Why Demand Generation Programs Fail, and How to Fix Them
By Bob Finlayson & Paul Brunato
For sellers of complex, enterprise-grade products and services, a demand generation program is a key component of an effective marketing and sales strategy. Yet many such programs fail to deliver sufficient results to justify their cost. Why?
In our experience, these failures have three primary causes:
The content created for these programs fails to build trust in the early stages of the customer journey.
The seller’s customer journey analysis (customer journey “map”) is not accurately aligned with the way their customers actually buy products and services.
The handoff from marketing to sales is fumbled, or the sales team misunderstands the customer’s current stage in their journey and, therefore, can’t effectively engage with the prospect.
Let's examine each of these challenges more closely.
1. Content and trust
As we noted in one of our prior articles, early in the customer journey, buyers may not yet understand they have a need for a new product or service. When they do recognize a need they often don’t know what they are looking for in terms of a solution, and they don’t know who to trust as a source of information to help them find answers.
This creates an opportunity for sellers to build trust with buyers, but only if they avoid these common pitfalls:
Overtly promotional content – In the early stages of the customer journey, buyers are looking for insights, not sales pitches. To avoid this failing, address the buyer’s challenge, help them ‘frame’ it, or demonstrate how to think about the challenge, and show them how to identify and evaluate potential solutions. First and foremost, your content should be educational and informative.
Misunderstanding the buyer – Simply put, you can’t educate and inform the buyer if you don’t understand their situation and perspective. This is where marketing content often fails. Avoid this trap by creating customer personas informed by real data, and a detailed customer journey map that is accurately aligned with your buyer and their needs through every stage of their journey.
Inaccessible content – We are not talking about the buyer’s ability to find your content; we are talking about content that fails to meet your buyer where they are, in a format that appeals to their content consumption preferences. Ensure your content is attractive and accessible, by leveraging your customer personas to understand the type of content the buyer wants at each stage of their journey. It may be a white paper, short article, video, infographic, interactive tool, case study, webinar or other content.
Look out for these pitfalls. Do your research. Get help where you need it. And put the buyer’s needs at the center of your content strategy.
2. Misaligned customer journey map
This is a new challenge marketers must contend with. This misalignment can be understood through the work a number of researchers have done around B2B buyer behavior. Their findings show we are moving out of the age of the “empowered buyer” to one in which buyers of complex, enterprise-grade products and services are more confused than informed, more overwhelmed than confident, and less trusting of sellers’ claims and intentions.
Consequently, understanding your buyer’s journey is more important than ever. As noted above, building trust in the beginning stages of the buyer's journey is critical to creating success in the later stages of that journey, when buyers are evaluating and selecting solutions.
What the new research shows is that marketers focus most of their attention and content on the early stages of the customer journey, and then pass prospects to sales once they move into the consideration and purchase stages of their journey. But this is not what most buyers want.
According to the Future of Enterprise Sales report by Gartner, B2B buyers want less interaction with sales representatives and more self-service capabilities, even when buying complex, enterprise-grade solutions.
As we noted in our recent article about this change, marketers must develop new types of content that engage buyers into and through the consideration and purchase stages of the customer journey.
The Content Marketing Institute found in its most recent survey that only 24% of marketers surveyed saw high value in content marketing targeting the consideration stage of the customer journey and only 8% saw value in content targeting the purchase stage. Clearly, most marketing professionals have yet to recognize or act on the new realities of buyer behavior uncovered by Gartner. New thinking is required.
Marketers must begin creating content and touch points that actively engage the buyer during and through the consideration and purchase stages of their journey. Some B2B sellers are already doing this with interactive tools that allow buyers to compare products, decide when or if they want to speak with a sales representative, or purchase products directly without consulting with a sales rep.
3. Fumbling the handoff
Clients often tell us that marketing and sales teams struggle to understand each other. They speak different languages. They have different educational and career backgrounds. These differences often lead to miscommunication when marketing hands off prospects to sales. The result is missed opportunities and lost sales.
Now more than ever marketing and sales must work together effectively. Over the next few years we expect to see the roles of marketing and sales change dramatically to better align with the new buyer behavior discussed above.
Marketing and sales leaders need to update their understanding of “best practices” to align with the new realities of the customer journey.
We recommend sales teams help marketers create the type of “hyperautomated, digital-first” content that will keep buyers engaged, even when they don’t want to interact directly with a salesperson.
Conclusions
Many demand generation programs have struggled to build the trust needed to engage the buyer and bring them along the customer journey. This is largely a function of not having data-driven and well-defined customer personas and customer journey maps. Additionally, early stage content often fails to nurture trust because of its focus on selling, rather than addressing the needs of the buyer.
These issues are exasperated by new buyer behavior documented by Gartner and others, and discussed in one of our prior articles. Successful marketers will recognize these changes and redesign their programs accordingly.
Next Steps
For deeper insights into how to make your demand generation program more effective, connect with us directly or message us on LinkedIn at Paul Brunato or Bob Finlayson.
