Strengthen Your Demand Generation Capabilities with these Key Focus Areas - Part 1

Demand generation is one of the four Client Management Activities that drive the results of your organization. In this 2-part series, we’ll zoom into the three challenges faced by many organizations.

Demand generation is the lifeblood of a sales team and both insufficient and excess demand can have an adverse impact. There are distinct challenges presented when a business has both insufficient and excess demand.?

When demand falls short, sales teams find themselves with limited opportunities, which can result in counterproductive behaviors that hinder client relationships. Conversely, an abundance of opportunities necessitates a stringent qualification process to ensure resources are not wasted on low-win prospects.

How successful a sales team is at Demand Generation, will either constrain or propel business growth. Let’s take a closer look at these three Demand Generation challenges to better identify focus areas to improve on:

When demand falls short

When there are insufficient qualified leads, it leaves sales teams scrambling to make the most out of limited opportunities. The key to overcoming this hurdle is:

• Prospect Targeting: Focus on identifying and reaching out to the right prospects, ensuring all sales efforts are strategically aligned.
• Marketing-Sales Integration: Seamless collaboration between your marketing and sales, to align on targeting, messaging, and follow-up.

When executed well, your sales team will experience greater market awareness around your capabilities, strengthened pipeline, and improved win rates, leading to enhanced revenue performance, target achievement, and all-round better sales results.

Market Mapping

Understanding your market and identifying qualified leads is crucial for sustained sales success. To overcome this challenge:

• Market Research and Ideal Prospect Profile (IPP): Dive deep into market trends and create detailed IPPs to ensure you're targeting the right audience.
• Persona Mapping: Develop clear and concise buyer personas, aiding your sales team in understanding and addressing the specific needs of potential buyers.

Implementing these strategies will lead to a repeatable and manageable approach to lead generation, fostering reliable sales results and contributing to top-line growth and expansion of wallet and market share.

Managing an abundance of opportunities

Having a consistent, systematic qualifying process enables informed and objective business decisions that help determine how to allocate sales time and resources. The knock-on effect to other aspects of the sales system becomes self-evident. Ensure your sales team is equipped to effectively qualify opportunities, distinguishing high-win from low-win probability scenarios.?

Encourage practices that prioritize identifying speaking to client needs and issues. This will change the client’s perception of salespeople from product specialists to problem solvers, ultimately shifting the relationship to that of a strategic advisor or trusted partner.

In our next edition, we will look at two other sales challenges in Demand Generation: Cross-sell & Up-sell and Accessibility of 'issue' Owners. Stay tuned for more insights, backed by over two decades in the sales arena, as we continue our path toward sales excellence.