How do you define "lead or demand generation"?

I’ll talk about defining “lead” in a minute but this is really about the process of managing customer touches all the way to a purchase order. For commodity products, demand generation may actually include purchasing the product off the website. For enterprise software products, however, demand generation typically stops at the point where you turn over a qualified inquiry to the sales team. And even in this case, I strongly recommend a closed-loop process to ensure demand generation results in closed sales.

How do you define a "lead"?

This is a term that Sales should define rather than Marketing. I am more precise on the vocabulary. I use terms like:

• Raw inquiry – a contact from a trade show, a whitepaper registration, or website visit


• Qualified inquiry – a contact that matches a pre-defined set of criteria (e.g. profiling)


• Lead – sales or inside sales deems it a “lead” or can become a lead if the contact has invested more time (attended webinar, asking questions, investing more time with us, etc.)


• Opportunity – sales team decides that this is a valid sales pursuit (budget, timing, fit, etc.)

How do you measure campaign success?

First of all, there is no one “golden egg” of Marketing. It takes a broad mix of different campaigns, vehicles and messages to create a marketing pipeline. I measure campaign success by how it helps me in the different buckets outlined earlier—raw inquiry and qualified inquiry. I also look at the conversion ratio as a contact moves from raw to qualified inquiry to closed sale. Then I compare these metrics against historical data to see if we’re improving or not.

What are your thoughts on "lead nurturing"?

I believe there are two pipelines---a Marketing pipeline and a Sales pipeline. The Marketing pipeline is really managing the customer touches from first contact through to a real sales opportunity. And I look at it from the perspective of the prospect spending increasingly more time as time goes on. For example, the initial contact might be downloading a whitepaper from our website. Then the prospect attends a webinar or a seminar. Then our inside sales person books a meeting based on their interest and fit with qualifying criteria.

You see, they’re investing more and more time. In the beginning it was more about information gathering or learning. Then it became a possibility of starting a purchase process. Marketing must “nurture” the prospect along by providing increasingly more useful and enticing information. These communications should be based on the customer actions or interest. So a whitepaper download might trigger a webinar invitation on a related topic. Marketing must offer education and not appear as high pressure or “salesy” because that’s a turn-off at this stage. Our job is to make sure that, by the time an inside rep calls the prospect, the customer is open to having the conversation. Remember, these phone calls are the most expensive on a cost-per-touch basis. So we must make sure they’re talking to the most qualified prospects possible.

What advice would you pass along to industry colleagues?

I’ve made plenty of mistakes over the years and I have learned from them, which in itself is one point to share. Processes and systems should incorporate measurements and reporting for determining what worked and what did not work, then incorporate that learning into your next program. Another key is to build relationships with sales reps. Pick a sales rep and do a campaign and see how it performs for him/her. Create internal evangelists for your marketing programs. I have worked with Sales reps who would even approach our executives asking them to allocate more marketing dollars to demand generation because it was so helpful for them. Sales and marketing folks must absolutely work together to win business.

Do you distinguish between "lead gen" and "brand/awareness building"?

Personally, I would combine these objectives whenever possible. My crystal ball doesn’t work well enough to tell me exactly when a prospect is receptive to my message, you never know exactly when a prospect is going to determine that they have a need. That means Marketing has to continually educate, inform and make them aware of the solution. I do decide upfront how much of the campaign is for branding and how much for demand generation. For example, I might look at readership to measure awareness, and look at response rate to measure demand generation effectiveness.

What are mistakes have you learned to avoid?

Two really come to mind—1) not relying on just one marketing program to drive leads but rather look at it as a mix of vehicles that reinforce each other, and 2) not learning from the past, not taking the time to measure program effectiveness, analyzing the data and adjusting actions accordingly.

What types of vendors do you engage? any favorites?

I am a big proponent of outsourcing, most companies need to focus their resources on their own solutions and services, buy outsourcing you can stay on top of the latest and greatest technology from folks who are driven to stay on top of the technology. I outsource areas such as telemarketing, database management, inquiry fulfillment and email marketing. But I treat my vendors as a part of my team and take full ownership of their services. For example, I’ve seen some colleagues blame the vendor for problems. I prefer treating them like employees or like internal partners. Some vendors I like are:

• Evaluation/ Education/ Consulting -- Sales Lead Experts
• Direct Marketing database / Integrated Direct Marketing -- Harte-Hanks or Protocol
• Email Marketing -- Twelve Horses

How do you work with IT?

I consider IT to be very important to demand generation. If you think about it, IT owns the systems for customer data, and research for campaign development or for targeting for cross sell or up sell opportunities are only as good as the data in the system. You’d do well to befriend IT.

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