Looking success straight in the eyes

At this time of any year, businesses scrutinise the success and failure of demand generation activities. They look at the hierarchy of resource, skills, technology and budgets that make up the magic formula to deliver their Annual Operating Plan (AOP).

In an extremely unusual year, it’s never been more important to look at how to adapt to ensure, at the very least, survival.  At best, achieve stability and growth.  As a result, business leaders are questioning what’s working, what’s not and what the demand generation winners and losers have been. 

Can you see where the revenue’s coming from?

What do you get for your budget and will it deliver the results you’re expecting?  It’s pretty obvious activity should be supporting the sales plan, yet many times sales and marketing aren’t aligned so returns are diminished.  A healthy plan needs to start with the science, be backed by technology and executed by sales and marketing in tangent, not in silos. 

How £much are you in for?  

Business development and demand generation activities are significant cost centres.  When combining all the costs – salaries for telemarketing and marketing (or outsourced staff), office overheads, campaign asset production and delivery, Mar-Tech licenses and events budgets, it’s a massive commitment.  A very conservative cost estimate here for business turning over c.£8M is a budget of c.£250K annually.  Hold this thought and read on.

Data holds the key

The customer and prospect experience has never been more important, yet the shocking truth is a huge amount of businesses have data that bounces like Tigger (the last campaign we ran to a new customer’s data was 27% hard bounces, meaning sales account managers were not updating their bread and butter information).

It’s now a fundamental requirement for businesses to engage with prospects and customers regularly, but from the outset, returns are diminished if data isn’t accurate.

All the gear and no idea

Those that’ve invested in Mar-Tech to manage buyer journeys and build communities are at least on the right path, but here, the majority of these businesses only use a fraction of the system’s capability because users have only had basic training. 

Don’t be tempted to jump straight to the “colouring in”

The next danger is to believe that a bunch of pretty images and some clever copy will woo buyers over the line.  Buyers are growing ever savvier and see right through a website with no substance, crowing with comparison charts and Gartner statistics placing the seller in the upper right quadrant.

Cold Calling that’s nothing to “Dial and Smile” about

Some jump right past anything marketing could ever do for them and “hit the phones”.  Good luck with that when trying to get hold of remote workers with no “follow me” desk policy or mobile phone numbers.  Even phone numbers and emails you pick up at events are often clever “ghost” details offered by buyers to stop unsolicited calls and emails.

Now’s the time to Be Brave. Swipe Right.

Get ready to shift your mindset.  Market Activation™ is a managed service designed to deliver jointly agreed to revenue goals.  It’s not for those who want quick and dirty, tactical, quarterly based initiatives, although we do deploy certain techniques to stimulate a lazy pipe!

As many of our customers know because they make their own money selling annualised services, there are significant benefits that come with “as a service”.

“It’ll never work for sales and marketing”, I hear you say. 

We’re not talking about the usual siloed outsourced tactical activities that companies lean on when they don’t have the resource to manage it in house.  We’re talking about the whole kit and kaboodle.

Step change, or a step too far?

As a business, you may well already have a fully scoped AOP, Mar-Tech, great copywriters, campaign planners, digital marketing experts, web designers, events organisers.  If so, fantastic.  Ask yourself if all the essential elements are working in harmony, or are sales and marketing paying lip-service to working as a joined-up unit, and delivering tactical activities so they can tick the boxes.

The Amigos way

Clients buy-in to both the long-term vision and the immediacy of the benefits the solution brings.  They understand the value of a scalable solution backed by highly skilled experts and not be burdened with overheads, resources and a hefty budget whilst leaving us to be accountable for their results.

Remember this?

“A very conservative cost estimate here for business turning over c.£8M is a budget of c.£250K annually”

A managed service will save you at least 50%.  This is due to economies of scale and guarantees because the whole range of activities is under one umbrella.

There are cost-neutral models available wherever you sit in the channel eco system and multiple markets yield even greater savings overall.

Accountability and Results as standard.

• AOP that defines your strategy.
• Calendar of demand generation activities backed with all the rich content needed to engage audiences.
• Digital Experience Platform: All the systems needed to manage and analyse data every which way and make the campaigns work harder. 
• Nurtured, scored leads delivered as a full engagement record straight to your own CRM (or ours if you need it)
• Appointment setting
• Analytics and business reporting.
• Portal for channel enablement and management, if required
• And a single point of contact to make life easy.
• All for a fixed monthly fee and to deliver the results outlined in the AOP.

Who’s currently benefiting the most from this service?

1. New vendors entering a new market(s) with limited resource
2. New vendors who want to run their channel without involving distribution.
3. Vendors looking to extend allocation of MDF funding beyond events and telemarketing, but don’t know how they would measure it
4. Vendors who need a cradle to grave view of buyers when selling via channel partners
5. Distributors who need to offer better value to their vendors and partners with end to end demand generation
6. Distributors who need to offer more than simply standard distribution services
7. Partners who wish to leverage vendor funding in new ways
8. Partners ready to step up to an aggressive growth path
9. Businesses that need efficient renewals programmes