Demand Generation, What is it?

Not enough demand for Your products & services out there? Get a fix. Uncover the Demand generation profession, strategy & tactics. Key word? Growth

Note: Disclaimer at the very bottom of this text.

Demand Generation (a.k.a. DemGen). What is it? If you work for a US-based IT firm, the concept of demand generation is likely familiar to you. Most companies, though, are not familiar with modern demand generation, even though they could benefit from it. Therefore, this text is to highlight some findings that can help to both create and increase demand for your products and services.

Naturally, this post does not aim to reveal the entire “holy truth” and therefore the call-to-action for you is to participate! Please help all readers by adding your own DemGen related views & comments below.

[Since earlier feedback on my LinkedIn Pulse blog texts has been to keep my posts shorter, I have decided to shorten this post by providing a LINK to more detailed views about this topic including Demand generation salaries, industries, company sizes and more...]

But for those of you preferring the shorter version, what is DemGen? Is it not the idea of generation demand itself, a bit odd? It assumes that any company (we, you) can impact and influence the demand for your products or services…that the “demand” somehow could be created out of the blue, from nowhere, totally from scratch? What is the reason behind such concept?

Was there NOT enough demand organically? More importantly, if there is no natural demand for your firm and its products or services, why bother trying?

 One of the reasons that demand generation concepts exist, I imagine, is that companies want to avoid costly, and sometimes slow and cumbersome tender bid processes (Request-For-Information; RFI & Request-For-Proposal; RFP). By creating the business cases where the need, pain and solutions are pre-defined together with the customer, companies may alternatively position themselves better. Influencing coming RFI & RFP stages to their favor, or skip those entirely, as being already the most suitable choice in a customer selection process.

 Second thought…perhaps the existence of DemGen is a result of the marketing “noise” out there and the “Red Ocean” of competition. If there are too many players and your firm goes unnoticed, Demand generation orchestration can help to differentiate your offerings in a very practical way. The idea is to be seen in the right manner in front of the right customers with the right need, who are thus receptive to help and ready to invest to get it.

 Thirdly, Demgen can be seen as a pure adtech gig, combining advertisement technology and marketing technology (adtech+martech = madtech?) stack to impact customer journeys based on circumstances. Is weather forecast saying it will rain outside? Maybe you buy adwords and online visibility that has direct mark towards your store demand. That is B2C to me, how to make it work for industrial B2B products. How do You know that DemGen works?

 Who leads Demand generation?

But in general, is Demgen not marketing’s job? Or PR’s? Good questions. Is it about awareness creation at the top of the funnel (#Tofu)? That belongs clearly to marketing and public relations area. Is it bottom of the funnel activity, #Bofu? No! Sales leaders should take care of conversion grade. Middle of the funnel then? Where does DemGen fit in organizationally? Or does it embrace it all? Is it operations and analytics? Another source of inbound or outbound activity? Or is it about governance and structure to bring marketing and sales together into a seamless collaboration? And what does customer success have to do with it, or is it out-of-scope?

 Which role performs what sort of marketing, sales & PR activities, varies within companies and their business units. People have formal titles and organizational structures, and yet in reality very few people do everything by the book. Formal responsibilities might be clear, yet actual reality overlaps. Sound familiar? For example, Demand generation can be external activities or about internal control. It depends on your company culture and way of seeing it. Ideally DemGen should focus on both, without forgetting to also integrate customer advocacy!

 According to a sales and marketing research firm that specializes in DemGen, Sirius Decisions, Demand Generation links to “shifting buyer behaviors, new technologies, new approaches and urgent business needs…Lead acquisition and qualification have become …an increasingly critical function for many organizations, others have struggled to achieve a systematic, repeatable and measurable demand engine that makes sales more productive” LINK: Demgen is systematic & measurable. Ok? But are we any smarter yet?

 One of their smaller competitors, a firm called “Intelligent Demand” (LINK ), wrote the following about DemGen and how much a DemGen function can bring to company. For example…

?           16% higher campaign response and conversion rates

?           33% increase in close rate

?           33% increase in marketing ROI

?           49% increase in year-over-year revenue

?           50% decrease in time to execute campaigns

?           85% decrease in cost per lead

?           150% increase in qualified leads

 That table has very “sales & marketing campaign results” view, does it not? How about strategy execution and customer inclusion, engagement and modified adaptive approach to audiences in their respective markets?

 Let’s assume your product or service is brand new. Nobody who knows about it and you must quickly develop a go-to-market (GTM) strategy to be executed, since management wants sales up and fast. What are you going to do to awake that demand from your markets? And how do you prove which actions have the most impact? You might google around and find firms who have written about it.

Firm mentioned above, Intelligent Demand, provides a list of DemGen tactics including: Lead Capture: The Driver of Effective Nurturing, Permission Marketing, Data, Segmentation and Measurement, Synchronizing with the Buying Processes, Improved Lead Management, Multichannel Campaigns, Marketing and Sales Alignment, Revenue Funnel Visibility and optimization. You got the picture. Exhausting? Many of these sound overlapping to me!

