What we fail to conceptualize is the more holistic, perpetual process of continuously moving buyers from their earliest lead state to a revenue close – i.e., a true, central ‘outcome-based’ process.  Moreover, we never really take a step back and consider that all of our other marketing and sales processes should be rationalized, optimized and simplified against this central process.  In fact, when we take this point of view, it explains much of the disconnect that exists between marketing and sales.  For decades, B2B marketers have produced campaigns, and B2B sales team members have produced revenue.  The two could not be more diametrically opposed.

The perspective fortunately is changing.  With 72% of marketing automation ‘top performers’ reporting their number-one goal today is to increase revenue, according to Gleanster, the r-word increasingly is top of the agenda for B2B marketers.  And an increasing number of B2B companies large and small are measuring marketing performance via – or at least asking initial questions that drive toward – a revenue basis.  Marketing campaigns and content increasingly are being built with the buyer’s content needs during the buying process in mind.  And as I mentioned in my previous blog post, thanks to marketing automation technology, we are no longer challenged when it comes to the technology to track our buyer’s interactions with our content and programs.

So you would think we would have all the right ingredients to succeed with perpetual B2B demand generation – to build, manage and optimize literal lead-to-revenue factories.  But no.

Our drive towards a managed demand process continues to fall apart at execution.

As it turns out, getting our stream of inbound and outbound buyer education working in tandem with our lead qualification efforts, automating everything and getting everyone on the marketing and sales team partnering and operating on a continuous basis around this process … well that’s where we still struggle.

Fortunately, there is a better way.

The key to a managed demand process and to operating perpetual B2B demand generation is adopting a new approach – a new mindset, if you will.  It is one that I call “demand process stewardship.”

In fact, while it may not yet be commonplace, I would go so far as to say that effective demand process stewardship is the ‘secret sauce’ for successful, modern B2B demand generation.

What is demand process stewardship?

While we increasingly talk about and envison the concept of perpetual lead-to-revenue paths – thinking about buying process and aspiring to a state where we continuously collaborate with our sales teams to keep their pipelines filled with high-quality opportunities – we don’t actually do much to deliver the continuity or perpetuity of these processes in our demand generation efforts.

We constantly cause breaks in the process.  In fact, understanding these breaks is perhaps the best way to wrap our head around the concept of stewardship.

Examples of these ‘breaks’ include:

• Different perceptions of our buyer target:  Are we all on the same page about who we are targeting?
• Delivery of the buyer’s experience:  Are we managing an end-to-end dialogue with a buyer across marketing campaigns and sales touchpoints that in aggregate makes sense and provides buyers with the answers they require to propel their process forward?
• Assessment of lead state:  Are we carefully keeping tabs on a buyer’s potential at every stage of our interaction – ensuring we don’t move from automated to live interaction too quickly, yet operating nurturing right up until the optimal point when we have a real, live sales opportunity?
• Team interference:  Are we carefully orchestrating marketing and sales interactions so that each team and its members are engaging to his/her highest and best use, or are marketing and sales activities literally competing for the buyer’s attention?
• Islands of buyer data:  Are we carefully correlating and acting on the conglomeration of insights we are garnering from a buyer across interactions and systems, or are we collecting and duplicating information in multiple systems and not really ever getting to a single (and actionable) buyer record?
• Different process goals:  Are we all working with different goals in mind – some activity goals and some outcome goals, and none of them aligned?

Our first goal of demand process stewardship, thus, is to ensure continuity and integrity of the multiple layers that define an integrated demand process – making sure the breaks we defined above do not occur.  Below is a model I use to illustrate the core, integrated layers of a demand process:

Source: Adam B. Needles

Another goal of demand process stewardship is to ensure that these integrated layers are working together and are being optimized against a unified revenue goal.

The final goal of demand process stewardship is to ensure there is active monitoring, management and accountability for each individual demand process flow.  Call it ‘a single throat to choke,’ but for every definable lead-to-revenue path (which you may segment by buyer audience, by solution, or by whatever the case may be, but for that ‘lowest common denominator’ of how you divide your B2B demand generation efforts), there needs to be a single block captain.  There will be input and interactions from numerous people along the lead-to-revenue path, but someone needs to be the process ‘steward’ – responsible for the core planning, management and optimization of this process and accountable for the results.

What does demand process stewardship look like?

It can be difficult to visualize the concept of demand process stewardship.  While having that central block captain is critical, stewardship is more than merely knowing who the steward is.

Effective demand process stewardship really becomes an overall design ethic – one that is focused on how we design the layers of a demand process to work together.  And this is why demand process stewardship is the core of effective B2B demand generation.

Where do we start?  The central organizing logic for designing demand processes is our buyer dialogue thread.

B2B buyers go through a series of steps – a buying process – each time they decide to purchase something from us.  This process, which may be highly formal or highly informal, initiates with a problem, is followed by an iterative series of questions (and answers) and eventually results in the choice of a solution (or the temporary or permanent abandonment of the process, altogether).  While the specific content consumption path for each, individual buyer in a Web 2.0 environment is more varied than ever, the holistic process – i.e., the ‘information requirements’ that buyers make at each stage of their decision path – are surprisingly predictable and repeatable.  And they provide a basis for planning our dialogue thread with a given buyer throughout each stage of his/her process.

