OnBase: Smashing Sales and Marketing Misalignments Ep 27 | Evolving Trends in B2B Sales, Martech adoption and Demand Gen with David Lewis
David Lewis, CEO of DemandGen is known as an innovator in digital marketing technology and methodologies. He has overseen marketing strategies for some of Silicon Valley’s leading technology firms.
In this episode, David discusses key issues related to adoption of martech stacks and best practices to ensure maximum output from them besides sharing some interesting thoughts on B2B marketing, B2B sales and Demand Generation.
About David and DemandGen International:
David started DemandGen International, an Inc. 500 global consulting and services company that helps sales and marketing teams achieve alignment, define and operationalize their demand-generation processes to create maximum advantage from marketing technology and sales technology systems.
DemandGen has developed a reputation of being THE experts in MarTech and trusted advisor to the world’s most innovative and progressive companies including Apple, Dell, American Express, Concur, Siemens, SAP, Medtronic, Citrix, CenturyLink, Workday, and hundreds more.
Top ten takeaways from the episode:
- “As CEO of the company, there’s a pattern every week. But a typical day includes working on blogs, working on books, working on my podcast — I just did my 100th episode at DemandGen Radio!”
- “I’m also a bit of a Chief Innovation Officer and that’s important to the company! I spend alot of time researching the marketplace and that’s important too!”
- “My first book ‘Manufacturing Demand’ has done incredibly well. It explains the WHY of aligning Sales and Marketing and its the Number 1 book in the category. The working title of my new book is ‘Agents of Change’ and its a story, a tapestry of stories that our clients have gone through so I can share with everyone how to go about Sales and Marketing.”
- “If Sales and Marketing doesn’t focus on Customer Experience, it doesn’t matter if you have the best products or processes.”
- “If Sales and Marketing view themselves as #oneteam with a common set of goals it optimizes results.”
- “To reduce friction between Sales and Marketing, I would say – walk in the shoes of your colleague!”
- “From a trend perspective, we are seeing Sales playing a different role in B2B buying. In every single industry where products and sellers meet, we are seeing less involvement by a person. Companies want less interaction with prospects in the buying process. I wouldn’t say Sales will be completely displaced. There needs to be representation from an individual. But in terms of skill sets and the role itself, it would shift towards more education – educating prospects on technologies and products. You got to be an excellent marketing person to be able to do good in Sales today.”
- “Unfortunately, a lot of companies do not align on vision and strategy. This affects the end outcome. It doesn’t align, its basically then random acts of marketing and random acts of selling.”
- “ABM is really hard. Its way easier to buy lists and go the generic email route. Its harder to think of a specific audience and personas within. But is ABM worth it? Absolutely. If people want ABM to be successful, it might make sense to target them through their install base data.”
- “Everything sounds practical and directional, but its hard. It takes the right team, it takes focus and it takes vision to succeed!”
About the podcast
Sunny Side Up is a series of 15-minute podcasts. Leaders and innovators share what they’ve learned in the B2B tech sector on topics related to marketing, product management, sales, and leadership.