When considering the pros and cons of bringing on a Demand Generation partner, there are legitimate fears and concerns.
As a company in the Demand Gen space, it is my job to evangelize the value, but also realistically face the fears.
Marketing is a multifaceted balancing act. Losing even a bit of control over the process has a fear-factor.
Would you be able to allow a team, not directly under your supervision, to assist with meeting your goals?
What if… you can maintain the control you need, and gain even greater control over the outcome?
Why is adding a Demand Generation partner even worth considering?
Today’s B2B tech marketing requires a multimodal approach to onboarding pipeline opportunities. It’s that simple. Do you have every reasonable track to client-acquisition covered?
In past articles, I go into detail on what Demand Generation has become. Not to be confused with ‘Lead Generation’, Demand Gen has evolved into an Account-based Marketing, precision-targeted, practice.
While your marketing department assesses the entire field of objectives, Demand Gen is highly focused on the end-target. The stakeholders.
For this article, I want to share some ways you can control expectations and ensure that we all achieve the desired outcomes.
Objectives:
A. Define clearly what your objectives are. Articulate them. Control starts when your partner is in sync with your goals.
B. Set KPIs. Don’t be shy. If the desired outcome has no measurable metrics, success can’t be measured. Set benchmarks that keep the entire campaign on track.
Expectations:
A. Make sure that your Demand Gen partner offers the depth and breadth of services that align with your desired ‘Scope-of-Work’.
B. As you are held to a timeline and budget, your Demand Generation partner expects to be held to the same fiduciary standards.
Quality Control:
A. Your Demand Gen team is an extension of your quality control standards. Unified messaging, consistency, as well as the client’s experience is critical to success.
B. Your Demand Gen partner must also remain compliant with all current laws and regulations as they pertain to outbound marketing techniques.
Optimize For Optimal Results:
A. Back to control. Your Demand Gen partner will provide timely reporting on campaigns under management as well as actionable results.
B. Scalability is essential to optimizing results. As ‘close cycles’, market-focus, strategies develop and mature, your partner will have the resources to scale with the changing landscape.
Evaluating ROI:
A. There is no smoke or mirrors. Cost effectiveness is clearly based on opportunities generated; sales closed. Overall impact on revenue.
B. Bringing on a partner that offers the entire range of Demand Gen services will provide significant efficiency gains.
C. All the internal work of building prospect lists, data analysis, writing content, developing email campaigns, managing outbound call campaigns, lead nurturing… all managed by your Demand Gen team.
Summary:
If you have an in-house Demand Gen team, you know how expensive it is to maintain. Even with talented business developers on staff, bad data is an unyielding consumer of time and resources.
Even with the best data sources, costing tens of thousands of dollars per year, per application, the result is static. At least 30% of the data you acquire will be error-ridden, or totally false.
Internal teams tend to ignore this as a bug, rather than an opportunity. If you have outbound callers making calls to the same flawed database, you are wasting time and money.
Second Sight spends more time on data verification than any other singular task. If done meticulously, more prospects can be reached with more actionable results.
The upside is, with AI integrations and other intuitive technologies, more data points are provided. That means we can do a better job homing in on the likely targets, with multiple touchpoints available.
Demand Generation is a highly effective means to an end. The end being pipeline opportunities and customer acquisition. The right partner is task oriented, and results driven. Ultimately you gain more control and more time to focus on the rest of the field.
-JF
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