A LOT of growth-stage marketing leaders I meet in the SF Bay Area treat demand generation in two ways:
1/ Seduced with measuring every bottom-of-the-funnel metric you could possibly imagine and tying it to annual recurring revenue. These people have financial models tying clicks on e-books to annual recurring revenue, to LTV, to company valuation. After all, how can you not measure anything and everything in Silicon Valley? They have nearly perfected the bottom of the funnel but keep hammering away and optimizing. They think this is mostly all there is to demand generation. Many of them also confuse demand capture with demand generation. Marketing Metrics are their AI Girlfriend.
2/ Obsessed with branding, putting millions into advertising for the long run when we are all dead. Many of these people have bottlenecks at the bottom of their funnels where sales people don’t follow up and leads get missed. Many of these purists think they are the custodians of the term “demand generation” or marketing in general.
I see more people with skillset #1 than #2, and that’s why I’m particularly disappointed by how branding is treated with such disdain or is so misunderstood/mislabeled.
And no, this isn’t about the nuances of defining what counts as performance marketing versus branding. It’s a binary choice many make.
If you’ve already fixed your bottom of the funnel to a large extent, why are you wasting your entire team’s time on the 5% of your customer base currently in the market and asking them to improve utterly useless marketing metrics? Why don’t you go out more and actually market the company?
Why is this the case? Could be a variety of factors such as lack of exposure to other areas of marketing, background from which you’ve been promoted, could also be a unique company situation, could be a lack of skill or will – after all it is not easy to speak fluently on a webinar or be a good orator in a room full of prospects.
And, if you think the CEO is the only oratory champion for your company – my friend, I have news for you. #NGMI
PS: I rarely meet anyone in the marketing department who talks about working on driving retention. Topic for another day!
Rohan Manchanda 