 If you are a tiny startup, you might want to embrace the sometimes slightly controversial growth hacking techniques. Here is a hands-on beginners guide (link: ). But if you are a serious established company, despite digitalization hype, hacking might not be the right word to mention in the Boardroom? What do you do then?

 Would you segment and analyze the market for the most promising customers who should have need for your offering? What would the next step be? To create sales and marketing campaigns (aligned if possible) towards these selected customers? Who can guarantee that it works?

 Demand generation is not just about writing content (so called thought leadership) and publishing it at social channels. Or even worse, DemGen is not about wishing for the best with spray and pray tactics that may lead to SPAM push communications. It is the very opposite! SPAM will kill all the real demand. 

 Just think of this in the context of a nightclub. Who wants to hang around with the tiresome, stubborn pusher?

And with regards to media exposure and social media business perspectives, are you not tired of seeing forms saying that their “free” social exposure gave them XXX Million USD worth of visibility and awareness?

 It sounds impressive, but what was the ROI? Can you measure it? Can you prove that all those likes lead to sales too? That was not the point, you say? Well, how many can afford creating goodwill and awareness without real tangible business results on the bottom-line?

 A/B testing, growth hacking....quite far from Entreprise standard DemGen?

Famous Growth Hacker Noah Kagan, from Sumo, stopped Instagram efforts (LINK ) and the reasons were clear. Have a quick look. He had a really inspiring channel success analysis there, how and when to cut fat out of your activities! Briefly: If it doesn’t convert, why do you do it? Can you afford to spread your resources thin to be a little bit (but not enough) present everywhere? For some firms reality might be that. But you want to be smarter, don’t you? DemGen measures your efforts and helps you to re-focus your doing to bring higher growth in. Work smarter, not harder. Or you can continue to waste your limited time. It is your choice.

 Demand generation units, or professionals (who might formally carry another titles, of course) should analyze the messages, see that those correspond to the target market, get actions to engage and educate the chosen audience about unique value and compelling reasons to act. It is not just solely in the hands of sales organization, nor in marketing.

 It is a combo, supercharged with analysis, continuous fine-tuning and refining of revenue generating activities. If DemGen activity doesn’t convert to sales, the “demand” from the customers was not strong enough. It indicates that you must further optimize the messaging, channels, activity types and collateral. Again, and again and again.

 Paradoxically DemGen is not about the firm. Not about product. Not about service, nor about you. It is about them (the Customers). Outbound spam will alienate and scare your prospects even further away. Demand generation orchestration requires deep understanding & dialogue with customers, so that the message comes from “inside”, grows at customer account when you are not present and “fits” in.

 No wonder that some Account based marketing (ABM) firms are mentioned in a DemGen context. But while ABM may provide laser-like focus, by definition it lacks coverage. DemGen units usually have a more holistic picture of wider audiences, too.

 How do you embrace customers then? Especially if your management just want you to push products and measures your SLAs or KPIs to hit quota? There cannot be any real customer advocacy or customer success (in terms of customers as external awareness creating brand ambassadors), if you do not take them into account. Short-sighted growth hacking to get traffic up will just create bad word-of-mouth, if you have no substance that resonates for real.

 One possible way to fix this is to analyze customer journey to see how and where you fit in with a positive twist. See this older yet still valid post that looks at Growth hacking vs. Customer Journey mapping posting here (LINK). What does this have to do with Demand generation? In fact it does - and it is quite relevant to base actions on customer journeys if you want to succeed!

How to build a business case for Demand Generation unit?

Who can do DemGen and how do firms do it? Is it too costly approach? What if you do not do it? What benefits do other companies get from using it? Is it worth the effort? When asked about DemGen, what does Google say, or Linkedin, Twitter,Quora & Glassdoor? More about those can be found behind this: LINK . Annoying with all these links? My excuses, hard to squeeze it all in here.

Meanwhile link clicking, ask yourself: Does your company’s growth curve correspond to what you are expected to deliver locally? And don’t ask what they can do for you; ask what you can do for your company to change it for the better. Are you ready to take ownership & responsibility?

If there is not enough demand, create it!

Are you not tired of living with wishful thinking and a weekly/monthly/quarter focus? What if you could proactively predict coming next fiscal Q3 & Q4? By analyzing proactively your activities and what nuances can be changed to get the impact right now, so far in advance? DemGen is meant for that. DemGen can provide sustainable growth to your business. Reach out to us, we are happy to help!

So having read the above post, now it is time to add your view of DemGen to the discussion. What does demand generation mean to you? Orchestration of above mentioned Tofu,Mofu & Bofu? Influencing and optimizing conversion rates? Looking forward to your comments!

Best DemGen regards,

Kari

P.s Disclaimer: The text above is not, and will not be, a representation of any copyright, trademark, legal unit, person, firm, or corporation. These are my own personal reflections, based on open and publicly available data. This post provides no direct or indirect endorsement for anyone or anything on purpose. Your possible interpretations of this text and any conclusions you draw from it, are entirely your own responsibility.

 P.p.s Since there was no product or service advertisement here to buy for a “quick fix” and you might have been expecting it, have a look at this (I promise) very last LINK !