Source: Adam B. Needles

Buyer dialogue thus should be rationalized via a clear understanding of the buying process and of the buyer’s subsequent information requirements. Hand-off from marketing to sales must ensure that there is continuity in this dialogue between upstream marketing content offers and downstream sales education.

Demand generation requires more than mere buyer education, though, as we want to qualify our buyer as a potential revenue opportunity in tandem with this education.  We also want to think about the true ‘organic’ point at which a buyer will be inclined to engage with a sales resource – a point I think of as the true moment of a ‘qualified lead.’

We also want to make sure that our marketing and sales teams, as well as our technology systems and data, work together in tandem with our buyer education and qualification.  What individuals and systems will handle buyers at specific stages in the process, and what do they need to accomplish with the buyer at these stages?  How will these individuals and systems measure their performance?  And what are the live and automated buffers that exist between these individuals and systems to optimize end-to-end interactions with the buyer?

Below is a model I use to visualize the design of demand process layers to ensure integration and fundamental demand process stewardship.  Note I am not suggesting that this specific configuration, below, is the right one – that depends on a number of factors including the nature of sale, nature of the buyer, etc. – so realize the specific stages and roles below are hypothetical, albeit a strong illustration of what this might look like.

Source: Adam B. Needles

What are the barriers to effective demand process stewardship?

I’m working on a column for BtoB Magazine where I will jump into the final question here of why it is that we as B2B marketers struggle with getting to demand process stewardship.

Stay tuned for the link to that article …

It opens:

We’re at a crossroads in modern B2B demand generation.

Fifty-eight percent of marketing automation adopters cite “generate more leads” as a key motivator, according to Gleanster.  Similarly, 78% of B2B marketers report “generating high quality leads” as their greatest B2B marketing challenge in MarketingSherpa’s “2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.”

Yet a 2011 joint study by Vorsight and The Bridge Group noted, “On average, Sales Reps report that only 31% of all leads generated fit their Ideal Customer Profile.  Said another way, Sales Reps believe roughly 70% of the leads they receive have a low probability to purchase.”  And data from a recent IDC Technology Marketing Barometer Study indicates that year-over-year, between 2011 and 2012, our marketing and sales alignment around demand generation has actually gotten worse.

What’s going on?

The column looks at our challenge as B2B marketers aligning with sales and maintaining a strategic focus on revenue, and it examines how this relates to our frequent over-focus on marketing qualified leads (or MQLs, a term coined by SiriusDecisions) in our demand generation programs.

Click here to read the entire column.

As always, I appreciate your feedback on the piece.

• The most-recent U.S. Census Bureau survey on the topic reported in 2008 that B2B commerce accounted for 52% of total commercial activity, and B2B e-commerce accounted for 92% of total e-commerce.

B2B marketing in the U.S. (also) is a big deal.

• B2B marketing represented 35% of total spending on marketing and advertising in the U.S. in 2010 – to the tune of $129B – according to research firm Outsell.

In fact, you might even make a credible argument that much of the innovation at a people, process, content and technology level in the overall marketing discipline, today, is primarily taking place in the B2B marketing and sales segment.  Definitely more than in the consumer marketing arena.

Source: B2BCamp

Yet it seems more difficult than ever for B2B marketing and sales leaders to get the education and peer insight they need to stay ahead of their game.  And, whereas the consumer world seems to have a real ‘esprit de corps,’ the idea of ‘community’ in the B2B marketing and sales world is a rare thing.

… which is why I’m so excited about the first-ever B2BCamp (Twitter: @b2bcamp, #b2bcamp #atl) in Atlanta this coming Saturday, March 10.

Billed as an ‘unconference,’ the event is squarely targeted at delivering the type of education, peer insights and community that too often seem to elude B2B marketing and sales leaders.

I’m also excited to be keynoting the event – giving a talk that is based on my book, Balancing the Demand Equation, and that frames up the day by talking about the larger set of challenges and opportunities facing B2B demand generation today.

An UnConference

So what is B2BCamp?  The organizers explain:

B2BCamp is a user organized gathering focused on B2B Marketing topics. B2BCamp is one of many “unconferences” held  throughout the world. Although similar to traditional industry conferences, at B2BCamp there are no “attendees” because everyone participates in some manner. Some participants will present while others will lead a roundtable discussion. Some will contribute simply by sharing their experiences and others by helping with logistics, securing sponsorships, setting up Wi-Fi, etc. B2BCamp is a self-organizing collaborative event that is rewarding, fun and a totally cool  experience!

And if it’s not 100% apparent, B2BCamp – despite a focus on the topic of B2B commerce – is in fact not a commercial event.  I.e., all of the organizers are volunteers, and sponsorships are set at a low level … just enough to help cover costs.

Vote for Your Favorite Session … and It May Make It on the Agenda

A key feature of B2BCamp is that the agenda is developed by the attendees via two rounds of voting – before the event to narrow the presentations and on-site to finalize the agenda.

In fact, you can review the proposed sessions and vote online here.

BTW:  At the time I’m typing this blog post the top session is “Welcome to the Buyer-centric Movement” – a topic I love because it’s literally one of the two guiding concepts in my book.

