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8 Min
There has been a misconception that demand generation is solely about putting ads in the right spots, optimizing landing pages, and generating leads to throw over the fence to sales.
But when viewed through that lens, demand generation is bound to be ineffective.
Effective demand generation starts before the buying process even begins, before a prospect is even in a buying motion.
Effective demand generation continues beyond a prospect filling out a form and being routed to sales.
Effective demand generation is a broad, cross-functional discipline that requires contributions and deep alignment across the GTM team.
Here, we’ll walk through the different components of demand generation and how to approach them.
Creating demand is the first step in demand generation and is directly tied to prioritization.
Demand creation happens organically when a prospect recognizes they have a problem and a need to solve it.
You can’t force demand creation.
But you can deliberately create the conditions that foster “organic” demand creation.
Despite its name, demand creation in many organizations is not directly owned by the demand generation team.
Demand creation is driven by content. Content that sparks an idea in the prospect's mind that they need to change their status quo.
Demand creation doesn’t happen in a silo. It requires product, content, brand, growth, sales, and leadership to be successful.
To successfully create demand, you need to explicitly identify the following:
This should be a problem that a specific target persona cares a lot about.
What is the category that you position yourself into? Is it new, growing, or mature? What does the competition look like in your category? All of these factors will impact how you go about creating demand.
There are three types of awareness you need in order to effectively create demand.
Your prospect needs all three in order to move forward with purchasing your solution.
You should know your target customers inside and out which is where personas can come in handy.
Not the old demographic-based personas either. Personas should go deeper exploring:
Beyond your target buying personas, you should also be aware of the personas that make up the typical buying group.
The typical buying group size in B2B software is made up of 6-10 decision makers. Who is in that group will vary from one organization to the next. However, based on your market and solution, you should be able to know the most common players in the decision hierarchy.
Once you have a solid understanding of these foundational elements, the next step is to craft your point of view.
This is critical.
Your POV should consider:
Your POV should be evidence-based ideally with original research and should have an outsized emphasis on the pain of remaining with the status quo, while painting the picture of a better future.
Once you’ve crafted your POV and actually tested it with actual customers and prospects, your next task is to seed this POV in your market through education and effective distribution.
You need content that focuses on the problem and the impact of remaining with the status quo.
You need content that talks about how to go about solving that problem.
And you need content that shows your solution as the secret weapon.
Then you need to get this content in front of your prospects reliably, repeatedly, in channels that they live in and in ways that they will consume.
Your channel mix is extremely important and the reason why it is really important to understand your target personas sources of influence.
This mixture is going to be drastically different from one company to the next.
It’s important to remember that at the demand creation stage, your goal is not to sell your product. Your goal is to get your prospects to prioritize the problem you solve and seek to solve that problem the way that you solve it.
Once you’ve done that, your job is to capture that demand.
When people talk about demand gen or lead gen, most of the time they are talking about demand capture.
Demand capture is where people who are interested in your solution come into your CRM at a specific point of conversion.
One of the pitfalls of B2B marketing over the past decade has been the over-emphasis of demand capture channels as demand creation channels.
The first step for an effective demand capture strategy is to understand where you are capturing demand currently.
Most likely your demand capture channels include some mixture of the following:
Most marketing budgets are heavily tilted towards reaching prospects at these conversion points.
If you’ve done demand creation right and the prospects flowing into your demand capture channels are good fits for your solution, your focus for demand capture is two-fold:
Being in the right spots is dependent on your target market and personas. For some businesses, Paid Search with Google Ads is a very effective demand capture channel. For others, it maybe Partner.
While the role of demand capture channels has been overstated with regards to attribution, it is important to understand which channels are capturing the most demand, the cost per lead, and how that demand converts further down the funnel.
How you optimize a channel varies. However, your approach to optimization should be done systematically, with controlled experiments, and documentation detailing how the experiment was set up, the outcomes, and the learnings you can carry through.
Quality Experiment Design includes
Statistical significance is the goal for a quality A/B test, but in many cases you won’t have the traffic volume required to achieve it. That doesn’t mean that the data is invalid. Perfect is the enemy of good.
The demand you capture can come in a variety of different signals. These signals show different levels of intent.
In a lot of organizations, marketing involvement in demand generation stops at demand capture. Leads are lobbed over to sales and marketing believes their job is done. Organizations that do marketing right realize there is a third part to demand which is demand conversion.
