lead gen and demand creation in europe full report - sirius decisions

What’s in this report?

B-to-b decisionmakers’ access to online information during all phases of the buying process has shifted control from seller to buyer. To adapt to this change, marketers must assess their demand creation approaches and tactics, and alter them as needed. Demand creation strategies must also adapt to each region and country due to differences in market size, buyers’ available budgets, and local culture and legislation.

In this SiriusDecisions Core Strategy Report, we draw on the findings of the 2013 EMEA Demand Creation Survey to analyze four major areas that impact European marketers’ ability to improve demand creation results:

Tactic mix. Which tactics are European marketers choosing when allocating demand creation budget? Which tactics are perceived to be the most effective? How should marketers measure tactic effectiveness?

Tracking demand. How extensive and accurate are European marketers’ efforts to track demand creation activities?

Marketing automation technology. How widespread is the adoption of marketing automation platforms (MAPs) in Europe, and how should marketers evaluate future technology investments?

Lead quality. Are marketers taking sufficient steps to ensure that high-quality leads are passed to sales? What actions can they take if this is not the case?

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Core Strategy Report

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How was the survey structured?

SiriusDecisions’ 2013 EMEA Demand Creation Survey examined the demand creation processes of b-to-b companies headquartered in Europe and companies with demand creation resources responsible for European markets.

Countries and participants. To ensure relevance across all countries surveyed, there was equal participation by companies in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the Nordic region. Survey respondents were demand creation professionals and senior marketing leaders from more than 400 companies. Many respondents were responsible for demand creation in multiple countries, providing more than 630 country-level data points in all. To supplement completed survey responses, we conducted in-depth interviews with more than 20 individuals in order to cross-check our findings and obtain additional insights.

Company EMEA revenue. Respondents provided revenue data for their EMEA operations only (stated in euros).

Industry segment. Respondents identified their company’s primary industry segment. The professional services, computer software, hardware and financial services sectors were most heavily represented.

Go-to-market model. Forty-three percent of surveyed organizations go to market via a direct sales model, 20 percent use an inside sales model, and 17 percent go through channel partners. The remainder sell through retail or e-commerce models.

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Which tactics are EMEA marketers choosing when allocating their demand creation budgets?

Thirty-five percent of the average EMEA marketing budget is allocated to demand generation programs. Respondents were asked to detail the percentage of their demand creation budgets allocated to each tactic from a provided list. Their responses indicated that, across EMEA, 51.2 percent of demand creation budget was allocated to the following five tactics: online banner advertising, email campaigns, third-party trade shows, live events and direct mail.

Organizations’ continued reliance on these five tactics at the expense of more effective inbound approaches can be attributed more to risk avoidance and perceived measurability than to buyer’s journey alignment and tactic selection based on facts and/or buyer insight. This was illustrated by interview respondents’ typical comments on these legacy tactics (e.g. “We always attend that trade show,” “Online banners are not great at driving inquiry, but we feel we should still do it”).

Inbound tactics – especially social media – require prolonged, consistent attention, and our survey results demonstrated that outbound tactics are disproportionately weighted. Marketers understand the importance of inbound approaches and are including them in their budgets, but most are not taking a coordinated approach.

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Which tactics do EMEA marketers believe are most effective at driving initial inquiry?

The table above shows (in blue) what respondents from each country believe are the five tactics that are most effective at driving initial inquiry. The chart also includes effectiveness perception data for each country on tactics that were ranked in the top five in another European country.

European marketers consider email campaigns, trade shows and live events the three most effective tacics for driving initial inquiry. Online banners were not considered effective by an equal share of respondents in all countries; respondents in the Netherlands did not include this tactic in their top five. However, additional findings (not shown in the table) revealed that budget spend on online banners in the Netherlands was second only to the spend in the Nordic region. This indicates that budget spend is sometimes not aligned with perceived tactic effectiveness.

Beyond the top three tactics, there is more variation in reported tactic effectiveness across European countries. For example, although user conferences are rated among the top five in some countries, other tactics score higher in other countries.

