In the Step-by-step guide to brand awareness on SDxCentral, we discussed how 80 to 90% of buyers have a list of vendors in mind before they start researching and that 90% of those buyers purchase from that Day 1 List. While we focused on why that drives the need for always-on brand awareness, it should be obvious this also has a significant impact on how you should approach demand generation.
In traditional demand generation, the main goal of the marketing team is to obtain names and contact information for the sales team based on a specific prospect profile. Those prospects will usually get dropped into a nurture path, but the burden of truly educating prospects has historically fallen to sales.
This no longer works. Instead of focusing on obtaining names and contact info, demand generation teams need to refocus their priorities on education and Intent tracking, leaving the nitty-gritty of contact scraping and Personally identifiable information (PII) collection to the sales teams. When done correctly this approach ensures placement on the coveted Day 1 List, improves resource allocation and shortens the sales cycles.