How Successful Marketing Teams Achieve Demand Generation Excellence
For winning B2B companies, the Demand Generation function is the engine that drives the company’s growth and success– delivering an ever-increasing flow of qualified opportunities for the sales team to close, with predictable results.
However, the breadth of marketing’s role and the constraints of team resources often inhibit its ability to execute all aspects of the demand gen system well… and ultimately, results suffer.
The good news is that there is a clear formula that can ensure success, even when resources are constrained. It starts with creating a comprehensive demand generation system. A well-designed system provides the foundation for long term demand gen success, ensuring:
- Accelerated pipeline creation
- Predictable results
- Maximum ROI
The System is The Key
In other words, with a high performing demand gen system, marketing is able to deliver new highly qualified opportunities at a staggering rate. Indeed, we’ve found that the top performing marketing teams can be 5-10 times more productive than average! With this in mind, we set out to identify the common characteristics of demand gen operations that are shared among some of the most successful B2B companies of the last decade. We drew upon our collective decades of experience as students and practitioners of demand generation, and we studied successful B2B marketing teams across a range of market segments to identify the common characteristics in their systems. Through this we recognized 7 defining features of their demand gen operations that they clearly shared. Given that together these qualities establish the strong foundation of long-term successful systems, we see them as “Pillars” of success.Three companies in particular that exemplified these 7 Pillars are:
- Data Domain, which grew to $340 Million in revenue before going public at a valuation of $1.8 Billion (and then acquired by EMC for $2.2B!)
- Equallogic which grew to an annual revenue run rate of $148 Million before being acquired by Dell for $1.4 Billion
- SimpliVity which grew to an annual revenue run rate of $160M before being acquired by HPE for $650 Million
What are the 7 Pillars of Demand Generation Success?
The 7 common principles that we’ve repeatedly witnessed as key success factors across companies are listed below. Each item is linked to its respective article:
- Codify the Demand Gen System
- Build and Work the Pipeline Model
- Differentiate and Define Roles within the Lead-to-Close Process
- Measure and Know Your Pipeline Throughput Capacity
- Design the Right Incentives – Particularly for New Customer Acquisition
- Enact, Implement & Enforce
- Execute Lead Gen Campaigns with Adherence to Best Practices
We hope you enjoy the series, and let us know your feedback and questions.
We also created this free PDF checklist — a simple yet powerful reference tool that can help to ensure you and your team put in place a solid foundation for long-term demand generation success.
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