There are sports coaches, life coaches, career coaches and other professionals who offer advice, encouragement and expertise from the sidelines. Jay Hidalgo, Founder and former CRO at ANNUITAS saw a need for a demand generation coach, so he recently started The Barzel Group, where he created Demand Gen Coach.
“Over the past few years, I just kept seeing the conversation turning to the fact that small and mid-sized companies need help with demand generation but didn’t necessarily want or need a consultant to do the work for them,” Hidalgo said in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “Typically, those companies that need a demand gen coach are smaller marketing departments — say maybe four to six people. They recognize that they don’t have the resources like larger companies, but they intuitively know that they need to make a change. They need someone to train them, not just do the job for them. That’s where someone my role as a demand generation coach can help.”
Why not hire a consultant? Hidalgo said that consultants are the right choice in many situations, but they can be more expensive than a coach and may not provide ongoing guidance. “Consultants are hired to solve problems and deliver solutions,” Hidalgo said. “Just as in sports, a coach doesn’t actually “carry the ball”. Instead, they instruct, provide expertise, encourage and ensure the team has the tools they need to win.”
Hidalgo said the Demand Gen Coach methodology is one of support and instruction, comparing the approach to the proverb, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day; but if you teach him how to fish he eats for a lifetime.”
A Three-Prong Strategy To Coaching
Demand Gen Coach uses a three-phase tactic to help marketers develop their demand generation strategy and process, Hidalgo explained.
In phase 1 —identification and needs assessment — the goal of this assessment is to understand the key demand generation gaps or pain points the organization is facing to develop a customized coaching and training plan.
Phase 2 is a one- to two-day workshop designed for each client. This session focuses on best practices and real-life scenarios to develop demand generation action plans and strategies.
Phase 3 involves ongoing coaching, which includes regular check-in meetings, as well as ad-hoc sessions. “Each session is designed to further instruct, train, review progress, and make sure demand generation goals are being met,” Hidalgo said. “In many consulting scenarios, the next time you hear from the consultant is when it is time to work on the next project. In a coaching role, we provide ongoing interaction.”
“A demand coach can help provide a framework for implementing a demand gen strategy,” said Mark Johnson, Senior Marketing Manager at National Heritage Academies, a company that builds and manages no-cost public charter schools.
“We had a lot of ideas, but one of the biggest challenges we had was turning all of our ideas into action,” Johnson said. “We recognized that we needed someone to train us. Unlike a consultant, we needed someone to give us input, but not necessarily do the work for us.”
A demand coach can also bring an outside perspective to help facilitate interactions between various departments, according to Raeanne M. Huskey, VP of Marketing Services for USA Financial, a financial services firm. “Having a demand gen coach was instrumental in getting the marketing and sales departments together for a conversation around lead scoring, for example.”
“A demand coach is a partner, which is different from the role of a consultant,” Huskey noted, “A consultant will tell you that you’re doing it all wrong, and we’ll do it for you. With a demand gen coach, it is more of a conversation about where the business is currently, where do you want it to go and how do we get there.”
Huskey said a demand coach’s ongoing support and guidance is beneficial. “If we find small things along the way or if we hit a bump in the road that we didn’t anticipate, the demand coach was there.”
