The B2B buying behavior has changed.
Today’s B2B buyers rely mostly on web searches, vendor websites, social media, community sites, and peer recommendations to research for products and solutions. Rather than talking to your sales team to get info, they prefer to independently do their research before interacting with your sales team directly.
To win in this new environment, B2B marketing and sales organizations must adapt to support, guide, and enable buyers. The old sales and marketing playbooks no longer work.
In this post, I will share a modern demand generation framework to help you generate demand and fill your pipeline with qualified leads. This demand generation approach is based on my years of experience building and scaling demand generation programs at various tech startups I worked at, and learning from demand generation thought leaders such as Andrei Zinkevich and Chris Walker.
What is demand generation?
Demand generation is the practice of targeting prospects that fit your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), and consistently running a wide range of marketing campaigns and activities to educate and inform your target audience the following:
- The problems your product solves
- How their outcomes could be better if they use your product
- The unique approach, technology, or method you use to deliver the desired outcomes and results for your target audience
Demand generation involves multiple touch points, campaigns, content, and offers. It also requires a strong alignment between marketing and sales, and support from the management team to make it successful.
The goal of all this is to generate awareness, create demand, attract inbound leads that fit your ICP, move the leads through the sales funnel faster, and close deals faster.
B2B buying process has changed
The B2B buying process is becoming more complex in terms of the time, the channels, and the number of team members involved in the decision-making process. This is especially true in enterprise deals.
Gartner recently published a report based on their research of the B2B buying process. They interviewed over 800 B2B buyers, and shares the following insights and information:
- Sellers have little opportunity to influence customers’ decisions – B2B buyers today prefer to spend the bulk of their time researching a business problem or solution on their own, using mainly digital channels. Gartner found that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their time meeting with potential vendors while considering a solution. Instead, they spend much of their time learning online (27%), learning offline (18%), and building consensus across internal and partner stakeholders (22% and 11% respectively).
- The customer’s buying journey is hard – Purchasing a complex solution or software can involve six to 10 decision makers, and it can take a long time. Additionally, buyers are overwhelmed with the expanding set of options and solutions, including new and emerging solutions.
- B2B Buyers complete a set of jobs to make a purchase – Gartner identified six B2B buying “jobs” that customers must complete to their satisfaction in order to complete a purchase:
- Problem identification
- Solution exploration
- Requirements building
- Supplier selection
- Validation
- Consensus creation
- The buying journey is not linear – The B2B buying process is not linear and predictable. B2B buyers complete their “buying jobs” more or less simultaneously.
- Suppliers must enable buyers to complete buying jobs – To win, suppliers/vendors need to provide helpful information that helps b2b buyers complete their buying jobs to their satisfaction. So rather than gating your best content with a form, you should make your content accessible.
Today’s buyers prefer to do their own research and evaluate products and solutions by asking questions in communities, reading reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra, and talking to their peers.
In addition, research by Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reveals that only 5% of B2B buyers are in-market to buy right now. That means a whopping 95% of the prospects that you are trying to sell to are not ready to buy until months or years later.
And, even if you strongly believe you have built a revolutionary product, you can’t persuade a company to buy your product when they’re not yet in-market to buy.
Yet, a majority of B2B marketers today are still executing the old playbook by running lead generation campaigns and pushing leads through their sales funnel.
To market and sell in this new era, it’s important to focus your demand generation activities on the 95% of prospects that are not yet in market to buy. You should leverage all the relevant channels to distribute/share your messaging and content, build a relationship with your target audience, and help them successfully navigate their purchase process by providing valuable information and resources.
This helps to create “top of mind” for your company’s product and expertise among your target audience, and gives your company a better chance of being included on buyers’ list of top vendors to consider and evaluate when they are in-market to buy.
