Social news sites
17. Partners – Not every partnership has to be so formal or restricted to “strategic alliances” Try working with more people on content development, and then share the promotion across both databases.
18. eNewsletters
19. Lead nurturing – This is our favorite way to distribute content of course, because it really allows you to map certain kinds of content to different buyers, as well as buyer behavior, so we always know we are sending the right content, to the right person, at the appropriate stage in their purchase process.
20. Syndication/RSS
21. Content discovery platforms – this is an interesting was to share content. These platforms are usually a PPC model for content distribution. You pay X, and they syndicate your content with relevant sites, and as people click through to your content and site, you pay for that visit. Check out OutBrain (I caught up with them at Content Marketing World and checked out the platform…pretty cool).

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?”

Adopting sophisticated, new approaches to B2B demand generation – particularly moving to marketing automation, and using it to deliver buyer-centric, multi-touch nurturing programs – is not merely about improving operational efficiencies and/or getting B2B marketing to ‘step up.’

It’s about top-line revenue … i.e., the revenue that organizations with un-sophisticated B2B demand generation are walking away from every day.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

I was reminded of this fact this past week as I read a DemandGen Report article, which cited recent IDC research on this very issue.  “BtoB companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies has cost them upwards of 10% or more of revenue per year, or $100 million for a billion-dollar company, according to IDC.”

This issue also was a central theme at the SiriusDecisions Summit 2011 in Scottsdale this past May – which I covered in my blog post from the event.  Richard Eldh addressed the issue in his opening address at the conference.

“Why is it we as organizations want to even focus on sales and marketing alignment?” asked Eldh.  He explained, “[O]rganizations … [that are] tightly coupled outperformed in both revenue growth and in profitability.”  A key element of this alignment – and of sophisticated B2B demand generation – is ‘closing the loop’ between marketing activity data and sales outcome data, and the SiriusDecisions team has found that there is a wide gap between ‘best-in-class’ and ‘worst-in-class’ closed-loop practices.

Eldh cited research by his team that shows that throughout 2009 and 2010, organizations with ‘Poor Measurement’ – i.e., those with ‘worst-in-class’ practices for connecting the dots between marketing and sales efforts – grew revenues an average of 1.4% over a two-year period (including an economic environment in 2009 that was particularly challenging).  Comparatively, organizations with true ‘Closed Loop’ – i.e., those with ‘best-in-class practices – grew revenues an average of 7.5% over the same period.

Clearly Closed Loop organizations perform better from a revenue-growth perspective than Poor Measurement organizations, but as Eldh highlighted, the story is even more dramatic from a profit perspective.

Eldh’s team found that Poor Measurement organizations saw an average of -23.4% profit growth throughout 2009 and 2010, whereas Closed Loop organizations saw an average of 146.3% profit growth over the same two-year period – quite a difference and one that supports his point.  In fact, almost as an understatement, Eldh commented, “We see significant impact … post putting in some measurement systems.”  Clearly.

Operating a best-in-class B2B demand generation program enables a more granular level of visibility into the connection between marketing programs and revenue outcomes – visibility that helps identify and convert a greater number and percentage of opportunities.  This visibility is key to tuning, and ultimately perfecting, an organization’s B2B demand generation formula.

This is supported by recent data from Lenskold Group in the “2011 Lenskold Group / The Pedowitz Group Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study.” The study noted:

Companies using full-featured marketing automation integrated with CRM or sales automation indicate much higher rates of reporting and forecasting metrics.  Compared to marketers with no marketing automation, integrated marketing automation users were more likely to report performance metrics (average 58% vs. 36% per metric), report final metrics (average 46% vs. 22% per metric) and forecast metrics (average 56% vs. 35% per metric).

What Can You Do?

In the book I introduce a framework for taking B2B demand generation practice from a legacy era to the modern era.  The core of this framework is finding the right balance between 1.) focusing on the buyer – i.e., becoming more one-to-one and bottoms-up in our buyer engagement – and 2.) adopting an operations mindset – i.e., shifting to a scalable, process-oriented mindset to deliver the volume of one-to-one buyer interactions and qualified leads required to succeed.  As the book explains, ‘balancing’ these two elements is ultimately the key to succeeding with modern B2B demand generation.

Let me boil this down, though, in light of some of the data I presented above, to two core elements that must underpin your B2B demand generation – and that help represent the difference between organizations that are ‘best-‘ and ‘worst-in-class.’

Moving from ‘legacy’ to ‘modern’ in your B2B demand generation requires that your approach and programs be:

> Buyer-centric: Your B2B demand generation program must be designed not only to score and qualify leads and/or to elicit minimal levels of awareness/response.  Sophisticated, modern B2B demand generation must be designed from the ground up to engage and accelerate B2B buyers in their buying processes.  This means developing content that is more about the buyer’s issues and needs than your product/service.  This also means adding value throughout the buying process with tools and resources that help the B2B buyer make a better decision.  And this finally means a multi-touch strategy that is iterative and that moves at the buyer’s pace.

> Closed loop: Your B2B demand generation program also must connect the dots between every content offer and the resultant revenue outcome – ideally through marketing automation sync-ed to CRM.  So not only must B2B demand generation educate buyers, but it also must make sure that we’re educating them with the right content, in the right sequence that is most likely to result in their buying from us.  Then our scoring and qualification makes sense, because we understand the ‘critical path’ of our targeted B2B buyer and can design programs that deliver the highest volume of leads that meet our ideal score profile.

There’s obviously a lot more that goes into successful, modern B2B demand generation; however, buyer-centricity and operating in a closed-loop fashion are a good start.  And frankly, it’s a big leap from where many of our B2B marketing programs are today.

But it’s a leap that is about more than just improving marketers’ operational efficiency; it’s about improving the ability of our organizations to identify and convert revenue opportunities.  Sophisticated, modern B2B demand generation efforts result in perpetual, buyer-centric, closed-loop programs that contribute to predictable and sustainable revenues for their organizations.  This is why B2B demand generation is no longer tactical; now it’s strategic.

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.

So anticipating some great insights, I joined the ‘consumer-not-spoken-here’ crowd out in the desert, May 4-6, and what follows are my major B2B demand generation takeaways from the event.

“Forging a New Alliance” Between B2B Marketing and Sales

The SiriusDecisions team turned this year to the issue of what it takes to achieve truly integrated B2B demand generation – i.e., the issue of how marketing and sales can operate as one, aligned unit in driving holistic demand generation.  Their theme was “B-to-B Sales and Marketing:  Forging a New Alliance,” and all of their subsequent analyst presentations and practitioner case study examples mapped in some way, shape or form back to this core theme.

In his opening remarks, SiriusDecisions co-founder Richard Eldh framed the theme by asking the question, “Why is it we as organizations want to even focus on sales and marketing alignment?”  He explained, his team has found “[o]rganizations … [that are] tightly coupled outperformed in both revenue growth and in profitability.”  He also highlighted that measurement is a key ingredient of this ‘coupling’; is critical to having buyer-level visibility; and is critical to aligning the joint efforts of marketing and sales towards demand generation objectives.

