B2B Demand Generation| Why it belongs in Marketing - Not Sales

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J. David Green wrote an awesome post for the B2B Lead Generation Roundtable blog. I posted part of it below, but you have to visit Four Steps to Convince CEOs that Demand Generation Should be a Marketing, Not a Sales, Function to read the full article. We thank J. David for his great post. At Find New Customers, we’ve preached that demand generation belongs in Marketing, but not as eloquently as J. David.

If you are looking for lead generating ideas and better marketing strategies, we suggest you read this.

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For most of us, the phrase “demand generation” conjures up things like campaigns, trade shows, and the corporate website.

But what about sales prospecting? Despite all the newfangled marketing automation tools, most CEOs increase the funding for demand generation by authorizing the expansion of the sales organization.

Surprised?

You shouldn’t be. Books like SNAP Selling, Sales 2.0, SPIN Selling and Solution Selling for years have been teaching sales people to generate demand, one conversation at a time. Most companies don’t call what sales people do “demand creation” or “demand generation.” No, we’ve given it more pedestrian names, like “pipeline development,” “sales prospecting” or “cold calling.” But, really, what’s the difference between what sales people are trying to do and what demand-generation does?

The Percent of the Sales Budget Spent on Demand Generation

Efficient sales people don’t spend much of their time prospecting. They network. They get referrals. They leverage LinkedIn and Twitter, and monitor news feeds about key accounts. When done properly, these activities are very effective and do not take a great deal of time. The rest of their pipeline will come from sales-ready leads.

But many sales teams spend 20 percent or more of their time prospecting. A recent technology software client of mine, for example, had their six-figure field sales people spending more than 40 percent of their time prospecting.

Multiply those percentages of time spent prospecting by the total sales budget for the team in question and, in most companies, money indirectly (and maybe inadvertently) allocated by sales for demand generation is at least as large as the entire marketing budget. In fact, it could be a multiple of the marketing budget.

Think about that.

It’s not like sales people like to cold call, cold calling is time consuming and often demoralizing. Sales professionals would prefer to talk to people who have a problem they could solve. So why do sales people do it?

There’s one simple reason: they have no choice. Marketing rarely generates a sufficient volume of truly qualified leads. It’s not because marketing can’t or won’t. It’s because marketing doesn’t get the funding necessary. So sales people have to pick up the slack.

A Four-Step Plan for Making a Bigger Different with Lead Generation

If that sounds like your situation, let me share these ideas for driving change:

1. Measure how much money your sales organization really spends on demand generation.
2. Determine the revenue capacity that would be available if your sales team spent more time working opportunities instead of looking for them.
3. Share these findings with the executive leadership team and propose an experiment in collaboration with sales, finance and your CEO to improve sales’ financial performance: supply a sales team with a sufficient volume of sales-ready leads so that their time spent prospecting is cut in half.
4. Compare the revenue performance of the pilot team with that of their peers.

To read the rest of this article, click Four Steps to Convince CEOs that Demand Generation Should be a Marketing, Not a Sales, Function

Our Lead Nurturing and Scoring Service goes up from $24,995 to $29,995 on September 1, so book today!

“If more companies listened to (Find New Customers) a lot more would be sold.” Dan McDade, Pointclear.