Demand Generation
Don't isolate the enterprise motion
“To fill a room, to have your outbound answered, and to walk into a favorably inclined room, you need awareness and credibility.”
B2B marketers love rebranding themselves. (Which makes sense, because what kind of marketers would we be if we didn't??)
Ten years ago, Web/Digital Marketing and Event Marketing were two squarely separate camps. Then, as an industry, we came up with Demand Gen. What that meant varied company to company. Sometimes it meant digital. Sometimes it meant events. The only commonality? Being tied to a pipeline number as a key metric. It was a great time to be a demand gen marketer, because suddenly you weren't a cost center, you were directly tied to revenue. Lucky for me, at the time, I was reporting into a CRO, who had given me a pipeline number to be responsible for and told me to do my thing. He also obliged when I told him I wanted Demand Gen in my title: a pivotal moment in my career.
Since then, we cycled through Acquisition Marketing, Revenue Marketing, Integrated Marketing, Performance Marketing (which just used to be called Digital?), and finally Growth Marketing, which just formalized what used to be called Growth Hacking and turned it into a discipline. Except then it also started to mean all the previous titles, including Demand Gen.
You know what I'm seeing more and more of again? Demand Gen. Except in this iteration, it almost always means what I'm used to thinking about as Field Marketing: ABM, events, pipeline acceleration.
I think it's a direct response to how crowded the AI space has become. When individual usage is your primary motion, churn is cheap. What isn't cheap is compute and the costs of giving away product at low cost or for free. So the big lever for sustainable revenue growth is the enterprise. And enterprise requires a different kind of marketing discipline: deliberate, account-focused, relationship-driven. Cue the Field Marketing job postings masquerading as Demand Gen.
“To fill a room, to have your outbound answered, and to walk into a favorably inclined room, you need awareness and credibility.”
But what's missing is the understanding that to fill a room, to have your outbound answered, and to have your Sales team walk into a favorably inclined room (virtual or otherwise), you need awareness and credibility. That's organic and paid and press and partnerships and community, all underpinned by customer stories and love. So I'm all for calling it Demand Gen or Growth Marketing or whatever the term du jour is (do we rebrand Integrated again?), but whatever you call it, don't isolate the enterprise motion without also building the other parts of the marketing engine that support that motion.