Kevan Savage: Good day everyone, thank you for joining! Today’s topic is around demand generation, improving marketing pipeline contribution, touching on demand generation performance, investments and trends. My name is Kevan Savage. I’m a principal at Alexander Group. I run our marketing practice. I’m joined by my colleague Mike White, who is a principal in the firm as well and leads our MedTech practice.
Kevan Savage: Mike, thanks so much for joining us today.
Mike White: Thanks for having me, Kevan.
Kevan Savage: Well, for the audience, we’ve had a lot of interest from current and prospective clients around the topic of demand generation. We just came out of market about two weeks ago with some great trends, and I’m going to share those with the group here today. So, starting at the top, one of the things we wanted to do when we put this research into the market is we wanted to get participation from a healthier profile of companies. These are companies that are on track to meet their revenue plans that are growing at a rate of 6 to 10%. And the reason for that is to talk through the trends in demand generation as it relates to the incremental aspect of growing their business. So, a few things emerged from the study that we’re going to unpack and talk a little bit more to Mike about in terms of what’s happening in MedTech companies today. One is on the investment front – 53% year over year growth in demand generation investments. We define demand generation investments as internal personnel expenses. Those could be our digital marketing team members, SDRs, BDRs resources focused on demand generation activities in addition to external program and agency spend 53% year over year. Now, a few activities emerged in terms of where marketers are looking to put some of those investment allocations.
One is around AI, not the AI for everybody, for everything and everywhere AI specific for SEO, content development and aggregation. A lot of activity around knowledge hubs, education centers, patient portals where historically marketers haven’t been able to build that mid-funnel rich in depth content, leveraging AI to really drive a lot of that. Things along the lines of account-based marketing. More specifically, allocating demand generation investments to tiered-coverage models. Tier one gets these amount of dollars, tier two, three and four aligning with sales on the investment and the performance and productivity of those investments. And the third to share with the audience is around virtual roundtables and forums. Every single participant said, look, events, conferences, webinars. We have to keep doing those things. But we need to find better thought leadership, smaller audiences, better areas where we can target our campaigns around demand generation and get better conversions. So, a couple highlights there on the investment front. We also asked a series of questions around performance and structure. What percentage of the pipeline is influenced by marketing? That number – 41% is what was reported by the participants. And then we asked a series of questions around qualification rates and what everybody cares most about bottom of funnel revenue performance. So, qualification rates coming in at 36% improvement year-over-year. That’s the equivalent of a marketing qualified lead to a sales acceptance status. And 84% closed one revenue improvement year-over-year. So pretty strong, healthy profile of both investment and performance coming from these MedTech companies. So we’re excited to kind of share a bit more insight in terms of what’s happening in the industry.
Mike, what are you seeing? What are you hearing from your clients around demand generation?
Mike White: I think broadly, marketing in MedTech has advanced pretty significantly in the past few years. So, it’s trailed marketing investment has trailed other industries and in part because of the significant reliance over the years and the legacy models and medical device or MedTech on the physician-to-rep relationship. The rep is in there in certain product lines and dealing directly with patients and supporting patients. So there’s a difference in how much the role of how much the rep plays versus what other aspects such as marketing, do to drive revenue in the organization.
That shifted in the last couple of years, especially as we’ve gone through the pandemic and the amount that companies have found that productivity they can drive with marketing. And so we’re continuing to see investment. And that’s highlighted. That overarching point, I think, is highlighted in some of the points in the summary, with the 53% investing growth in the tiered programmatic approach that you have to demand generation.
Another interesting point in the study is that 41% of pipeline can be attributed to marketing. Now, that’s a surprising stat to a lot of marketing leaders and sales leaders in MedTech. I think that one of the big drivers of that is that companies are starting to shift away from last touch attribution modeling, and they’re becoming more advanced in linear attribution modeling or U or W-shaped attribution modeling. Those are advancements that we’ve only seen recently in leading companies taking out in front in that way around not only the investments in demand generation, but the tracking and attribution modeling that they do.
Kevan Savage: Those were insightful points, Mike. We’re certainly seeing the same in other industries outside of MedTech in terms of this research, but also in terms of kind of best practice from organizations.
So thank you very much, Mike, for sharing those insights around MedTech companies. Thank you very much for attending again. Again, this was an overview around our recent Alexander Group demand generation performance and Investment Research Improving Marketing Pipeline Contribution. To learn more, visit Alexander Group.com.