Find Out Who Will Be There

Not only is this unconference transparent about selecting the sessions, it’s also transparent about who’s attending.

To find who’s attending, click here.

Worth a Full Saturday

As I mentioned above, the event is this Saturday, March 10, near the Perimeter Mall in the Atlanta area.

The event organizers tell me there are 175+ B2B marketing and sales leaders already registered, and so it’s likely to be a sell-out.

See you there.

Should be a good first step towards building a (much-needed) B2B marketing and sales community … in the Atlanta-area, and then around the country as B2BCamp hits the road! TBD.

Problem Two:  Our Lack of an Operations Mindset

Given we have a rapidly expanding set of technological capabilities – through marketing automation and similar platforms – to ‘track the buyer,’ what is remaining for us to effectively manage demand as an end-to-end, optimize-able process?  I noted in the previous post in this series, “Clearly there is something else – something bigger – that is holding us back … .”

That bigger issue is B2B marketing leaders’ lack of an operations mindset.

This is the issue that B2B marketing leaders – especially CMOs – often can’t put their finger on, but that is at the core of much of our modern challenges.  They talk about not being able to demonstrate the revenue impact of marketing; they talk about not having ‘hard numbers’; or they speak to not having a dashboard to really visualize marketing results.  Obviously none of these ‘wants’ represent an operations mindset, per se, but they do represent the result of successfully managing demand as a process.

So how do B2B marketing leaders typically remedy this situation?  They invest in technology, but when it comes to their marketing programs, they continue to do ‘more of the same.’

Therein lies the disconnect, as I note in Balancing the Demand Equation:

The disconnect:  If as B2B marketers we are applying legacy mass-marketing, top-of-funnel techniques to the effort of customer acquisition and nurturing in an era of Buyer 2.0, there is a high likelihood that we will have a single, ineffective touchpoint with our buyer and then subsequently lose his/her engagement as (s)he goes through the buying process.  Most of our demand generation programs thus remain highly inefficient, largely focused on awareness, and so we consistently lose track of warm leads that literally ‘leak’ out of our sale funnel, as Forrester has noted in its research.  This is particularly problematic because Buyer 2.0 is moving forward in the buyer education process and will make a purchase, but if our B2B demand generation program loses touch with that buyer, the chance of him/her purchasing from us is greatly decreased.

Most B2B marketing organizations thus do not have a top-of-funnel problem.  What they really have is a ‘middle-of-the-funnel’ problem.

This is why our B2B demand generation efforts cannot be haphazard or intermittent; instead, they need to be consistent and continuous processes.  …

Yet it is exactly this type of a consistent and continuous B2B demand process – one that perpetually operates to move a buyer through multiple education and qualification stages (adjusting to the pace of the buying cycle), that combines both automated and live touch points and that only turns a lead over to sales after sufficient processing – that B2B marketing leaders are challenged to build.

We want a lead factory – a construct that requires understanding and enabling the multiple processing stages required to take in raw inputs and to churn out a finished product – but instead we deliver a series of ‘stage shows.’

What is at the core of this issue?  It has nothing to do with good intentions; rather, it is the product of biases that are deep-rooted and fundamentally engrained in B2B marketers.

• First, right-brain/creative types are often drawn to marketing, not left-brainers.
• Second, marketing training at the vocational and academic level is focused on channels and tactics and on building consumer brands, but rarely speaks to the orchestration and coordination of multiple channels and tactics in a sequence to drive buyer dialogue.
• Third, on the off-chance a B2B marketer has some operations-analysis experience, it was probably garnered either in an MBA class or in an industrial setting, and it was probably applied to some sort of manufacturing process – meaning it never ‘clicked’ that this could also be applied to marketing.
• Fourth, the opportunities and challenges around such a complex, iterative and information empowered Buyer 2.0 are relatively recent; meaning, it truly is a changed world of marketing today from five years ago or ten years ago, when more ‘one-and-done’ tactics in more limited channels might have actually been a successful route.

It’s time for our training, bias and ultimate mindset as B2B marketers to catch up with our operational reality.  So where do we need to focus our time and attention to drive change?

Below are the top-five areas where we need to focus:

> #1 – We don’t organize our marketing efforts around enabling a buying ‘process’: 

Despite the best of intentions, the majority of B2B marketing activities continue to occur in a tactical silo.  They are planned and executed as specific events, email blasts, Webinars, product literature and sales enablement tools, created at a specific moment in time, to drive a short-term goal.  Their lifecycle is short, and the scope of these activities is incomplete when compared against the total set of information needs our buyer has as (s)he goes through his/her end-to-end buying process.

It is rare that planning these activities is rationalized against enabling the buying process at specific stages.  So there is ultimately no granular, multi-stage buying ‘process’ at the core of how we organize our marketing, and this means we’re not thinking about enabling or optimizing a process from the get-go.

> #2 – We have an outbound, interruptive, push bias: 

Closely associated with the previous point, much of our marketing efforts are focused on getting buyers’ ‘attention’ via outbound channels, but such a stance assumes that if we can garner our buyer’s attention, the buyer will initiate a buying process (or be immediately ready to buy).

