Demand generation had grown into a patchwork of country teams, each running its own agencies, content and campaign calendars across a complex catalogue of industrial equipment and parts. Agency rosters had multiplied without anyone owning the total, the same product stories were rebuilt market by market, and cost per qualified lead varied so widely that procurement could not say what good looked like.
VA collapsed the fragmented country arrangements into a lean global-regional panel with a lead demand and content partner on a single scope, tied a meaningful share of fees to qualified-lead contribution, and built a shared content engine for reuse — so cost per qualified lead falls and sales trusts the leads.
Head of Marketing, Head of Demand Generation, Head of Marketing Procurement
The strategic problem
Demand generation had grown into a patchwork of country teams, each running its own agencies, content and campaign calendars across a complex catalogue of industrial equipment and parts. Agency rosters had multiplied without anyone owning the total, the same product stories were rebuilt market by market, and cost per qualified lead varied so widely that procurement could not say what good looked like. Marketing reported activity volumes; sales judged the leads as thin, and finance saw rising spend with no defensible link to pipeline.
Diagnose & Design
VA ran a spend mapping and cost baseline analysis of demand-generation investment across markets, separating agency fees, content production, technology and working media so the true cost per qualified lead could be compared like for like. A marketing and production ecosystem audit mapped the fragmented agency roster, content workflows and overlapping tools, exposing where the same asset was paid for several times over. Gap and maturity assessment and market benchmarking set what best-in-class industrial demand generation should cost at this catalogue scale, and governance design — RACI, a lead and pipeline KPI framework, scorecards — fixed the structure tying spend to lead quality, with a transformation roadmap sequencing the consolidation country by country.
Ecosystem & Remuneration
VA designed a consolidated demand-generation partner ecosystem: roster rationalisation and consolidation collapsed the fragmented country arrangements into a lean global-regional panel, and a managed selection appointed a lead demand and content partner against a single defined scope. Vendor scouting and shortlisting from the VA 5,000+ supplier database identified specialists able to handle a long, technical industrial portfolio. Remuneration model design tied a meaningful share of fees to qualified-lead contribution rather than output, and fee benchmarking and validation confirmed competitive rates across the consolidated roster; scoping and SOW design formalised a shared content engine built for reuse across products and markets.
Rollout & relationship management
Contracting and onboarding formalised the consolidated roster with agreements specifying content-reuse obligations, lead-quality performance clauses and a shared measurement standard, so cost per qualified lead became a contractual commitment rather than an internal hope. Handover, rollout and commitment tracking managed the country-by-country migration, retiring local agencies in sequence and confirming each team had adopted the shared content engine before its legacy contracts lapsed. AURA/Planner (the workflow planning tool) back-planned the rollout to two milestones — shared content engine launch and lead-linked measurement go-live — while relationship management kept marketing, sales and procurement aligned on the lead-quality definition.
Execution Oversight
VA applied briefing and estimate review to content briefs and campaign estimates at intake, ensuring every activation was scoped against the shared content engine before any bespoke production was authorised. Production cost validation and budget control tracked cost per qualified lead by market against the baseline, flagging deviation and stopping country teams from quietly reverting to independent production. Bid governance kept competitive tension across the demand-gen technology and data stack, and a final reconciliation closed each campaign against committed lead-quality targets.
Performance Measurement
With the roster consolidated, demand generation was finally measured on the leads it produced, not the activity it ran. KPIs and scorecards from governance design — cost per qualified lead, MQL-to-SQL conversion, content-reuse rate, marketing-sourced pipeline — were tracked via partner performance evaluation on a 90/180/360 appraisal cadence, with cost saving and cost avoidance reported separately. Outcomes: a 19% reduction in demand-generation cost, 11% cost avoidance from content reused across the catalogue, and a 34% lower cost per qualified lead [illustrative, to be confirmed] (today closure reports; full performance measurement on the roadmap).
Why VA
In industrial B2B, marketing earns its budget one qualified lead at a time. VA consolidates the agencies, builds the shared content engine and ties spend to lead quality, so cost per qualified lead falls and sales finally trusts what marketing sends across.
Common questions
What is a lead-linked demand-generation operating model?
A consolidated global-regional panel on a single defined scope with a shared content engine for reuse and a meaningful share of fees tied to qualified-lead contribution — replacing country-by-country agencies, content and calendars with no shared ownership.
How do you make demand-gen cost per lead comparable?
By consolidating the roster onto one scope and rate card and measuring cost per qualified lead and MQL-to-SQL conversion across markets — so procurement can finally say what good looks like and thin-lead complaints are addressed at source.
How does content reuse cut cost in a technical catalogue?
A shared content engine builds product stories once and adapts them across markets rather than rebuilding them, and content-reuse rate and marketing-sourced pipeline are tracked on a 90/180/360 cadence — so cost falls as reuse rises.