Eldh cited research by his team that shows that throughout 2009 and 2010, organizations with ‘Poor Measurement’ – i.e., those with ‘worst-in-class’ practices for connecting the dots between marketing and sales efforts – grew revenues an average of 1.4% over a two-year period (including an economic environment in 2009 that was particularly challenging).  Comparatively, organizations with true ‘Closed Loop’ – i.e., those with ‘best-in-class practices – grew revenues an average of 7.5% over the same period.

Clearly Closed Loop organizations perform better from a revenue-growth perspective than Poor Measurement organizations, but as Eldh highlighted, the story is even more dramatic from a profit perspective.  Eldh’s team found that Poor Measurement organizations saw an average of -23.4% profit growth throughout 2009 and 2010, whereas Closed Loop organizations saw an average of 146.3% profit growth over the same two-year period – quite a difference and one that supports his point.  In fact, almost as an understatement, Eldh commented, “We see significant impact … post putting in some measurement systems.”  Clearly.

For Eldh and the SiriusDecisions team, this is ultimately about measuring how marketing and sales efforts contribute in a coordinated fashion toward business outcomes – i.e., revenue outcomes.  “High performance companies care about business outcomes,” said Eldh, and he explained that aligned organizations are more successful at achieving these business outcomes.

Eldh wrapped up his opening presentation by asking, “What are the four or five elements that drive organizations that have this high performance — this tight alignment?”

He used this segue to introduce SiriusDecisions’ ‘four pillars’ of alignment, which are:

• Enablement focused
• Measurement
• Investment portfolio
• Marketing technology

One final point that Eldh made and that really resonated with me:  He called out that there is an undeniable link between alignment and commitment – i.e., when marketing and sales organizations are in alignment, they also tend to share a common commitment toward joint outcomes and toward delivering on what each needs from the other.  That’s why “[m]ore organizations are signing up for service level agreements between sales and marketing than ever before,” explained Eldh.

Tony Jaros (Twitter: @tjaros), one of the firm’s leading analysts, expanded on this insight in his day-one presentation.  He said, “There’s three things a great SLA is based upon:”  1.) definitions, 2.) responsibilities and 3.) rules.  And he urged the audience, “You want to build your SLAs completely.”

Key B2B Demand Generation Takeaways

So beyond the high-level point that aligned organizations perform better, what were the major B2B demand generation takeaways I had from my time in the desert?

Let me say that SiriusDecisions Summit 2011 was a veritable fire hose of B2B demand generation insights, but to be clear, I mean this in nothing but the most positive of ways.  Honestly, the quality and quantity of the insights were tremendous, and I have nothing but positive feedback.

Yet for me I challenged myself to boil down the two-and-a-half days into some of the top points that most resonated with me.

My top B2B demand generation takeaways were:

> B2B demand generation program design and investment strategy should be closely aligned with what you want to accomplish and where you are in your marketing/sales lifecycle … and different companies of different sizes at different stages in their growth should have different mixes of demand generation elements.

John Neeson, a co-founder of the firm, and Megan Heuer (Twitter: @megheuer), one of the firm’s service directors and a very visible member of the team, provided a great framework and commentary around the variability that should exist in B2B demand generation models, based on the objectives and environment facing a given company.  Their session, “Marketing Investment: Driving Greater Alignment and Accountability,” very much conveyed 1.) the importance of adopting a portfolio mindset when designing a B2B demand generation program and 2.) that different companies need different portfolios.

“It’s not just about the broad market trends,” commented Heuer, “you need to know what’s going on with you and your goals.”  Heuer also noted, “Marketing must invest according to realistic business requirements, and be held accountable for realistic outcomes.”

Neeson and Heuer provided a number of great examples of how the portfolio should be varied in various situations.  What are the factors at the core of their different variations?  They commented that there are four core elements to consider when establishing the right B2B demand generation mix for a company:

• Business model: “Establishes operations requirements”
• Routes to market:  “Sales requirements are different by route to market”
• Demand type:  “Product and market maturity impact investment level”
• Scale:  “Competency requirement changes by size of company”

Neeson provided some commentary introducing these points, explaining that “[r]outes to market dictate marketing mix and investment priorities based on the demands of how you sell.”  He continued, “Demand type impacts key ratios of demand creation to brand and awareness building, as well as content requirements.”  And “[a] demand center strategy will be deployed differently at different stages of a company’s development.”

One data point I found interesting was the SiriusDecisions-benchmarked ratio of revenue to spending on marketing.  For example, SiriusDecisions reported that for established markets, spending on marketing as a percent of revenue is typically in the 2-8% range.  Conversely, for companies with a new paradigm or new concept, their spending on marketing may be 1.5-2X their revenues for their products/services.

> Inbound marketing is a critical and growing slice of the pie for successful B2B demand generation programs, yet our B2B demand generation efforts retain a legacy of outbound mindset – one that we must overcome.

With the caveat that B2B demand generation programs should be varied to the situation, one piece of advice was clear:  Heuer commented on day one, “Online right now is your most important investment,” when it comes to the entire B2B demand generation mix.  And this comment was backed by a slide that stated, “The best opportunity to influence decision makers is capturing their interest online when they look for answers.”

On day two, Jay Gaines (Twitter: @izjay), a new service director with the firm, delivered a session on Website conversion.  He echoed in this session something that I’ve personally written and spoken quite a bit about over the last two years.  “Buyers are more empowered.  They’re deciding when to contact us.  They’re doing their own research online.”  Spot on.

The consideration from a B2B demand generation standpoint?  “Around 60% of inquiries are coming in via inbound channels.  …  It speaks to buyer behavior,” said Gaines.

The problem though, per Gaines, is that “[m]ost of our Websites are not optimized to convert visitors.”  The legacy of B2B Websites is one of their being largely developed in their own silo, disconnected from B2B demand generation planning; moreover, B2B demand generation tactics too often are focused on outbound and/or email activities.  Thus – in a problem we often tackle with our clients at Left Brain – inbound is not being harnessed as a strategic component of 24/7, always-on B2B demand generation.  Instead too many Websites are simply online brochures and/or catalogues.

Gaines urges that inbound is a critical element of getting to a point of “perpetual demand creation” – a.k.a. something I’ve referred to before as organic demand generation – which “creates a steadier stream of leads over time,” notes Gaines.

One major call-out from Gaines:  He presented a great framework for how to move from an informational site to a ‘conversion-optimized’ site.  The four critical elements of conversion optimization, per Gaines, are:  1.) content, 2.) Website ownership, 3.) technology and 4.) program integration.

Another major call-out from Gaines was the importance of having a company’s Website play an integral role in the lead qualification process.  “On an optimized site, it’s a progressive approach where you’re learning a little more about your buyer over time,” commented Gaines.

