How to launch a demand generation program at a B2B company with high ACV?

Demand generation is now a buzzword. Lots of marketers talk about it and share case studies. But many B2B companies still wonder how they can implement it, especially when they have a high ACV and long sales cycle.

In this article, we’ll show you how to launch a demand generation program at a B2B company that sells high ACV products.

Specifically, you’ll learn:

• The 6 key steps to launch and scale a demand generation program at a b2b company;
• How to use customer research to amplify your demand generation program;
• How to refine demand capture;
• How to operationalize and scale B2B demand gen?

Let’s dive into it.

What is demand generation?

Demand generation is a marketing tactic whose ultimate goal is to build brand awareness and accelerate business growth by creating and capturing demand for a specific product. 

It helps you stand out in competitive markets while educating your target audience on needs that they may not have seen, and on how your product can help them. 

In the next section, we’ll show you some practical steps you need to follow to launch a successful demand generation program at a b2b company that sells high ACV products.

6 key steps to launch and scale a demand generation program at a B2B company

Demand gen is not just a mix of organic and paid tactics. It’s a long process that starts with:

STAGE 1: Positioning

This first stage is a huge part of a demand gen strategy. 

Why?

Because at its core, demand generation is all about who your audience is: who you wish to be known by and what for.

Vladimir Blagojevic, co-founder @Full Funnel put it so well when he said “at the end of the day, demand generation is all about creating awareness and generating demand with people who need your product.”

But the thing with companies that sell high ACV products is that they don’t really need a large number of customers.

Yes, you read that right. They don’t need tons of clients. All they need are the right customers.

And that ultimately leads them to align with their sales and executive teams on their ideal customer profile ICP and the target segments they’re going after. That implies that their internal teams have to work hand in hand in order to identify where the bottleneck stands.

Team alignment — ring a bell?

Because after all, the end goal of demand gen is to generate demand that will lead to inbound opportunities and pipeline and sales.

Next, you have to figure out what your unique value proposition is for your target audience and what you want to be recognized for:

1. Do you help companies get better ROI?
2. Do you want to help them generate opportunities with for example 20% of their target accounts?

In a nutshell, it’s very important to create content that stands out, but to reach that level you need to have a unique point of view or a unique perspective in your industry.

That leads us to the second key step to launch demand generation at a b2b company with high ACV.

STAGE 2: Define key awareness and demand creation activities and channels

This stage consists of creating a plan, including the two following major parts:

First thing: Define the activities and the channels 

This is a twofold process. First, you need to be active on the channels where your customers are, and second, you need to organize and execute activities that capture their attention and interest.

You’ll also need to have a calendar of regular marketing activities (it might be webinars, workshops, boot camps, B2B marketing summits that you do daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly) where you can communicate and educate your buyers. 

But most importantly, make sure your audience does not forget about you by sharing content on a regular basis.

Second thing: Optimize your content for your audience — whether it is on LinkedIn or Twitter, your target audience should be captured. 

It’s not just about creating content, it’s all about how you engage proactively with your audience.

And this is where many B2B companies get it wrong. They usually think they need 50 different tactics to grow their business, when really, they just need to do some experiments and find out which activities generate the most revenue and focus their efforts there.

“There is no black magic to successfully attracting customers”

Rand Fishkin, CEO at SEOmoz

STAGE 3: Prioritize content

As you experiment and determine what content works for you — or not — starting from creating awareness, you’ll have to identify expansion and upselling opportunities.

“And that’s typically what Full Funnel strategy stands for: creating awareness, then generate demand, and capture that demand” – Andrei Zinkevich, co-founder at Full Funnel

That said, make sure your customers have a great experience with your product and that they are getting the expected results. Ultimately, you’ll have to identify the upgrading opportunities to document your case studies.

However, in case your customers are enjoying your product but are not willing to join customer interviews and recommend you, here’s what you can do:

• Determine some areas you need to improve on;
• Have an honest conversation with them and let them see what is in it for them;
• Stop thinking you can create everything at the same time, especially when you are not a big team.

As you may have already guessed, B2B demand gen is different from lead gen in that it is not all about promoting your content on a social basis but having different types of content for specific goals.

STAGE 4: Align revenue teams on content, activities, and responsibilities to influence the buying process

The goal here is to influence the buying process, right from awareness creation to closing the deal.

For that, you need to :

1. Align all your teams, whether it is executives, management team, SDRs, content team, etc., on the exact same cause of your campaign

2. Define the main activities, the channels, and the content that should be used at each stage — altogether — so that everyone knows what is expected from them and what their responsibilities are.

Make sure each team involved in the process understands what they are there for.

STAGE 5: Create stand-alone reports for your demand gen campaigns

All campaigns should not be measured the same way. I hate to be the one to break it down to you but you can’t set up the same metrics and targets for all your campaigns.

You have to tie a specific campaign to its related revenue; that is how you can clearly see the MQLs and where they are coming from. 

So, track the right audience. You may also track target accounts on LinkedIn, number of sales conversations, number of discovery calls, number of opportunities and pipeline value that is coming from a specific activity — but also media invites that are correlated with the quality of your content. 

But how to measure all of these? The answer is in the 6th and last key step to launch demand generation at a b2b company with high ACV.

