🕵🏻‍♂️ From Lead Gen to Demand Gen 

Written by Adechina Odjo, Content Marketer @Trenches

Hey ,

Demand generation has become an industry buzzword that everyone talks about. Many marketers sing its praises, but very few of them show you how to do it in a way that brings in qualified leads.

Well, in today’s newsletter, that is the myth we are going to debunk. But not only that, we'll also draw on Cognism's experience to guide you through the steps you need to take to make a smooth transition from lead generation to demand generation.

Let’s get down to brass tacks.

The Art and Science of Lead Generation

To better understand the concept of lead generation, it makes sense to first define what a "lead" is.

A lead is a person or a company that shows interest in your products or services in some way. In other words, a prospect or a future client.

That said, lead generation is the process of attracting prospects to your company and reinforcing their interest through nurturing, with the ultimate goal of converting them first into customers and then into ambassadors for your brand.

Forms, blog posts, webinars, ebooks, and free trials, are all ways to generate leads.

Case in point. The heart of the lead gen model at Cognism is (or was) creating ebooks. They spend time working on an e-book, then add it to a landing page, and run ads. Afterward, they collect the data, move it into their CRM, and pass it on to sales. The sales team will then call the leads, follow up, and book meetings.

That is a typical lead gen approach.

This graph is a perfect illustration of how most B2B companies generate leads.

The Art and Science of Demand Generation

For many marketers out there, demand generation boils down to running ads on ungated content with occasional thought leadership SM posts, podcasts, and blog posts. While these activities should be added to your demand gen mix, they are by no means the complete demand strategy.

In fact, demand gen is more of a continuous, long-term activity designed to raise awareness and generate real demand for your product or service. Here are some fundamental objectives of demand generation:

• Increase the volume of inbound opportunities;

• Warm up target accounts to make it easier for salespeople to get in touch;

• Shorten the sales cycle and drastically increase your win rate.

Demand generation strategy and its key pillars

B2B demand gen is like a demand waterfall that has 3 pillars.

1. DEMAND ACTIVITIES

To develop a successful demand generation strategy, you first need to define how your customers are searching, learning, and buying.

Next is to identify demand activities that can create awareness and demand on a consistent basis. These include:

• interviewing target accounts on your podcast;

• content co-creation with your target accounts;

• niche-focused events to build awareness and trust;

• well-researched guest posts on blogs, newsletters, and communities where your target accounts have an active presence.

2. DISTRIBUTION

Unless you are a well-known brand that consistently produces top-notch content that your audience longs for, you need to have a proactive distribution plan. Under no circumstances should you limit your content distribution plan to ads alone.

Here are 3 content distribution tactics you can start using today.

1. Build your own audience that you can connect with directly and easily. No middleman.

Email newsletters, Whatsapp/Telegram channels, slack communities, and social media, are some of the core assets that allow you to connect with your audience directly and not depend on other platforms.

2. Borrowed audience

Find non-competitive companies that also sell to your audience and run co-marketing campaigns with them. This can be done through:

• Educational webinars

• Mentions and link exchange

• Featuring each other on podcasts, etc.

3. Involve your sales team in your content distribution plan

This tactic works like a charm because your sales team is already in contact with your target accounts. A posteriori, they know them (or at least, they should).

And by taking part in content distribution, your sales teams position themselves as trusted advisors, not as SDRs that no one generally wants to talk to.

3. DEMAND CAPTURING

For complex high ACV products with a long sales cycle, you capture demand at the stage where buyers show a significant engagement and interest in your product, but didn’t make any final decision.

Maybe they're doing some more research, evaluating your competitors, checking your use cases, or trying to figure out if your product is the right fit for their needs at this particular time.

So, instead of pushing them to book a demo call, set up an engagement threshold and track their engagement across your website and other channels. This will help you identify the accounts that demonstrate high interest in your product.

Here's a practical example of an engagement threshold:

• an account spent 30 minutes on your website reading a case study;

• then they checked your pricing page;

• afterward, they signed up for a product webinar;

• in total, they visited your website 5 times in the last 30 days.

With such an engagement threshold, you can proceed with warming them up and activating them using ABM tactics.

But while demand gen produces commendable results, it is by no means a foolproof strategy that you should start using without thinking. There are boxes to check in order to make sure that it is right for you at this stage of your growth.

