The Missing Piece in Most Demand Gen Marketing Programs

Good salespeople recognize there will always be a new audience for their product. Great salespeople figure out how to find that audience. And the best recognize they need marketing to help make that happen.

In my 12-plus years selling IBM Security, Cloud and cloud-based technology solutions to clients big and small, I recognized early on the importance of marketing in helping us reach a wider audience, to get to the people we weren’t talking to. That is how the business grows. It also didn’t take long for me to realize the relationship was reciprocal – marketing needs sales to help them understand the value proposition in terms of meeting customer needs, which enable them to better represent the business’s products and services through better-quality content.

As a sales leader, I regularly faced a number of issues, including:

• Increasing the number and quality of sales leads in the pipe
• Accelerating the sales cycle
• Helping salespeople build relationships with their accounts
• Getting salespeople to focus on selling specific products within a larger portfolio of offerings

Traditional sales motions and even working with channel partners wasn’t enough to sufficiently reach the new customers I needed for growth. I needed something more to help get in front of new customers and expand to new buyers at existing clients. That’s where demand generation came into the picture. We needed to make ourselves visible to new audiences, especially as we rolled out new offerings.

When I learned about demand generation, my first thought was, “I wish I knew this existed before,” especially down-funnel offerings, as they aligned to the issues I faced as a sales leader. I realized demand generation could be the vehicle that brought greater customer awareness to our products and filled the sales pipeline.

Many marketers and sales leaders fail to realize how intertwined their jobs are. Demand gen enables marketers to fill their marketing stack to nurture leads for new customers, while down-funnel options address sales leaders’ needs to close business and grow revenue. As marketing departments continue to evolve to revenue marketing, the ROI from demand generation will be paramount in growing their impact on the business, just as it is for the sales leaders they work with.

Activate offers a number of programs that can help raise awareness of your products and fill your sales pipeline. One of our newer programs, SQL Plus, is a late-stage funnel program that surfaces enhanced sales-qualified leads that guarantee the right buying environment for your technology. An SQL Plus program asks a key qualifying question that confirms right buying environment and vetted interest in speaking with your sales rep, with robust data to create a connection more quickly with the prospect. Included in the program is a Full BANT qualification as well as a sales-qualifying question added to tele-confirm. It is a proven program and one that many clients have found success with.

Interested in learning more about SQL Plus or any of our other programs? Contact us here.

About the Author

Prior to Activate, Shep was the senior executive leading several large software businesses at IBM. Most recently he was VP and GM of the Public Cloud business in the Americas. In other executive sales roles Shep focused on security, data and analytics, and automation. Aside from his sales leadership roles, he worked as a strategy consultant for government clients and was an Associate Partner in IBM’s corporate strategy department. His experience leading multiple businesses to consistently beat market growth has been partially due to his focus on the interconnectivity between sales and marketing. Shep holds an MBA in Strategic Management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Systems Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point.