What Demand Generation Trends Mean for B2B Marketers
We surveyed hundreds of B2B Technology marketers to understand how they approach their demand generation strategies. The 2023 B2B Technology Demand Generation Trends Report uncovered the top priorities for Marketing and Sales, and how the two teams must work together for successful demand generation.
Demand Generation Investments Are On The Rise
It’s no secret that economic uncertainty has taken its toll on the technology sector, but the vast majority of marketers are still heavily investing in demand generation, either at increased rates or similar levels as the prior year. With marketers being pressed to make every dollar count, demand generation serves as an opportunity to build relationships with customers. Cutting a lead generation budget is often short-sighted, so it’s important that your lead generation efforts are supplying your marketing and sales funnel for future quarters.
Lead generation that allows you to reach buyers earlier and speak their language sets you ahead of competitors in the buying journey. To put you in front of the right buyers with the right messaging, your lead generation strategy should enable you to segment messaging based on firmographic filters and use predictive intent data to have educated conversations when buyers are researching your solution.
Lead Quality Is A Top Priority While Service Is An Afterthought
Lead quality and program ROI are the largest factors marketers use to evaluate their demand generation providers. Marketers want their campaigns to be as effective as possible and result in marketing attributed revenue. In order to make it all the way to closed-won opportunities, your sales team needs quality leads.
While lead quality is a necessary starting point for any lead generation campaign, it’s surprising that only a third of marketers identified ROI as their biggest priority. Even if marketers are being measured on lead targets and not directly on ROI, they still need to make sure they’re spending their money effectively. To get the most out of your lead generation campaigns, look at the full picture of campaign performance, which is much easier to do with a full service program.
Marketers are so focused on lead quality and ROI – which should be the baseline for any lead generation program – that service becomes an afterthought. Your lead generation provider should make your job as a marketer easier. It’s crucial for them to support your goals so that you’re aligned throughout a campaign and can make adjustments if they’re needed.
Marketers should not settle for a one-directional relationship that ends with lead delivery. Your provider needs to share campaign progress regularly and solicit feedback from your entire team to understand how a campaign is performing. If they simply pass off the leads, then your provider is not invested in your marketing success.
Lead Quality Is A Sticking Point, But It Doesn’t Have to Be
It may not be as surprising that marketers are prioritizing lead quality when you consider it’s their biggest frustration as well. In an industry that can be shrouded with mystery, lead generation vendors have a responsibility to understand what happens to leads after they’re delivered. Are leads being qualified? Are they converting through the funnel?
The easiest way to mitigate frustrations with your lead generation campaigns is to ensure your marketing and sales teams are aligned from the start. Before leads are ever delivered to the sales team, you must agree on your targeting and qualification criteria. Having a common definition of a qualified lead builds trust with your sales team.
Setting expectations with your sales team is also key to keeping your lead generation program frustration-free. Your sales representatives should understand how to best approach different types of marketing leads in their cadences instead of relying on one-size-fits-all tactics. Marketers must set sales up to make the most of MQLs.
Beyond lead follow-up best practices, BlueWhale programs also stress the importance of account penetration techniques. If you’re leaving an entire account on the table just because one lead didn’t pick up the phone, you’re missing out on lots of potential buyers. Having a plan for using MQLs as a leverage point to break into accounts turns the conversation from lead quality to opportunities.
Lead Generation Is a Team Sport, Not Marketing vs. Sales
Collaboration between Marketing and Sales is incredibly important for successful demand generation, so why aren’t both teams involved in creating the strategy? Only 58% of B2B Sales teams work with their Marketing counterparts to create demand generation strategy, with the rest solely providing feedback or having no involvement at all. Demand generation is a crucial function for business growth, which means both Marketing and Sales need to start treating it as a team sport.
That team mentality starts with aligning Sales and Marketing goals. If Marketing is most concerned with lead volume while Sales is focused on revenue, how will campaign success be measured? Your demand generation strategy needs clear goals that satisfy both Sales and Marketing KPIs to ensure buy-in from the beginning.
Regular feedback must be a part of your strategy as well. The best laid plans should adapt as you see how your audience is responding. Sales has front-line access to your customers and Marketers need to take advantage of that. Your Sales team hears your audience’s pain points straight from the source, which allows Marketers to be more targeted with their messaging.
Involving Sales early in the process also prepares them for proper lead follow up. Instead of Marketing simply “throwing leads over the wall,” your Sales team should be educated on how leads are generated and how they can use that information to start effective conversations. Give Sales the assist by providing the training and insights they need to score the opportunity.
Lead Qualification Challenges Can Be Solved With Shared Goals
If Marketing and Sales cannot agree on a demand generation strategy, the outcomes of that strategy will create further misalignment. Over half of Marketers are given feedback from their inside sales teams that Marketing leads are not qualified. Lead qualification becomes a sticking point between the two functions because they are not aligned on definitions and goals.
Sales and Marketing can overcome lead qualification challenges by sharing a common definition for Marketing Qualified Leads. If leads are from a target account list, what personas fit into that MQL definition? Is an MQL anyone associated with the buying committee or just specific titles? What level of engagement must a lead have before it is passed to Sales?
The two teams must also align on how goals are measured. Are your inside sales representatives incentivized mainly on activity volume, or are they given the opportunity to use MQLs to penetrate accounts? This contributes to how sales reps view qualification. Instead of ignoring a staff-level lead in favor of only contacting executive-level prospects, your inside sales team can start seeing all of the MQLs in their cadence as being opportunities to meet their goals.
MarTech Should Make Demand Generation Easier, Not More Complicated
Streamlining demand generation efforts across Marketing and Sales is much easier thanks to MarTech. However, the tech stacks that marketers use to manage demand generation may introduce additional complexities. Attribution becomes a challenge when multiple tech solutions are involved and need to talk to each other.
The solutions in your tech stack should help reach your goals. Marketers must be thoughtful about what solutions are a part of their tech stack, if they provide ROI, and whether they are the most effective tool for the task at hand. That’s not to say that all Marketers need to consolidate their tech stacks, but rather that they should evaluate tech with a careful lens for the value they provide and how they fit into achieving overall demand generation goals.
Putting Trends Into Action
The key areas of the 2023 B2B Technology Demand Generation Trends Report highlighted:
- Continued investment in lead generation;
- Prioritization of lead quality and program ROI;
- Challenges with lead quality and qualification;
- Misalignment in demand generation strategy creation; and
- Bulky tech stacks contributing to misalignment.
To put these insights into action, Marketers can start by aligning their goals and campaign expectations. Your demand generation programs should be set up to meet your goals so that you’re receiving the types of leads and insights you need. This sets both Marketing and Sales teams up for successful strategy implementation.
Watch our Demand Generation Trends Webinar on-demand to see how two B2B Tech marketing professionals react to these findings.