Demand Generation

Demand Generation is the discipline of utilizing marketing efforts to generate and manage interest in, and demand for, products or services. Commonly used in business to business, business to government, or longer sales cycle business to consumer sales cycles, demand generation involves three core areas of effort:
* creating awareness
* facilitating discovery, and
* guiding validation
in order to increase the level of demand for a product or service.
Creating Awareness
The demand generation function in most businesses is part of the marketing organization, and as such, is involved with efforts to create awareness for a product or service offering. For many new products or services, the market is not aware that the solution category on offer exists, or that is able to solve a particular business challenge. Awareness creation efforts in demand generation organizations are focused on one or more efforts to ensure that key prospective purchasers in the market are aware of the solution category. These may include:
* Search Engine Marketing - the purchase of advertisements on search engines to appear when keywords related to the business challenge are searched for.
* Search Engine Optimization - the use of a variety of techniques to increase a web site’s natural position in search engine results when keywords related to the business challenge are searched for.
* Outbound Marketing - purchase or rental of targeted lists of potential prospects, often based on their role, industry, geography, or company size, to send them a marketing communication by email, direct mail, or other means, communicating a message about the solution category
* Tradeshows - presentation of the solution category to an audience of like-minded attendees of an industry-aligned or function-aligned tradeshow
* Public Relations - developing relationships with press or industry analysts to enable conveying a message about a solution category to the broad audiences served by these groups
* Social Media - the use of a variety of web-based media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, or YouTube to generate discussion around relevant topics that facilitate awareness of appropriate topics.
There are numerous other techniques that are used to facilitate awareness, and any given demand generation organization will likely use a number of them on a regular basis, while experimenting with the effectiveness of other techniques.
Facilitating Discovery
The second key area of focus for a marketer focused on demand generation is ensuring that when a prospect decides to seek a vendor to provide a solution in a given solution category, they discover the vendor that the marketer serves. This is again accomplished with a variety of techniques and tools, often overlapping with the tools used for creating awareness of the category, but with a different emphasis.
* Search Engine Marketing - the purchase of advertisements on search engines to appear when keywords on the specific category, or known competitors in the solution space, are searched for.
* Search Engine Optimization - the use of a variety of techniques to increase a web site’s natural position in search engine results when keywords on the specific category, or known competitors in the solution space, are searched for.
* Webinars or Seminars - online web based seminars, or in person seminars to allow prospective buyers to discover and understand a vendor’s solution, how it can be used, and who else is using it, in detail
* Demonstrations and Free Trials - easily accessed, often online, tools for demonstrating a solution or accessing a time-limited or feature-constrained trial version to assist prospective buyers in discovering the solution and its fit with their need
Again, in this phase of the demand generation process, many approaches and tools are used and this list is only a selection of the more common approaches.
Guiding Solution Validation
The final phase of the buying process involves validating that a selected vendor will meet specified requirements, coming to an agreement with the vendor on costs, contract terms, support and services, and finalizing the purchase process. Demand generation organizations guide and facilitate this aspect of the buying process through continued use of the marketing tools outlined above, and the coordination of inside sales and field sales resources to assist in the negotiation process.
This often involves coordinating the involvement of other organizational and extra-organizational resources such as sales representatives and reference clients.
* Marketing Tools as Detailed above - trials, demonstrations, whitepapers, and seminars designed for a more detailed evaluation and validation of the solution in question
* Reference Management - cultivation, management, and selection of client references willing to provide a potential purchaser with the perspective of a current (or past) client.
* Sales Involvement - coordination of the right sales resource to interact with the prospect to navigate the final stages of the buying process including contract negotiation, legal terms and conditions, and signoff
The coordination of sales involvement, can be a significant area of a demand generation organization’s focus as the decision to have sales engage with a prospect, the selection of the right sales resource, and the timing of the involvement can be difficult to determine. The scoring, ranking, and routing of leads from a demand generation organization into sales is a sufficiently deep topic to warrant further exploration.
Sales Involvement
The involvement of sales professionals in the solution validation process involves three main aspects. These are the same whether inside sales or field sales professionals are being involved.
* Lead Scoring - understanding which prospective buyers warrant being contacted by a sales professional. Lead scoring involves scoring two distinct aspects of the prospect; whether he or she is qualified to be a buyer, and whether he or she is interested in being a buyer. The former looks at explicit information such as title, industry, and revenues to understand whether that individual is able to make a buying decision, while the latter examines implicit information such as recent online activity and marketing response in order to determine whether the individual is currently interested in making a buying decision
* Lead Ranking - based on the scoring of leads, leads can be assigned ranks based on the business process sales should follow in interacting with the leads. For example, if explicit scoring leads to a 1, 2, or 3 ranking on how qualified the lead is, while implicit scoring leads to an A, B, or C ranking on how interested the lead is, a follow-up process may have 1A leads contacted within 24hrs, 1B leads contacted by a field sales professional within 72hrs, while 1C, 2A, and 2B leads are contacted by an inside sales professional and 2C and all leads ranked as a 3 are not contacted.
* Lead Routing - once a business process is determined, a lead routing process determines which lead should be connected with which salesperson, based on geographic territory, industry, company size, or any other factor. Often this involves management of the notification of the salesperson and monitoring of the time taken to follow up.
Related Disciplines
In order to effectively manage and optimize the required communication, response, and lead management processes outlined above, marketers focused on demand generation must become proficient at two other related disciplines
* Data Management - the centralization, de-duplication, profiling, appending, normalizing and cleansing of marketing data so that it can be effectively used to personalize communications, define target lists and segments, score leads, and route leads to sales.
* Marketing Analytics - the analysis of the effectiveness of marketing efforts, from individual tactics such as email communications or landing pages through to overall campaign performance.

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