Demand conversion is what takes place once a prospect has entered into your sales funnel. For B2B software this is often where the ball is dropped.
Failure to reach out to a prospect who requested a demo, poor systems for converting inbound demand, progressing non-fit prospects further into the sales pipeline are all places where organizations can find trouble.
The first step in the process is to ensure there is a smooth handoff from declared intent into the sales funnel. This should be done as quickly and efficiently as possible.
For a while, “speed-to-lead” was the default approach. There have been a lot of studies showing the impact of getting to a lead within 5 minutes. Even if you can get in that 5 minute window, there are still going to be leads who ghost.
Due to this, there has been a movement towards automated booking with Sales reps via a calendar link. This is the best way to improve conversions from demo request to meeting booked. The downside to this approach is that this could fill your AEs calendars with prospects that aren’t a fit for your service.
Which is why direct calendar booking should be paired with a way to filter out non-fit prospects. There are several tools that can help make this happen based on your size and target market.
April Dunford in her book Sales Pitch and Donald Miller of StoryBrand talk about the importance of being a guide for your prospects.
Similarly, in the Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, they found that the best sales experiences are the ones where the sales rep’s act like teachers helping the prospect understand their options, the tradeoffs, and overall how to make an informed purchase.
Your brand is not the hero. Your role is to help your prospects understand their choices and how to buy. To make them comfortable with making a decision because they understand the tradeoffs between what you offer and their other alternatives.
Making your prospect comfortable is very important. These purchase decisions can make or break a career for the person leading the decision.
Remember that the easiest, least risky decision is to do nothing. Which is why the demand creation work of emphasizing the pain of the status quo is vitally important and cannot be overlooked.
It’s easy to play the role of the guide during sales conversations. But you also need to be a guide outside of those direct 1:1 conversations.
Anyone in marketing or sales has heard the statistic that ~70% of a purchase decision is made prior to reaching out to sales. I think that is a broad generalization, the buying journey is so convoluted and there are so many factors at play that I don’t think it makes sense to ascribe a fixed number to it.
But the reality is a lot of the buying process happens outside of direct conversations. Your prospects want to collect as much information as they can in order to make an informed decision.
They’re going to get the information one way or another. From peers, from review sites, from thought leaders, from your competitors.
Or they can get it from you. From your website, your content, from your social media. And that should be your goal, to provide as much relevant information about making a purchase to those prospects as possible.
If they get it from you, you control the narrative, you can inflect your POV, you can guide the journey. When they get it from outside sources, your ability to guide and influence is diminished.
For a long time, conventional wisdom was to not directly discuss alternatives. Be it competitors or approaches.
Maybe that made sense prior to 2010. But now, not addressing alternatives in B2B SaaS is disingenuous and reduces your credibility.
Any responsible buying group is going to evaluate alternatives. Many organizations require a certain number of vendors on their shortlist to ensure that proper vetting is happening.
You need to have a narrative and POV for three primary sets of alternatives:
Direct Competitors - Here your work is to explain why your unique differentiator sets you apart and makes you the clear choice.
Category Alternatives - If you’re in a new category, your best bet is to dam demand from an adjacent category. Here your work is to explain why your category’s approach to solving the problem is the best option.
Do Nothing - The biggest alternative out there. Here your work is to emphasize why the pain of sticking with the status quo is greater than the pain of change.
Marketers can feel like they can’t impact the buyer’s journey once a prospect is in the sales pipeline. Sales reps can be wary (rightfully so) about people interfering with their opportunities in progress.
Where marketers can help without directly interfering is by getting in front of open opportunities with specific bottom of funnel content.
Any kind of social proof, case studies, testimonials, reviews, etc. are safe bets that can deliver trust signals to prospects in open opportunities. The more relevant to their business and desired use cases the better.
The other play for marketers to run at this point in the buying cycle, is specific content aimed at other members of the buying committee.
LinkedIn works great for this. Build content that tells an ROI story for the CFO. Or build an ad campaign specifically for folks in procurement. This is where developing buying group personas can be really effective.
Demand generation is more than just putting ads in front of your target market and hoping they convert.
Demand generation is about getting your prospects to understand why they need a product like yours to solve an important problem. Showing them that the way to solve their problem is with a solution that does what your product does.
Then you have to be able to convert those prospects into customers once they decide to change their status quo.
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