Yet such a posture is largely at odds with the research about how buyers buy and about how Buyer 2.0 initiates a buying process.  MarketingSherpa has noted over the past few years in its annual “B2B Marketing Benchmark Report”, that nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers at any given point in time will make a purchase decision in a period greater than one month or one quarter.  No amount of ‘interruption’ can change this fact.

And so such an outbound, interruptive, push approach to engaging with the buyer can mean we’re more likely to be out of sync with a buying process than in sync with it, and this hinders our ability to get to a point where we’re enabling a buying process.  It often requires us to reverse how we engage with buyers – looking at how our marketing programs can be better aligned to be ‘found’ by buyers in the right place, at the right time, and then how our outbound efforts can shepherd a buyer through education and qualification once it’s clear the buyer is actually in a buying process.

> #3 – We attempt to educate and qualify our buyer in single-step programs: 

The modern B2B buying process is complex, incorporates a high volume of content consumption and has many steps.  Yet our B2B marketing programs too often are single-step.  For instance, we’ll run a single Webinar or offer a single whitepaper to garner attention, and then what?  No follow-up; no logical next step is even planned other than having a sales person call.

We don’t break our content offers up into a series of short steps.  By analyzing the buying process and leveraging marketing automation, we’re able to serve up a stream of consecutive next steps with content.  This content is able to follow a logical dialogue thread – one that is welcome from the buyer – and this can help us take a buyer as far down the buying process as possible before serving up a qualified lead to our sales team.  Moreover, this is a state that can be managed – and optimized – as a process.

The same can be said when it comes to forms and lead qualification, which should be served up in tandem with our content offers.  We also try to do all of our lead qualification in one step – overloading a single form, rather than ‘progressively’ profiling our buyer over a series of steps.  (It’s pretty obvious when a form is really just a precursor to an immediate sales call; see below.)

Source: IBM Unica marketing campaign landing page

In the same way that buyer education should proceed as a series of steps throughout the buying process, qualification should proceed in an iterative fashion – i.e., ‘getting to know’ a buyer more and more over a series of steps, where additional questions are asked at each point of interaction.  This process also can and should be repeatable and optimize-able over time.

> #4 – We don’t benchmark our success against revenue: 

The core of process management is having a clear sense of the inputs, the outputs and the steps in-between.  Yet we as B2B marketers, more likely than not, are not benchmarking success of our B2B marketing efforts in terms of its revenue impact, which means that we are not able to fully assess the output, nor are we able to assess many of the steps that lead to that output.

The “2010 Lenkold Group / eMedia Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study” notes that only about one-third of B2B marketing organizations link marketing activities to revenue outcomes.

Instead, we too often focus on activity-based metrics, such as traffic and impressions or intangible metrics, such as brand-recognition.  And if we count leads, they are of the initial-respondent genre – i.e., a net-new email address from someone who engaged with an individual content offer.

Revenue is the output of a demand process; thus, if we’re not focused on this output, we’re not able to manage demand as a process.

> #5 – We organize along functional departments, not around our roles in the demand process: 

The final culprit – which you might argue is both cause and effect of this system – is that we organize our marketing teams around mediums and tactics.

The lack of grounding in our buyer and his/her needs has been compounded for decades by our teams’ organizing according to communication channel – i.e., an overly-rigid ‘functional’ model versus a model built around role or contribution to the buying process.  We would have an advertising department, a PR department, a tradeshow/events department, and more likely than note, these elements would not be in full orchestration and/or optimized to support the buying process.

In the pre-Internet era, these channels were fewer and better defined, and so they were a safe default.  But today with an explosion of communication channels, it’s a more challenging than ever for us to organize in this way, nor is it truly rational.  (Would you have a ‘Pinterest department’?)  Moreover, it does not address the true cross-channel dynamics of modern B2B buyers, as Akin Arikan notes in his book, titled Multichannel Marketing.  Today the buyer literally shifts with each phase of the buying process across mediums, but his/her dialogue is surprisingly linear across these mediums – which requires our logic and planning to do the same.

Our marketing organization must embody what I call ‘process stewardship’ – a concept I’ll be talking about more over the coming weeks – which should be at the core of how marketing departments are defined.

Building, Sustaining and Monetizing Demand as a Process

We’re at a crossroads in business and as B2B marketers.  We’ve spent decades turning production and supply-chain activities into optimize-able processes.  Now is the time to understand and begin to manage demand as a process.

The first step – as I covered in the previous post – requires us to be able to track a buyer in his/her buying process – but with this capability, we still need to go through a substantial shift in how we operate as marketers.  That shift means rationalizing and planning our marketing activities as processes that we will build, manage and optimize over a longer period than just this month or this quarter.

A major change, but one that is worth the result:  repeatable, predictable and sustainable revenue generation.

I open Balancing the Demand Equation by commenting, “Modern B2B demand generation is failing.  Seriously.”  What’s going on?  Amid an information power shift from sellers to buyers, an explosion of Web 2.0 communication channels and raised expectations from sales colleagues and executive management, B2B marketers are finding it tougher than ever to credibly and efficiently add value in the “lead-to-revenue” process, as Forrester terms it.  I hear this challenge regularly from senior marketers and CMOs, who often are hard-pressed to show the real impact of their efforts on their companies’ bottom lines.

Where’s the gap?

