At the same time, buying cycles are slowing, and teams that already had a pipeline problem are under greater pressure to increase volume—all while ‘no-decision’ outcomes fill up the CRM.
Demand generation teams are under pressure to pivot spend away from lackluster campaigns and dialup those that are driving results. They don’t have the luxury of a “wait and see” approach. Marketers need real-time insight into what’s working and what’s not—across the whole funnel from first touchpoint to close.
But most companies don’t have the expertise or the tools in-house to meet this pressing need. In fact, recent RevSure research found that 34% of CMOs cite a lack of full-funnel insights as one of the top challenges keeping them up at night.
75% of marketers say they spend too much time in “fire drill mode" answering questions from leadership regarding revenue projections and pipeline forecasts and manually aggregating data across multiple systems. Why? Limited insight into their pipeline.
Without actionable, quality data, marketing can’t accurately diagnose funnel leakage or know with confidence which leads have the greatest likelihood to convert. Marketing leaders are left in the dark, making the same bets as before, but with less budget to be successful.
7 Best Practices of Demand Generation Effectiveness
Marketing intelligence technology has evolved to enable AI-powered full-funnel attribution. For the first time, marketing teams can gain access to a full-funnel view of which levers are driving success.
In this guide, we’ll deconstruct demand gen effectiveness and uncover seven effective strategies for pipeline generation. You’ll learn how to leverage full-funnel attribution technology to place your bets with confidence and proven ways to shape a growth strategy that achieves your revenue goals.
Effective demand gen programs involve a vast set of tactical and strategic components. This includes the orchestration of impactful campaigns, the creation of engaging content, the delivery of clear and compelling messages, and the reinforcement of your unique value proposition across multiple touchpoints.
But today, it’s not just about clear messaging and robust campaigns. Speed and impact play a bigger role than ever. Marketers are increasingly being measured by their contribution to organizational revenue goals. This increased alignment to revenue means that there’s a bigger emphasis on impact beyond acquiring new leads.
To make your demand gen strategy work best, you must find the right balance between getting immediate results and having projected outcomes you can feel confident about—and it ultimately boils down to having high-quality data. That’s where accurately forecasting how much business your marketing efforts will generate and the revenue you will bring in becomes a critical variable for success.
It begins with setting achievable goals, pinpointing which levers are making the greatest impact in your path forward, making informed investments that will maximize the ROI of your programmatic efforts, and ultimately improving your overall pipeline generation machine to achieve predictable revenue growth, backed by data.
Creating a solid demand gen strategy includes seven best practices that we will break down in this guide.
Have a clear direction for where you’re headed, and align to overall organizational growth and revenue objectives.
Lay the groundwork for a comprehensive view into how your programs, campaigns, channels, and activities are driving impact.
Learn how to make sense of your data and improve marketing spend efficiency.
Uncover the tactics that will contribute to more pipeline and gain actionable insights into pipeline health.
Gain a forward-looking projection into prospect behavior and identify high-performing opportunities.
Leverage technology to understand marketing performance and to boost pipeline.
Enhance communication, facilitate collaboration, and streamline processes to drive revenue.
The pitfall of this approach is that it fuels unrealistic expectations, sets growth teams up for failure, and creates mistrust between sales and marketing teams. So where to begin instead?
One of the most important pillars of a successful growth strategy is focus. This doesn’t mean your tactical approach should be slim in scope, but it does mean that who you target should be specific and strategic.
This will enable you to effectively test your messaging and have a greater impact on pipeline generation, especially if you’re aligned with the sales team on their late-stage opportunities.
Alignment to your organizational goals means that you must work hand-in-hand with your sales operations and revenue operations leaders to set goals that roll up into overarching organizational Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). This alignment with other revenue teams ensures you work together toward the same objectives and don’t reinvent the wheel.
Making accurate predictions on lead generation is easier said than done. With data hygiene crises on most revenue teams, it’s hard to get a grip on pipeline health. However, it’s not impossible. Mapping your GTM motion and leveraging AI to analyze the journey can help you uncover conversion and leakage insights that can help you improve the overall lead journey and your goal attainment.
Marketing attribution is correctly assigning credit for the impact of all marketing campaigns on pipeline and revenue. Proper attribution is a critical way to measure the results of marketing programs. It helps you prioritize your budget and see where to place budget bets. Most importantly, marketing attribution helps organizations plan for the future with predictable outcomes.