Finally, in a day-three presentation, Gaines, noted that one implication for sales – and for marketing and sales alignment – is that sales teams must understand an be positioned to leverage inbound engagement.  “One thing sales has got to do is make sure they’re ready to engage with better-informed buyers,” said Gaines.

> Content is strategic, not tactical, when it comes to modern B2B demand generation – particularly when it comes to leveraging inbound engagement as a strategic element of perpetual demand creation.

Okay, I admit, there is a little of my own commentary mixed in here.  No one at SiriusDecisions actually said ‘content is strategic, not tactical.’  Rather, it’s a line right out of my own presentations, and my upcoming book, but it’s a point of synthesis that I really did hear coming from session after session at the event – particularly from Gaines, Heuer and Jaros – and I think it’s a point that was intended by the SiriusDecisions team.

“Your content is your currency,” commented Heuer on day one, and one of her presentation slides stated, “Quality content is the key to the kingdoms of awareness, influence, trust, participation and loyalty.”

In his day-two session, Gaines highlighted the importance of mapping content to the buyer journey, and he noted a key modern guiding principle for content is not creating content that does not have a clear role either in the buyer’s process or in a company’s conversion process.

Gaines urged in that afternoon session, “Focus on content. If you don’t have a solid content foundation, you’re going to struggle.”

Gaines also expanded on content marketing strategy in a day-three presentation, “Content:  The Heart of Effective Demand Creation.”

First, he acknowledged that successful content is not easy.  “Great content requires effort plus discipline plus hard work plus strategy,” commented Gaines.

Second, he highlighted four trends in content marketing, including:

• Adoption of new technologies, approaches
• Buyer’s journey focus
• More formats and buyer preferences
• Thought leadership

Third, he highlighted the emerging need for leadership around content in B2B demand generation.  “A new role we’ve seen emerge is that of a content strategist,” commented Gaines.  And he helped justify this statement noting, “Companies should pay as much attention to their content quality as their product quality.  …  Many more people will be exposed to … the content … than the product.”

> Technology – by itself – cannot solve B2B demand generation problems.  It requires evolution of people and processes that may substantially change the face of the B2B marketing organization.

“People are what fix marketing and sales problems, not technology,” commented Heuer in the closing panel on day three.  Technology thus is not the B2B demand generation panacea, and much of the work that we have to do on getting to successful B2B demand generation has to do with people and processes.  Technology is merely the catalyst for thinking and operating in a new mindset.

There is no question that technology adoption is growing in the B2B demand generation arena.  One of the slides in Neeson and Heuer’s day-one presentation noted, “Fact:  Average spend on technology in 2011 is 4% of marketing budgets, nearly double what it was in 2009.”  This also was the starting place for Heuer in her day-two presentation, “B-to-B Marketing Technology: Blessing, Curse or a Bit of Both?”  Heuer noted in that presentation that approximately 74% of the B2B organizations SiriusDecisions polled have adopted CRM technology, and 46% have adopted marketing automation technology.

Yet Heuer noted that organizations struggle with their marketing automation deployments and that one of the issues is that they haven’t deployed or integrated other assets, such as a marketing data warehouse and/or inbound marketing platform.  She also noted that less than 20% of B2B marketing teams have sufficient skills training for their marketing technology environment.

This skills gap is a point that was also discussed in the final panel on day three.  One SiriusDecisions analyst commented, “The skills that are needed today are very different than they were five years ago.”  Heuer commented on that same panel that part of getting people and process right is imagining new organizational structures.

“Just because we put people into silos historically, doesn’t mean it’s the right way to plan,” commented Heuer.  Her colleague, Jaros, agreed, saying, “You cannot realize new approaches in legacy models. There will be inherent friction.”

Some Closing Thoughts on Building B2B Demand Generation Programs

Clearly some great insights and lots of learning at this year’s event.

In fact, the greatest benefit of the SiriusDecisions Summit each year – in my honest opinion – is that it gets me thinking about the state of ‘best practice’ in B2B demand generation.  As head of strategy for Left Brain, which is a B2B demand generation agency, this is obviously top of mind.  I want to make sure that the counsel and programs we provide to our clients will help them get ahead of the pack, and so understanding the state of the art in both technology and process innovation is critical.

Along this vein, I’ve had some time to reflect on what I learned this year in the two weeks since the Summit wrapped, and two thoughts have emerged in my mind – points that aren’t really so much feedback or criticism of the great insights from the SiriusDecisions team as they are some ‘nuances’ that come to mind when I think about going from theory to practice in building B2B demand generation programs.

> Nuance #1 — Don’t over-centralize your demand center: One of the ideas that SiriusDecisions talks a lot about is the concept of a ‘demand center.’  I agree that it makes a lot of sense to have your organization mirror the type of Closed Loop B2B demand generation program you want to run.  This means centralizing your systems and your marketing operations teams.

But when it comes to the details – particularly the content – for complex, buyer-centric B2B demand generation programs, this is something it’s hard to centralize.  Specifically, I think it’s impossible for one, centralized organization to run effective B2B demand generation programs for a large enterprise, across multiple segments, products/services and geographies, supporting diverse sales teams.  Salient and effective, one-to-one, buyer-centric demand generation programs require content and front-line knowledge, which requires subject-matter and audience-facing experts.  This is tough to centralize.

So I think in practice this means that you should have two key teams, partnering to execute programs – an internal marketing operations group — that is centralized — and then a myriad of external marketing programs and/or field marketing groups — that are not centralized — architecting and building buyer-facing programs.

> Nuance #2 — There is not a ‘one-step’ nurture to take leads from Inquiry to MQL: The SiriusDecisions waterfall has a single qualification step going from Inquiry to Marketing Qualified Lead.  And listening to Tony Jaros talk about nurturing, he had lots of great ideas for nurturing post-MQL, but he treated the pre-MQL nurturing, again, almost as a single step.  Not sure I agree with this point-of-view.

The obvious call-out – as someone who spends a lot of time at the pre-MQL stage with clients – is that in effective B2B demand generation programs there is a lot that happens before MQL – both in terms of qualification, and in terms of nurturing.  Both Gaines and Heuer talked a lot about the engagement that occurs with buyers upstream and inbound before they ever get in front of a sales-team member.  And I counsel clients that this is a prime opportunity to get engaged with buyers earlier on in their process by helping to structure and facilitate the myriad of interactions that occur before they become an MQL.  This is a time period when there is much to learn about a buyer and much that you can share without the pressure of direct sales contact.

So I think that in practice this means that when it comes to building programs in an enterprise environment it’s necessary to put some thought into a more granular set of qualification stages and nurturing steps between Inquiry and MQL.  Your nurtures should take a buyer as far along in his/her buying process as possible, and you should qualify buyers for response, demographic qualification and behaviors that are indicative of being in an active buying sequence … all before a buyer is truly at an MQL level.

