September 13th, 2009
We are in a new business climate – call it World 2.0. You’ve undoubtedly heard about Business 2.0, Web 2.0 etc. – the idea behind this “2.0-fication” is that the critical paradigms governing business have changed radically – almost creating a new dimension of complexity around critical areas such as technology development, sales and marketing, brand and competitive positioning.
No area is more critical to a business enterprise than demand for its products and services in the marketplace and thereby enabling revenue growth. Indeed, enabling market demand has always been the holy grail of business – but enterprises today are faced with a completely new realm of challenges and possibilities – all brought about as a result of the evolution of these new paradigms. Continuing to drive sustainable and accelerating demand in this new world requires newer skills and capabilities – and many of the practices from even a few years ago are no longer effective. This is DEMAND GEN 2.0
Let’s examine these Demand Gen 2.0 challenges and opportunities in more detail. Three fundamental forces affecting virtually all business are noteworthy – Virtualization, Super-Specialization, and Social Media.
VIRTUALIZATION - Businesses are getting increasingly virtual – geographically, functionally, and organizationally. Many of today’s organizations are dispersed across multiple locations, indeed, the trend of having more and more critical staff working or located remotely is accelerating. Companies are realizing that technology enables them to hire top talent without being constrained by their place of residence or location.
Even more intriguing and impactful is the trend to virtualize from a functional standpoint – essentially outsourcing. Maintenance and staff functions are being increasingly outsourced to vendors – these include marketing, demand generation, legal and tax functions, human resources and benefits management, finance functions, payroll, IT support, maintenance engineering etc. Companies are realizing that virtualizing these administrative and maintenance functions enables them to dedicate more resources, energy and focus to their core competencies and business.
Of particular interest is that companies find that outsourcing their demand generation enables them to save significantly on costs while at the same time having a far more accountable and productive demand gen engine. It also enables them to migrate their sales organization to more skilled individuals that are focused on closing deals, as opposed to “wasting” their valuable time on prospecting / building the pipeline.
SUPER-SPECIALIZATION - Broad business specialization is not a new trend at all – it’s been around forever. However, we are talking about extreme specialization – each industry vertical is not being split into very fine sub-verticals and sub-sub-verticals – and businesses are competing in those highly-niche domains.
The driving force behind this level of super-specialization is once again technology. Technology has enabled companies to extend their market reach globally – meaning that they have access to far bigger markets. However this also means a dramatic increase in competitive pressure – and businesses are responding by differentiating themselves based on their expertise in increasingly defined and niche areas. As we will discuss in the next paragraph, the social media paradigm has become a powerful tool for teams that want to project and market their product, services or domain expertise – and thereby build a strong brand.
Given this growing trend of super-specialization, demand generation gets even more critical and challenging. The demand generation engine needs to account for brand integrity, critical on-target messaging to the marketplace, and always maintaining the very delicate balance between driving a broad market demand while at the same time ensuring that that market’s needs can be served successfully and profitably.
ENTERPRISE SOCIAL MEDIA – Among all the trends affecting businesses over the last year or two, none is perhaps more powerful than the social media paradigm. At a fundamental level, what social media enables is very seamless and effective collaboration and idea-exchange between a community of individuals, teams or businesses. The rapid adoption of social media and networking technologies and applications into the business enterprise has started to have radical impacts on how business is getting done.
Social media offers businesses a new and powerful medium to propagate their business. Starting from brand development and management, to driving thought leadership and subject matter expertise, collaborating with various different constituencies of the enterprise, and leading into demand generation – enterprise social networking is a extraordinarily powerful tool to drive demand for any enterprise.
These three trends discussed above are subjects of far-more detailed study and discussion. These three trends combine together to radically alter and create a new landscape for demand generation for businesses – and it is for this very reason that we believe that we need to look at Demand Generation 2.0 – as a generational evolution of this critical enterprise function.
Entry Filed under: Demand Gen > $$$
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