Today, marketing attribution is complex and confusing. While digital marketing has made it possible to track and measure most activities, attribution data is generally siloed, preventing a true view across the full funnel. And because marketing and sales outcomes are tracked in separate systems, organizations can’t assess buyer journeys or see how the earliest touchpoints affect pipeline and revenue. It’s a frustrating situation.
Marketers can choose from several attribution models: single-touch attribution models, which assign credit to one touchpoint (usually first or last touch), and multi-touch attribution models, which give credit to various touchpoints along the lead journey.
“The purpose of attribution is budget prioritization and to know what’s impacting and what’s not.In the world of a tight budget, marketing measurement has never been more important.”
Unfortunately, these attribution models are subjective. They often drive tension across marketing and sales teams who want to earn credit for pipeline generation, and they’re simply not a straightforward way to truly understand what’s working and what’s not.
Only 31% of marketers say they can measure ROI accurately using multi-touch attribution. Traditional attribution models don’t provide insight into the “deep funnel”, don’t account for incomplete data, and—because they rely on historical data—don’t enable forward-looking predictions. Legacy marketing attribution approaches can be ambiguous and cause tension between marketing and sales teams.
But today, there’s a better way to approach attribution. Marketing intelligence technology has paved the way for AI-powered full-funnel attribution, allowing marketing teams to gain access to a full-funnel view of which levers are driving success.
☑ Pin-point your highest converting channels
☑ Surface common conversion paths to determine what works best
☑ Evaluate touchpoints based on engagement and effectiveness
☑ Provide recommendations on your best path forward through ‘next best action’
By facilitating a forward-thinking and predictive approach to attribution, deep funnel attribution links to specific funnel tactics for real-time strategic insights.
This approach equips marketing teams with the information they need to make informed decisions on a daily basis. It helps identify the most effective strategies at each stage of the lead journey, optimizing resource allocation and ensuring that every action aligns with forecasted goals.
Marketers must move beyond first- or last-touch attribution. Gain full-funnel insight by understanding how dark funnel data informs deep funnel behavior and conversions
Full-funnel attribution goes beyond the fundamental question of assigning credit into the nuances of real impact. It sheds light on the highest-impact tactics across campaigns, channels, and activities.
This approach offers insights into the likelihood of converting leads to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Its granularity empowers marketing leaders with the knowledge needed to optimize their efforts and drive greater success throughout the entire sales funnel.
By analyzing many data points, both on-and off-line, deep funnel attribution can also recommend the "Next Best Action" for sales rep follow-up, lead nurturing, and conversion, offering detailed next steps to help marketing leaders determine how to tweak and adapt marketing efforts based on what’s working.
The rise of full-funnel attribution, powered by AI, provides marketing teams with a complete view of the sales funnel and valuable insights into what's driving success.
Historically, creating an attribution model has been daunting and complex, but new marketing intelligence technologies are simplifying this process with great success. Now, marketing leaders can concentrate on refining strategies and execution with actionable insights on not only where to attribute success, but also what to do next, and where to invest.
BigID is a leader in data security, privacy, compliance, and governance; enabling organizations to proactively protect and get more value from their data in a single platform.
As a high-growth technology company in a competitive market, BigID’s marketing team moves quickly and wants to move even faster. But data siloed in separate systems and lack of campaign visibility across the whole team was preventing each member from driving their own programs to optimize strategy. The company wanted to ramp up its analytics capabilities to drive results more effectively.
"There are multiple people on our demand gen team who go into RevSure every day and can easily point and click and get what they need. That makes them more agile, and makes us more responsive and able to optimize our campaign strategies, which in turn drives growth across the entire business.”
Sarah Hospelhorn, BigID CMO
Now BigID has:
Now that we’ve explained full-funnel attribution and the role AI plays, it’s time to drill into the nuts and bolts: determining what’s working, what’s not, and how to make budget calls that don’t leave you sweating on pipeline calls.
Many marketers report lacking confidence in the ability to convert leads, especially as leads move further into the funnel. According to the RevSure State of Pipeline Generation Report, only 37% of marketers report being extremely confident about converting MOFU leads and one in ten marketers feel not at all confident about converting BOFU leads.
It boils down to the fact that predictable pipeline contributions and outcomes are stymied by a lack of solid analytics. There are three steps you can take to remedy this:
1. Make sense of data
2. Optimize campaign effectiveness
3. Improve marketing spend efficiency
Following these three steps will empower you to predict campaign outcomes so that you can maximize marketing ROI.
