Technology Case Study

Guiding a Client Through Demand Center Design

Introduction

Leveraging the Alexander Group’s Marketing Expertise for a Successful Integration

After a technology client integrated two separate business development teams that were previously within the sales organization, the client sought to move the newly integrated team to the marketing organization. Needing support to integrate the teams, evaluate the overall demand generation operating model and improve the teams’ productivity through lead prioritization and job design improvements, the client turned to the Alexander Group. Having established a previous relationship with the client and private equity ownership team, the client trusted the Alexander Group to bring in much-needed marketing expertise during their new integration.

Approach

Collecting Analytics to Inform Demand Center Design

Alexander Group conducted 30 leadership and individual contributor interviews with marketing, sales and operations. We also collected marketing analytics during the engagement by leveraging data and accessing client marketing systems. These marketing analyses included funnel fallout, campaign & channel contribution, lead source & win rate and channels & mix. We also conducted qualitative assessments of roles, coverage, tools and processes. The project included an assessment and blueprint readout over eight weeks, with another five weeks added to the engagement for design.

Key Findings

Client Was Losing Many Opportunities as Leads Passed Through Their Funnel

During the engagement, the Alexander Group discovered that the client’s funnel fallout was high. Out of all opportunities that make it to the qualification stage, 45% of these opportunities fall out before reaching the development stage. The client was in need of guidelines on process and handoff. In their existing processes, leads are quickly passed from MQL to SQL stages while cycle time increases by 20% between the SQL and qualification stages.

Recommendations and Outcomes

Creating Distinct Demand Center Roles to Improve Win Rates

Based on the Alexander Group’s findings, we recommended that the client carve out four distinct demand center roles to meet the needs of each segment and region, align unique compensation plans to these roles, create new guidelines and standardization for lead qualification processes, update the lead scoring criteria bases on the Alexander Group’s effectiveness assessment, and incorporate ideal customer profiles and personas as an input into lead qualification and segmentation criteria. With headcount and role allocation adjustments, the client anticipated improved win rates based on updated processes and lead prioritization.

We constructed a blueprint timeline spanning over three months into March 2024. During this time period, the client realized the following results:

Trusted Marketing Expertise to Lead Organizations Through Transformations

For organizations looking to integrate various marketing teams and optimize demand generation and productivity, the Alexander Group can help improve win rates by assessing and designing demand center roles, guidelines, and processes. Contact us today to learn more.

About Alexander Group

Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.