Stop playing ‘Pin the Tail on the Donkey’ with your marketing efforts

Recent research we conducted on ABM suggests that success can come in all shapes and sizes and that success is being realized on the back of some key process changes. One critical area of change is leads — what they really are and how they’re handled by marketing and sales. This takes me back to when SiriusDecisions launched its major reconception of the Demand Waterfall two years ago. While I came out bullish on the Demand Unit Waterfall, many of my industry colleagues were less sanguine. Well, now it’s two years later and the core systems of the MarTech stack still aren’t built to easily implement the DUW and the process changes needed can be hard. However, the evidence shows that the architects of this model are onto something very big. Here are four pragmatic steps that many more companies could be taking to improve their demand capture now. #1 – Agree that ‘leads’ aren’t the be all, end all: I’ve written a lot about this and so have many others. Leads were a construct we adopted in B2B because we didn’t have anything better to represent actual demand measurably. Leads have a ton of shortcomings that contribute mightily to our sales counterparts’ opinion that many leads are useless. Thus, B2B organizations that remain committed to leads as the marketing be-all, end-all must face a frustrating reality: To make your planning numbers tie out, you’ll be forced to grow lead volumes without addressing the fundamental issue of quality. Since the classic demand gen lead is a poor predictor of real demand, a slavish focus on lead volumes commonly makes matters worse. Even if volumes go up, quality goes down.