This data raises two key questions: First, how are the survey respondents measuring effectiveness? Second, are tactics that are perceived as effective aligned with the ways buyers educate themselves as they move through the buying cycle?

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How closely does the current tactic mix match buyer preferences?

European sellers still rely heavily on outbound activities (e.g. email, direct mail, live events, user conferences, newsletters). However, the 2013 SiriusDecisions CXO Buyer Persona Survey revealed that EMEA-based executives’ preferred sources for educating themselves during the buyer’s journey do not match these outbound tactics (see the brief “B-to-B Persona Deep Dive: CXO”).

This disconnect is visible throughout all phases of the buyer’s journey (education, solution, vendor selection). Sellers’ tactics remain fairly constant, aside from a shift from online banners to user conferences during the solution and vendor selection phases. There is a surprising lack of alignment in sellers’ failure to provide buyers with the forms of content support they prefer.

To accommodate buyers’ preferences and behavior, sellers must consider not just the fact that buyers search online, but also how they search and what they search for (e.g. solution category, specific problem). Knowledge about buyer personas should be leveraged to guide demand creation efforts as well as campaign design and new product development.

Tactics cannot be applied generically; content must be adapted to buyers’ information needs during different stages of the buyer’s journey. Consider not only the tactic or group of tactics, but also the intended audience, message, sequence and goals.

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What actions can be taken to improve tactic effectiveness and better support the buyer?

Understanding tactic effectiveness is not only about looking at individual tactic metrics (e.g. whether an email was opened or an online banner clicked on) but also determining the influence exerted over the complete buying process. Tactic attribution is key; consider the following three dimensions: Who responded to the tactic (e.g. champion, influencer, executive)? When in the buying process did the response occur? What was consumed − was it something that typically advances a buying process?

We recommend starting with multi-touch analysis to plot marketing’s impact over the course of a deal cycle. Pull the records of interactions within a series of successful deals. Take one deal and plot the interactions over time, using the points at which opportunities were created and deals closed as anchors. Next, associate each interaction with typical buying roles (e.g. CXO, influencer).

Layer in additional deals with similar characteristics and positive outcomes to identify and analyze patterns. The aim is to identify patterns that can be used to improve tactic effectiveness. This analysis also requires a comparison of successful deals to similar deals that did not achieve favorable outcomes.

Do not focus exclusively on opportunities sourced by marketing. Marketing’s contribution can also be captured for deals sourced by sales. This multi-touch approach helps build hypotheses that can be tested against a larger set of data. If these hypotheses pass the test, they can be translated into tactical metrics and goals that can be tracked over time.

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Can European marketers prove ROI and track their demand creation efforts?

Understanding marketing’s contribution to business results should be on the top of every marketing leader’s list of priorities. However, this is a significant challenge for many Western European organizations; 54.3 percent of survey respondents said they are unable to measure the effectiveness of their demand creation efforts in simple ROI terms related to driving revenue. This high figure indicates that, in many organizations, marketing has difficulty justifying and proving the value of its work.

Our study shows that marketers have a good – though not excellent – ability to track the sources of leads (marketing, tele, sales) at the top of the demand waterfall. However, this ability fades in subsequent waterfall stages, resulting in an inability to measure and track a lead from cold to close.

We asked marketers the extent to which they can track their performance against five metrics: number of inquiries or raw responses, marketing qualified leads (that meet criteria agreed on by marketing and sales), sales accepted leads, sales qualified leads and closed business. Less than 22 percent of marketers indicated that they can track leads through every stage of the waterfall. Many organizations do not yet have the processes or systems in place to track a lead all the way from cold to close.

Whether due to poor process adoption or lack of access to the necessary data, marketing is struggling to show its contribution to the health of the business. Informative performance measurement is not being undertaken in a systematic and repeatable manner. This lack of insight into conversion rates throughout each stage of a lead’s progression reduces marketing’s ability to evaluate activity effectiveness, align with sales processes and, most importantly, understand its impact on the organization’s pipeline and revenue.

