Demand Generation Management is the role at the moment.
Enterprises’ sales team needs results urgently, and the promise that this new role is quickly going to solve this issue is not real. I will tell you why. First, we have to understand that generating demand is not creating demand, but getting them to find our solution and contributing sensibly to their purchase journey so that they know that our solution is the best, and that is a long way. If you try to solve this problem by hiring a demand generation manager, it is the first step, but it is not the end of the matter.
We know that inbound marketing methods work, but just as computer problems only arose after their existence, so does digital marketing. I am making this comparison with computers so that managers understand that this is more of a general process in the company’s culture than just hiring a demand generation manager.
The success of generating demand for qualified marketing and sales leads depends on processes that involve the entire company and not just the marketing sector. It seems obvious, doesn’t it? In practice, I have seen that it is not, including technology startups. And this is because, despite all the understanding of building a lead generation machine, they still work with analog and traditional processes as approaches without any data strategy and cold calls. The worst is that it works, of course, it works, but in an analog way.
The most exaggerated example that I see mainly in the United States is insurance companies. You do a price search on the internet to make a price comparison, fill out a form and in half an hour you receive ten nuisance calls from salespeople from companies you don’t even know well wanting to push you to an exchange plan that you don’t know for sure if you’re going to do it. This sales model is dead. If salespeople were even aware of how many cold leads, they would waste their sales hours, they probably wouldn’t take the job.
Content marketing in demand generation management
According to Demand Metric, content marketing is thrice effective at generating leads than outbound marketing while costing a whopping 62% less. By focusing your lead generation efforts on creating and promoting great content instead of reaching out directly to potential customers, your budget will stretch further, and you’ll see more leads. You’ll also be improving your brand loyalty as you’re giving your customers something for free and making them feel more like a partner than a sales target. The Content Marketing Institute ensures that 80% of B2B companies use content marketing for lead generation. Hubspot also confirms that blogs are 13x more likely to generate positive ROIs for marketers, complementing the relevance of content marketing to lead generation.
Perhaps companies still believe in outbound because surveys point to higher conversion in quick followup. A survey by Ziff Davis in a study conducted last year showed that leads are nine times more likely to convert when companies follow up in 5 minutes. Hey body!! this is undoubtedly in hot, and not cold leads at the beginning of his buying journey, let’s wake up. In addition to that, the sales scalability time is, most of the time, compromised. Performance is then far below the potential and sustainability of the business. What is strange is that we are talking about digital marketing and demand generation at scale. Some figures already prove this poorly structured culture. 
A 2020 Hubspot report released recently revealed that 61% of marketers rate lead generation as their number one challenge. A survey by BrightTALK found that 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation. This number shows the importance of lead generation, in the same way, that something is not working well in the processes. In this same survey, however, 34% of marketers spend less than half of their budget on lead generation. (Source: BrightTALK).
While Hubspot’s research reveals that less than a fifth of marketers think Outbound practices provide valuable leads, it does not mean that a minority of CEOs and sales managers believe the same way. I have seen in my consultancies that most of them still think of outbound as the best way for valuable leads. If, in a survey carried out by one of the requisite Inbound Marketing tools in the world, you identified that 18% of marketers still believe in the outbound model, imagine businesses that have not yet done the digital transformation or are in the process of making the inbound machine?
In conclusion, it will not work only to hire a demand generation manager for the digital marketing of your business. If your sales machine works structured for the outbound model, or if your marketing believes that outbound is more valuable, forget about it. The most likely consequence of placing all responsibility in generating leads for this role is to set up an internal structure to resolve, which will be a mistake.
According to Fearless Competitor, outsourcing lead generation makes 43% better results than internal lead generation. Therefore, the cost will increase, and the result will take even longer, so letting an agency generate demand is better. At the same time, your manager’s role should focus more energy on the internal processes they will receive, and nurture leads to ensure the highest conversion into sales.
Another Hubspot report, this is from 2017, found that most medium and large companies generated less than 5,000 qualified leads per month, with an average raised at the time of approximately 1900 leads generated monthly. An indicator that already suggested the importance of generating qualified leads much higher than the volume.
Drawing the profile of the buying persona, understanding the buying journey, and establishing scalable behavioral criteria to define when the lead is a sales opportunity or not. In an inbound marketing machine, the best goal is to identify leads that are interested in buying with the potential to buy.
Finally, the question should not be how to generate demand when there is no demand, but when to create demand when there is no demand.
If you want to improve your company’s demand generation, book time with me. Bpress can help you improve your processes for attracting qualified leads.
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