Demand Generation

Everyone wants quality leads. “Quality over quantity,” “high-quality responses,” “HQLs,” and “sales-ready” are just a few of the phrases I hear every day when building lead generation programs for clients. Every lead you purchase should be high-quality, or you’re wasting money. But let’s clarify the semantics of what I mean by “quality.” Quality, to most,…

A lot of people in the B2B world are talking about “sales enablement” these days. Run a Google search, and you’ll get almost two million results. The conversation has been slowly building since the early 2000s, and in the past year or two, we’ve seen the inception of “sales enablement software,” which ostensibly helps businesses do…

The demand generation manager holds one of the most important positions on a B2B marketing team. In many ways, the success of the company depends on the demand gen manager’s ability to drive qualified leads through the sales pipeline. ALSO READ: The Art of Demand Generation Meets the Science of Lead Generation But pipeline volume…

Sometimes I miss being a sales manager in the early 90s. We hired salespeople. We made cold phone calls. We walked into businesses and grabbed business cards. That was top-of-the-funnel marketing at its simplest. Although I look back on those days with great nostalgia, I also see some wild inefficiencies. Now we use “data-driven lead…

Every company has their own interpretation of how the B2B pipeline should work, how customers behave, and how to segment their marketing and sales efforts. If the last decade of marketing and sales innovation has made anything clear, it’s that having a plan is non-negotiable. ALSO READ: Adapting to a Nonlinear Buying Cycle A 2015 study by Vantage…

Kendra Morton is the director of demand generation marketing at Teradata Marketing Applications and was a recent guest on our podcast, B2B Nation. In the episode, we discussed: Below are some of the highlights from our conversation.* I have a traditional definition of demand generation. “Demand generation is the generation of demand for a business’s products…

Small businesses face numerous challenges: access to capital, creating sustainable revenue, making payroll, etc. Growing a small B2B company into a larger one can help solve some of these issues, but B2B growth requires leads. Unfortunately, generating leads with a traditional inside sales model takes people and time — two resources in short supply at…

Amanda Sibley manages the demand generation team at HubSpot — one the biggest and fastest-growing marketing automation vendors in the world, not to mention a wellspring of resources for marketers, advertisers, and creatives. Her job is kind of important. I had the privilege of talking to Sibley last week about what she does on a…

A lot of analysts and B2B companies use the terms “demand generation” and “lead generation” interchangeably. While not overtly harmful, this conflation is inaccurate. On a semantic level, demand and leads are two very different things. A lead is a potential customer with a known data profile. Depending on your campaign tactics, a lead can…

If you’re familiar with software-as-a-service growth metrics, you’ve probably come across the term “lead velocity.” As a concept, lead velocity is fairly simple. Mike Preuss, CEO of Visible, explains in a recent post on the subject, “Lead velocity rate is . . . a metric that quantifies your business’ growth in terms of qualified leads.”…

Loosely defined, “demand generation” is the practice of creating interest in your product or company to expand your reach and gain more customers. But the discipline is broad, and the specific components of demand generation are harder to define. There are hundreds of different strategies you can use to “generate demand.” Also Read: 10 Inbound…

Inbound programs can generate some of the most qualified, valuable leads in your marketing mix. That’s because inbound leads are primarily driven by their own will and research. At the point of conversion, they knowingly opt-in and submit their contact information, which gives you clear permission to continue the relationship. But inbound lead generation isn’t…

The marketing qualified lead (MQL) is supposed to be an olive branch between marketing and sales, but what do you do when sales hates your MQLs? It seems like you’re doing a decent job running lead gen campaigns, but you get pushback from sales every week: You may feel like the sales team hates your…

It happens every year: marketing leaders review their department’s spend over the last twelve months in preparation for next year’s budget proposals. ALSO READ: 5 Strategies Every CMO is Planning for 2016 The case for creating a lead generation budget that gets approved isn’t difficult to make. Everyone wants more resources because no one wants…

For most B2B companies, lead generation is the engine that drives profit. If you want that engine to run at maximum capacity, you need to make sure all the smaller components are in working order. That means having the right tools in place, balancing programs across multiple channels and lead sources, and maintaining close alignment…