Yeah yeah, I know – the only reason you kept reading, is because you’re into leads and demand gen. I’ll get back to marketing porn in a moment. Is there really a difference between lead generation and demand generation? Our friends at Marketo put it well: “Demand generation is the evolution of traditional lead generation. Unlike traditional programs that throw any lead over the wall to sales, it is about qualifying and prioritizing prospects, nurturing a steady crop of qualified leads that want to engage with sales, aligning marketing with sales, and measuring and optimizing the results over time.” That’s kind of true, but it’s a little simplistic. Large enterprise hardly ‘throws any lead’ over the wall to sales – the qualification process (often telesales) was in place way before the term ‘demand generation’ was even coined.
There’s no doubt that B2B marketers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in sustaining an ongoing dialogue with their prospects to improve the quality of the lead and ultimately increase conversion ratios – thus, demand gen rules. Now if you follow that logic through…as ‘bare bones’ lead gen (e.g. white papers, cpc, webinars) gets commoditized and marketers apply price pressure to vendors, will their budgets increasingly flow into data warehousing, data mining and marketing automation? Will marketers want to bring the entire nurturing cycle in-house by generating cheap leads and scoring and intensifying each ‘dialogue’, thus providing their sales organization with optimal inbound demand? Or will they want to outsource and be handed ‘the perfect lead’ at a much higher CPL?
Knowing the time and resource constraints of the 10,000+ marketers I have spoken to over the past 12 years, I would hazard a guess that what they would really like is control of the ‘demand generation’ cycle without the headaches of en masse data handling and interoperability. Here is – in my humble opinion – what needs to happen for this to become a reality over the next 5+ years (and yes, it WILL take that long):
1. ‘Marketing Automation’ will need to grow up and become a turnkey data warehousing/data mining/marketing automation environment and provide the technology and associated services to adapt to individual needs more intelligently. There will need to be a universal industry standard, developed by marketers and the various vendors in the field.
2. ANYONE who sells leads (online or offline) will need to use related technologies which will seamlessly integrate with this universal industry standard for data transfer and scoring purposes. This, in turn, will provide an opportunity for these vendors to play a more significant role in extending their services to nurture leads without the ’scoring disconnect’ which is so frustratingly prevalent today.
3. Any company must measure its demand gen marketers ENTIRELY by pipeline or business closed, all whilst rewarding creativity and commercial smarts.
4. Once these steps have been accomplished, lead generation will be FREE and marketers will hold vendors accountable based on conversion to opportunity or even conversion to sale – which will of course become the new points of transaction. And yes, they WILL enjoy watching vendors fall over themselves to make sure THEIR ‘nurturing’ programs lead to the highest conversion ratios. Sound good? Since we need a soundbite to go with the times, let’s call that TRUPEBAMA (“true performance based marketing”). Needless to say, TRUPEBAMA is marketing porn.