Most marketers today spend hours analyzing spreadsheets with countless tabs, moving from sheet to sheet, trying to tell a story with the data. Unfortunately, many organizations have a data hygiene crisis. Inconsistent data from the CRM, account-based management platforms, and other revenue analytics tools make it hard to paint an accurate picture.
This means most marketing teams have a skewed, incomplete perspective on which marketing programs are driving the most impact, what channels are providing the most value, and which leads actually have a high likelihood of closing. In fact, 48% of marketers report that they are measuring campaign success solely based on Return On Investment (ROI) or Customer Acquisition Cost, illuminating how other contributing data points are often disregarded.
Here’s where AI can play a critical role in helping you make more informed decisions.
Activate Funnel Management
Instead of using guesswork to predict what’s contributing to conversions, marketers can use AI to gain visibility into their marketing mix and attribution, empowering you to maximize ROI throughout the customer journey. This helps you understand what levers can be pulled to ensure an opportunity moves through the journey, optimizing close rates.
Understand Lead Propensity
AI allows marketers to determine how likely their leads are to buy. As an advanced alternative to lead scoring, AI-scored lead propensity offers the ability to measure the likelihood of leads contributing to the pipeline.
Increase Funnel Speed
AI allows marketers to understand where bottlenecks are from marketing to sales, and offers guidance on where to improve the process around the buying journey.
Aggregate Data
AI enhancements of attribution and data cataloging allow marketers to gain a holistic view of data and strategically dissect which sources create leads with the highest propensity to purchase or with larger average deal sizes.
SnapLogic is the leader in AI-led generative integration. The SnapLogic platform accelerates digital transformation across the enterprise and empowers faster and easier integration.
Before implementing RevSure’s full-funnel attribution solution, SnapLogic’s marketing team knew where it was spending money and what the return was. However, it lacked the ability to analyze the ROI of their GTM strategy on a granular level and couldn’t determine what percentage of spend was driving pipeline. In addition, each revenue owner had a separate data analysis spreadsheet, which led to conflicting reporting, conclusions, and action plans.
“With RevSure’s AI-based pipeline acceleration platform, we know how things are moving across the funnel, what’s moving forward, what’s moving back, what’s staying stagnant.”
AJ Patel, Senior Director of Finance, SnapLogic
Now SnapLogic has gained unprecedented insight into its revenue motion, including:
Every company’s marketing mix execution plan varies the amount of time, budget, personalization, and automation required for success. The best strategies employ the right mix of tactics and spend to reach and convert target audiences.
Here are five tactics you can implement to improve your marketing strategy and optimize campaign effectiveness.
1. Be where your buyers are
It’s critical to assess where your buyers go to conduct their research and improve their domain knowledge. For example, a B2B manufacturing buyer may not be active on Instagram or Threads, so investing in this channel will yield low ROI.
2. Run a competitive analysis
Another factor to consider is the competitive landscape and the current and emerging trends in your industry. You can conduct a SWOT analysis to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to your competitors and their demand gen strategy. Today’s SEO tools can provide granular insight into keywords, and ads that your competitors are bidding on.
Ask these Questions:
What marketing & sales activation channels am I using today?
☑ Which channels are owned vs paid?
☑ What is my budget allocation across paid channels?
☑ Which channels do my target buyers actually engage with?
☑ How do I measure success on each channel?
☑ Which business-level metrics and KPIs can I optimize?
☑ Can I connect each channel to revenue or other business-level metrics?
3. Define your segments and tailor your messaging
Align channels to your target segments, as different types of personas take different engagement strategies. Messaging tweaks, timing, outreach style, and marketing tactics vary for each segment that you target.
4. Choose your channels
Based on your lead generation goals, you can determine which channels to begin with. If you’re starting from scratch, a good place to start is to understand which free channels are frequented most by your buyers, and use the content distribution matrix to map out your greatest areas of opportunity. Then, you can make investments into these channels with the creation of relevant, educational content.
5. Monitor and measure performance
Finally, after you define your action plan and set it in motion, you need to create a framework to monitor and measure performance. The types of metrics you track and assign value to will determine the effectiveness of your reporting mechanism. Avoid the trap of using only traffic and engagement metrics as a core measurement of success. It takes an integrated approach to all metric types—from traffic to engagement, to conversion to business impact—to paint a holistic picture and move the needle on revenue goal attainment.
of those surveyed reported that email marketing is making the most impact for marketers, but social media, content marketing, and organic search are close behind.
Get a Holistic View of All Marketing Metrics
Marketing reports provide you with a limited benchmark for how things are working.
With a reporting mechanism in place, you can look at a report and get a partial glimpse into if you’re succeeding, where you’re falling short, where improvements need to be made, and which channels are working and which are not.
