The Demand Center - A new approach to B2B Marketing?

In a very interesting article, Sirius Decisions, proposes the concept of the Demand Center, a Shared Services concept (insourced or outsourced), that provides the services (Marketing Infrastructure, Marketing Services, and Tele Services) needed for new generation campaigns that depart from the traditional, linear approach to B2B Marketing: Generate a Lead, Qualify the Lead, Pass the Lead to Sales, but align the Demand Generation process to the customer process and purchasing cycle.

This Demand Center allows for the leverage (through centralization!) of: (1) Best Practices in Campaign Creation, (2) Specialized Skills, not necessarily present in all B2B Marketing Organizations, and (3) IT Infrastructure needed to run increasingly complex systems for the Management of Marketing.

On the other hand, the implementation of the Demand Center, will certainly bring controversy. The global, centralized approach, usually misses the mark in terms of providing the necessary localization - and I am not only talking about language translation, for effective marketing campaigns in different geographies.

However, this is a concept worth exploring, in two directions: One, in terms of providing a hybrid infrastructure that centralizes some of the marketing assets in a hub, while providing the required autonomy in country for some of the activities. The other is in using the Demand Center at the Latin America level. In my experience, localization is often minimal when providing marketing assets to different countries in the region, and most of the times it can be limited to translation!

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 percent to 60 percent 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: