Demand Creation vs Demand Conversion | Snack-Size AI Ep. 7

Historically, the MarTech space has been focused on demand creation, investing in tools to fill the top of the funnel. But CMO David Greenberg thinks it’s time for Marketing teams to get more balanced in their approach. Marketing leaders need to adopt technology that increases demand conversion to optimize their funnel—or get used to losing their expensive leads to competitors.

It’s been really interesting to watch over the last decade and a half how MarTech has developed and how so much of the focus has been around new ways to create demand. Some of that’s been driven by new channels opening up like social and mobile. But I think the natural and historical motion, unfortunately, has been to just find new ways to create demand and not necessarily equally think about how you can better convert that demand.

The importance of lead generation and demand generation is always gonna be there, there’s no doubt about it. But putting more and more at the top without putting thoughtful work into how you’re gonna manage that lead stock and convert that lead stock is going to be a miss for marketers in the future.

Because I think all of us are feeling the pressure, not just because of a looming recession, but just the constant, how do you find breakthroughs and how do you do more with less?

Obviously, there’s been a whole new introduction of bringing AI-driven Assistants to the market to help support these revenue teams on their conversion. Inside sales reps, sales development reps, business development reps. Marketing can start using AI Assistants to start removing the barrier of people as the only conversion method for their company. So once they start deploying Conversation Automation technology, they can get to 100% lead follow-up and do it appropriately, with the modern buyer mindset.

The benefit of having a well-balanced approach and thinking through both lanes is that you get a much more efficient funnel. You can spend less to generate more at the very highest level because you don’t need to keep filling and spending the dollars to just stuff the top of the funnel when you know you’re focusing on driving the conversions. And scaling your conversions as well, which has traditionally been one of the biggest limiters.

This comes back to the fundamental promise and results we’ve seen here at Conversica with our customers, which is they can put less into the top of their funnel. By focusing on conversions and deploying our Assistants to help drive those conversions, ultimately it leads to a significantly larger increase in their overall pipeline. At the low end, we don’t talk to customers unless we think we can give them a 10X ROI.