We are failing in demand gen efforts. Personalization at scale offers a solution.  

For too many organizations, personalization means using generic, or AI generated, content in ham-handed and increasingly ineffective ways. 

The work around building and executing sequences is often done in a silo, disconnected from any overarching GTM content strategy. Add to this that in many instances, demand gen teams are just ramping up the volume of outreach to try to make up for the declines in effectiveness. 

Here are some mind-blowing (-numbing) statics from The Bridge Group: 

Increasing turnover rates:

The median annual turnover for SDRs stands at a staggering 50%. 

Increase in outreach volume:

Median activities for an SDR, per day, is 104 and the average length of a sequence is 11+ touches.

Decline in Quality Conversations:

The average number of qualifying conversations per rep, per day, where at least one piece of qualifying or disqualifying information is learned, has fallen to 3.6—a 55% decline since 2014..

Stage 0 Passed Metrics:

The global median of Stage 0 Passed, stands at 11. 

I’m no math major, but an SDR, on average, is sending 2,080 touches a month to get 11 SQLs past stage 0. That’s a yield of 0.5%. And it’s more alarming when we consider that many, or most, of those SQLs will wash as they make their way through the funnel. 

The waste and expense is massive. If a six sigma expert looked at the demand generation outputs of most organizations, and the churn in the people who are tasked with executing it, he or she would be left stammering in disbelief. 

So what do we do? Personalization at scale means we focus on targeting specific value messages to specific buyers, rather than focusing on scaling uniform messaging.

In future posts, we’ll go deeper on some of these topics, but here are a few questions we can ask ourselves about what must change:

• Do we have a GTM content strategy? How are our inbound/outbound motions informed by it?
• How are we leveraging intent data to calibrate when, to whom, and with what content we reach out? How is intent data factored in as part of our approach to personalization? 
• How are we leveraging our own demand gen data to improve our operation?

At a time marked by high turnover rates, declines in quality conversations, and a tsunami of demand gen noise, personalization continues to be an imperative to breaking through the noise.  

The “yes and” to personalization is using data, both intent and your own results, to inform the “who, when, why, and with what.” When we get that right, your SDRs, and Six Sigma experts, will thank you.