We need to build marketing pipelines that are a scalable-automated engine.
Demand Generation, like everything in Marketing has evolved a lot over the last two decades.
There are different strategies depending upon if your product is a brand new product category and you need to be more assertive about educating the target audience about benefits, or if the product is in an established category and you choose to be less intrusive.
AI definitely has an outline of steps to take, and I have had experience at some very successful companies and have seen what works and what doesn''t. Let's dive right in...
We need to focus on these core technical and strategic categories:
It is necessary to connect intent data platforms (like Bombora, 6sense, or Breeze Intelligence which comes native in Hubspot) into your CRM and marketing automation engines without degrading data hygiene.
Data Hygiene is about identifying the right person, at the right company, and the actions they have taken so our intent data is valualbe and accurate. That means you need to capture URL and UTM parameters and store them in hidden fields in your CRM / PRM Partner Relationship Management Database as well as decide on a fixed parameter, usually email address, to match up actions of a target prospect, no matter how someone enters their company name in the database. In the case of first party data, we can also pixel prospects to show ads to targets in CTV for example.
Often Technology Manufacturers rely heavily on Global Distributors, Resellers, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Our architecture must account for through-partner execution.
Once we pass a lead to Partners from intent data that is signalling interest or a need for our products. We need to also pass the perfect playbook to our Partners, meaning questions to understand the opportunity, plus tips based on Breeze Intelligence intent signals, such as product or problem they are trying to solve, who is looking, what's going on in their company news such as promotions, problems, and up-coming Projects.
We support partners with ready made content to advertise and send co-branded emails they can copy. We supply partners with Marketing Designated Funds to run these ads independently, and incentivize them to share their progress early with account updates in detail in our shared Partner Relationship Marketing.
At Palo Alto Networks we took it a step further and used autodialers to call all the partner's contacts that would be a target for the next-gen firewall with partners listening in as SDRs pitched the benefits of the product, so partners could learn the pitch and we knew the targets were being actively pursued.
At Imanami, I blasted our French partner's target email list they provided in a co-branded email to introduce Imanami and the partner, set appointments, and educate targets about our products. The return email given was the local partner's, along with their local address and phone, in keeping with French Laws at the time.
Accessible natively in your HubSpot portal, this dashboard organizes target markets and surfaces high-intent accounts.
I was the Marketing Department at Imanami, and I knew I needed to creating closed-loop marketing analytics in order to scale their revenue to the next level.
We weren’t getting leads flowing to the right territories at Imanami.
We also wanted Sales to have visibility of the campaigns that prospects had already engaged with via marketing so they could contact target prospects with higher lead scores first and have an idea about which of our four products the leads were most interested in. To that end we wanted to insert codes that represented which campaigns were opened by the leads we had gathered from the form fills we had received in Hubspot Marketing Automation. We wanted to move that information to our Sales Team and into our Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Hired a MS Dynamics consultant to add fields to import campaign fields into the crm from Hubspot Marketing Automation.
An Internal team member had written code to flow leads into Sales territories: We could write that code using claude code now, as you know.
Looped in Lytton, the Richardson Texas vendor that built our third-party API for Hubspot to MS Dynamics CRM. Hubspot has APIs for most CRMs to connect to Marketing Automation natively now.
We did several calls to try to resolve the issues with Lytton's technical resource, then with Microsoft's tech support. We eventually needed to escalate the problem to a Level 3 Microsoft Tech Support Engineer who made a copy of our internal code for flowing leads to customer territories, and the leads immediately flowed in to MS Dynamics CRM from Hubspot Marketing Automation, which we had captured in various campaigns after blasting a targeted list. We spot checked several of the leads that were expected to now be in MS Dynamics and they were all there.
That is how we successfully created closed-loop Marketing Analytics for Imanami. We increased revenue 4x in a single year.
Obviously there are more steps, which I outlined above, such as a Partner Relationship Managment Database (PRM) and Dashboard, Data Hygiene, Attribution Models, UTM Parameters, Shared Marketing Activities, and Partner Development Funds, to name a few.
Plumbing problems can happen at any point in the machine, but automating these processes saves the company and Partners both time and money and greatly increases our velocity in Go-to-Market (GTM) with new products vs. the competition.