Today’s B2B companies face serious challenges: increasingly saturated marketing channels, difficult-to-reach prospects and competition for buyers’ attention. To greatly influence sales conversions, companies need to start at the top of the sales funnel - where prospects are identified, interest is captured, demand is generated and leads are nurtured. Marketers need to be able to clearly see the opportunities and impediments in their demand generation processes, so they’re better able to break the bottlenecks, eliminate waste and strategically allocate resources to produce results. Many of today’s leading companies are implementing management techniques traditionally used in manufacturing for this demand generation process.
The customer acquisition processes - from lead development and lead scoring to interest capture and lead qualification - should work together as cohesive elements. The objective is to generate the maximum throughput (the useful end-products of the process, such as sales or appointments) with the minimum amount of raw materials and inventory (raw traffic, lists, campaigns and work-in-process).