So that’s a wrap on another successful Summit.

Again, a great event overall, and I want to say thanks to the team at SiriusDecisions for putting on such a thoughtful SiriusDecisions Summit 2011.  I’ll be looking forward to what the team will come up with in 2012.

The truth is, while we’ve seen strong growth in the marketing automation space, which David Raab believes doubled to more than $200 million in spending last year, we’ve also seen a high failure rate with marketing automation adopters–a reality my colleague, Adam Needles, touched on in an earlier post.

Marketing automation projects fail when B2B marketers can’t connect the dots. One, they need to have a clear picture of how to build a successful, modern demand generation program from a process and program level. And two, they need to be able to tune their demand generation efforts against revenue outcomes.

So far, the majority of marketing organizations have focused on the technical aspects of automating the management of email pushes, contacts, campaigns, and they’ve largely tuned these efforts against the delivery of leads to sales teams. But ultimately tuning demand generation programs requires a clear and rationalized focus on the buyer and his/her buying process, alongside a picture of how enabling this process results in revenue. I do believe marketers today understand they need technology to target the right buyers, to get the right leads to sales, to nurture leads through their buying process–automatically, and to measure everything from prospect Web behavior to marketing generated revenue, but putting the emphasis on technology, versus demand generation process evolution, is a mistake.

The emerging focus among marketing automation vendors on revenue performance is a positive trend that is helping to shift marketing automation beyond the technical and ultimately will help B2B marketers connect the dots between demand generation inputs and revenue outputs.

Decoding Marketing Automation Vendors’ Terminology

Vendors such as Eloqua and Marketo are leading the charge for driving visible B2B marketing impact, while optimizing content and lead processes along the way. While each have their own way of defining it, they support the same movement–strategic demand generation, visibility into the marketing/sales pipeline and maximizing efforts to directly impact business growth through B2B marketing inputs.

Eloqua calls it “Revenue Performance Management” and defines it as a “systematic approach to identifying the drivers and impediments to revenue, vigorously measuring them, and then pulling the economic levers that will optimize top line growth.” So it isn’t just about putting technology in place, it’s about understanding how different marketing activities directly impact revenue, and having the real-time insight to be proactive about changing and adjusting either content, messaging or process (internal or external).

Marketo’s spin is slightly different but basically means the same thing. How are you being scientific with your marketing, how accountable are you holding the marketing organization for driving revenue? While Sales is traditionally the revenue generator and predictor, Marketing’s role is evolving, and according to Marketo, should now be responsible for sales forecasting and direct revenue generation. Marketo calls it “Revenue Cycle Analytics” and defines it as the ability to track, measure and optimize every marketing program or piece of content used to progress and better understand buyers as they move through the Revenue Cycle.

Connecting Demand Generation to Revenue Performance

Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of The Annuitas Group, recently commented that early adopters of marketing automation are shifting their “marketing focus to demand generation, customer acquisition and retention [because] marketing is becoming increasingly relevant and a strategic part of the business in terms of revenue creation.” He also stated, that since marketing is generating more quality leads, developing nurture programs and customer-focused campaigns, there has been an evident shift to unite sales and marketing.

DemandGen Report also recently published a study, “The State of Marketing Automation,” and noted that companies using marketing automation are now embracing Revenue Performance Management (RPM) as a means to optimize sales and marketing performance to drive revenue predictability and consistent growth.

What is the impact on Demand Generation?  And how can Revenue Performance Management be leveraged effectively?

The true (r)evolution in demand generation is being led by Buyer 2.0. It’s the buyer who now sets the rules, deciding how they’d like to be engaged, acquired and nurtured through their individual buying process. Smart companies understand this shift is real, and are reacting with a holistic demand generation process that acknowledges buyers’ needs–each step of the way–and addresses them accordingly via content and careful timing of its delivery. That’s the demand generation model you want to work toward achieving, a dual buyer-centric and operational process mindset that emphasizes understanding your buyer intimately, then leveraging marketing automation to provide buyers exactly what they want, when they want it, to make their purchase decision. The goal of this activity, of course, it to ensure the buyer’s choice is your product or service–along with a resultant revenue outcome.

At Left Brain we believe there are different layers of components that are the key to successful, modern demand generation. Technology is the bottom layer, or the infrastructure that makes your strategic efforts possible.  It supports your lead management process, which makes things run more effectively. But content marketing is arguably the most important layer of your demand generation strategy.

While the infrastructure and lead management processes make things run more smoothly, the content is what really progresses prospective buyers through their buying stages. The content is what’s relevant and valuable to the customer and it’s the most important because it’s so dependent on buyer feedback and reaction and because it essentially forms the basis for modern buyer dialogue.

Content is the basis for every interaction you have with your buyers, so there needs to be a heightened awareness of how it’s performing, what should be changed, and what should come next — i.e., how to tune our content to improve our demand generation outcomes.

Revenue performance management is how you should measure the success of this content marketing, and how you subsequently should optimize your overall demand generation efforts. It helps you understand how aligned your programs are, and whether or not you are in fact reaching the right buyer, with the right message, at the right time. It’s a strategy designed to provide visibility into buyer interactions throughout their entire buying process, optimize those interactions by providing value at every possible intersection, and enable revenue predictability and more rapid growth.

Revenue performance management really comes down to understanding the link between your content inputs and revenue outputs. It provides a framework for optimizing that content continuously so it is always relevant and always valuable to the buyer … and is more and more aligned with that buyer’s journey over time. This is the key to building repeatable and sustainable demand generation.

Marketing automation is infrastructure, not a strategic process. It’s an extremely valuable solution; however, to truly drive marketing revenue, your demand generation needs to be holistic and must consistently address your buyers’ needs. Content is at the core of successful demand generation, and it’s effectiveness should be measured through a Revenue Performance Management context.

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.

And an important change.  At far too many other B2B marketing and marketing technology conferences over the last two years, I’ve felt much of the dialogue around B2B demand generation has unfortunately remained very basic, and frankly immature.  (Sorry, not naming names of any of the bad ones; however, I will call out the SiriusDecisions Summit as an All-star, which has also been advancing the dialogue in a positive way, so there have been some other stand-outs.)

In the past I’ve seen far too many examples of:  social media as the ‘shiny new thing’ (with so-called ‘gurus’ everywhere), the persistent mythology that marketing automation technology is easy to use (it’s not) and can improve your lead management with minimal effort (sorry, requires a lot of process change too) and B2B marketers continuing to try to leverage legacy, interruptive, mass-marketing techniques to engage a clearly-disinterested Buyer 2.0 (and they wonder why their email campaign got a 1-2% click rate).

Fortunately, the dialogue has been shifting over the last six-plus months, and the number-one thing I took away from OMS 2011 is strong evidence of the maturation occurring in B2B demand generation.  A (r)evolution is occurring in how we engage, acquire and nurture buyers through the holistic demand generation process, and marketing practice is starting to catch up with the challenges and opportunities that Web 2.0 has brought us.

