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What Is Demand Generation?
Demand generation is the focus of targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interest in a company's products and/or services. Commonly used in business to business, demand generation involves multiple areas of marketing and is really the marriage of marketing programs coupled with a structured sales process. There are multiple components of a stepped demand generation process that vary based on the size and complexity of a sale. These components include building awareness, facilitating discovery, positioning relevance, supporting validation and mitigating customer evaluation.
Building Awareness The demand generation function in most businesses resides as part of the marketing organization. Demand Generation is a holistic approach to marketing and sales cohesiveness within the company. Building awareness is a vital component in the demand generation process. Building awareness often takes a continued effort and involves multiple facets of marketing. Advanced demand generation programs typically rely on some form of proactive Lead Generation activities supported by more traditional market programs and processes. This is because demand generation programs tend to assume that prospective customers are aware that they have a need or problem, and are attempting to solve it when they search for solutions. If the prospect is unaware (consciously or, at least, subconsciously) that they have the problem, then demand generation may not be effective - thus the need for adjunct lead generation activities such as: Branding Inbound marketing Search engine optimization Viral marketing Social media marketing Email marketing Pay per click marketing Outbound Marketing Inside sales/telemarketing Outsourced lead generation Outsourced appointment setting
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Facilitating Discovery This is again accomplished with a variety of techniques and tools, often overlapping with the tools used for creating awareness of the category, but with a different emphasis. Search engine advertising – the purchase of advertisements on search engines to appear when keywords on the specific category, or known competitors in the solution space, are searched for. Search engine optimization – the use of a variety of techniques to increase a web site’s natural position in search engine results when keywords on the specific category, or known competitors in the solution space, are searched for. Webinars or seminars – online web based seminars, or in person seminars to allow prospective buyers to discover and understand a vendor’s solution, how it can be used, and who else is using it, in detail Demonstrations and free trials – easily accessed, often online, tools for demonstrating a solution or accessing a time-limited or feature-constrained trial version to assist prospective buyers in discovering the solution and its fit with their need
Solution Validation This often involves coordinating the involvement of other organizational and extraorganizational resources such as sales representatives and reference-able clients. Marketing tools as trials, demonstrations, whitepapers, and seminars designed for a more detailed evaluation and validation of the solution in question
Sales Involvement The coordination of sales involvement, the selection of the right sales resource, and the timing of the involvement can be difficult to determine. The scoring, ranking, and routing of leads into sales is a sufficiently deep topic to warrant further exploration. The involvement of sales professionals in the solution validation process involves three main aspects: Lead Scoring - understanding which prospective buyers warrant being contacted by a sales professional. Lead scoring involves scoring two distinct aspects of the prospect; whether he or she is qualified to be a buyer, and
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whether he or she is interested in being a buyer. The former looks at explicit information such as title, industry, and revenues to understand whether that individual is able to make a buying decision, while the latter examines implicit information such as recent online activity and marketing response in order to determine whether the individual is currently interested in making a buying decision Lead Ranking – based on the scoring of leads, leads can be assigned ranks based on the business process sales should follow in interacting with the leads. For example, if explicit scoring leads to a 1, 2, or 3 ranking on how qualified the lead is, while implicit scoring leads to an A, B, or C ranking on how interested the lead is, a follow-up process may have 1A leads contacted within 24hrs, 1B leads contacted by a field sales professional within 72hrs, while 1C, 2A, and 2B leads are contacted by an inside sales professional and 2C and all leads ranked as a 3 are not contacted. Lead Routing – once a business process is determined, a lead routing process determines which lead should be connected with which salesperson, based on geographic territory, industry, company size, or any other factor. Often this involves management of the notification of the salesperson and monitoring of the time taken to follow up.