Resetting Your Demand Generation Strategy to Support Ambitious Revenue Targets
When manufacturing leaders set goals to grow revenues year-over-year (YoY), plans can often involve supporting current partners and onboarding new partners, penetrating new verticals and/or saturating existing markets and, of course, increasing lead volume. Many executives, particularly those with decades-long experience who have built up a large network and mastery of the industry, can easily identify the strategy requirements to enhance the partner channel.
It’s the strategy to boost lead volumes that can remain a vague mystery.
Not that marketing efforts haven’t previously made an impact. Some technical papers or blog postings may have drawn in a few leads, perhaps prospects engaged with social media and events may have even brought in some qualified leads. But is this varying mix of tactics enough to support a 20-30% YoY revenue target? Not likely.
Rather than hiring a full-time CMO, companies now have the option to engage with a fractional Chief Marketing Officer (fCMO), like Towers Fractional Marketing, to unravel their previous demand generation wins and losses, and build a strategy that scales. As the principal of Towers Fractional Marketing, I bring a fresh perspective from over two decades of experience in serving as a marketing leader in SMB manufacturing and technology companies. This perspective naturally leads to a closer look at where marketing effort breaks down and growth stalls despite sustained investment.
Growth cannot come from more of the same marketing. In fact, operating within the same framework will cost you.
Finding the Friction Between Effort and Growth
There’s a familiar pattern that many manufacturers encounter in their marketing efforts. They can generate activity, but not true demand. Demand generation, as defined by Amazon, “is a type of inbound marketing…that creates interest in your brand’s product or service.” Demand gen builds the awareness of your company, products or services and lays the groundwork for trust and credibility to foster your lead generation strategy, in which suspects turn into prospects. But before defining that strategy, it’s essential for an fCMO to review the full landscape of the business – not just the previous marketing activities.
1. Translating Targets->Goals. In addition to revenue targets, what are your margin goals and sales capacity by channel (direct, dealer, partner)? The fractional marketer should work with you to determine pipeline requirements, such as volume, velocity and conversion rates, so demand and lead gen is tied to bookings.
2. Know Thy Buying Committee. B2Bmanufacturers usually follow a complex sales process, rife with multiple buying roles involved with the deal. Your fCMO should uncover your ideal customer profiles (ICPs), vertical priorities, typical deal sizes and geographic focus, complete with mapping the buying group to their trigger events, common objections and information sources for a comprehensive “lay of the land.”
3. Words Matter. Particularly with depth and breadth of channels available to buyers today, your messaging can carry a lot of weight – or not. Your company’s ability to properly differentiate, distinguish proof points and deliver message consistency across websites, sales decks, partner materials, campaigns, social media and more should be vetted by funnel stage effectiveness. The fCMO should address messaging discrepancies, product/feature centricity or missing reliability indicators – and the costs associated with these missteps.
4. The Math of Marketing Performance. This is a key aspect of the assessment, one that can be surprisingly laden with conflicts. In analyzing how well your existing marketing and sales efforts are performing, which includes measuring your funnel by stage (Lead->MQL->SQL->Opportunity->Win), customer acquisition costs (CAC) by channel and sales cycle length, the assumptions that may have existed since company inception are often rooted out. Curiosity is one of my core values, so I tend to question everything: from what constitutes each prospect and deal stage, to lead ownership to the definition of lead sources. Sometimes marketing follows certain rules of engagement (ROE) that sales or account management is unaware of or conflicts with its practices. The goal is to properly set existing baselines and identify misalignment, leakage and potentially underperforming investments.
5. Supporting Infrastructure and Governance. The health of your marketing technology infrastructure and data governance will often come into play during performance measurement, as your strategic fCMO burrows deep into CRM hygiene, lead routing and scoring, attribution and reporting. Disconnected systems, unidentified spend allocations, bandwidth strains and other issues typically surface as an opportunity to shore up the marketing foundation for demand gen growth.
This kind of diagnostic work reframes the challenge: growth cannot come from more of the same marketing. In fact, operating within the same framework will cost you: there’s often heavy sales discounting to compensate for weak demand and disengagement from channel partners due to poor marketing support. Rather, it’s better-aligned demand generation that will help take on your aggressive revenue targets.
Rebuilding the Engine
The output of such a manufacturing demand generation assessment generally includes strategy development and guidance on what should be fixed before scaled. Instead of immediately launching into new tactics, for example, an fCMO may look to clean up CRM data, redefine lead qualification and buying intent signals with sales, establish shared KPIs tied to pipeline value and delegate new internal/external marketing accountabilities.
Then the marketing machine can really get fired up.
With the highest-margin ICPs, verticals and channels clearly defined, manufacturers can take on new campaigns, including outcome-driven narratives supported by case studies and ROI points, to reduce low-yield spend while sales and partners are equipped with practical enablement assets that accelerate deal velocity.
Running on All Cylinders
For manufacturers pursuing aggressive growth through partner networks, construction channels and emerging markets, demand generation isn’t a series of tactics. It’s an operating system. And the right fractional marketing leader doesn’t just turn it on - they make sure it runs, scales and adapts as the market changes. Schedule your intro call with Towers Fractional Marketing and get closer to resetting your demand generation strategy to reach your revenue goals.