So what was different about OMS 2011?

Aaron Kahlow (Twitter:  @AaronKahlow) put together a top-notch educational program with strong speakers and panelists who are driving real forward thinking in modern online marketing.

Source: Left Brain

There was acknowledgement in the presentations and sessions at OMS of the evolving role social media is playing in the buying process, including displacing first-generation search in some cases.  There was focus on how adoption of new marketing technology must be accompanied by new process evolution. There was emphasis on how revenue, not merely program activity, must become marketing’s success metric.  And I heard discussion about ‘what’s next’ – things like HTML5, which will impact the next phase in the evolution of the social Web.

I also heard presentations at OMS by B2B marketing organizations that are emerging as the true ‘poster children’ of what it takes to succeed with modern demand generation.  One such firm is Taleo, which impressed the heck out of me.  Taleo presented a case study on the evolution of its demand generation program, both from the standpoints of implementing Eloqua and of building out all of the processes and content necessary to drive successful programs (and to fully leverage the technology).  The evolution of their demand generation efforts is impressive; however, what is most impressive was hearing the company report a 64% increase in sales-qualified leads, a 58% increase in the ability of the company to do successful, outbound prospecting and a nearly 90% acceptance rate of leads passed to sales.  Now that’s sales and marketing alignment!

My own day-one presentation, titled “The Key Elements of a Successful, Modern Demand Generation Program,” focused on the fundamentals that underlie such a successful program.  I noted in my presentation that two keys to focusing your B2B demand generation efforts are:  1.) thinking and operating in a “buyer-centric” fashion and 2.) adopting an “operational, process mindset.”  And I was pleased to see that these themes also were highlighted in comments and statements from other presenters and panelists at various points throughout the event.

Source: Left Brain

So what were my top B2B demand generation insights from OMS 2011?  Below are points that really resonated with me.

Managing buyer dialogue in B2B demand generation requires balancing the buyer’s needs with the seller’s goals.

This is (and has always been) a major challenge in B2B demand generation, but it has become more acute in a Web 2.0 environment.  How do we give the buyer what (s)he wants to support the buying education process while not losing site of our eventual transactional goals?

“Content marketing can be a bit shy.  A lot of the content that is out there is relatively shy about asking people about the next step,” called out Ion Interactive CTO Scott Brinker (Twitter: @chiefmartec) in his session on “Conversion Content Marketing.”

The challenge is that Buyer 2.0 is in the driver’s seat when it comes to finding information to support his/her buying process.  So while we want to get to the ‘ask,’ we also don’t want transactional goals to stand in the way of productive, engaged, pre-sale content dialogue with buyers.  Christelle Flahaux (Twitter: @mktgstella), a field marketer with Taleo (the case study I highlighted above), noted of her own firm’s approach, “We’re not trying to sell them the first time they come to the site.  We’re building interest throughout the sales cycle.”

Brinker’s subsequent call-out was that content marketing and conversion optimization lie at the extremes of a spectrum:  “Content marketing drifts towards ‘free love,’ and conversion optimization drifts towards ‘used car salesman.’”

Brinker presented his own “five principles” for balancing the two:  1.) content is king, 2.) conversion is always optional, 3.) always be testing, 4.) form shouldn’t be formulaic and 5.) produce copiously.  (Click here to view his full presentation.)

Another call-out is to work collaboratively between marketing and sales to determine what should and should not be ‘gated.’ “We need to constantly work with our Web team and our Inside Sales team to not let our routing rules overly dictate the information prospects can get access to,” noted Flahaux.  She said her goal is to support effective nurturing but also to not make it difficult for buyers to get the information that they need in their buying process.

Finally, a key point I made in my presentation is that it’s truly not either/or – a big part of it is thinking through the role different types of content play in the buying process and integrating ‘organic,’ inbound content that is about engagement and getting found with outbound content that is focused on nurturing and getting to a ‘close,’ so that the two work seamlessly together – in tandem with the buyer’s own education process.

Engaging with the modern B2B buyer requires listening to your buyer, staying in the moment and being relevant and timely with your demand generation efforts.

This is an important call-out.  Much of the insight we need to succeed with modern B2B demand generation simply requires us to gather and process the insights buyers already provide to us.  “The social media conversations are happening, whether we participate or not,” noted marketing consultant Pelin Thorogood (Twitter: @pelint), who moderated the demand generation panel.

Listening to the buyer was a theme called out by several marketers at OMS.  “Make sure you are listening, before you are speaking, in your marketing,” commented Jen Brady (Twitter: @jenbrady) with marketing consultancy FRED on the demand generation panel.  And an Intel marketer commented on the day-one closing panel, “Listening helps identify the forums. You want to go where the conversations are.”

Another call-out was that connecting with the buyer increasingly also is about being on the right device, in the right way.  One member of the “Conversion Testing” panel commented, “Devices … that’s a new spin on segmentation.”

So what can we do?  The keys to engaging our buyer via content are a.) recognizing that content is not merely tactical, it is strategic and is the basis for dialogue with our buyers throughout ~95% of their process – a point I made in my own presentation – and b.) keeping that content fresh and ‘in the moment.’  “Content marketing tells us a lot more can be gained by creating new content, rather than just testing and iterating,” commented Brinker.  “Keep getting new content experiences out there.”

Optimizing B2B demand generation requires getting a complete and continuous picture of your buyer’s journey; using scoring and routing to engage buyers in the right place, at the right time; and constantly tuning your demand generation model against revenue results.

This really gets to balancing the two principles that were at the core of my own presentation – again making sure your B2B demand generation is both “buyer-centric” and has at its core an “operational, process mindset.”  And it’s clear from many of the other presentations at OMS that the nexus of these two is where really great B2B demand generation occurs.

A Hoovers marketing executive commented on the demand generation panel:  “We can actually trace unique visitors, click-throughs … We can actually trace 80% from gross lead to close.”  An integration of programs and infrastructure that is impressive.

Flahaux with Taleo said that their team regularly analyzes the performance of their demand generation programs against their buyer’s journey.  Taleo takes “… deals that have recently closed [and examines] what that account has done on our Website from the day they first came to us to the day they closed.”

Walking through the efficiency of your demand generation efforts and making improvements against your baselines is critical to really impacting downstream results.  Somehow we too often are complacent about our conversion efficiency as marketers.  Yet, as another member of the conversion testing panel noted, “The deeper in the funnel, the more valuable every click a buyer makes.”

Not only do we want to optimize our content offers to buyers, we also want to triage them at every step of engagement via lead scoring and routing.  “The only way you know how to separate the wheat from the chaff in your leads is to score leads,” commented Genoo President Kim Albee (Twitter: @kimalbee) on the demand generation panel.  “Who is your ideal customer profile? Do that. Score that.”