There are many challenges, but perhaps one of the greatest is our frequent inability as B2B marketing leaders to conceptualize and manage ‘demand’ – used here in the classical economics sense of the word – as an operational, repeatable and sustainable process.  Stated in another way, we do not treat B2B buyer demand as something that is built via a series of optimize-able steps, through which we turn initial buyer interest into a lifetime of customer revenue.

What goes into such an end-to-end demand process?  The core organizing thread is the logic around the dialogue we plan to drive with the buyer, based on his/her buying process.  This aligns with a virtual ‘layer’ of content marketing efforts that should extend across channels, addressing various stages of the buying process.  This dialogue also should be aligned with a layer of lead qualification activities, which extend throughout all phases of the buying process.  These parallel layers of content marketing and lead qualification should align with various marketing and sales roles, spanning both automated nurturing and also live interaction at various stages of the buying process.  And the entire process should be supported by data and systems that enable the end-to-end orchestration of marketing and sales efforts to move the buyer forward.

Active demand process management thus is critical to successful, modern B2B marketing and demand generation, and yet B2B marketing leaders are only beginning to scratch the surface of doing so.

In fact, this gap was driven home as I was reading a recent pair of research briefs, written by Lori Wizdo and Jeff Ernst (Twitter: @jeffernst), both analysts at Forrester.  The first brief, “Automating Lead-to-revenue Management” by Wizdo, notes that B2B technology marketing organizations’ contribution to lead pipelines, on average, hovers at a surprisingly-low 27%.  The second brief, “The State Of B2B Demand Generation: Disjointed” by Ernst, further notes that only one in four B2B marketing organizations “… have defined a lead-to-revenue management process that their marketing and sales teams follow” and that less than 5% of aggregate marketing and sales interaction with B2B buyers rises to the level of what Ernst would consider truly “orchestrated.”

Clearly modern B2B demand generation is failing.  And all of the great messaging and creative, smart tradeshow sponsorships and new technology investments that we throw at the problem cannot help if we are unable make a critical leap.  We must be able to manage demand as an operational process.

So why haven’t we done this yet?

Our challenges with this fall into two major categories – a first, which today we are easily able to remediate, and a second, which it’s much more challenging to address.

Problem one:  Our Inability to Track the B2B Buyer

Another book I have been reading recently is Revenue Engine by Steve Woods (Twitter: @stevewoods) and Alex Shootman (Twitter: @shootman) at Eloqua.  Their book provides an analytical framework for thinking through the high-level management and optimization of the lead-to-revenue process, and it’s worth a read.

Synthesizing some of their points, the two would contend that managing demand as an operational process probably was not even really viable until recently.  But they note that something substantial has changed in the last decade, which has enabled us to begin to approach lead-to-revenue management in a serious manner – the ability to observe a B2B buyer throughout his/her entire buying process:

Historically, marketing and sales have not been held to the same standards of measurement, optimization, and control that other corporate disciplines have confronted.  Why?  In a word:  visibility.  Scientific management was enabled by the ability to observe a worker, measure and time the tasks performed, and refine them accordingly.  The tracking innovations in logistics and warehousing meant that analysts could track each package, each movement, and each shipment to a granular level, which gave rise to supply chain management.  And the ability to precisely and automatically measure defect rates and manufacturing tolerances meant business could feasibly embrace and implement the total quality management discipline.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t typically been the case with marketing initiatives or sales conversations that have long eluded meaningful measurement.  Without the ability to see and measure the progress of buyers, it has been virtually impossible to systemically optimize the performance of the revenue creation process.  Until now.

Unprecedented transitions in buyer behavior and online access to information over the past 10 years have enabled, for the first time, the management and optimization of the entire revenue-creation process.

The same Web 2.0 world that has complicated buyer communication – challenging us as B2B marketers – also has delivered more mechanisms than ever for observing what Woods has termed “Digital Body Language.”  I.e., more than ever, we have the tools to observe a buyer’s substantive interaction with our companies throughout the entire buying process.  This capability is critical because leveraging trackable insights is at the core of our ability to optimize B2B demand generation and leads to what Woods/Shootman would term a state of more ‘scientific’ lead-to-revenue management.

So connect up inbound marketing and social media tools with marketing automation and a CRM platform, and you’ve got end-to-end tracking of much of the B2B buyer journey via his/her consumption of digital content.

Okay, problem number one solved, right?

… but yet we know this is not sufficient.  Merely adopting platforms such as marketing automation gives us a new level of capability for engaging with B2B buyers, but how do we leverage the technology to efficiently manage the demand process?  As I’ve noted in a past blog post, why is it that our adoption of the technology, by itself, does not seem to tackle our problems and that an alarmingly-high percentage of new technology adopters also report overall failures in their B2B demand generation programs?

Clearly there is something else – something bigger – that is holding us back from effective management of demand processes.

Part two of this series looks at the fundamental issue of B2B marketing leaders’ ‘lack of an operations mindset.’  Stay tuned …

I can honestly say it was a very cool moment in my own personal and professional life, and I am thankful for so many who have helped make this project a reality over the past two-plus years.

So nearly 30 days later, how’s it going?

