Demand Generation Program

Demand Generation – What’s in it for Me

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As the owner of a healthcare software company, you were more than pleased when your marketing department shared the results of your last webinar. Nearly 150 registrants attended—50 more attendees than had attended the webinar that had preceded it, and a new record for your growing company. But despite an aggressive sales effort, three months later, only a handful of those attendees (13 to be exact) had converted into sales. It’s a common problem: 75% of potential customers who come into contact with your company are not ready to buy. In fact, they are not even qualified to speak to your sales department. Businesses are challenged with distinguishing lead generation (generating potential customers who are ready to buy) from demand generation programs (generating increased brand awareness and recognition). Because many companies struggle with this distinction, they approach demand generation too narrowly and lead generation too aggressively. The result is a marketing department that does not generate enough awareness to fill the back end of a marketing funnel and a sales department that alienates prospects by approaching them before they are ready to buy.

At Marketo, we’ve developed a demand generation program to distinguish between lead generation and demand generation. Our program has helped us become the fastest growing marketing automation firm in the industry. In our first 10 months, we signed over 130 clients and generated revenue levels that have positioned us at the highest levels in the Software as a Services (SaaS) market. Our demand generation program keeps our sales department flush with leads and helps our marketing department prove accountability to our board. The advice we offer is our own ‘secret sauce’ and has been customized to fit our own needs.

Generate Awareness

Generating awareness is a natural first step for many marketers who seek to increase demand. So, outside of offering a great product or service that prospects and customers want to be more aware of, how do you build awareness? At Marketo, we focus on four areas for building awareness:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Our blog, Modern B2B Marketing
Public Relations
Advertising

Historically, we have found that our website accounts for 47% of eventual sales leads, making a strong SEO program absolutely vital to our demand generation success. Public relations and advertising, meanwhile, are classically traditional ways to drive awareness of your brand and product or service. What we’ve found as our #1 option for driving awareness of Marketo is our blog, Modern B2B Marketing. In this forum, it is exceedingly rare that we discuss or promote anything having to do with Marketo. Rather, we use this forum to promote B2B marketing thought leadership and best practices. Those who visit and frequent Modern B2B Marketing are nurtured by our content and, in so doing, are more quickly elevated to the status of lead.

Meet the Marketing Funnel

Once an individual begins interacting with Marketo or its content, they enter into our six-stage marketing funnel:

Awareness – Defines everyone who knows about Marketo. We know what a visitor is doing, but not who they are. Equate this to peeking out the window of an auto showroom and seeing a new customer on the lot.
Inquiry – Anonymous ‘awareness’ transforms into the ‘known,’ via a name and email address.
Prospect – A potential buyer or ‘qualified inquiry.’ This individual may have downloaded a webinar or whitepaper, but has yet to show any greater interest. But they are definitely on our radar.

(Notice that we are now past the first three stages of the funnel and have yet to identify a ‘lead’. As noted, a common mistake made by many marketers is to pass ‘leads’ along to sales far too aggressively.)

Lead – At the lead stage, the prospect has shown sufficient interest to receive a score high enough to pass it along to sales. We’ll get into lead scoring soon.
Opportunity – A certain number of leads will transform into sales opportunities. Again, we’ve found this to be about ¼ of the amount of leads we generate.
Customer – A bell rings as a sale is made.

The Importance of Lead Recycling & Lead Scoring

Many marketing departments simply pass leads onto sales and hope for the best. Meanwhile, the lead will sit – perhaps receiving a call, perhaps not. Perhaps engaging with sales, perhaps not. Perhaps becoming a customer, perhaps not. Thereby exists the unfortunate split between marketing and sales. At Marketo, we adhere to both a strict lead recycling program and lead scoring program. Both are designed to ensure that leads are not passed along to sales too quickly and are not lost if their personal sales cycle is longer than anticipated. Four Types of Automated Campaigns

Tying our lead recycling program and lead scoring program together is a strong lead nurturing program built on four types of automated marketing campaigns:

Processing & Triage – When an inquiry first comes in, it is usually requesting a piece of fulfillment. At this stage, an email containing the fulfillment and personalized with the name of the sales rep that owns the lead is immediately sent.
‘Stay in Touch’ – After processing & triage, we continue to nurture the lead by sending out consistent and relevant information. At Marketo, we have found that if we can keep the information valuable, bite-sized and relevant, we can move leads through the funnel much quicker.
Accelerators & Scoring– The beautiful thing about lead scoring is that you can set any rules or parameters you prefer.At Marketo, we’ve spent a great deal of time developing our own customized list of lead scoring rules. In no way is our list complete, and quite frankly, we do not anticipate that it ever could be. But some parameters we’ve defined (for instance, if a prospect were to Google our name) show a clear enough level of interest that the prospect receives a very high initial lead score. We also take points away, incrementally, if the individual goes an extended amount of time without interacting with our site. When a lead achieves a lead score of 65 or greater, based on the parameters set, they are passed along to sales.
Lead Lifecycle– Once a lead enters the realm of sales, it begins a 21-day lifecycle. But only 25% will make it through this lifecycle. Rather than letting the remaining 75% sit, or tossing them aside, this overwhelming balance of leads is filtered back through our sales funnel for additional nurturing.Critical to keep in mind is that a sales lead moves at its own personal cycle. 21 days is an ideal but arbitrary number. One of the reasons our program has been so successful is that we recycle every possible lead, not disqualifying them until we have indisputable proof that they are not worth pursuing.

The Promise of Marketing Accountability

Of course, this all sound fine in theory. But can this process be used to prove marketing accountability? The answer is a resounding yes, and it’s one that our marketing department answers at each and every board meeting. Using a board-level forecast showing the total number of prospects, leads and opportunities currently in our funnel, we can present a waterfall-style report predicting which prospects will become leads, which leads will become opportunities and so forth. Because the predictive numbers are based on the real-world lifecycle models we create, we can help determine what the company’s revenue will be and prove the value our efforts bring to the entire organization.

Demand Generation – What’s In It For Me? Summary

Final points to consider as you begin your demand generation program:

Keep your sales funnel full – Only about 25% of your leads are ready to buy – and it can take far more time than you anticipate for awareness to transform into leads.
Determine the source of your most prized leads – For Marketo, it’s organic leads from the Internet, making SEO a critical component to our tactical marketing mix.
Nourish your awareness – Our Modern B2B Marketing blog offers nourishment to our inquiries and helps us move individuals to lead status far more rapidly.
Score your leads before you try to sell your leads – Stay in touch with your sales department and develop a common set of parameters that define a lead as sales-ready.
Recycle Your Leads – Never let a lead get away just because it’s not ready to buy today. There is always a tomorrow.
Prove Your Accountability – Follow the steps in this whitepaper and you will be able to develop powerful projection formulas that prove your department’s accountability.
Always strive for improvement – Never seek to be done, seek to be better.

For more information on any of the concepts in this whitepaper, visit the additional resources below or contact Marketo at sales@marketo.com or 650-425-7454.