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10 Steps to a Successful Demand Generation Programme

“A memory is what’s left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.”

Edward de Bono.

Do your sales people spend most of their time trying to sell to those prospects they believe are ready to buy while largely neglecting the rest? If so, they can be forgiven.  With challenging sales targets and a recession into the bargain, the temptation to cherry pick one’s leads is very hard to resist.

But resist one must. 

Because for every prospect who is aware of a need, there are typically another dozen who would readily buy, but simply don’t realise they have a problem, or if they do realise it they don’t feel able to justify the expense.

So how do you tap into this latent pool of potential customers? Simple: you educate them, and you do this by putting in place a demand generation programme.       

Making the shift from conventional sales to a sustained demand generation is one of the most important transformations a business can make to deal with the challenges of the modern marketplace.

That said, to succeed it demands a radical change of mindset, and it doesn’t always come easily. It requires working to a long-term vision, instead of focussing exclusively on short-term wins; it requires levels of knowledge and skills that are radically different from those applied to ‘features and benefits’ selling; it requires patience; and most of all it means keeping your nerve and having faith that it will work.      

Committing time and effort on activities that are unlikely to payback this quarter, or perhaps not even contribute to this year’s sales targets, are anathema to most sales people, and understandably so.  It runs counter to the existing metrics and incentives used by managers and their teams. 

The payback from demand generation activities is long term and can be difficult to measure. With conventional prequalification, leads are generated and graded according to their level of sales readiness. However, with demand generation, contacts are nurtured to sales readiness via a process of education. 

Lead nurturing involves replacing ‘budget, authority, timing and need’ as the criteria for which prospects to target with customer profiling based on industry, company size, etc.  This does not mean that you scrap prequalification (this remains necessary to feed your short-term sales pipeline); you are merely complementing prequalification with a parallel strategy. 

Compared to traditional selling, which targets people who are aware they have a problem, nurtured leads can take two or even three times as long to close.  In fact conversion rates can appear to fall off dramatically if measured in the short term. But fast forward six months and a very different picture will emerge.

In the first place it means agreeing on what demand is to be created, and how best to create it.  What fundamental need exists in the target market – business drivers, priorities, strategies, events, and so – that can be leveraged to generate demand for your product or service?   

To generate demand, a tangible problem must be seen to exist. It might be a desire to cut costs, save time, ensure compliance, improve security, etc, etc. Whatever the problem, the aim is to create awareness of it and to bring it to the fore; to demonstrate that the performance of the prospect’s business can be improved in a way which may not previously have occurred to them.  

Marketing and sales must work together very closely to nurture leads through the sales pipeline. By nurturing, I’m not talking about sending glossy brochures and special offers. Successful lead nurturing is all about providing useful, relevant and credible information to the buyer, e.g. whitepapers, case studies, webinars, etc. (See Norm’s B2B Lead Generation Blog # 46: “Savvy lead nurturing versus ‘foot in the door’ sales tactics”.)

10 Steps to a Successful Demand Generation Programme:

1. Drum up the support of others in generating demand – industry associations, journalists, experts, etc.
2. Highlight the problem as it relates to your target prospects’ industry using 3rd party validation to make it credible – e g: ‘Analysts Gartner put the cost of unlicensed software at up to 40% of budgets annually…
3. Demonstrate the results achieved by their competitors using your product – e g: ‘Using our quality control software, we helped Company XYZ bring its industry-leading products to market in just 12 weeks’.
4. Provide useful information, not just marketing puff: for example white papers, blog posts, case studies and analysts’ reports rather than glossy brochures and offers.
5. Link your solution with a campaign, or a cause that has existing momentum – something that the customer is likely to be passionate about, topical or fashionable.  Remember it’s always easier to rally people around a cause or principle than a product.
6. Organise educational events: talks, seminars and webinars, where customers and experts can talk about industry challenges and how they can be resolved.  But be certain to keep the focus firmly on providing useful information, as opposed to using the event to pitch your product.
7. Help prospects to reconsider their priorities by comparing them with their competitors – e g: ‘We asked IT managers about their priorities for 2011 and they told us that…’
8. Position yourself as a thought leader – for example, writing posts or articles, sponsoring research, or speaking at events.  Create buzz and draw attention to yourself by making the topic provocative.
9.  Always target C-level executives – these are inevitably the people who shape priorities allocate budgets and make decisions! 
10. Be patient. It’s vital to understand that effective demand generation is not an isolated activity, but a programme of activity. To be effective it must be maintained over time. 

And finally, with Christmas on the way, some seasonal food for thought…

“If you think of life as like a big pie, you can try to hold the whole pie and kill yourself trying to keep it, or you can slice it up and give some to the people around you, and you still have plenty left for yourself.”

Jay Leno

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading. As ever, your comments and ideas are very welcome. 

And always to a higher response!

Norman

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