Let’s look at some signals that will show you if it's really time for you to move to a demand-generation approach.

How do you know it is the best time to make the transition from lead gen to demand gen?

You know it's time to move on to demand gen when you're starting to generate a lot of leads with your lead gen program but are having a hard time converting them into opportunities and revenue.

Picture this: how would you feel in front of your CFO if you generated thousands of leads but booked few or no meetings? Let alone sales opportunities. Probably because there was never any intent in the first place. Or outright, because you have to wait for six months during which you are nurturing the lead.

Let’s take a real-life example, the case of Cognism.

For Cognism, the trigger came when they looked at the results they were getting from their lead gen model.

Fran went on to add: ‘’Splitting the funnel is what really opened our eyes to why this demand gen approach would be a better way to go. We basically split the funnel and we found that we needed 25 direct inbound demo requests to secure one deal. And for content leads, -leads from events or from a white paper or ebook, we needed 500 of those to generate or close one deal.”

Then they thought and realized that the best way would be to generate more inbound demo requests. For that, they started collecting leads and taking on the shift, testing demand generation.

How to switch from lead gen to demand gen?

To move from lead generation to demand generation, there is one important detail that many companies overlook: change management.

Change management involves your executives, marketing, and sales teams aligning on 5 important points.

1. Accept and address existing challenges

These include the following:

• Your product is unknown and no one wants to buy it. At least not at this time.

• Prospects do not understand the added value of your product or service. Your Unique Value Proposition is ambiguous to them

• Your sales teams don't understand the buyer's journey and/or the needs of the buyers.

The executive management, the sales, and the marketing teams should all accept these sad realities and objectively create programs to solve the issue on the ground.

2. Set realistic goals

Did your company raise money? Okay, that's great. But do not let that lead you to set unrealistic goals.

Take note of this, having a bigger budget doesn't mean generating more revenue. That’s even true when the challenges from the previous steps were not solved and your company lacks proven marketing frameworks.

3. Demand generation campaigns should not be evaluated on leads alone

With demand gen, you'll have a variety of campaigns whose primary objective is to educate and raise awareness among your target buyers. Not necessarily to generate leads.

As a result, demand generation campaigns should have their own set of key metrics that are closely tied to your company's revenue.

4. Demand generation operations rather than one-off campaigns

Demand generation is a long-term strategy, not a one-time activity to generate quick revenue. Therefore, you need to have a complete timeline and a comprehensive list of operations and activities to conduct.

5. Time, dedication, and patience are the keys to success

Far too many B2B companies give up too soon simply because they did not generate sales opportunities off the bat. They feel that demand generation is a burden and go back to the lead generation strategies they've been applying for years.

Sure, demand gen doesn't bring in revenue quickly, but it does have a compounding effect in the long run:

• reinforcing or building your company's brand,

• focusing on positioning,

• and building awareness in your target market.

But the truth is, transitioning from lead gen to demand gen isn’t all fun. Let's see some difficulties Cognism encountered during their transition process.

The bottlenecks faced during the shift

The switch from lead gen to demand gen at Cognism didn't happen overnight. They ran a lead gen and demand gen model in conjunction with each other for 9 months before they made the full switch.

Generating leads used to be the comfort blanket of Cognism. Their marketing team was used to delivering hundreds of leads and the sales team was used to seeing those leads coming through the CRM.

But when you switch to a demand generation approach, you don't get loads of inbound leads overnight. At least not like you used to. It does take time.

So, the main problem they faced was getting the buy-in of the sales team at first. It was not easy to find the right approach to educate them about the change. The lack of patience was obvious and rightly so.

Why?

They were used to receiving a large number of leads which would certainly decrease drastically after the transition.

So, you need to be patient and make sure that you're really communicating internally. Let them know you’re better off focusing on quality instead of quantity.

Ask for a small test budget (in the case of Cognism it was 2% of their monthly marketing budget). Run the test for 3-4 months. The more success you get, the more buy-in you will get. It is just like a show-and-tell exercise.

BEST SHARES FROM THE TRENCHES COMMUNITY

• How we get marketing, sales, and customer success on the same page? (Read here)

• How to create a demand generation calendar (Read here)

• ICP-driven sales and marketing process: the complete workflow - based on hours of hot internal debate (Read here)

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina D. ODJO