Economic uncertainty and higher-quality products have made customers more likely than ever to postpone major purchases to extend the life of their existing devices. This trend, combined with widespread consumer biases, has caused sales interactions across many industries to evolve from a series of discrete transactions to a continuous stream of opportunities that flow as needs arise. Aftersales parts and service, as well as upsell and cross-sell opportunities, now play a much larger role in generating revenue and satisfying customer needs. As individual transactions tend to be less valuable, companies must focus on identifying, qualifying, and converting leads more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Applying Martech and GenAI to lead generation and enrichment can improve marketing efficiency and account engagement by creating highly personalized marketing content, including visuals. For B2C applications, some companies have reduced the lead time for creating new marketing content and campaigns from over six weeks to less than six hours. For B2B companies, GenAI opens up many possibilities, including the ability to draw inspiration and insights from the extensive and diverse data they already collect about their customer base. GenAI can help sales and marketing teams understand what a compelling offer should look like. It can also provide recommendations for better business cases and stories that help teams reshape the decision-making process for individual buyers. This is especially helpful for new salespeople.
To take advantage of this changing environment, companies must align the roles and responsibilities of marketing and sales to tightly integrate the two functions to include clearly defined collaboration and handoff points to ensure a seamless customer journey.
In our experience, companies that have undertaken this transformation and achieved the benefits highlighted in Figure 1 have built such connections, adopted new marketing technologies and tools to gain more insights from existing data, and optimized and improved processes across the funnel shown in Figure 4. They also made complex transformations less intimidating by breaking them down into smaller integrated initiatives.
The primary deliverable of the demand center is the marketing qualified lead (MQL). Each should contain required and optional qualitative elements that enable the sales team to efficiently convert these leads into sales qualified leads or SQLs. The automated demand center in the funnel in Figure 4 uses available data to qualify and evaluate potential new business and prospects from existing business (upsell and cross-sell opportunities and churn risk). The highest priority leads are sent to sales for further qualification and eventual conversion, while others are given lower priority and sent back to the nurturing process or demoted. Demand Center’s GenAI module can incorporate a wide range of contextual data to scale and personalize lead generation and enrichment while accelerating the process.
To realize the full potential of demand centers, B2B companies should focus on three steps:
