Demand Generation Implementation Survey: Half of Users Deploy Basic Features in One Week

Summary: a small survey of demand generation users shows that more than half deployed basic demand generation features within one week, and about 75% within one month. More complicated features take longer, but in general, 80% of the features ever deployed are in place by the end of two months. This suggests that marketers are quickly gaining value from their systems, but also highlights the need for continued training to be sure they take advantage of all system capabilities.

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Yesterday’s post described the responders to my online survey on demand generation implementation. Today we get to the main event: what people actually do.

Table 1 shows the actual responses, with the items ordered by % used (that is, how many respondents ultimately deployed a given function).

table 1
How soon after starting implementation did you first do...
first done:	first week	first month	second month	third month	later	never	total	% used
outbound email campaign	22	8	5	1	0	0	36	1.00
campaign response reporting	12	15	3	2	4	0	36	1.00
lead transfer to CRM	18	5	8	0	2	2	35	0.94
CRM integration / synchronization	23	4	2	1	3	3	36	0.92
landing page	19	9	2	0	2	4	36	0.89
lead scoring	12	7	3	0	10	4	36	.89
multi-step lead nurturing campaign	8	10	7	2	5	4	36	0.89
Web site analytics	14	7	6	2	2	4	35	0.89
Webinar campaign	5	13	5	1	6	5	35	0.86
campaign ROI reporting	7	11	3	0	8	6	35	0.83
data cleansing process	10	7	1	3	7	8	36	0.78
pay per click campaign reporting	9	5	1	2	6	12	35	0.66
Web page survey	3	6	5	1	6	15	36	0.58
email survey	2	2	6	1	7	16	34	0.53
combined	164	109	57	16	68	83	497	0.83

Looking at the table, we see:

- virtually everyone (more than 90%) does outbound email, campaign reponse reporting, lead transfer to CRM, and CRM integration. No surprises there.

- Just slightly fewer (80-90%) do landing pages, lead scoring, multi-step lead nurturing, Web site analytics, Webinars and campaign ROI reporting. I’m a bit surprised to see Webinars ranking so highly, given that support for them is rather limited in many demand generation systems. But they’re certainly a popular marketing tool, so I guess people will run them through their demand generation system regardless. The high utilization of other relatively advanced features is impressive (lead scoring, lead nurturing and ROI reporting), although perhaps to be taken with a grain of salt.

- Other features are less widely employed (53-78%), including data cleansing, pay per click (PPC) campaign reporting, and Web and email surveys. The latter three make sense: it’s hard to get PPC costs into a demand generation system, so many people probably don’t bother. Surveys are simply not that common, bearing in mind that most data is gathered through forms on landing pages. On the other hand, the relatively low utilization of data cleansing is a bit scary because I strongly suspect nearly everyone needs it. This may reflect the fairly limited data cleansing tools in most demand generation products.

So far so good. But the main purpose of the survey was to understand when and how quickly the different functions get deployed, to get a more nuanced view of the implementation process – and, in particular, see what marketers can realistically expect to accomplish in the first week.

Table 2 addresses this by calculating the cumulative fraction of responders who had deployed each function by each milestone (one week after implementation, one month, two months, etc.). The calculation excludes people who never deploy a given function, since we’re trying to understand how quickly the people who use a function deploy it.

table 2
cumulative deployment rate (base: ever deployed)
cumulative %	first week	first month	second month	third month	later	% used
landing page	0.59	0.88	0.94	0.94	1.00	0.89
outbound email campaign	0.61	0.83	0.97	1.00	1.00	1.00
CRM integration / synchronization	0.70	0.82	0.88	0.91	1.00	0.92
campaign response reporting	0.33	0.75	0.83	0.89	1.00	1.00
lead transfer to CRM	0.55	0.70	0.94	0.94	1.00	0.94
Web site analytics	0.45	0.68	0.87	0.94	1.00	0.89
multi-step lead nurturing campaign	0.25	0.56	0.78	0.84	1.00	0.89
Webinar campaign	0.17	0.60	0.77	0.80	1.00	0.86
data cleansing process	0.36	0.61	0.64	0.75	1.00	0.78
pay per click campaign reporting	0.39	0.61	0.65	0.74	1.00	0.66
campaign ROI reporting	0.24	0.62	0.72	0.72	1.00	0.83
Web page survey	0.14	0.43	0.67	0.71	1.00	0.58
lead scoring	0.38	0.59	0.69	0.69	1.00	0.89
email survey	0.11	0.22	0.56	0.61	1.00	0.53
combined	0.40	0.66	0.80	0.84	1.00	0.83

I’ve arbitrarily chosen to highlight when each function exceeds 75% utilization. This shows the relative deployment speed and presents a very interesting pattern:

- the basic demand generation activities needed for a simple email campaign (outbound email, landing pages, CRM integration and response reporting) are almost fully deployed in the first month . In fact, about half the users deploy them in the first week.

- Lead transfer to CRM doesn’t quite make the one month cut-off, but it’s also deployed by half the people in the first week, and almost everyone by the second month. Clearly moving leads to sales to a core demand generation function. The somewhat slower deployment, if it’s anything more than noisy data, might reflect the added time needed to set up a lead transfer process in cooperation with sales. You’ll note that the preceding four items were totally under marketing’s control.

- Web site analytics shows a pattern like lead transfer: nearly half the people do it immediately, but then there is a lag until it reaches nearly 90% deployment in month two. This might also reflect the need for help from the an outside department (whoever runs the company Web site). It might also reflect relatively low urgency, since other Web analytics tools are often in place. But bear in mind that detailed activity tracking of individual Web site visitors (not provided by traditional Web analytics) requires the demand generation tracking code to be installed.

- Multi-step lead nurturing and Webinar campaigns are both fairly complex projects, so it makes sense that deployment of these builds slowly and steadily through the first few months. We can probably infer that most marketers start with something simpler and then add these as they become more proficient with the systems.

- Most of the remaining items (data cleansing, PPC reporting, Web and email surveys) are relatively low priority, as reflected in their % used scores, so relatively slow deployment makes sense. The two exceptions are campaign ROI reporting and lead scoring, which have high ultimate usage rates (83% and 89%) but take a long time to reach those levels. Both are relatively complicated and require cooperation from external departments: ROI reporting needs revenue from sales and approved formulas from finance; lead scoring needs coordination with sales management. I think it’s reasonable to conclude that the importance of these items pushes marketers to deploy them, but their complexity and the need for external cooperation slows the implementation.

Is there a trend in deployment speed over time? I did some analysis of results by implementation year, and the pace does seem to be picking up. But it's a tricky analysis since more recent implementations haven't had time to deploy the longer-lead functions. I'll revisit this if time permits and let you know if I find anything.

Table 3 is similar to table 2, except that the fractions are calculated including never-deployed cases. This gives a more realistic view of the actual pace of deployment for different features. The sequencing is pretty much the same as table 2, with the notable exceptions of lead scoring and campaign ROI ranking somewhat higher.

table 3
cumulative deployment rate (including never deployed)
cumulative %	first week	first month	second month	third month	later	never
outbound email campaign	0.61	0.83	0.97	1.00	1.00	-
landing page	0.53	0.78	0.83	0.83	0.89	0.11
CRM integration / synchronization	0.64	0.75	0.81	0.83	0.92	0.08
campaign response reporting	0.33	0.75	0.83	0.89	1.00	-
lead transfer to CRM	0.51	0.66	0.89	0.89	0.94	0.06
Web site analytics	0.40	0.60	0.77	0.83	0.89	0.11
multi-step lead nurturing campaign	0.22	0.50	0.69	0.75	0.89	0.11
lead scoring	0.33	0.53	0.61	0.61	0.89	0.14
Webinar campaign	0.14	0.51	0.66	0.69	0.86	0.11
campaign ROI reporting	0.20	0.51	0.60	0.60	0.83	0.17
data cleansing process	0.28	0.47	0.50	0.58	0.78	0.22
pay per click campaign reporting	0.26	0.40	0.43	0.49	0.66	0.34
Web page survey	0.08	0.25	0.39	0.42	0.58	0.42
email survey	0.06	0.12	0.29	0.32	0.53	0.47
	0.33	0.55	0.66	0.70	0.83	0.17

Summary

Pulling back from these details, what I find really impressive is how quickly in general the features are deployed: 40% of the features ever deployed are deployed in the first week; two-thirds are deployed in the first month, and 80% by the second month. An optimist might argue that this shows marketers are quickly gaining value from their systems. A pessimist could say this shows that marketers learn a few things quickly and then stop.

The slow-but-steady deployment of complex processes like ROI reporting and lead scoring suggests that neither view is quite accurate, since marketers do add some features over time. It’s also true that this survey didn’t capture some of the more esoteric demand generation applications that marketers might add later. So it does seem there is at least some continued development after the initial implementation.

Circling back to the original question of how much marketers can expect to accomplish during the first week, the short answer is: quite a bit, actually. But it still takes a couple of months to get fully up to speed, and there is certainly a need for continued training to ensure you get the full value of any demand generation system. The job is far from done the day the implementation team walks out the door.