Demand generation offers a powerful model for coordinating marketing and sales efforts to attract and win more business. In a way, it’s the digital transformation that reunites marketing and sales into the continuum of teamwork it should be. Marketing and sales should work in parallel, not sequentially, and as a coordinated team. For example, sales should not assume that a prospect who is talking with them has already been exposed to all the key messages being delivered via the company’s various marketing channels.
With demand generation, all roads lead to attracting and creating a better-informed customer. One who has already gained value from your content (blogs, webinars, white papers, etc.) to the extent that they are primed for worthwhile conversations with sales. And after that, demand generation suggests that the sales rep will know how to draw on additional marketing resources to deepen both the relationship with the customer and their understanding of your entire portfolio of value to them.
One of the goals of demand generation is to avoid the blind-man-and-the-elephant syndrome. In marketing, that’s when potential buyers—or even existing customers—are hyperfocused on a small subset of your offerings, unaware of other products or services they could also get from you. This is why it’s so important to ensure exposure to a variety of content during a series of contacts with your brand. Done right, demand generation will actually increase the demand for what you sell, because you will be attracting, educating, and engaging customers much more effectively than ever before.
Five things you should be doing to drive Demand Generation:
- Give marketing teams access to sales funnels and CRM activity
- For key accounts and targets, bring marketing and sales together to strategize
- Let sales people view and help shape marketing campaigns early in the process
- Expose customers to your full range of offerings through all channels
- Use customer surveys to show customers your full range of offerings
