New Report Underscores Need For Engaging Content And Alignment In Demand Gen Campaigns
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- Published in Content Strategies
According to a recent survey, a vast majority of salespeople and marketers feel their demand generation campaigns are insufficient when it comes to helping them achieve selling success. In fact, 80% of respondents described their demand generation campaigns are ineffective or semi-ineffective, while only 20% felt they were fully effective.
Corporate Visions, Inc., a provider of sales and marketing messaging solutions conducted its second quarter survey on demand generation, which polled more than 440 B2B sales and marketing professionals globally.
The survey, which is detailed in Corporate Visions’ Q2 2012 Sales and Marketing Messaging Report, found:
- Marketing creates content, but sales doesn't always use it: More than half (65%) of respondents said their sales teams use less than half of the demand generation content their marketing department produces.
- Concerns over content quality and organizational alignment: When asked of the single most important factor that prevents organizations from having successful demand generation campaigns, 37% said their content isn’t engaging enough, while 31% said it was due to lack of sales and marketing alignment. The remaining 29% of respondents said it was due to budget constraints, not enough content or lack of executive buy-in.
- Misplaced messaging focus: 60% of respondents said their organization's demand generation campaigns focus solely on their own company’s products, features and services, rather than focusing on their customers’ pain points.
“Salespeople know that the customer lives in their stories, but too often marketing creates content that lives in the company story,” said Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Corporate Visions. “This is why so much of the content that marketing creates goes unused by salespeople. The actual conversations with prospects start with their needs and why they should consider changing to another approach, but most marketing content starts with the new product and its super-cool new features and benefits.”
Riesterer told DemandGen Report that demand creation messaging and content should be developed in a joint effort with salespeople to vet and validate the messaging as it’s created, not after the fact when the field refuses to use it.
After the results from last quarter’s Sales and Marketing Messaging Report found that more than 50% of sales and marketing professionals have insufficient or no training to deliver compelling virtual conversations, Corporate Visions sought to determine what disconnects are also evident in demand generation campaigns.
Click here to download a detailed explanation of the survey results.