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How can the maturity level of demand creation processes and effectiveness be improved?

For reporting purposes, global organizations often consider EMEA a single market. This oversimplification can lead to frustration and a failure to appropriately diagnose demand creation practices. The countries within the European Union represent a collection of individual markets that vary widely.

For effective demand creation and meaningful measurement, European marketers must agree on processes to be used at the country, regional and global levels. These process elements must include the definition of a quality lead, as well as service-level agreements (SLAs) that clearly define shared processes and responsibilities among marketing, sales and teleprospecting.

By implementing the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall and tracking performance metrics at each stage, organizations gain a structure for measurement that provides insight into demand flows and outcomes (see the brief “Demand Creation: Five Metrics That Matter”). It may be necessary, at times, to use multiple waterfalls. For example, blindly combining a North American waterfall with an EMEA waterfall would not be appropriate, given their differences.

Taking into consideration local nuances (e.g. demand type, solution maturity within the local market), European marketers must qualify leads to the levels stated within the SLA, with a focus on delivering high-quality leads. This allows local sales reps to focus time and effort on further qualifying higher-potential leads, increasing their efficiency and improving pipeline dynamics.

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What does the survey indicate about the level of adoption and usage of MAPs?

SiriusDecisions defines a MAP as a technology solution that helps enable the seeding, creation, nurturing and acceleration of demand within a new or existing customer base. MAP capabilities include data management; data integration and analytics; automated workflows; the ability to develop tactics such as emails, landing pages and Web forms; and lead management and reporting. Best-in-class companies have leveraged MAPs to move away from filling the top of the funnel with a high volume of leads and instead focus on delivering fewer, high-quality leads to their sales teams.

A MAP is required to effectively implement and measure multi-touch integrated marketing programs. However, only 22 percent of survey respondents reported that they have a MAP; another 27 percent indicated that they have plans to implement a MAP in the next 12 months.

We asked respondents that have a MAP to indicate how they are using the technology. While it is encouraging to see that lead nurturing (38 percent) and personalized content delivery (34 percent) are key activities for MAP users, the overall adoption of these activities remains low.

The low current adoption rate of MAPs and the limited use of MAP functionality show that there is room for improvement in the use of technology to drive more interactive, efficient engagement with prospects and customers.

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What are the implications of low MAP adoption and technology usage?

Technology forms the infrastructure for marketing effectiveness, enabling marketers to support informed buyers through all stages of the buyer’s journey and deliver greater levels of personalization.

To justify investment in a MAP or other technologies, companies must produce a roadmap to guide the rest of the marketing organization, based on a vision for usage that goes beyond traditional email marketing. To realize the full demand creation benefits, this plan must include investment in – and integration with – other technologies (e.g. sales force automation, Web content management). Companies must drive MAP usage beyond demand creation in order to support all phases of the buyer’s journey, including customer marketing (e.g. cross-sell, upsell) as well as Web-based and social media tactics.

In addition to standard benefits (e.g. management of nurture campaigns and lead scoring), a MAP can drive the adoption of cross-border processes and provide a more consistent view of the behaviors of multi-country buying teams. It also can be a tool for disseminating consistent multi-country content via standard email templates.

Most marketing applications are software-as-a-service (SaaS) based, allowing a marketing function to develop and maintain a technology roadmap without the need to establish the on-premise infrastructure. However, this places the burden on marketing operations to create a technology vision and implementation roadmap for the marketing organization (see the Core Strategy Report “Marketing Technology Audit”).

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What is the quality of leads being passed to the sales or channel function?

Our survey generated surprising statistics about the quality of leads being passed by marketers. More than 27 percent of respondents reported that they pass on a lead as soon as someone “demonstrates an interest in the product or service” (i.e. level 1 lead). In other words, little, if any, further qualification is conducted. At the other end of the lead spectrum, a mere 21.5 percent of respondents qualify a lead beyond level 4. Almost 80 percent of respondents do not determine if the potential buyer has defined a requirement or has a budget and a timeframe in mind.