Albee also pointed out that “[l]ead scoring is never, ever done.”  This was echoed by Brady, who commented, “If you have your lead scoring modeled out, make sure you have it optimized and up to date as much as possible.”

“It’s not set it and forget it,” reminded Flahaux of demand generation programs.

I noted in the wrap-up of my own presentation, successful demand generation is:  1.) organic, always-on, 24/7, 2.) buyer-driven, 3.) a living, breathing ‘system’ that must be managed and 4.) optimized against revenue performance.

Flahaux echoed this last point:  “It’s about revenue.  It’s not about leads or inquiries anymore.”

So, overall, a great event with some really strong B2B demand generation insights this year.  Thanks to Aaron Kahlow and the rest of the team at Online Marketing Connect for putting on a top-notch educational event and for inviting me to speak.  And I look forward to participating in the upcoming OMS event in London as the event series moves from its annual event to the road show.  See you there!

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.

The important thing to remember about social media is that it is used and consumed in different ways depending on the buyer audience, as well as the problem that buyer is trying to solve and where (s)he is in his/her decision-making process.

Social media can help to establish initial rapport, build confidence, and ultimately trust.  A 2010 study by Base One and B2B Marketing in the UK found that blogs, word of mouth and Twitter were the top-three, most-trusted mediums early on in the B2B buying process.  Social media also can help with one-to-one buyer engagement, and it can open up substantive dialogue with buyers when they are framing the initial problem that they are seeking a product/service to help solve.  In fact, a 2009 ITSMA study found that three-quarters of technology solution buyers leverage social media in their decision-making process – especially to connect with other buyers and influencers.

How can you use social media in your own demand generation efforts?  Here are 5 ways to do so:

1.)  Distribute Targeted Content: A recent study conducted by Co-Tweet and ExactTarget found that 25% of people who follow a company on Facebook, do it because they want access to exclusive content. One of the major advantages of social media is being able to find and serve content to niche markets and targeted groups, and in most cases they are interested in the content if it’s relevant and exclusive.

2.)  Nurture “Not-Ready” Leads into “Sales-Ready” Leads: To support other programs you are running, and to help Prospects learn and become more engaged with the brand, it’s great to leverage social media, especially blogging as part of a drip nurturing track. Look at the communications campaigns you’ve established and see where blog posts or videos fit in for added value.

3.)  Track or Monitor for New Opportunities: Monitoring social media is generally first thought of for damage control or for overall brand awareness, but more and more inside sales teams, demand creation teams and marketing operations groups are leveraging sales and marketing tools combined with social media (or social CRM) to research Prospects, to generate net-new leads and also to learn about new potential buyers through online forums, groups and comments on blogs or social networks.

4.)  Promote Exclusive Offers: Another way to leverage social media is to promote exclusive offers. In the same study mentioned above, Co-Tweet and Exact Target found that 40% of people following brands are doing it especially for discounts or special offers. Social media can be very effective in creating an exclusive environment that people feel like they are getting something special for their participation or just membership within a group.

5.)  Retain and Up-sell: Most of the time companies focus on driving revenue, but forget about the people they’ve already won over. Why aren’t there more retention and up-sell programs that leverage social media? You customers already understand the value of your product or service, why not leverage social media to get your customers even more engaged.

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.

Second, it made me think of another number.  24%.  This is the percentage of marketing automation adopters, according to a Bulldog Solutions/Frost & Sullivan study, that reported they are ‘generating enough demand’ to meet their sales team’s needs.

On one hand marketing automation technology continues to struggle with more mainstream adoption among B2B marketing organizations.  On the other hand, when B2B marketers spend on marketing automation technology – what is pretty robust technology that can do a lot – a minority seem to be finding success.  This all points to a pretty dismal state of evolution in our B2B demand generation efforts.

What’s to blame for the failure of modern B2B demand generation?

It’s not the technology.  Technology is not failing B2B marketers, but neither is technology a panacea.

Marketers, what they know – or rather what they don’t know – and how they approach demand generation are to blame.  People, process and content, as I noted in a past blog post.  But it’s not their fault.  Marketing practice developed over the last forty or fifty years – i.e., since the Post World War Two ‘Mad Men Era’ – completely fails B2B marketers in the modern demand generation environment.  This marketing ‘science’ was designed by tagline-creating, ‘big-idea’ martini-guzzlers at ad agencies in an era of Seller power.  This is an era that is forever in our past – an arbitrage opportunity that is long gone.  In the modern Web 2.0 world, Buyers have power, not Sellers, and this new polarity requires a very different approach to B2B demand generation.

But let’s get granular.  Rather than just make a broad brush statement here, we should dig deeper into the mechanics.  What’s a marketer to do?

Why do (well-intentioned) B2B demand generation efforts fail?  Here are my top three thoughts about how we get off track – why we fail – and what we can do to begin moving again in the right direction:

Failure #1:  Your plan is not (really) built around your targeted buyer(s).

This needs to come first.  There are many reasons why we fail in our B2B demand generation efforts, but often at the core – or closely related to another reason for failure – is this fundamental point.  Too often B2B demand generation plans are not built around the modern B2B buyer and his/her information consumption needs.  Rather, plans start with a product we want to sell to the market, and we subsequently develop a sales plan and operate a selling process to foist it on as many unsuspecting, uninterested buyers as possible.  I’m not sure if this strategy worked decades ago, but I can assure you that in the modern environment, this definitely doesn’t work.  And I’m not just talking about the need for ‘targeting’ or ‘segmentation.’  We often already do this – in a cursory way – but we don’t go far enough.

What I’m advocating for is a complete realignment of your B2B demand generation processes around the buyer – literally making every point of communication and contact focused on and driven by the needs and behaviors of the buyer in his/her buyer-education process.  This means getting away from our linear, mass-marketing mindset – one that too often results in a ‘push architecture’ that is only working when we’re driving it – and instead moving to an iterative, buyer-driven mindset – one that looks more like a ‘pull architecture’ and that is ‘always on’ and always available when and where a buyer needs it most.  (And I’ll go ahead and say I do believe that marketing automation is critical to succeeding with this new architecture, but you must put process in place first.)

I’ve spent a good portion of the last two years of my career – first at Silverpop and now at Left Brain Marketing – advocating that the greatest challenge we face today as B2B marketers is this seismic shift that has occurred in the power balance between Sellers and Buyers.  A year ago I published a blog post that dug into the deep numbers proving that the nature of the B2B Buyer has changed.  And this past August, I published a follow-up post showing that the lack of Buyer focus is significantly impacting our demand generation programs.

Now it’s time to do something about it.

This means starting with a real, deep understanding of your buyer and his/her education needs.  It means aligning content across search, Web assets, social media and email nurturing campaigns that is aligned to when/where a buyer is looking for information.  There should be a coherence to your content marketing efforts – not simply relying on one-off offers and promotions.  This means rationalizing whether you pursue a channel and/or content piece based explicitly on the role it will play in supporting the buying process.  This also means reframing some of your KPIs to focus granularly on the linkages between specific content offers, and sequences of content, and fundamental revenue outcomes.  And all of this must happen before you build your first campaign in marketing automation – a point most marketing automation vendors even agree with.

