Demand Generation

The demand funnel is evolving from the traditional cone to an hourglass-shaped model with a “lead management” funnel on top feeding an inverted “customer management” funnel below, according to David Lewis, CEO of DemandGen International. He presented this updated view of the demand funnel in a webinar titled: “It’s The End Of The Funnel As We Know It.”

“The top of the funnel should be as wide as possible, but so should the bottom,” Lewis said. “The acquisition stage is where the marketing automation takes the stage. CRM occurs in the lower funnel. This funnel symbolizes marketing and automation coming together.”

Adaptive Computing, a cloud computing provider selling to Global 2000 clients, was looking for a more efficient way to get leads from its web forms and trade shows into the sales pipeline. The company had recently migrated to Salesforce.com for its CRM software and wanted an automated way to streamline the capture and distribution of leads from its web site as well as trade shows and webinars.

Before implementing Act-On earlier this year, it took the sales team at Adaptive Computing up to three weeks to follow up with prospects who registered on the web site and downloaded the vendor’s free Open Source scheduler, due to the delay in getting the customer information into the CRM system. Now that the registration data is automatically entered into Act-On and synchronized with Salesforce, the sales team can make that contact within 24 hours.

Deciphering online buying patterns and regaining control of the sales cycle were just a few of the topics covered as executives from GrowthFusion, DemandGen International and BrightTalk shared strategies for harnessing online buyer behavior at BrightTalk’s 2013 Digital Body Language Summit.

The webinars also covered:

• Best practices for impacting the buying process through effective lead nurturing;
• Fundamentals of lead scoring; and
• The importance of customer analytics.

Vidcaster, a provider of video marketing solutions, has announced an integration with Marketo that enables users to capture and score lead behavior with any video player embedded on a web site and funnel that data into Marketo’s marketing automation platform.

The Vidcaster Leadwall enables users to tailor their video gate to generate lead data that is automatically streamed into Marketo activity logs. This data can be used to trigger nurture campaigns, impact lead scores and ultimately deliver detailed data to their CRM to optimize their ongoing sales process.

Marketers are quick to discard duplicate leads to avoid doubling their demand generation efforts. But new research reveals that duplication isn’t necessarily a dead end to sales.

A new study, titled: “Duplicate Leads: Unrealized Value or Waste of Time?” and conducted by Leads360, found that leads flagged as duplicates have a conversion rate that is 167% above average.