I recently received an email from someone with the title “Demand Generation Specialist“. This got me thinking – mostly about who dreams up these titles?

It dawned on me that maybe the term “Salesman” wasn’t cool anymore – but I soon realised that Demand Generation is a neat new buzz word in the lexicon of sales and marketing teams. Same work – different words.

The idea is to use all sorts of media to tell people about your products and services and get them to phone you!

Wow! Novel! Gotta try that – or wait? Isn’t this what marketing has been trying to do for years?

It seems as if everything is getting a coat of the coolness paint at the moment. Take the hype about Cloud computing. Cloud this and Cloud that. Not long ago we called these things SaaS (Software as a Service) which is how Striata provides a heap of our services. And before that it was ASP (Application Service Provider) and before that just ‘Outsourced’.

But back to demand generation…

The single most important touch point with an existing customer is their monthly bill. It has the ability to generate or prevent thousands of service calls to your call centre. But it also has the ability to generate thousands of clicks to your website.

As a demand generation tool – the old statement stuffer (now with a new coat of coolness and called “transpromo marketing“, when associated with eBilling) can act as the primary cross-sell and up-sell tool for both B2C and B2B businesses.

Electronic payment confirmations or notices are also prime real estate for personalized messages. Of course you have to get this real estate in front of your customers – no use if your green program isn’t actually driving customers to your billing site and as a result they never see another bill. A case study from an Austrian company showed 85% paper turn off but only 30% of clients were accessing their eBills each month!

The current eInvoicing automation programmes are killing off demand generation from transpromo marketing. No-one sees the actual bill anymore and hence the opportunity to market new products and services is lost. Billers are asking how they can replace this vital touch point.

Whilst we are all striving to reduce paper and increase efficiencies – we would do well to remember that all business starts with a customer wanting to buy our products and services.

Maybe “demand generation” isn’t such a bad term afterall…