“A key to marketing automation is reframing your thinking to focus on your customers’ buying process rather than your selling process,” notes Eloqua CTO Steve Woods in a blog post.  He cautions, “Before you implement a marketing automation program, you should map how your customers move through every stage of the buying cycle and become aware of their questions and concerns throughout each stage.”

Failure #2:  You are focusing on lead quantity over quality.

This is the bad practice direct marketing methods have taught us.  What no one talks about is the diminishing returns of this so-called ‘science.’  Imagine trying to explain to a non-marketer how by any stretch of the imagination it makes sense or is efficient to send out snail mail and email messages to people that mostly don’t care about what you have to say and recognizing that a ‘good’ yield is in the single digit points.  Aren’t we obsessed as a nation with the price of oil and energy efficiency?  Efficiency!  Yet what is more inefficient than traditional mass-context, direct marketing techniques?  We’ve got to get to a new mindset – one that is focused on outcomes, not mere activity – as B2B marketers.  This means trading big numbers of low quality leads for smaller numbers of high quality leads.

“[O]ne of the outcomes of generating quality leads means less volume because you’ve removed the unlikely candidates and extended the dialogues with those who remained,” explains Ardath Albee in a post on her blog.  That makes sales managers nervous, because they think that what they are doing is merely a numbers game.  Albee challenges this mindset, “But it also means those leads will have a higher propensity to convert into customers.”  And this ultimately results in higher revenues.

The research supports this.  Lower quantities with higher quality actually improve sales performance, whereas flooding a rep with a higher number of lower-quality leads can actually decrease his/her total performance.

Joe Galvin with SiriusDecisions explains in a November blog post, “What our research is proved is that the performance of sales reps who managed to a 4X or greater pipeline was lower … when compared to salespeople working with 3X or less pipeline requirement.”  Galvin continues, “[S]ales reps that focused on fewer, more winnable deals tend to do better.  Flooding the rep with low quality/high quantity leads only increases their inefficiencies … .”

How do we get to this scenario?  It requires taking your newly-crisp knowledge of your targeted buyer and translating that into a clear definition of what constitutes a Sales Ready Lead and that is likely to lead to a Sales Opportunity … and convert into revenue.  This so-called Universal Lead Definition for each buyer persona targeted will help serve as your benchmark and will improve the revenue yield of your demand generation efforts.

Failure #3:  You don’t frame your B2B demand generation plan in terms of a.) your revenue objectives or b.) the ‘reverse funnel math’ it will take to get there.

Why do you want to know your buyer and understand what a quality lead looks like?  Because this is the path to more efficiently and sustainably achieving your desired revenue outcome.  Unfortunately, this is where the third ‘sin’ of B2B marketers in demand generation often surfaces.  Are you framing your demand generation efforts in both a qualitative and a quantitative fashion?  What numbers of leads at each stage and with what rates of conversion do you need to achieve from the top to the bottom of your demand generation funnel to go from Prospect to Closed-Won?

I explained in my recent post on the “Elements of a Modern Demand Generation Plan,” that “… you have to work backwards, and typically this is book-ended by some very large numbers for estimated total number of inbound and outbound marketing Prospect impressions you’ll need to drive to acquire enough Respondents – i.e., raw leads – and subsequently to hit your targeted number of Sales Opportunities per month.”

This is something we do with our clients at Left Brain Marketing.  We have a giant Excel model that we use to help do analysis of lead conversion dynamics by stage and that crisp up our quantitative targets at each stage in the process.  And this is a critical step in the process through which we develop a B2B demand generation plan.

Source: Left Brain Marketing

May seem like a lot of work – especially for a ‘right brained’ traditional marketer.  But going through this process has two key results.

First, knowing your objectives and doing the reverse math will give you a very granular sense of your ‘critical path.’  What do you really need to deliver via your B2B demand generation program at each stage?  It helps you carefully construct your engagement, acquisition and nurturing logic, and it gives you an important baseline against which to track your performance and growth.

Second, it’s also critical to better aligning with your sales colleagues.  “Being able to describe marketing plans in the context of the sales challenges is the most effective way to demonstrate how marketing has listened and where they can have an impact,” comments John Neeson of SiriusDecisions in a recent blog post.

Fortunately, it’s not all gloom and doom out there – you’re not left without a candle.  There are some great examples of successes B2B marketers are having adopting new practices alongside new technology.  I saw some great examples of this at this past December’s Dreamforce event.  It all starts with process evolution, though, and must come together in a newly-framed, modern B2B demand generation plan.  You will also need a hand at some point.  Most B2B marketing organizations find it challenging to go through this process evolution.  That’s why I’d encourage you to add a demand generation agency to your team of resources in 2011.  (And feel free to reach out to me directly via LinkedIn, Twitter or our Contact Us page if you’d like to chat more about your own organization’s challenges with B2B demand generation.)

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.

On the other hand, Salesforce.com has become the leader in cloud-based application infrastructure.  It offers the same platform technology that Salesforce.com is built on as a basis for supporting the development and deployment of cloud-based applications.  Much of this message is targeted at application developers, but I’ll note that it is this cloud-based approach that also is critical to enabling the demand management software ecosystem I noted above.  (And I’ll submit that marketers MUST increasingly care about and be knowledgeable about ‘the cloud.’)  Whereas the supply-chain management ecosystem – which has significantly matured in recent years – could rely on suppliers to get on the same platforms and to share information, demand management is more complicated than that.  Buyer data – especially sentiment, intent and garnering a complete picture of your organization’s interactions with that buyer – is a lot harder to collect and manage, and even harder to act on.  That’s where cloud-based data and processing is a critical tool for marketing leaders – serving as the technology infrastructure necessary to get your arms around your complex, dynamic marketplace and to be able to drive and tune your buyer-centric demand generation engine.

Perhaps what is most impressive about Dreamforce, though, is that there is no other technology-based event that draws such a large group of sales and marketing executives – and the technology vendors that serve them – in one place, at one time for nearly a full week.  Some of my best conversations each year occur at Dreamforce, and this year was no different.  Not only did I attend some great sessions – especially Benioff’s day-one keynote and Eloqua CTO Steve Woods’ panel, “Marketing as a Revenue Engine,” but I also had many, great meetings with a number of customers, prospects and partners that all helped me get a great check on the pulse of modern demand generation.

So what were my major demand generation insights from Dreamforce 2010?

Here are two major takeaways from this year’s event:

B2B buyer insight is more-pervasive, more real-time and more-accessible via ‘the cloud,’ and marketers must learn to leverage this dynamic asset.

