The Dawn of the Demand Center
Of all the desires emanating from the C-suite in relation to marketing quickly becoming the most dominant is the desire for leverage. CFOs and CEOs want to know where efficiencies can be found so that cuts can be made. CMOs are looking for answers so they don’t have to gut their function. It is the desire for leverage that is driving large organizations toward structures that maximize field marketing at a global level, and smaller organizations toward enhanced centralization.
The demand center is a central or regional hub of shared marketing services, infrastructure and process that enables organizations to bring programs to market by leveraging key corporate assets and best practices. It is a hybrid structure between centralization and decentralization, leaning toward a pragmatic “center of excellence” approach. B-to-b marketing has evolved dramatically in recent years, with field marketing leading the pack in terms of both performance and budget (typically 40% to 60% of overall marketing spend). What seems to be most frequently missing, however, is a go-to-market model that enables consistent field marketing performance across disparate geographies or lines of business. At the heart of this requirement are four key factors, including:
• A new campaign model. The old days of taking a response, looking to qualify it quickly and pass it on to sales are over, replaced by an integrated multi-touch, multi-channel model centered around prospect and customer buying cycles. Such an approach requires significant change management; leveraging a center-of-excellence approach can accelerate this change.
• Technology. The new campaign model focuses heavily on digital relationships that often leverage a marketing automation platform (MAP), emphasize the Web and require significant data management. Marketing campaigns that are designed to automatically serve offers based on a prospect’s behavior require a technological backbone, one that is both complicated and costly to deploy multiple times on a one-off basis.
• A marketing skills gap. Most b-to-b organizations have historically hired marketing managers with strong skills in designing one-dimensional campaigns that didn’t require sophisticated technology. With a new campaign model and new technology now required, these marketers are challenged to catch up. Replacing them is often not an option; with the concepts I’ve discussed so new, a strong talent base hasn’t had a chance to develop. In the end, these marketers need help, something that a center of excellence is specifically designed to do.
• A lack of best practices. I have observed many organizations that attempted to implement the strategies and purchased technology we originally classified as “Field Marketing 2.0” back in 2007 have only been partially successful. As a result, senior management has perceived the moves to be a waste of investment. By having marketing personnel equipped with the appropriate skills in a regional center that can deliver learnings and best practices to the remainder of the organization, more rapid success follows.
As an integrated regional marketing organization, the demand center should provide three core services.
1. Infrastructure. Regional centers from which marketing infrastructure can be deployed and accessed will provide the expertise and tools for a region or country, ensuring it is deploying best practices. Core infrastructure at the demand center level includes a MAP, data quality tools, media measurement tools and Website optimization technology.
2. Marketing services. Includes help for local marketers to assemble a best-practice campaign from corporate assets, or to provide the execution services to implement the campaign on their behalf. While often handling the campaign assembly and execution, the demand center is also allowing access to highly specialized marketing roles, including Web anthropologists, marketing automation power users and data management experts.
3. Teleservices. Providing telemarketing and teleprospecting services at regional inbound and outbound centers will allow an organization to leverage best practices and infrastructure, as well as to benefit from a central management approach that tends to be more effective for call centers. Such an approach, however, depends on the scale of the business and may be difficult to afford and execute.
Without the demand center approach, corporate or global marketing often creates assets and sends them to either a skeleton regional marketing group or directly to country marketers, hoping that the assets are effectively used. In the demand center model, corporate or global marketing creates the campaign strategy and marketing assets, then sends them directly to regional demand centers. The demand centers assemble the campaigns, adjust them for local markets and either hand them off to country marketers or execute for them. The demand center model is not appropriate for every company. Organizations under $250 million typically should implement a hybrid approach of country marketing and a demand center that is centrally managed but less regionally deployed.
The demand center model is usually not deployed without controversy. Regional marketers are often frustrated receiving assets they can’t localize or strategies they can’t effectively implement; as a result, any form of regionalization or centralization is not overwhelmingly popular at the outset. However, the demand center model is designed both to execute campaigns where marketing resources are limited as well as offer best practice advice. In many ways, this can provide the global community with the balance of applying unique marketing strategy to specific markets while leveraging best practices the company has learned.