Create content to help buyers complete the buying jobs
The best way to generate demand is by sharing helpful content and information that address your buyers’ questions, concerns, and objections, and engaging with your potential buyers on channels and communities where they hang out. You should do this consistently through various channels (newsletters, YouTube, Linkedin, Quora, podcasts, webinars, events) and communities (Slack) where you can reach and engage with your target audience.
Gartner recommends that you create content that helps buyers complete their buying jobs, which again are:
- Problem identification (We have a problem and we need to do something about it) – The key here is identify the problems, pains, and triggering events (what happened to cause them to look for a solution) of your ideal buyers, and then create content related to these points.
- Solution exploration (What are the solutions out there to solve our problem?) – Here, you can create guides, case studies, or webinars to share about your company’s unique approach or technology that can solve effectively (lower cost, high performance, faster results, etc) the ideal buyers’ problems or issues. Also, you can discuss how it is different or better than competing solutions in the market.
- Requirements building (What exactly do we need the purchase to do?) – List and showcase your capabilities and features and the value or benefits they deliver on your website. You should also create product demo videos and product tours.
- Supplier selection (Does this do what we want it to do?)
- Validation (We think we know the right answer‚ but we need to be sure.)
- Consensus creation (We need to get everyone on board.)
It’s important that your content delivers value in terms of answering their specific questions and providing helpful and new information and insights. Additionally, you must find ways to include your unique perspective and discuss your unique approaches to solving buyers’ problems.
To come up with ideas for content, you can interview customers/partners/thought leaders, or listen in on sales calls.
To deliver value, it’s imperative to include subject matter experts in the content creation process, especially if your product is highly technical. Fluffy and low substance content will erode trust in your brand. You need to offer your unique perspective and insight.
Your content also needs to deliver a great user experience. If your content is full of texts and lacking any visuals or multimedia, you will quickly lose their attention. The content also needs to have elements of entertainment and memorability if you want to ensure that people remember your brand.
You can enhance the user experience by incorporating images, GIFS, videos, and graphics (show, don’t just tell), improving the formatting of the content (make it easier for people to skim and scan the content using shorter paragraphs, descriptive subheadings, bullets, shorter sentences, etc), and using conversational and engaging languages, humor, and storytelling elements.
In this day and age, most people have a very low attention span. As such, try to make your content concise , digestible, and entertaining (if possible).
Here are the types of content/offer you need to create in order to attract and nurture your target audience:
- Blog articles – Regularly publishing blog articles on narrow topics that contain new and interesting insight and information is an effective way to drive potential buyers to your website. Talk to your customers or members of your sales team and find out what are the questions customers have and the things they want to learn about. Try to focus more on creating articles with bottom of the funnel topics to drive people to want to explore your product.
- Guides or Ebooks – Guides and Ebooks are great for providing an in-depth discussion of a new technology or a new or innovative method of solving a problem that is relevant to your buyers. Of course, you can mention what role your company plays in delivering this new technology or new method.
- Checklists – Checklists work great as a lead generation asset since they’re actionable and easy to consume. Create a checklist that can help your target audience solve a certain problem or improve the way they do their job.
- Case studies or customer success stories are a fantastic way to build credibility for your products or services. Do whatever it takes to get your best customers to help you write a case study. The case study should tell a compelling story of your customer’s journey. First, it should describe the challenges/problems faced by your customer prior to using your solution. Next, the case study should describe what’s involved in the implementation of your solution, how long it took to implement, and how soon they began to realize the benefits. Finally, it should quantify how your solution has impacted your customer’s productivity, sales, revenue, cost savings, etc.
- Product landing pages with details on the capabilities of your products or services and the benefits customers gain by using your products or services.
- FAQs – FAQs are great to have at the bottom of your pricing page or product/solution page. Talk to members of your sales team to find out what are the common questions customers and prospects ask.
- Product demo videos or product tours that show how your product works to deliver the desired outcomes for different use cases.
