B2B buyers today expect seamless experiences across the buying journey. To deliver on heightened buyer expectations, demand generation-focused marketers need to orchestrate, align and coordinate people, processes, platforms, tools, perspectives, strategies and tactics. They need to build a high-performing modern marketing engine.

Yet, like any effort to build a complex system, building a modern marketing engine brings an array of challenges, including some that are easily anticipated and some that may fly under the radar. One of the hidden challenges that often goes unaddressed is when those involved—from the demand gen-focused marketers to their counterparts in customer insight, brand marketing, content marketing, marketing operations, sales operations and sales, as well as vendors and agency partners—lack a shared framework, a “mental model” to rally around and guide collaboration and investment.

In the absence of a deliberate and shared mental model, individual B2B marketers across disciplines may bring different mental models for how to operationalize their strategies and tactics and where to focus, which can lead to lower integration, inefficiencies and reduced effectiveness for the system as a whole. Put another way, there’s risk that people know their parts but miss the bigger picture.

Organizations need to establish and socialize a shared mental model to guide how multiple teams within the overall demand gen marketing function—including external providers such as agencies and technology vendors—will work together to achieve high performance.

Having a shared mental model improves team performance

Extensive research in social psychology about team performance reveals that those teams that develop and share a mental model for how to orchestrate the various parts of the overall system they operate within achieve higher levels of performance than those who do not.

It follows then that organizations seeking to maximize the value they capture from their investments in modern marketing initiatives, programs and supporting technologies should establish and mobilize around a shared mental model (a.k.a. framework) for how to integrate and orchestrate all the moving pieces of their demand gen engine.

Introducing a shared mental model for modern marketing

The Demand Engine 2.0 framework offers a new mental model for organizations to think about what strategies and tactics they need to have within their marketing system and the relationships between elements in that system. When leveraged across teams, the framework can improve collaboration, drive greater team alignment and increase positive outcomes.

In the diagram below, we share the high-level Demand Engine 2.0 framework. The framework identifies and situates the individual components in relationship to one another with the most foundational elements at the bottom of the framework and the target goals and ultimate desired outcome—revenue growth—at the top of the framework. Download Demand Engine 2.0: A modern marketing framework for driving revenue growth to dive deeper into the framework and its constituent parts.

Is your modern marketing engine firing on all cylinders?

High-performance modern marketing requires a new, shared mental model. Demand Engine 2.0 brings each of the modern marketing disciplines together into a coherent system and can help you orchestrate and tune your initiatives and programs so you’re maximizing positive outcomes.

If you’ve got questions about how to build your modern marketing engine and establish a shared framework within your organization, reach out and let’s chat.