As background, I wrote the book to help fellow B2B marketers understand and succeed in a challenging modern demand generation environment – a topic I’m obviously passionate about and have been speaking and writing about now for several years. It covers how and why B2B marketing has changed in a Web 2.0 environment, and it provides a framework for building and operationalizing a ‘successful, modern B2B demand generation model.’  (BTW, to download a more-detailed summary of the book and its table of contents, click here.)

Literally, I wrote the book on B2B demand generation that I believed wasn’t out there — but needed to be!

I’m thus happy to report that the book has been well-received by the very B2B marketing community it was written for, with strong early sales and some fantastic initial reviews.

But no book release is without its ups and downs.  I’ve had my fair share of supply-chain issues and I’m sure I have frustrated a few people who have tried to order the book.  (And for that I apologize.)  Yet I can’t complain; that’s what happens when your book becomes a top-five bestseller on Amazon!  (Read:  Selling out can be a good problem to have.)

So given all that’s happened in the last 30 days, I thought I’d do a quick round-up and share some highlights, as well as providing an update on availability of the book.

Initial Reviews

Initial reviews have been fantastic.  In fact, I’m humbled by what a number of colleagues in the B2B marketing / marketing technology / demand generation world have written about my book, and I wanted to share their comments with you below:

Ardath Albee (Twitter: @ardath421), Author, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, wrote on her Marketing Interactions blog:

The simplicity of his approach is admirable. … It’s both strategic enough to help you think through the issues and tactical enough to help you actually do something meaningful to address them.

David Raab (Twitter: @draab), industry analyst and Author, The Marketing Performance Measurement Toolkit, wrote on his Customer Experience Matrix blog:

Adam Needles’ new book Balancing the Demand Equation closes the gap. … Consider this a guidebook for how to play the game and win.

Anand Thaker (Twitter: @AnandThaker), a marketing operations strategist and former colleague of mine at Silverpop, wrote on his Marketing Technology blog:

Balancing the Demand Equation is about the changing B2B environment where relevancy and efficiency matter most, but marketers are currently unable to deliver.

Scott Brinker (Twitter: @chiefmartec), President and CTO of ion interactive, wrote on his Chief Marketing Technologist blog:

I’ve been a fan of Adam’s for many years … he’s a master mechanic of modern marketing engines. … For the mere price of a book, it’s a bargain to tap into Adam’s experienced and inspiring thinking on these topics.

And these write-ups come on the heels of some already strong reviews, highlighted on the back cover of the book, which I shared a few weeks ago.

Again, I’m humbled, and my sincerest thanks to Ardath, David, Anand and Scott for taking the time to read and review my book.

Availability Update

While I’ve had great luck with such fantastic reviews, I can’t say the same about the supply chain side of things.

What can I say — and without getting into the details — is that within a very short time of my book being released, it was sold out and unavailable, and it took about two weeks to get back to a point where the book was consistently available via Amazon. The good news is that we’ve finally got things dialed with the printer, and we’ve been able to consistently keep the book available for the last week or two.

I obviously want to apologize to anyone who had a bad experience getting early copies; hopefully, that will not happen again.

So where can you get a copy of Balancing the Demand Equation at this point?

• Hardcopy:  It is available in hardcopy format on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
• Electronic version:  It is available in electronic format on Nook.  (And stay tuned as I hope to announce Kindle and iBook versions very soon.)

Amazon Bestseller!!!

Perhaps the most exciting development over the first thirty days is that my book hit Amazon top-five bestseller status in more than one marketing category.

Below is a snapshot of its ranking on October 11 … just a few days ago and probably the best day of sales yet:

So that’s the scoop!

All-in-all, a great first thirty days as an author.

I’m really excited by how the book has been received so far, and I look forward to sharing it with more B2B marketers over the coming weeks and months.  I also look forward to additional feedback as others read the book.  Let me know what you think!

Finally, thanks to so many people for supporting me in this endeavor.  Writing a book is not a solo activity.  I’ve acknowledged a number of people in the front of my book, but I want to once again say thanks to that group and to the broader network that has helped make this a reality.

The inspiration for the book is literally the years spent as a B2B marketer saying to myself, “There’s got to be a better way.”  And so I wrote the book as a modern handbook for B2B marketers to navigate the complex, new world of Buyer 2.0, sales/marketing alignment and marketing automation.

The book provides a framework to help B2B marketers transform their demand generation approach – moving from a legacy of batch-and-blast mass marketing and of reactive ‘sales support’ to a new state of building perpetual, buyer-centric programs that contribute to predictable and sustainable revenues for their organizations.

Click here to download a PDF overview of the book and its table of contents.

I’m also excited to share some early reviews of the book by some pretty well-respected names in the marketing and sales arena.

Jim Lenskold (Twitter: @JimLenskold), President of Lenskold Group and Author, Marketing ROI: The Path to Campaign, Customer and Corporate Profitability, wrote:

A must-read book for B2B marketers ready to drive bottom-line results and truly deliver marketing ROI through better management of the complete purchase funnel. Balancing the Demand Equation provides guidance on marketing’s increased role in educating, engaging and nurturing sales-ready leads in today’s world of marketing operations, automation and outcome-based metrics.

Robert L. Jolles (Twitter: @Jolles), President of Jolles Associates, Inc. and Author, Customer Centered Selling, wrote:

Finally! A roadmap to help B2B marketers understand the modern buyer and pioneer successful, customer-centered demand generation programs.

