by: Jon Miller
How do you know if your demand generation is good enough or when it’s time to take your lead management processes to the next level? Here are 14 important questions that indicate whether or not you can benefit for more sophisticated marketing automation.
Ask these questions to ask yourself, your boss, your direct reports, your head of sales, and any other stakeholders in your demand generation process.
Lead Generation
- Are you happy with the number of leads in your pipeline? Is your sales team?
- How many more qualified sales leads could you generate if you had the ability to nurture relationships with qualified prospects and automatically identify when someone is ready to engage with sales?
- Do you get a lot of leads that seem good but are not yet in an active buying cycles? What do you do with them today?
- How many more sales-ready leads could you create if you had the ability to develop relevant and personalized relationships with early-stage prospects before passing them to sales?
Lead Follow-Up
- Does sales follow-up on all your marketing leads today?
- Do your leads ever get dropped on the floor? Are you confident that every lead gets appropriate and timely follow-up?
- How much more effective would your lead generation be if you could ensure no lead got dropped and everyone got appropriate and timely follow-up?
- How much more effective would your marketing programs be if sales followed up on twice as many leads as they do today?
Marketing Efficiency
- How long does it take you to design and create a new campaign? How many people do you need to get involved?
- Do you ever feel like you have too much to get done in a day? Do you ever feel like you get stuck in the weeks managing all the detail of your demand generation campaigns?
- If you could design and create every aspect of a new campaign in just a few hours, how much could you improve your marketing results?
- How much time could you save if you had a software tool that helped to automate the boring, manual aspects of campaigns? How much could you improve ROI if you could spend more time focusing on the strategic and creative aspects of campaigns?
Demonstrating Marketing ROI
- Do you wish you could better understand and demonstrate how all your marketing activities impact pipeline and revenue?
- How much could you improve the ROI of your marketing programs if you understood how each program is influencing pipeline and revenue, and could adjust budgets accordingly?
Interpreting the Results
Perhaps your current demand generation processes are just fine. If so, congratulations! If not, there is dramatic ROI to be gained from better lead management. According to Forrester Research, B2B marketers who make this shift are 2X more productive — plus companies with mature lead management processes are almost twice as likely as average to act on 75% or more marketing leads and are 230% more likely than average to follow-up within one day (Laura Ramos, B2B Marketers Lack Lead Management Maturity, October 2006).
Are you ready to take the next step?
Original Post: http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2008/09/demand-generati.html