But at most companies, it’s a daunting task to capture, measure, and synthesize all of these data points. Today’s AI-powered attribution solutions let you aggregate data, simplify reporting, and gain granular insights. AI can help you analyze performance and arm your revenue teams with confidence.
The last step is to determine where your marketing spend is actually contributing to revenue.
One third of marketers report budget allocation as a top challenge for achieving pipeline generation success. When marketers don’t have access to the right data, allocating marketing dollars is a guessing game.
The last step is to determine where your marketing spend is actually contributing to revenue.
One third of marketers report budget allocation as a top challenge for achieving pipeline generation success. When marketers don’t have access to the right data, allocating marketing dollars is a guessing game.
Being able to predict and forecast pipeline enables you to make data-driven decisions that inform how well you spend your marketing dollars. The quality and timing of these recommendations are critical to impact pipeline in the short and long term.
With RevSure’s Pipeline Projections, you can extract, transform, and unify data from every major sales and marketing platform for accurate learnings on your pipeline health that you can use to shift investments into the channels, campaigns, or ads that are working well.
Leveraging AI, RevSure assigns a pipeline conversion likelihood and a potential opportunity value to every lead. This assigned value is unique to your GTM motion, factoring in attributes such as lead, account, and opportunity journey data. By tracking conversions at every stage of the lead journey, you’re able to focus on the right efforts on a stage-by-stage level.
When you become proactive on generating and covering your sales pipeline for both current and future quarters, you enhance your ability to predict outcomes, identify potential issues early, and access valuable insights that can help you increase revenue faster.
Once you’ve started to improve campaign ROI and marketing spend, it’s time to improve how those leads convert into qualified sales opportunities. This step is critical to drive revenue, but arguably the hardest of them all.
The handoff of a lead between marketing and sales often faces a lot of challenges. As hard as it can be to admit, what makes a qualified lead for you might not be perceived as a qualified opportunity by sales. Here’s where defined marketing lead criteria and a rigorous de-qualification process are key to driving the trust needed for sales to follow up on your hard-earned leads.
Here are three ways to accelerate pipeline efficiency:
1. Diagnose pipeline health
2. Close funnel leaks
3. Improve sales velocity
Having insight into conversions beyond the funnel and into the pipeline is critical. Tracking stage-by-stage conversions can help you better understand where opportunities are getting stuck in the funnel and drive predictability, speed, effectiveness and alignment.
A healthy sales pipeline means that there are enough leads and opportunities in each stage to ensure consistent revenue growth. Analyzing pipeline health helps teams identify areas that require improvement, such as increasing lead generation, improving sales conversion rates, or shortening the sales cycle.
By managing the pipeline health effectively, sales and marketing teams can increase revenue, improve forecasting accuracy, and ultimately achieve business growth.
Real-time projections help you monitor your pipeline and bookings, including where you are tracking against your targets.
Now that you have analyzed pipeline health and know where leads fall out of the consideration funnel, it’s critical to take a surgical approach to closing these leaks.
Begin by analyzing why prospects leave the funnel. If most leave at an early stage, you may be targeting the wrong Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Mid-stage losses can be attributed to lack of information or mismatch with prospect needs. Late-stage losses can be due to competition or missed opportunities to reinforce your value proposition. You must also determine whether it’s a lack of follow up or other action by the sales team.
One tool to prevent lead loss is content that showcases the ROI of your solution, aligns to unique buyer motivations, provides social proof, and validates your offering. A nurture campaign of stage-appropriate content such as white papers and case studies can keep buyers informed and engaged.
Here are three types of gap-closing content:
An ROI Calculator
It’s critical to assess where your buyers go to conduct their research and improve their domain knowledge. For example, a B2B manufacturing buyer may not be active on Instagram or Threads, so investing in this channel will yield low ROI.
Competitive comparison one-pagers
Another factor to consider is the competitive landscape and the current and emerging trends in your industry. You can conduct a SWOT analysis to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to your competitors and their demand gen strategy. Today’s SEO tools can provide granular insight into keywords, and ads that your competitors are bidding on.
Third-party reviews
There’s no better way to prove your value than through the words of your customers. Make investments in third-party review sites like G2, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, and Capterra. If done right, these sites can also serve as lead-generation sources.
Moving deals through the pipeline faster requires ruthless prioritization and lead scoring. It means you need to be sourcing higher-quality leads—even if that means having fewer leads altogether.
