Building a World-Class Demand Center

Creating a world-class demand center is not easy nor hard but it take sometime to be structured, hire the best talents to serve in various components of marketing automation, identify what work for the sales and marketing organization, lead process and management, unified the processes and technologies and tools, governance, demand center of excellence, establish best practices and alignment with both sales and marketing's on various areas like lead management, expectation and SLA. 

Many different organizations have different demand center structure. Some just provide campaign support with marketing automation tool and campaign strategy and consultation to the marketing stakeholder. Others will try to own the entire end to end marketing resource management (MRM) where it provides the software infrastructure to support marketing operations management (MOM). Marketing operations management is the alignment of people, process and technology to support marketing activities and improve marketing effectiveness. (from Wikipedia)

Creating a demand center provides a central or regional hub of shared marketing services, infrastructure and process that enables organizations to efficiently bring programs to market by leveraging key corporate assets and best practices.
(from SiriusDecisions)

To establish your type of demand center that will work for you as a Marketing Demand Center leader and the Marketing organization, you need to look at various type of roles available.

To have a sense of what kind of marketing roles that you may want to structure up the Demand Center team, a very good example of common marketing roles can be seen from the Oracle community site - Topliners - Definitions of Common Marketing Roles. The roles and characteristics clearly summarizes the kind of marketing roles that could possibly be setup as the ideal global and regional demand center. A quick look below at the different types of marketing roles available in today's world.

1. Marketing Automation Manager 
2. Marketing Technologist 
3. Marketing Operations / Outsource Partner Agency
4. Marketing Data Analyst 
5. Email Marketing Manager 
6. Marketing Communications Manager
7. Affiliate/Channel Marketing Manager
8. Product Marketing Manager
9. Content Marketing Manager
10. Event Manager
11. Brand Manager
12. Loyalty/CRM Manager
13. Field Marketing
14. Marketing Specialist
15. Campaign or Program Manager
16. Digital or Acquisition Marketing Manager
17. Social Media Marketing Manager

Next will be the processes, technologies and tools that will help to run the demand center more effectively and efficiently, as well as to the Marketing organization. Processes will cover areas like budget and cost, campaigns, leads, reporting,  communications, integrations, etc. Technologies and tools will be also be evaluated to determine the best tech solution for marketing operations.

Remember, no matter what kind of setup you have to establish a demand center, plan it out and think about who are your stakeholders and how can your team aligned to the stakeholders, what do you need to provide to support processes, technologies and tools.

Think about whether you are creating a world-class demand center or just a decent demand center. It make lots of differences.

You may want to check out SiriusDecisions' Introducing the SiriusDecisions Demand Center Engagement Model (login or registration may required).

What kind of marketing demand center that you are experiencing or setting up now?