- Webinars and podcasts work really well to nurture leads. This is something you should do on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Get an expert in your company or team up with a customer/partner/industry expert/influencer to do the webinar/podcast. Be sure to deliver lots of educational value, and talk about your unique method, key capabilities or features, and how they can best help solve the prospect’s problems or pain points. Keep it around 30-45 minutes.
How to promote your content to generate awareness and demand
Now that you’ve created the necessary content assets, the next step is to share and promote them to generate awareness and demand. You need to actively share content and engage with target audience on channels where they hang out.
Here are the different methods/channels you can use:
- Linkedin – Linkedin is the most effective channel for reaching B2B audiences. An effective way to distribute your content and engage with potential buyers and influencers is to get leaders and subject matter experts in your organization to be active on Linkedin. You should also use Linkedin ads to promote your content and solutions. Refer to your ideal customer profile worksheet and set up the targeting to include the relevant job titles, job functions, seniority, company sizes, skills, etc. Be sure to test different ad creatives. The key here is to share the meat of your content or messaging within the Linkedin platform, without asking users to click to an external site (Linkedin users prefer not to leave the platform). As such, a 30-45 second video works really well on Linkedin.
- Google Search – Google Search is a great channel for capturing demand. But you’d need to focus on the high-intent keywords in order to not waste your budget. Here are a few campaigns you should run on Google Search:
- Competitor takeout campaign – Target your competitors’ brands and send people to a landing page where you discuss how your product or solution is better or different
- A campaign targeting keywords related to your product category
- Campaigns targeting long tail keywords related to use cases or specific pains or problems that your product or solution is a good fit for
- YouTube – You can run YouTube video ads targeting viewers of competitors’ channels and targeting viewers watching videos on topics relevant to your product category.
- Online publications that publish content related to your industry – Reach out to their media/ad manager and see what programs they offer. Most offer banner ads, newsletter ads, sponsored posts, webinars, and content syndication. You can usually negotiate to do a trial for $2K – $5K. Some popular online publications that cater to IT/Tech audiences are: Techtarget.com, idgenterprise.com, stackoverflow.com
- Newsletter – Having your own newsletter in which you share quality and relevant content from your company as well as from 3rd party sites is a great way to nurture leads in your database. You may also consider sponsoring 3rd party newsletters if they have a large number of subscribers that fit your ICP.
- Quora – On Quora, you can find questions related to the problems or pains that are relevant to your solution, and provide a detailed answer.
- Community sites
- Podcasts – Reach out to podcast hosts in your space and ask to be a guest on their shows. You may also consider hosting your own podcast.
- Hosting private dinners and workshops
- Speaking at conferences and events
The idea here is to share your content and engage with your audience in all the places where your target audience hangs out. Once they are on your website, you can then retarget them with ads to promote your case studies (to build trust), demos, free consultations, or free trials.
You should also run on-going marketing activities (newsletters, webinars, workshops) so you can continue to nurture your buyers and keep them informed.
Depending on how complex your product is and how long the sales cycle is, you may need multiple touch points with your target audience before they decide to engage with someone from your company. If a particular campaign doesn’t generate meetings or opportunities right away, it doesn’t mean that the campaign is not effective. Each campaign is responsible for one touch point among the many touch points needed to build demand and influence a prospect to want to engage with your team.
The important thing to remember is that you are exposing your target audience to your best content and messaging. This helps to position your company as a key player in your space, and to make them aware of how your products or solutions help them, and what makes your products or solutions better than the alternatives.
This is how you stay on top of mind. This is how you help drive conversations about your product or service in the dark social (slack, email, private messages). This is how you create demand.
You can’t force someone to buy if they are not ready. But when the time is right for your buyers to make a purchasing decision, they are more likely to consider your company’s solution if you are consistently sharing with them valuable content and information.
Additional tips to maximize the performance of your demand generation campaigns
- Identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – Identifying your ICP first will help you focus your time and resources on generating demand from companies that are a good fit for your business. In addition, you’ll be able to create more effective messaging, content, and offers that resonate with your target audience. The ideal customer is the type of customer (based on size, industry, geo, revenue, tech stack, budget, pain points) that your company can have a sustainable and mutually beneficial relationship with. Take time to do customer research and get to know their pains, fears, desires, objections, and goals.
