Carlos Hidalgo, founder and CEO of VisumCx, a customer experience strategy firm, is the author of Driving Demand: Transforming B2B Marketing to Meet the Needs of the Modern Buyer.

For the last six years, Carlos has also been named one of the 50 Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management, and in 2015, he was recognized by Onalytica as the “Most Influential Person in B2B Marketing in North America”.

Not a bad set of credentials for someone who consults on the role demand generation plays—or should play—in B2B companies.

So we decided to ask Carlos a few questions about demand generation that we think are relevant to every B2B company, no matter how large or how small. As always, his answers offer some great insight.

• What’s your own personal definition of demand generation?
• I define demand generation as a five-part strategic function:
  1. A marketing-driven process that is linked and unified with sales;
  2. A strategic marketing approach that aligns content to the buyer’s purchase journey, from initial education and attraction, through nurturing, and ultimately to the decision stage and sales conversion;
  3. A multi-channel mix of inbound and outbound communications;
  4. A measurable process focused on business outcomes, meaning, contribution to pipeline, ROI and contribution to revenue;
  5. A crucial stage in the customer lifecycle.

• In what ways does it differ from traditional lead generation?
• Traditional lead generation focuses on “filling the top of the funnel” and measuring success by the number of leads that come in. But the truth is that all leads are not created equal, and they usually don’t identify where the potential customer actually is in the buying process.
• Demand generation addresses every stage of the buyer’s journey and is designed to align with the potential customer’s goals across his or her entire buying cycle. Demand generation is also an end-to-end engagement process that allows B2B companies to add value and build demand from the customer’s point of view—not a one-off metric like lead generation that measures quantity with no distinct criteria for quality.

• What components does a company need to manage a proactive demand generation program?
• If by components you mean technology, it’s important to understand that while technology is needed to enable demand generation, it’s not the starting point. In fact, this is where many companies fail. Too many companies buy into the myth that technology will solve their demand generation woes, and don’t realize that without a defined, buyer-centric strategy, technology can only do so much.
• As for the components that actually need to be managed, companies must include every area of business that will have an impact on the buying journey, and the truth is, it’s a pretty long list. Digital properties and (yes) technology, people, content, data, analytics and reporting, and more. But the denominator is always the same—the components you need to successfully manage a demand generation program include anything that will affect your buyer’s decision to choose you over your competitors.

• What have you found are the biggest challenges and pitfalls companies face in getting started?
• I think the biggest barrier is change. It wasn’t long ago when the role of marketing was simply to support sales and their needs in the field. Today, CEOs expect their CMOs to drive strategy, generate insights into their buyers and ensure their demand generation programs contribute to revenue.
• This requires organizational change that starts with culture. I still see so many organizations that are “sales-led” and view the sales team as marketing’s core customer. This has to change. With über-sophisticated buyers who now have access to information with a click, the actual purchaser has become marketing’s primary target.
• But a change in culture isn’t the only challenge companies face when starting a demand generation program. More often than not, there is a very real need for a new skillset in the firm’s marketing organization. In a recent demand generation survey of B2B enterprise companies, the overwhelming majority of senior-level respondents considered their marketing teams’ skillset to be marginal. You can’t compete in today’s B2B marketplace and engage buyers in the way they expect with just a marginal set of customer-centric skills.

• What specific steps are involved in getting a demand generation program started?
• The first step is getting the insights into your buyers and their purchase path. To do anything before this is a fool’s errand. I’m seeing more organizations develop personas, which is a good start, but in reality, many of them don’t really help in terms of demand generation. Why? There are a couple of reasons.
• First, many personas fail to capture the idea of consensus buying. According to CEB, in a typical B2B purchase, almost seven individual stakeholders are involved in a buying process. Each is looking at the problem differently, and has different motivations, biases and objections. A single persona labeled as “decision-maker” fails to address the reality of most B2B buying cycles.
• The second reason is that most personas today are created as a static process. But, more sophisticated organizations interview their sales teams and their customers, and do research into what is actually happening at the moment. They also use their own structured data to gain further insight, and to have the ability to adapt quickly to changing buying patterns when a major shift in the market occurs. (For example, think of healthcare buyers if the Affordable Care Act gets repealed.)
• Ultimately, organizations need to look at adopting customer data platforms that enable them to gather better buyer intelligence—relevant information that is both dynamic and provides the ability to continually fine-tune their approach to buyers.

If you have any other questions about demand generation, just let us know. We’d love to hear from you—no matter where you are in your buying journey.