Thomas C. O’Guinn, Ph.D., with the Center for Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin–Madison wrote:

This is a very smart book on a very important topic. Anyone who knows much about B2B marketing knows that almost everything written on it is just a round-peg-square-hole ‘fit’ of B2C knowledge, or a worked-over sales management PowerPoint deck. They also are real slogs to read. Not this. Needles’ book is a new paradigm, and one that fits perfectly with the new realities of commerce. This is sophisticated analytics, content creation and REAL customer relationship management. If a company were to seriously adopt this model, they would make a lot more money. No kidding.

Ann Handley (Twitter: @marketingprofs), Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and Co-author, Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business, wrote:

Dear B2B Marketer: Your world is changing, and here’s the field guide that shows you precisely how to adapt.

Steven Woods (Twitter: @stevewoods), CTO of Eloqua and Author, Revenue Engine, wrote:

In Balancing the Demand Equation, Needles weaves together a well-crafted B2B demand generation framework, at both the strategic and tactical level, that shows executives a clear path to more-predictable and more-sustainable revenue outcomes. Grounded in case studies and detailed research, the book provides specific guidance and critical insights for getting the most out of marketing automation investments, while never losing sight of the strategic change towards buyer-centricity.

Sincerest thanks to these folks for taking the time to review — and in some cases even contribute to — the book.

And I look forward to your own feedback to the book over the coming weeks!

With good reason (as I’ve been hard at work finishing this project up), but no more.  I’m pleased to announce that …

Balancing the Demand Equation:  The Elements of a Successful Modern B2B Demand Generation Model is now set to be released via New Year Publishing in hardcover on Amazon on September 19.  (Click here to pre-order your copy.)

It also will be available on iBook, Kindle and Nook shortly thereafter.

I’m particularly excited to announce the book’s release to the community of B2B marketers I’ve worked so closely with over the years.  I think this is a book you’ll find very useful in helping to take your B2B demand generation programs to the next level.  And I look forward to your feedback on it.

As I note in the book’s description:

The goal of the book is to help B2B marketers fundamentally transform their demand generation approach – building perpetual, buyer-centric programs that contribute to predictable and sustainable revenues for their organizations.  The book also helps B2B marketers re-position their role, from tactical execution manager to that of strategic demand-chain manager – a critical shift.

B2B marketers need more than a minor course correction.  They need a massive overhaul in their approach to B2B demand generation.  Balancing the Demand Equation delivers both the rationale and approach to help B2B marketers succeed in this re-alignment and to emerge as leaders in the new B2B demand chain.

Click here to download a PDF overview of the book and its table of contents.

There’s more to come on the book and its release, and I’ll keep Propelling Brands updated with the details over the coming weeks.

Also, I’ve picked back up my blogging again.  This past week I published a new post on the Left Brain DGA blog site, titled “The Real Cost of Retaining a Legacy Approach to B2B Demand Generation … And What You Can Do About It.”  And I’ll be doing more posts in the near future around many of the topics in the book.

More to come …

The update: After working and re-working the focus and scope of the book over the last six months, I’m happy to announce I’m on what I believe is a strong path to completion.  I’m more confident than ever in the evolutionary direction and focus of the book, and I strongly expect to complete this book over the next few months.  (I’m about 2/3 done today and could see being done with major writing by May or sooner.  In fact, if you’ve noticed me blogging and Tweeting less lately, it’s because I’m spending a lot of time on the book … that is, when I’m not working with Left Brain clients, which are always my priority.)

Balancing the Demand Equation, as I’m currently titling the book, will be an in-depth look at the keys to succeeding with modern B2B demand generation.  It will help B2B marketers truly understand how to balance educating the buyer with achieving repeatable, sustainable delivery of leads and revenue.  And I believe it consequently will help B2B marketers take their game to the next level.

Moreover, as you would expect from me, it’s backed by 18-plus months of serious research and thought about the model.  So it’s comprehensive and thorough, but I also think the core model and principles are quite simple.  So it’s highly digestible, as well.

The request: I’m featuring in the book a select group of B2B marketing organizations that ‘really get it.’  More than case studies, I want these examples to really prove that it’s possible to take your B2B demand generation game (and science) to the next level.

This is where I need your help.

I am putting out an open invitation to nominate best-in-class demand generators — i.e., B2B marketing organizations that are truly proving the potential today of 2.0 demand generation techniques — through evolution in their content marketing, their lead management processes, their nurturing logic and their use of marketing automation technology.

How can you nominate a best-in-class B2B demand generator?

Three options:

• One, drop a comment below nominating the specific organization and/or specific marketer.  When you do so, I’ll also get your contact information (which won’t be public), and then I can follow up with you directly via email.
• Two, use the contact form on my blog to send me a note, and then I can also follow up with you directly via email.
• Three, DM me over Twitter, and I’ll share my email address so you can send me a nomination directly.

I need nominations to be in by end of March, so that there’s time to include everyone.

As always, thanks for your support and encouragement on this project.  It’s been a long time in the making, but I think it’s a better book today than it would have been six or twelve months ago.  I’m going to be proud to share the final product with you.

And I look forward to your nominations!

