Demand Generation: Important but Underlooked Aspect for Most B2B Marketers

For more than a decade, B2B Marketer has been focusing on building brand and generating leads for the business. Brand building and lead generation is definitely an important aspect, however, both of them only cater to the upper funnel.

As a marketer, you may drive tons of leads from your marketing activities such as webinars, SEO, SEM, Paid Ads, Content, or other lead generation approaches.

But do those leads really want what you have?

Without a demand generation plan, they may never realize they do. With an effective demand gen plan, they’ll pay attention, engage with you and – if you get it all right – become a customer.

A demand generation plan is like the perfect marriage between the marketing and sales funnels. It helps bridging everything from the first interaction with prospects to the point a qualified lead becomes a customer.

A great marketer doesn't only care only about filling up the top funnel. Because what do Sales team really want is the opportunity. I always see sales and marketing should be the perfect couple. If we do only care about what we as marketer things is important which is traffic, number of leads, SERP, etc, and ignoring what our spouse wants (hot leads, opportunity), do you think the marriage will go in the long term?

THE PING PONG GAME

I've frequently seen many cases where Sales and Marketing are complaining to each other. It's a blame game where Marketing and Sales blame each other.. and it usually begins like this:

Sales: "There aren't enough leads."

Marketing: "There are, but you are just not following up with them."

Sales: "We are following up with them. The SQL acceptance rate is garbage."

Marketing: "Sending a couple of emails to schedule a demo? I don't consider that following up."

Sales: "We are not getting 70% of our pipeline from marketing."

Marketing: "We are hitting our MQL numbers, which should easily allow you to hit 70% pipeline if you were doing your job."

Sales: "But the MQLs are low quality. Look at the low connect rates."

Marketing: "The connect rates are low because you guys are lazy."

Sales: "We need to invest more in top of the funnel."

Marketing: "No, we need to invest more in data infrastructure, lead handling, and bottom of the funnel."

Sales: "Lots of deals end up in closed-lost due to No Decision."

Marketing: "That's because you guys don't know how to sell the value proposition."

Sales: "Our messaging isn't clear or consistent."

Marketing: "Our messaging is fine, the CEO loves it."

Sales: "We need to get better at marketing."

Marketing: "We need to get better at sales."

Sound familiar to you? Fortunately, you're not the only one. This game happens in many companies. Definitely, it's not the marriage that we are dreaming of, isn't it?

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Most of the time, Marketers are focusing on generating new leads - Top of the funnel. While Sales People are focusing on hot leads - Bottom of the funnel. Why are they behave so?

Generating new leads is an easy way out for marketers.

Run paid ads on eBook downloads, send them lots of marketing emails, wait for a few of them to click on links or visit your webpage, trip the MQL score - and pass them to Sales.

Sounds easy. And straightforward.

While for Salespeople it's also easier converting the Hot Leads into Customers than the other type of leads.

Both Marketer and Salespeople are looking for an easy way out. That's why most of the leads are die in the middle of the funnel

Here are some statistics that support the fact

• Sales reps ignore 50% of all marketing qualified leads. [Source: Marketo]Of the other 50% they don't ignore, they only make two attempts to connect on average. [Source: Sirius Decisions]
• And yet, 74% of marketing teams say that converting leads into customers is their top priority. [Source: HubSpot]

UNDERSTANDING THE ROOT CAUSE WHY LEADS ARE NEGLECTED

The root cause why so many leads are being neglected is because They Hate Doing So.
And it's not because our salespeople are lazy.

They hate to do it because working on your low-propensity leads is not a fair use of their precious selling time. According to Salesforce research, on average, only 13% of leads are converted into opportunities. The conversion rate from opportunity to deal is even lower — only 6% of opportunities convert to deals. 

Given only 0.78% of leads are converted into a deal, it's become very clear why the Salespeople are don't want to give up their precious time to tightly following up the leads from marketing.

Even more, isn't their fault either if they pick out only the leads they consider very promising - which is the hot leads.

However, the kind of behavior from salespeople also creating a big hole. There are might be plenty of opportunities in the leads that they're neglected. The marketing team generates leads is require time and cost. Simply neglecting this type of leads, won't help to fulfill their sales pipeline and waste all the effort have carried out.

A SUSTAINABLE WAY OUT - FOCUSING ON GENERATING DEMAND, NOT LEADS

A lot of people are confused about how demand generation differs from lead generation.

The core difference between demand generation, and lead generation, is the intentions as marketers.

Is the intention of our marketing campaigns only to collect contact information, so we can pass them on to salespeople?

Or is the intention to educate our prospects, on the problem space, and why our product is a perfect fit for them?

Demand Gen is the hardest part. That's why most marketers hate it. It needs the combination of determination, stamina, consistency, creativity, and analytics to do the demand gen properly.
Demand Gen makes the difference between Best Marketers and the regular one.

Focusing the effort on the demand gen also definitely helps our salespeople. They will love Marketing even more. The perfect marriage between sales and marketing we're dreaming about is about to happen.

MOVING FORWARD - DEMAND GEN TACTICAL APPROACH

I know demand gen is hard. Therefore I'll share some practical tips on making the way to do Demand Gen easier.

This is the simple flow of demand generation I frequently use. The demand gen process is started with generating leads. Just assume I run a webinar that drives 487 registration or leads. Instead of passing all these 487 leads to salespeople, I would rather utilize Automate Lead Conversion Tools.

These tools will help to automate your outreach process to your leads in a personalized way just like humans follow up. The tool will help to identify if the leads are interested to talk further, or if S/He referring to other people, or maybe if S/He is not ready yet.

The tools also help to respond to the leads according to their status. If they're ready to talk with the salespeople, the AI/Bot will contact the leads and notified the respective Salespeople to move forward with the conversation. But in case they're not ready to move forward, the AI/Bot will reply to the leads politely and send the leads back to the marketing platform to be nurtured further.
Utilizing these types of tools will save hundreds or maybe thousands of your salespeople precious hours in doing follow up with the leads and marketers time to manually nurture the leads.

On the picture above is a more detailed conversation flow carried out by the AI/Bot to the leads. Even though the AI/Bot is very useful in making things automate, however, it's in our hands - marketers to make the conversation more personalized.

We can't communicate the same way to the leads that downloaded our e-books compare to the ones registering for our webinar. Personalization is the key to this process.

Are you a demand generation marketer or lead generation marketer? Let's discuss further on the comment below

Author

Handito Aji Saroso

Marketing and business development practitioner who has strong exposure in brand development, demand generation, lead conversion, deal closing, and account management through digital and non-digital approach for a wide range of company sizes from SMEs to Large Enterprises. He has a deep understanding of Customer Journey Optimization, Inbound, Digital, Content, Branding & Account-Based Marketing, Inbound & Social Selling, Solution and Consultative Selling, and Strategic Negotiation.