B2B Demand Generation Investment and Performance Trends - with Kevan Savage, The Alexander Group

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Kevan Savage, Principal of the Marketing Practice at the Alexander Group. Today, I'll be covering four main topic areas with Kevan, and they include trends in demand generation investments, the latest pipeline development sources benchmarks, pipeline development benchmarks by channel, and marketing ROI performance measurements specific to demand generation and pipeline development. Kevan, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your background to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Kevan Savage** (1:14)
Well, Ray, thank you for having me this afternoon. Very much appreciate it, and I hope the audience finds these new insights valuable from the Alexander Group and from Ray's podcast. My background is I've run marketing for 25 plus years as a practitioner. I joined Alexander Group a few years back to stand up and put their marketing practice into the marketplace on the consulting side. Love this type of research. Been on the marketing leader practitioner side, on the consulting side now. It's good to see a lot of best practices, non-best practices, and look forward to the discussion today.

**Ray Rike** (1:48)
Ray, well, thank you for joining me. I was so excited when I saw the initial draft of Unveiling Pipeline to Profits focus on demand, generation, performance, and investment insights. I really wanted to have you here in a podcast. Let's start at the beginning. What was the goals and the construct of this research you were doing to better understand pipeline and demand generation?

**Kevan Savage** (2:09)
Yeah, it's a great question. Both on our end, on the consulting side, current and prospective clients, every day there's a conversation about demand generation for tech companies, for companies in other industry verticals with us, and we didn't have a good response to was like, what's happening in the marketplace? We commissioned this research study to answer some questions around investment and performance levels, in terms of functional contribution of pipeline, channel meets, but then also those efficiency metrics as it relates to what should organizations expect in return from their demand generation efforts. It was really born out of need from current and prospective clients.

**Ray Rike** (2:46)
Got you. I really liked what you did was, I love it when executive report starts with an executive summary, unless people like me say, I want to see more about this part. So the executive summary, you really broke it down into four areas around investment growth, performance and structure, qualified demand on their rise and revenue generation returns. Was there one or two things that jumped out at you that really surprised you here in 2023, Kevan?

**Kevan Savage** (3:12)
Yeah, a couple of things. On the investment front, from a quantitative standpoint, we saw good growth in terms of investment profiles increasing year on year across all revenues, cohorts, and our revenue cohorts for the study were defined as annual revenue size of the participating companies.
The investment growth was good to see. Now, what was more interesting were questions around, what are the activities that marketers or organizations are looking to put into the marketplace that are incremental to what they've been doing in the past? One that surfaced of interest was ties back to AI. We all know how buzzworthy and how transformative that is at the moment. But more specifically, SEO for mid-funnel content and pointing demand generation efforts towards that specific set of strategies. Things like knowledge centers, education centers, all that rich mid-funnel content that historically marketers have not been able to get the scale around. They're using AI to leverage the constant development and the orientation of that content and also driving conversion improvements in mid-funnel when they're developing out those SEO and content strategies. So that was number one, one thing to share. Secondly, that was interesting was we saw pretty healthy contribution of marketing teams as a function to pipeline relative to other functions like sales development, partner programs or alliance programs, things along those lines and we saw an increase in that area. What was interesting there was not just the percent of the contribution, but actually how marketers are working cross-functionally at stimulating and fulfilling that demand across the functions. And so one thing that was interesting from one of the CMOs was, look, I don't care if marketing is 80% of the pipeline contribution. What I care more about is that we're really dialed in around our segmentation and our ICPs, so all functions grow and fulfill demand at the most effective way possible. So a couple of highlights there, and certainly there's some more to share as we get deeper into the discussion today, right?