This would not be a problem if the respondents were all marketing a completely new product; no one has a budget for something they do not know exists. Demand type is a basic building block of best practice demand creation. Sales, marketing and product management must agree on whether the product or service disrupts the market (new concept), improves an existing process (new paradigm) or is seen as a necessary purchase (established market). Agreement on the demand type of an offering should inform discussions on what level of lead information marketers can realistically expect to capture before handing the lead to a receiving function.

More than 40 percent of respondents indicated that they operate in an established market, but although they could raise lead quality by sourcing additional information on buyer intent, they fail to do so.

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What is the state of the teleprospecting function in Western Europe?

Using a teleservices function to further qualify inbound leads can raise the quality of leads that marketing passes to sales. However, only 32 percent of respondents use a teleprospecting function (whether in-house or outsourced).

We asked the organizations that use a teleprospecting function how those teams spend their time. They reported that the highest percentage of teleprospecting time (24 percent) is spent on contact discovery, followed by marketing campaign followup (23 percent) and cold calling (16 percent). Only 11 percent of teleprospecting time is spent on lead nurturing, which can improve the quality of leads passed to sales.

Respondents indicated that Just 9 percent of teleprospecting time is spent on small-net fishing, a process designed to accelerate new leads into the demand waterfall. Small-net fishing programs are often an urgent response to circumstances, including market disruptions that create new opportunity (e.g. mergers and acquisitions), competitive actions requiring a response (e.g. price reductions), cross-sell promotions triggered by missed pipeline or revenue targets, and competitive wins that can be leveraged (e.g. penetrating a new market). Small-net fishing programs are a better way to optimize teleservices vs. simple cold-calling exercises.

The survey results indicated that teleservices functions often perform a variety of disconnected project-based activities. However, a well-defined teleprospecting structure should be an integral and strategic part of the demand creation process.

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How should a multi-country teleprospecting function be structured?

SiriusDecisions recommends the following steps to determine how an organization should structure its teleprospecting function (see the brief “Structuring a European Demand Creation Teleservices Function”):

Assess key considerations. All stakeholders must agree on the role the teleprospecting function will play within the demand creation process. Consider elements outside the teleprospecting team’s control (e.g. sales go-to-market model, number and size of markets, minimum language coverage requirements). Also assess internal teleprospecting factors or those that can be influenced (e.g. required teleprospecting contribution to pipeline, expected level of lead quality prior to handoff, available technology support).

Define model options. Most organizations operate one of three major teleprospecting structures: marketing-led local country decentralized, marketing-led multi-country centralized or sales-led team aligned.

Evaluate model scenarios. In the context of the role the teleprospecting function will play, evaluate the tradeoffs of each organizational structure.

Select the right resources. Decide whether to staff the function with in-house resources, external resources or a blend of both. Consider the benefits of workload balancing, division of tasks by market or activity type, and market coverage.

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What are the key takeaways I can share with my team?

Results from the SiriusDecisions EMEA Demand Creation Survey highlight a major disconnect between the tactics marketers use and the tactics buyers prefer. This lack of effective alignment, along with the frequent absence of end-to-end demand waterfall measurement, shows that marketers’ perceptions and priorities often are not based on solid data. Consequently, marketers often rely heavily on outbound tactics that are easily tracked, resulting in a marketing budget spread too thinly across inbound tactics.

EMEA organizations must improve the quality of their measurement efforts in terms of what they measure and how they measure it. A lack of consistent processes and an inability to track results hamper marketing executives’ ability to explain how their team’s actions have contributed to top-line revenue and how effectively marketing is helping to create demand.

Marketing results in Europe are also impeded by low technology adoption rates. The real benefits of technology investment accrue when systems are integrated and can enable, monitor and measure the full view of what marketing contributes to the business and how it supports the buyer’s journey.

Pressure to deliver a high quantity of leads can result in low lead quality. As demonstrated by our respondents, many organizations show little appreciation of demand type and are limited in their use of further qualification options (e.g. integrating a teleprospecting function into the demand creation process).

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lead gen and demand creation in europe full report - sirius decisions

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