Do You Have the Right Demand Gen Model for the Brave New World of B2B Marketing?

Does your marketing organization have a thoughtful blueprint upon which to build pre-sales nurturing programs? A strategic plan will help you and your team understand the goals and objectives of upstream lead qualification and serve as a step-by-step framework for moving from initial buyer engagement to vetting the specific buyer as a lead that is ready to engage with a sales team member. It also helps diagnose opportunities and gaps that exist in many demand generation programs, by narrowing the objectives for lead qualification at each stage in the nurturing process.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are these challenges?

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

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

Sounds like a problem that needs solving, right?

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

Revenue Performance Management and B2B Demand Generation: Connecting the Dots

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

B2B Demand Generation Insights from OMS 2011

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

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

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

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

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

Dreamforce 2010: Demand Generation Insights ‘from the Cloud’

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

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

2 of 2: Elements of a Modern Demand Generation Plan … Program Translation

Today’s post is part two of a two-part series I started about two weeks ago.  In part one, I covered two main points:  One, the greatest challenges most B2B marketers face in building a modern demand generation program is that they have no idea how to do this or where to start.  Two, the first step in building a successful demand generation plan is to do some analysis.  I called this developing ‘buyer-targeting context’ – i.e., understanding the environment within which you are targeting your buyer, what your objectives are and what it will take to get there.  And I addressed the qualitative and quantitative analysis necessary to establish this context.   In part two today, I’ll dig into what it takes to translate this context into an executable demand generation plan.  ~ABN

Part Two:  Program Translation

Developing your initial buyer-targeting context gives you the baseline you need to start to build your demand generation plan.  By this point, you should have a clear idea of the following:  who your target buyer is; what constitutes a lead that is qualified to go to sales; what are the conversion steps and quantitative dynamics you’ll face in your nurturing programs; and what your overall ‘reverse-funnel math’ looks like.  These are all critical inputs.

1 of 2: Elements of a Modern Demand Generation Plan … Overview + Buyer-Targeting Context

How many posts a week do you find with ‘tips and tricks’ for improving your demand generation program or for leveraging marketing automation technology?  These posts are valuable, yet if you are part of the 97-98% of B2B marketers that either are not currently using marketing automation technology or that are not using it successfully – a reality I covered in parts one and two my ‘Real State’ of modern demand generation series – then you’ve got bigger fish to fry.

Where’s the gap?

I find B2B marketers increasingly ‘get’ the key building blocks.  They know – at least subconsciously – they need both process and technology (even if they don’t act on it).  And a growing group understands that in order to do successful online demand generation, they need some combination of marketing automation, together with lead management strategy and content marketing strategy.  B2B marketers also are increasingly aware of the importance of holistic nurturing.  Unfortunately, these remain mostly tactical considerations for far too many B2B marketers.  I think this is why demand generation remains a tactical, not strategic, consideration inside far too many companies, and why many have a narrow scope of what demand generation entails. 

A Layered Approach to Lead Nurturing in B2B Demand Generation

This afternoon I am speaking at the Boston-area Silverpop B2B Marketing University on the topic of “Succeeding with the Nurturing Dialogue.”  It’s a critical topic.  I truly believe that in the emerging era of Buyer 2.0 – i.e., in the era of a Web 2.0-empowered B2B buyer, who is now in the driver’s seat – it’s more important than ever for us to drive successful content-based dialogue at the core of our demand generation programs.  And lead nurturing is the holistic activity of managing this dialogue in a way that ties the buyer’s process to the marketing and sales organization’s ‘funnel’ – orchestrating our demand generation efforts.

How important is lead nurturing to B2B marketers?

If you polled a group of B2B marketers that have purchased marketing automation platforms, I’m sure 100% would say one of their top objectives is to drive email-based lead nurturing programs.  We know B2B marketers send out a lot of email.  In fact, approximately 89% of B2B marketers leverage email in their marketing efforts, according to Forrester at their Forrester Marketing Forum 2010.  And I’m sure an even higher percentage of this group is on the hook for supporting (at least) some portion of top-of-funnel lead generation via a combination of tactics that include email.