Scanning my Facebook feed this morning, I noticed that several of my friends have committed to some sort of new health regime, such as paleo and ketogenic diets, nutritional cleansing, and multi-day fix programs. In my town, the new craze is yoga with goats. I kid you not. Apparently, downward dog now involves baby goats jumping on your back.
Photos: Goat Yoga
We’ve become obsessed with health and fitness with good reason: our lives depend on it. The same obsession should also serve our professional lives and the health of our demand generation systems. While it doesn’t really compare in scope with grave illnesses, an unhealthy demand system can lead to misalignment, weak pipeline and revenue loss.
At Demand Spring, we’ve identified seven essential components of a healthy demand system:
- Buyer journey insight – the foundation for understanding your buyers and their pains, needs, and preferences
- Sales and marketing alignment – a shared commitment to goals, strategies, and KPIs
- Optimized lead management processes – clearly defined stages, handoffs and SLAs
- Technology foundation – marketing automation synced CRM and complementary technologies that help to close funnel gaps
- Inbound marketing – aligned to personas, personalized and multichannel
- Content that engages and educates throughout the buyer journey
- Analytics that enable data-driven decision-making
Very few organizations are operating at peak performance in all seven areas. Many have done buyer journey research, but only to the benefit of Marketing. Sales is still off doing their own thing. Others have well thought out inbound marketing and nurture programs, but lack the analytic insights that can identify which channels deserve increased investment. This doesn’t mean you’re headed for the demand generation ICU, but developing an optimization blueprint should be a priority.
Demand Spring has developed a new workshop to help you assess and optimize the health of your demand system. This two-day workshop is a great way for your marketing team to stay up-to-date on the best practices and processes that enable lead creation, progression, and hand-off to Sales. It includes:
- Live instruction from one of our senior demand generation strategists, covering best practices within each of the seven essential areas.
- Actionable templates for conducting a self-review of your demand system.
- Presentation slides and notes to share within your organization.
The workshop does not include goats!
If you think I am fabricating yoga with goats, you can watch the video below.
