Putting leads at the front end of your sales pipe and hoping for the best is not going to work for B2B sales in 2013. Every B2B company needs to have a well-thought out and clearly defined process for generating demand that includes content marketing and sales lead management.
Before we dive into what a company needs to do in order to generate demand, we need to ensure that there is a clear understanding of the differences between demand and lead generation. If you were to do a quick web search for the two terms you might get back a few dozen definitions. Let’s take a look at the real differences between the two disciplines.
Lead Generation vs. Demand Generation
For Gabriel Sales, lead generation is about putting targets into your sales funnel at the very front end. A lead is getting an individual from a company that is interested in learning more into your sale funnel. Demand generation is the process of moving that lead through the sales and marketing process, educating the buyer so they are interested and ready to speak to sales.
Demand Generation & Sales Lead Management
B2B demand generation’s job is therefore to drive and close business. In order to close business, successful B2B demand generation requires sales content that educates, verifies and finally convinces the customer to transact. That content must be integrated with insights about your customer buying cycle, so that relevant and valuable content reaches your prospect at the right times. These insights could include knowledge on whether your ideal customer prefers short YouTube videos or long whitepapers. This is what successful sales lead management is; knowing your lead well enough to give them the right information in the right form at the right time.
If you add the sales content and customer insights to the right technology to track digital consumption, your well-designed demand generation strategy will give your team the ability to:
- Source marketing qualified leads
- Take leads from marketing qualified to sales qualified and then engage
- Nurture leads not ready to buy (until they are)
- Supply the closer with content required to take to proposal and close
B2B demand generation involves your reps and marketers having the right conversations and sharing the right information in the right channel at the right time in the customers buying cycle.
If you would like help with any part of this strategy, Gabriel Sales has the experience and expertise to help you jumpstart this process and reach your business goals. We can help you take the content you create to support your reps and repurpose it across digital platforms and social media, so your customers can find you and you sales reps have third-party verification ground cover. At Gabriel Sales, we can help you create a B2B demand generation engine with a seamless sales process that integrates sales reps, leverages digital content and improves sales results with the right sales technologies stack.
For more information on demand generation for sales lead management, please contact us.