I’ve already somewhat introduced this point, but it’s critical to highlight the increasing importance of cloud-based buyer insight to the success of modern demand generation.

I’ve written on many occasions about the fundamental shift that has occurred in modern B2B marketing.  In a Web 2.0 environment, power has shifted from seller to buyer.  One of the consequences of this new evolution, though, is that buyer sentiment is increasingly available via Web – via the cloud – more than ever before.  So whereas early on, buyers had an information advantage, increasingly sellers have access to a range of demographic and behavioral insight into their current and perspective buyers.  It’s no longer a one-sided interaction, but it does represent a fundamental change in how we interact with buyers, and it does require a new level of competency for marketers in engaging this dynamic asset.

Benioff highlighted this new evolution in his day-one keynote, saying “the old Internet is dying off” and we’re seeing “a broad change in Internet usage.”  He continued, “What is happening on the Internet has changed,” and he highlighted how social media interactions with buyers were increasingly surpassing email-based interactions.  One of his executives echoed this later in the keynote, saying that “your customers are living in a different world, and you need to adapt.”

More than ever our challenge as marketers is not about garnering mass awareness or building traditional brands via traditional broadcast channels.  Our new job is to listen to and respond to our buyers – driving more one-to-one, buyer-centric demand generation activities.  But how do we do scale this and still lead efficient and sustainable marketing activities?  This is where cloud-based data increasingly is a critical success factor.

What is this cloud-based data?  It’s emerging in two forms.  On one level, we have a growing mass of public data – especially via search-engine-exposed social media, such as blogs and via Twitter.  On another level, we have rapid growth in private data, whether via information collected on private networks or via collaborative information and insights on buyer interactions shared internally within companies.  On both fronts, we saw several great examples of the role this data increasingly is playing in successful demand generation.

Benioff highlighted the importance of public cloud data, focusing on Twitter and Salesforce.com’s growing integration with this data.  “One of the most popular areas in customer service in 2010 is Twitter,” said Benioff.  He also highlighted the importance of private cloud data.  He focused on his company’s acquisition of Jigsaw – which he called “the world’s leading data cloud” and noted it is based on nearly a million people updating 23 million records.  He also highlighted the next phase of evolution for Chatter, which he called Salesforce.com’s “most successful product ever” and said that it is enabling organizations to capture internal buyer insight and interactions and literally index this information back to an individual customer record level.

The opportunity to leverage cloud-based buyer data was driven home in other sessions.  One marketing executive on Woods’ ‘Revenue Engine’ panel commented, “I personally believe LinkedIn is the most maintained database on the planet because we do it ourselves.”  He further commented that there is a growing “… realization that this big thing out there called social data is becoming more relevant to us [as marketers].”

Woods noted in his own post-Dreamforce blog post that Salesforce.com was not the only vendor focused on delivering cloud-based buyer data at Dreamforce.  “Salesforce.com has clearly made a significant investment in this area with their acquisition of (and deep integration of) Jigsaw as a data cloud, but folks like Hoovers, D&B, and StrikeIron were very present on the show floor with data sourcing, append, and cleansing services.”  We also saw Demandbase highlighting its ability to identify anyone that comes to your Website.  A DemandGen Report article noted the company’s Dreamforce announcement “… that its Real-Time Identification service can now accurately identify more than one billion IP addresses, matching them to over seven million businesses. The BtoB marketing solution provider now represents more than 75% of all business web traffic across North America and Europe.”

The increasingly-important role of cloud-based B2B buyer insight in successful, modern demand generation was a critical takeaway from Dreamforce – one I highlighted in an interview with DreamSimplicity from the show floor.  (Note:  For those offended by bad celebrity impressions, I’ll warn you that I DO attempt to do Marc Benioff as part of this interview.)

Dreamforce 2010: Adam Needles, Leftbrain Marketing – Marketing In The Cloud, Centralizing The Feed from DreamSimplicity on Vimeo.

Our role as marketers must focus more than ever on delivering leadership and visibility to help our organizations tune their demand generation machines and to ensure tight coupling with revenue outcomes.

Beyond the technology infrastructure powering it, there was rising dialogue at Dreamforce this year around the ‘new science’ of demand generation and the emerging, new leadership role of marketing in this evolution and in steering an organization’s revenue management.  And I was pleased to see increasing acknowledgement from marketers I talked with that adopting technology is only a fraction of what it takes to succeed with modern demand generation.

Woods kicked off his ‘Revenue Engine’ panel by commenting, “We all have the same challenge, if we have a dollar of investment to make … where do we put it?”  He continued, saying that “… our job as revenue professionals is to optimize the process and make it as efficient as possible.”  And he added, “The best organizations have a clear sense of where to invest.”

His panel featured several senior marketing executives talking about their own approaches to demand generation – especially the strategy and processes that underlie their programs and that their marketing technology infrastructure helps them to leverage.

A marketing executive with TrialPay noted, “There’s been a veritable sea change in how demand gen is done.  There are dimensions of science that are being brought into the marketing function.”  And I was pleased to hear him note that the challenge – and opportunity – for marketers today is to lead the development and management of their companies’ holistic demand generation ‘engine’ – one “… that generates cash, that is ROI positive.”

This requires marketers to take the lead – both from a strategy and from an infrastructure standpoint.  A marketing executive with McAfee noted that marketing must move to a “proactive state” in demand generation – beyond merely delivering sales-ready leads.  And he noted that merely sales-driven marketing is “like driving with the rearview mirror.”  Marketers must not only deliver repeatable opportunities but must also help their organizations constantly understand – and adapt to – a changing buyer landscape.

While people and process are critical elements of this evolution, it also was great to see so many marketing leaders acknowledging that marketing automation is a critical piece of their modern demand generation infrastructure.  An Informatica marketing executive on Woods’ panel called out, “I’m using [Eloqua] to allow me, almost from a forensic point of view” to see what is going on with marketing.  And Andrew Gaffney’s Dreamforce write-up for DemandGen Report noted, “With both Marketo and Eloqua playing lead roles as Platinum sponsors of this year’s Dreamforce, attendees were no longer asking what marketing automation is, but now more pointed questions about how they could and should be using it alongside salesforce.com.”

That is not to say that everyone at Dreamforce was so enlightened, and I sat in on one panel – ironically the ‘sales and marketing alignment’ panel – and was a bit aghast at some of the statements I heard.  Ardath Albee did a post capturing what ensued – so I’ll let you read her thoughts.  I’ll say, though, that while there are many progressive attitudes towards the evolution of demand generation – especially at Dreamforce – that is not to say that there are not sales (and marketing) executives out there that still believe the role of marketing is to get names for sales so that salespeople can cold call them.   (But I’ll let them figure it out for themselves.)

So all-in-all, lots of great learning at Dreamforce this year – with some great demand generation insights.  A sincere thanks to Marc Benioff (Twitter: @benioff) and his team at Salesforce.com (Twitter: @salesforce) for putting on a great show.