Hey WR,
I put a poll out and it seems like people would appreciate this type of content. Having just started a new role, I'm still learning about my ICP and what truly drives them. So, I figured I'd create this post with a past role in mind. This post is for people selling to demand generation teams. A few ground rules on this - it's for teams with demand gen filling sales pipelines. Whether it's b2c or b2b, a salesperson is following up on these leads.
What is demand generation?
They are the more revenue focused of the marketing teams. Their job is typically to fill the sales funnel with top, middle, and bottom of the funnel leads.
How do they do it?
PPC Ads on google, paid social, email marketing with specific CTA's, partnerships, and web traffic conversion. They look at things through the lens of owned channels (SEO for example) and paid channels. There are a million ways to skin this cat and marketing campaigns can be all over the place and combinations of thousands of tactics.
How are they measured?
This is a hot button issue. Marketers love to hide behind unmeasurable or difficult to quantify things like "brand." They tend to view any lead gen tactics as the shitty part of their job if they have multiple hats to wear. Generally, you're going to run into teams with a handful of main KPI's. The big ones are all centered around cost per and volume. They will almost always default to the one that makes them look best. Some sales and marketing teams will be aligned very well and others point fingers at each other. Well aligned teams measure marketing more closely to the revenue and poorly aligned teams measure as far from revenue as possible
Cost per lead - cost for a marketing campaign to generate a lead
Cost per meeting - cost for a marketing campaign to generate a sales meeting
Cost per demo - cost for a marketing campaign to generate a demo
Cost per sale/acquisition - cost for a marketing campaign to generate a new customer.
Each of these will have a subsequent volume associated with it as well. For example, total lead volume.
What problems do they have?
The above is extremely cut and dry and makes marketing attribution look easy. However, that's far from the truth. All of these campaigns will have a huge variance in channel and content mix and result different value of leads - a demo request vs a white paper download for example.
So all leads are not created equally, but marketers have 0 control of how prospect reacts to the forms. This is a major challenge as the recipients are in the thousands.
While teams may say that they generate leads organically or for free, the reality is that they do not. Essentially every action they take has a cost. SEO is the most "free" but that still means you have to built out a content library and distribute it or spend a ton of hours on keyword research.( Or build and manage a community like this - even then we may be talking about PGL.)
Nothing is free and they have to justify every penny they spend because it could have been used differently.
Marketing is passive. Anyone can fill out my form and a minor improvement in CTR (click through rate) on an ad seen by 100000 people has major snowball effects for all of their KPI's.
Because of that passivity, leads can be generated 24/7. It's great in theory, but is a friction point in reality. 100 bulk inbound leads from midnight to 6 am that an SDR team calls in the morning vs 12 every hour of the day would have wildly different contact rates. They want to have a consistent lead flow in every timeframe. hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month. Consistency in lead volume and conversion rate makes them happier than a new scarf, font, or even kombucha.
We, as salespeople, are contractually obligated to bitch about leads. That bitching is a CONSTANT in their days from every angle. It's coming from reps, managers, VP's etc. You know how your manager constantly asks you about that deal you're working on - it's that but with lead flow/volume/quality.
So in summary, when they grab drinks after work and complain (just like us) it's because: Nothing is consistent, they don't control how the leads are acted on by sales or by who in sales, they have to justify every penny they spend, and people outside of their team are focused on the individual lead vs the over arching campaign.
Starting conversations with them
Anything that will cause a company mandated change in pure lead volume will immediately fuck up their ability to scale and keep their metrics consistent. So when that happens, if you spitball around forecasting, click rate optimization, marketing attribution, lead flow consistency, lead quality consistency, visibility into sales motions (speed to lead is an enormous factor in opening deals on inbound leads), or ways to help their org see the campaign level picture rather than the minute to minute (exaggeration, I know) marketing output then they will likely start a conversation with you.
Hopefully this helps. Feel free to add things in the comments. Maybe we can set up a poll to see where we should go next with this type of content.
Your's in S.A.D.N.E.S.S
-RL
12 comments