Review
"The simplicity of his approach is admirable. ... It's both strategic enough to help you think through the issues and tactical enough to help you actually do sometihing meaningful to address them." ~ Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions
"Adam Needles' new book Balancing the Demand Equation closes the gap. ... Consider this a guidebook for how to play the game and win." ~ David Raab, Customer Experience Matrix
"Balancing the Demand Equation is about the changing B2B environment where relevancy and efficiency matter most, but marketers are currently unable to deliver." ~ Anand Thaker, Marketing Technology
"I've been a fan of Adam's for many years ... he's a master mechanic of modern marketing engines. ... For the mere price of a book, it's a bargain to tap into Adam's experienced and inspiring thinking on these topics." ~ Scott Brinker, Chief Marketing Technologist
"I never do book reviews, but it is interesting how many times I get asked: 'What should I be reading about B2B marketing?' That is why I am writing ... about ... Balancing the Demand Equation - it is worth passing along to everyone ... add [it] to your list." ~ Craig Rosenberg, The Funnelholic
From the Author
It's a brave new world for B2B demand generation.
Everywhere B2B marketers turn these days, they are exposed to new technologies for automating program execution and for closing the loop between tactical marketing activities and revenue outcomes. And they are being hit with a barrage of new buzzwords, such as content marketing, inbound marketing, lead management, lead scoring, marketing automation, marketing operations, nurturing and revenue performance - concepts that often are inconsistent with their legacy views of what B2B marketers can and should do for their organizations.
B2B marketers also are finding themselves more challenged than ever in their demand generation efforts. They are being pushed to improve alignment between marketing and sales teams, to tightly integrate marketing and sales processes and to become more transparent and accountable in these processes than ever before. They are at the same time contending with a seeming 'explosion' of new communication channels - including social media and mobile. Compounding these challenges, B2B marketers are struggling to engage (and are finding they are fundamentally out of touch with) 'Buyer 2.0' - i.e., the savvy, new B2B buyer in a Web 2.0 world.
How are B2B marketers responding to these challenges? Too often they are responding by going with 'what they know.' They are applying outdated mass-communication processes to new technologies and are winding up with worse results than ever before.
Thus the B2B demand generation 'formula' has never been more out of alignment. And at the core of the problem is a fundamental disconnect in B2B marketers' skill sets, with how they are positioned in their organizations and in their own understanding of the leadership role they must play in today's B2B demand chain.
Balancing the Demand Equation: The Elements of a Successful, Modern B2B Demand Generation Model was written to help B2B marketers overcome these challenges - to help them understand and succeed in the modern B2B demand generation environment.
The first half of the book delivers insights into the changing nature of Buyer 2.0 and the overall environment facing modern B2B demand generation - backed by data from a number of leading marketing researchers and thought leaders.
The second half of the book introduces a new framework for approaching B2B demand generation to help rationalize and re-orient our marketing activities. The core of this framework is finding the right balance between 1.) focusing on the buyer - i.e., becoming more one-to-one and bottoms-up in our buyer engagement - and 2.) adopting an operations mindset - i.e., shifting to a scalable, process-oriented mindset to deliver the volume of one-to-one buyer interactions and qualified leads required to succeed. As the book explains, 'balancing' these two elements is ultimately the key to succeeding with modern B2B demand generation. As with the first half of the book, this framework also is backed by comprehensive research, along with case studies from companies that are in the process of evolving their own B2B demand generation approaches.