- Nail your messaging and positioning first – Messaging includes the key things you want to communicate to your target audience. It is critical that you nail your messaging and narrative first before investing in demand generation and sales activities. Your product marketing team would need to do some customer research and then create a messaging document that articulates your value proposition, your positioning, your key capabilities and benefits, what makes your product or solution different and better than the alternatives, etc. Make sure that your messaging is clear and easy to understand, relevant to your audience, and conveys value and unique differentiation.
- Optimize your website to improve user experience and conversion – Make sure your website looks professional, easy to navigate, and that it effectively conveys your capabilities, benefits, and value in a concise and digestible way. If your company sells software or SaaS products, you should create product demo videos to demonstrate how your product is used for the different use cases and the values it delivers. Additionally, make sure it is mobile friendly, and can delight your site visitors with a great experience.
Demand generation performance measurement
Ultimately, the success of your demand generation campaign is determined by the number of qualified meetings generated and the number of opportunities created/closed.
Additionally, demand generation takes time and commitment to yield results. Before you can capture demand for your products, you’d need to first invest in campaigns and activities to create demand.
To measure the performance of demand generation campaigns, Sales and Marketing should pay attention to these metrics:
- Are more and more prospects that fit your Ideal Customer Profile visiting your website?
- Number of Sales Qualified Leads – Your ability to consistently generate SQLs determines the success of your demand generation program.
- Number of meetings booked – The number of meetings booked metric is a good indicator of your ability to generate high quality leads for Sales.
- Number of opportunities generated – Ultimately, it comes down to opportunities. If you are executing your demand generation strategy well, you should see a lift in the number of opportunities created. However, if your sales team is not having much success with closing opportunities, then you might want to reevaluate your ICP and your messaging.
How to properly do attribution
If you’re using attribution software to determine where to invest your marketing budget, keep in mind that not everything can be attributed by using attribution software. Attribution software is only good at capturing the last touch and giving credit to the last touch event. In other words,
There are certain marketing activities and campaigns (speaking at events and podcasts, actively engaging on Linkedin and other communities) that attribution software can’t capture, but these activities can be highly effective at driving awareness and influencing your buyers. As such, you should allocate enough budget to these types of campaigns.
One thing that marketing teams do today to overcome the limitations of attribution software is to implement self reported attribution. You can do this by adding a “How did you hear about us?” free text field to your demo, free trial, or contact us form.
By analyzing the combined data from the attribution software with the self-reported attribution, you’ll have a more complete picture of the buyer behavior to help you
Remember that it usually takes multiple touches (4-10) before a prospect is ready to engage with your company directly. B2b buyers are not impulsive buyers. No one is ready to buy a $1K-$20K solution in their first visit or 2nd or third visit to your company’s website. But they might want to sign up for the demo or free trial on their 10th visit.
Today, most buyers prefer to learn, share, discuss, and research on their own on channels like webinars, events, podcasts, Linkedin, Google search, review sites, community first before they want to interact with a sales person from your organization.
If you are consistently running demand generation campaigns and activities to share valuable insights and information, you will eventually see a big increase in the number of demo requests or trials from prospects that fit your Ideal Customer Profile, which will generate more qualified meetings for Sales.
It’s important for Sales and Marketing to be in alignment on this goal and work closely together to create/close opportunities.
Questions?
I hope this blog post gives you a good starting point to guide you in developing your own demand generation program. Just know that demand generation efforts take time to bear fruit. But you must put in the effort and be creative to create content that educates, informs, entertains, and delights your audience. All of these activities will eventually drive demand for your company’s products or services.
There are lots of good resources on the web if you want a deeper dive. You may also drop me an email at NQPETER at gmail.com. I’m happy to answer any questions and share my experiences.