The Demand Generation Desert

This morning I received a text from a friend of mine who has been working for a startup for nearly a year. The news wasn’t very good. The company is struggling and is letting go over 20% of its staff, my friend included. He’s frustrated about it but not necessarily because of the sudden unemployment, but because he was energized by the job and his team was making some very good progress. In our text exchange, he mentioned that they were crushing TOFU (top of the funnel).

Demand generation was succeeding, but the company was struggling.

There are more details to the situation to be sure, but the fact that demand generation was doing well while sales was not should be an alarm to anyone anywhere who is aggressively focused on demand generation. All the demand in the world doesn’t immediately turn into closed deals. In fact, we should probably stop calling it demand generation, because that implies that the fruit of the work is clamoring customers with their checkbooks out ready to buy. That is rarely the case especially in deal cycles that last longer than a month or two. A longer sales cycle means a very engaged sales force singularly focused on closing business. These types of sales teams don’t care about the TOFU, they never have, and they never will.

What they do care about is getting in front of the right customer, at the right time, with the right message. They want to be empowered to engage their prospects from a position of strength and authority. They want to know with a fair degree of specificity what their prospects care about, what they are talking about, and what the impact is to their business if specific scenarios play out.

This is nothing new, in fact in the 2000s this desire from the sales force to be more empowered to connect, engage, and guide their prospects gave birth to some great advances in persona based messaging and marketing. But since then the marketing disciplined has been very focused on the operational improvement over how marketing converts tire kickers into leads. This focus gained momentum with the success of content marketing automation solutions like Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot, and Eloqua.

The marketing automation formula was too enticing to ignore. Create content, jack up our site visits, amplify our social media presence, convert visitors to leads, nurture them, hand leads over to sales, repeat. The process got better, and the metrics improved. But a funny thing happened along the way. Buyers got way smarter and leveraged technology to educate themselves to make better decisions. Content has not kept pace with this maturation of the buying public and as a result, there are thousands of marketing teams that are filling the top of the funnel up like crazy but for some reason, sales still suffers.

What makes matters worse is that most marketing teams double down on marketing operation improvements without taking action to better enable their sales force. “If we can squeeze just one more percent out of our conversion metric all will be solved,” they tell themselves. Meanwhile, the sales team’s frustration grows along with the chasm between the marketing and sales teams.

If the startup that my friend was working for had paid more attention to enabling the sales force, and less on filling the top of the funnel he might still be employed today.