For those of you who are not familiar with Dreamforce, you might be asking, ‘Why a write-up on what is (at a surface level) merely a technology user conference?  What’s the takeaway for marketers?’

Source: Salesforce.com

An obvious initial response is that Salesforce.com has emerged as one of the dominant – and one of the fastest-growing – CRM platforms in the marketplace.  That alone earns it some attention.

But beyond this, as I note in my post, “Dreamforce increasingly has grown into the annual host of two critical, interdependent and growing ecosystems – and consequently was an event filled with great demand generation insights.  …  On one hand, Salesforce.com serves as the cornerstone for a growing software ecosystem around buyer-centric, demand management software.  …  On the other hand, Salesforce.com has become the leader in cloud-based application infrastructure.  …  [And] it is this cloud-based approach that also is critical to enabling [this] demand management software ecosystem … .”

Dreamforce also is a unique annual event as there doesn’t seem to be any “… other technology-based event that draws such a large group of sales and marketing executives – and the technology vendors that serve them – in one place, at one time for nearly a full week,” as I comment in the blog post.  In fact, “Some of my best conversations each year occur at Dreamforce, and this year was no different.”

So what were my major takeaways?  The blog post focuses on two major demand generation insights:

• “B2B buyer insight is more-pervasive, more real-time and more-accessible via ‘the cloud,’ and marketers must learn to leverage this dynamic asset.
• “Our role as marketers must focus more than ever on delivering leadership and visibility to help our organizations tune their demand generation machines and to ensure tight coupling with revenue outcomes.”

I also have embedded in this post a link to my Dreamforce interview w/ the DreamSimplicity video crew in which I talk more about the new impetus for ‘marketing in the cloud.’

Click here to read the full LBM DemandGen (r)Evolution post.

I’ve done a number of posts over time on the various holistic elements that go into successful B2B demand generation here on Propelling Brands, on the Silverpop Demand Generation blog and more recently on the Left Brain Marketing (LBM) DemandGen (r)Evolution blog.

Yet I note in this new LBM post that despite all the tips and tricks out there in guides, blog posts and Tweets, for a lot of marketers there still seems to be a ‘glaring gap’:

How do you build a modern demand generation program? What does that entail? Where do you start? What are the keys to success?

I think this is the real disconnect for many B2B marketers today. They do not really understand what it looks like to architect an entire, modern demand generation program, end-to-end – one that is appropriate for a marketing environment in which power has shifted from sellers to buyers and where Web 2.0 realities predominate. These B2B marketers need a way to sort out how all of these tactical systems and advice in blog posts and through consultants all come together in a real program.

I argue in the first post in the series that starting place should be a thoughtful and comprehensive demand generation plan. I then proceed to outline the initial research and analysis required to start with developing your plan — a first step in the process I refer to as establishing ‘buyer-targeting context.’

Source: Left Brain Marketing; click to enlarge

I then use the second post in the series to explain how you translate this initial research and analysis into actual demand generation programs — a second step in the process I refer to as ‘program translation.’

This is the same process we go through with clients of Left Brain Marketing to help them develop their own demand generation programs, so the content of these two posts is well-grounded in reality.  (I also provide a number of slides right out of our decks as illustrative graphics in part two.)

I end the second post by noting:

There is certainly more to say around the details and best practices of building out your sub models and of operating and refining your demand generation program. … Nonetheless, I hope this post and the previous one represents a good starting place for wrapping your head around how to approach and build a successful demand generation plan.

And I really do believe these two posts are a good starting place — and a comprehensive reference source — for your own B2B demand generation programs.

Click here to read the full part-one post on LBM DemandGen (r)Evolution; and click here to read the full part-two post.

Source: Left Brain Marketing; click to enlarge

Despite increasing adoption of marketing automation technology, “[w]e’re really bad at lead nurturing as B2B marketers,” I explain in the post.  I subsequently dig into the disconnects, and I recommend a strategic ‘layered’ approach to rationalize nurturing programs.

So where is the gap in our lead nurturing?  In the post I look at three realizations that are critical to successfully developing and positioning your lead nurturing.  Specifically, it’s critical for B2B marketers to realize:

• Nurturing is a strategic activity, not a tactical one
• Nurturing balances targeted buyer education with buyer qualification; it is two-way communication
• Successful nurturing is aligned with, and supports the buying process

The resultant call-out is the need for a model to better think through how to build a successful lead nurturing program – balancing lead-flow goals with the need to engage the modern B2B buyer and giving you a foundation for building out nurturing tracks within your marketing automation system.

My ‘layered’ model – which the post explains in more detail – is one approach to rationalizing and organizing your lead nurturing tracks as part of your overall B2B demand generation program.   (And it is something we are leveraging at Left Brain Marketing in our client engagements.)

In the post I note:

Successful lead nurturing requires thinking in terms of a matrix of potential content offers and reactions on the part of the B2B buyer – all of which are designed to help support the buying process, accelerate decision-making and orchestrate content dialogue with that buyer. 

…

It’s impossible to envision every single choice a buyer will make in every situation, but you can understand if a  buyer is ‘on track’ or off, and have an approach to getting buyers back on the right track.

Click here to read the full LBM DemandGen (r)Evolution post.