New Tools Changing the Demand Generation Approach
- Written by
- Published in DemandGen Reports
By Jeff Pedowitz, president and CEO, The Pedowitz Group
For salespeople and marketers in today’s selling environment, everything has changed. Executives expect more from marketing than just longer lists of qualified leads — they want a measurable return on their marketing investment. They want proof that marketing activities are making a real impact on revenue.
At the same time, buyers have changed the way they buy. More often than not, prospects have researched your solution online before ever interacting with a salesperson. By the time they are ready to buy, they already know what they want and how much they are willing to pay for it.
In response to these radical shifts in buying behavior and executive expectation, new breakthrough technologies have entered the sales landscape that provide companies with a new approach to demand creation that better aligns the sales process to the prospects’ buying process.
This new class of software, which includes marketing automation, lead management and automated sales enablement tools, arms salespeople with the insight and power they need to take part in a prospect’s evaluation process earlier by observing digital body language and taking automatic or real-time action based on this behavior.
The results are both quantifiable and revolutionary. By reading prospective buyers’ online behavior, salespeople can quickly gauge the strength of opportunities and determine who is ready to buy. At the critical point in the buyer’s evaluation — before they engage with a competitor — an alert is sent to the salesperson indicating that it is time to engage.
The way salespeople work opportunities has also been impacted by these technologies. Salespeople can now include multiple contacts within a prospect’s organization in the process by adding them to various nurturing campaigns to educate them about their solutions. This creates access to key stakeholders and decision makers and builds brand awareness and credibility.
These new capabilities are causing a seismic shift in the traditional sales cycle, ultimately changing how leads are managed and opportunities are converted into sales.
Today, salespeople have more choices. Leads can be qualified and converted to closed business, disqualified, or added to a nurturing campaign — defined by specific criteria such as persona, timing, vertical, territory, etc. — that engages them until they are ready to buy. The result is dramatic. Salespeople only call on those prospects that have a true interest in talking to them.
As companies everywhere continue to look for new ways to create revenue, the pressure on marketing to make a measurable impact on revenue will continue to intensify. Companies have a different view of marketing in this new sales landscape. The new breed of marketer — the Revenue Marketer — creates demand with marketing automation tools that focus on following leads throughout the entire lifecycle. Leads are tracked every step of the way, from first inquiry to closed business, and marketing manages a predictable, reliable funnel with a plan that ultimately produces higher-value leads and maximizes revenue.
Automated sales enablement tools impact every aspect of the sales process from quota to deal size, length of sales cycle and conversion rate. These tools give marketing the ability to produce more high-quality leads while giving sales visibility into what marketing is doing on their behalf.
The result is nothing short of transformational. Marketing has become a demand generation department, earning a seat at the proverbial revenue table. Expectations are high. Clearly, the role of marketing has evolved — as have the tools at their disposal.
Jeff Pedowitz is an industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience leading successful BtoC and BtoB organizations. He writes and speaks on a variety of topics related to demand generation, Web 2.0 and marketing. The Pedowitz Group is the world’s largest full-service demand generation agency, focusing on delivering marketing and sales automation solutions to drive sustainable revenue and return on investment for global clients including such industry leaders as Comcast, Deutsche Bank, Intel and Palace Sports and Entertainment.
For more turnkey tactics to rev up your demand generation efforts in 2011, download “The State of Marketing Automation,” a comprehensive report that includes insight from BtoB experts on content marketing, the new sales & marketing alignment paradigm, and the technology & tools driving growth in 2011. The report also includes a vendor profile, complete with growth metrics and new products from a dozen leading marketing automation solution providers.