There are two common ways to capture and nurture high-quality opportunities to drive sales velocity.
1. Remove prospects with the lowest likelihood of progressing
Sometimes, we get stuck on the notion that we must cultivate every prospect in our pipeline. By cutting the dead weight, you can focus efforts on the opportunities that have the strongest outlook. Pipeline intelligence can help sort through which opportunities to pursue with greater accuracy and speed.
2. Define step-by-step actions for high-quality prospects
Once you have identified the best opportunities in your pipeline, pursue them with a clear action plan. Scaling this manually can be a challenge. Pipeline intelligence capabilities that set your next-best action enable you to take proactive steps to keep prospects engaged.
With RevSure’s predictive intelligence capabilities, you can hone in on win rates and improve your overall performance. AI-powered solutions provide intelligence that can help you design a powerful action plan with confidence. Additionally, you can gain insights into the current state of your pipeline and the key factors influencing win rates. Monitoring pipeline health and aligning it with predefined targets becomes a straightforward task, allowing for proactive adjustments.
Predictive intelligence equips teams with the knowledge needed to enhance pipeline quality and identify areas of potential leakage. It provides insights into which segments have the highest probability of conversion and offers actionable guidance on transforming leads into opportunities and driving successful conversions.
Perhaps most importantly, reporting becomes a much simpler lift, eliminating guesswork and enabling your entire marketing organization to make data-driven decisions confidently.
“We need to keep looking at the pipeline goal as a shared responsibility of sales and marketing, with sourcing splits being directional, not absolute.”
While there are a variety of vendors on the market today, it’s critical to find the best fit for the needs of your marketing team. Here are a few tips to consider.
1. Identify a solution that analyzes performance from both marketing and sales funnels
It's crucial to find a platform that will actively bridge the gap between marketing and sales funnels. This platform should offer comprehensive insights into the lead-to-prospect journey, enabling you to make informed decisions for your entire revenue motion.
2. Make sure AI modeling is designed for inconsistent data
Let’s face it—most marketing teams don’t have the cleanest data. The good news is, there are ways to diagnose your pipeline health even with incomplete data inputs. When choosing a partner, seek out AI modeling that can handle incomplete data inputs effectively. This will help keep your reporting reliable, even when dealing with varying or irregular data sources.
3. Choose a platform that goes live in weeks, not months
In a world where market conditions can change rapidly, the ability to get your platform up and running within weeks allows your business to respond swiftly to emerging trends and shifting business demands. Shorter deployment timelines often translate to cost savings. With fewer resources allocated to getting timely, accurate analytics, you can focus on making strategic decisions that will impact pipeline this quarter and next.
4. Choose a pipeline intelligence offering that complements your ABM platform
Traditional ABM platforms have a wealth of insights and reporting capabilities for accounts, intent and engagement. However, platforms that offer more sophisticated pipeline intelligence capabilities include pipeline predictions on how those accounts will convert and how much pipeline they will generate. In using these two solutions together, companies can build more accurate forecasts around where larger deals from target accounts will come, which helps with sales bandwidth and resource planning as well as marketing allocations.
Establishing shared goals and a common attribution model between marketing and sales is paramount to growing existing accounts and securing new business. Aligning teams ensures these critical functions are working in tandem, concentrating on identical objectives and strategies. This synchronization leads to a more efficient approach to lead generation, nurturing, and conversion.
Robust attribution and reporting mechanisms empower sales teams with the confidence to pursue leads generated by marketing. By relying on data-driven insights and metrics that genuinely reflect marketing effectiveness, sales can maximize their efforts.
To achieve this, it’s imperative to move away from vanity metrics towards shared goals. Vanity metrics such as views or impressions are often showcased in marketing reports and can be misleading. While they may appear favorable, they fail to provide an accurate gauge of marketing’s actual impact on business outcomes. This misalignment can hinder progress and decision-making.
This readiness fosters a seamless lead handoff and enhances the likelihood of successful conversions.
When your sales and marketing teams can capture every touchpoint and see exactly what is generating pipeline, you can surface insights that are instrumental in crafting a go-to-market (GTM) strategy that is both predictable and scalable.
Adopt these best practices for demand generation and never miss a revenue target again.
RevSure’s full-funnel attribution solution empowers businesses to drive qualified opportunities with predictive insights from the entire revenue funnel to optimize marketing and sales investments and ensure you never miss pipeline targets again.
RevSure takes the guesswork out of your marketing strategy, giving you data-driven insight into your overall funnel health so you can know how to improve your marketing efforts and drive revenue growth.