STAGE 6: Blended tracking

Blended tracking is one of the most effective approaches to tracking resources by:

• Self-attribution — how did they hear about you?
• Digital Analytics — channels that were identified in the digital analytics (Google Analytics, email software, etc.);
• Customer interviews — collect more insights about how customers identify you.

These 6 stages are obviously important but there are other tactics you can take advantage of to amplify your demand gen programs.

How to use customer research to amplify demand generation programs?

Here, you should know how to incorporate customer research and how to leverage the insights you get from it.

Some people might tell you to talk to your customers, ask them questions, yay!

But the hitch with this approach is that many people do not ask the right questions such as:

• What’s happening in the business that motivates them to look for your products? 
• What attracts their attention to your products? 
• How are they going to research solutions like yours?

When you don’t think about these categories of questions, you may never get the entire picture of the buying journey. You’ll barely get a part of it.

The next thing is to know who is involved in the buying process:

• What are their major concerns? 
• At what stage do they join the buying committee?
• What justification do you provide for product purchase and how?

Then comes the value, as we’ve mentioned above. You should provide solutions that are different from the ones of the competition and your customers should be able to notice that difference.

After that, the channels! One of the most inappropriate questions B2B marketers ask their customers is: Hey! What channel did you use to discover our product? 

Sorry to break it to you, but this can be improved. Really.

In order to have practical insights, you should rather ask yourself:

• What platforms, websites or newsletters do they generally check?
• What social media do they use?
• Who do they follow and why?
• And even more, what comments do they drop on the posts of those people they follow?

It’s tons of insights that you can actually check and use to create a map of informational needs. This is a document that gives you an understanding of the different topic clusters and questions that your target audience is genuinely interested in.

How to refine demand capture?

Some people usually compare demand generation to demand capture. But these are two different stages. Andrei explained it well when he said “you first need to create demand and then capture it” .

Actually, if you only focus on demand gen without taking demand capture into account, you can’t make any accurate predictions.

Why?

First, because nothing is predictable in this industry; you can’t just be running an activity and predict the exact number of opportunities or amount of revenue it will generate on a monthly basis.

Secondly, you can’t control the quality of inbound opportunities. In other words, you never know who will reach out or not. So even if you have opportunities that get an ABM consultancy, there might be low quality opportunities that don’t fit your ICP.

That being said, you need to capture the demand by:

1. Leveraging high-intent channels

Here, you can check and watch the episode that we recorded with Justin — we shared how to leverage insights from the digital crowd on LinkedIn retargeting.

2. Creating dedicated content hubs

This can be articles, case studies, testimonials — different content hubs each related to a specific part of your ABM service.

Thanks to this content hub you can actually see who engages with the content and how much time they spend on that particular content. For example, if a person checked for a GTM program, you automatically know that they’re interested in the “go to market” strategy.  

Obviously, this won’t give you a 100% success rate, but these are just strategies you can put in place to capture demand and activate some of your accounts.

You can also share some materials such as your product benefits, social proof, case studies, etc. that will be considered as call to action — the goal being to showcase your product or solution.

In the same vein, content hubs also provide intent known as engagement signals.

3. Leveraging engagement and intent signals

Track engagement on LinkedIn, connect with people who are regularly engaged, look for the high intent on your website.

4. Timely personalized campaigns — personalized outreach.

Another way to capture demand is to remove friction from the buying experience.

Andy Pitre, VP of product at Hubspot said it best: “Don’t think of leads as leads; instead, think of them as people who are frustrated because understanding and buying your product is too hard. Your job is to make it easy for them to learn your product and get started”.  

So, prior to generating more opportunities and interest in your products, it’s super important to reduce friction from the buying process.

Buyers may not say it but they face super complex and annoying practices that most companies make: 

1. Hiding the price — they do not put it on the pricing page or do not have it at all;
2. They force clients to repeat the process of responding to questions all over again;
3. Their sales want to engage with customers too early;
4. No buying intent — just because someone joins the webinar or downloads one of your ebooks doesn’t mean they want to purchase from you;
5. Not defining the right criteria for the MQL before sending them to the sales team;
6. Sales not being able to answer questions about the product;
7. Not giving much information or description about the product on their website;
8. Making customers wait.

So, you should avoid these (tons of) friction points. It’s all about helping buyers have a smooth and frictionless experience, and it just takes 2 points to get to that level:

1. Providing the right answers to questions they have at every specific stage; and

2. Reaching out easily, quickly, and smoothly.

“The easier and the faster you can help your buyers get information, the better your overall results will be” – Vladimir Blagojevic.

Unless you reduce friction, you are definitely going to generate a lot of demand that will be wasted. 

How to operationalize and scale B2B demand gen?

You cannot jump in and ask your teams to carry out all the programs you have in mind. You risk not achieving your goals or piloting your campaigns just for the sake of doing it. With no tangible results.

That being said, the first thing you can do is map out everything according to the different stages. Then, avoid launching multiple programs at the same time, even if you do have great ideas. Introduce new programs gradually.

And that’s why we recommend you go through these three important stages:

Stage 1: Pilot campaigns where you just experiment

This is a learning curve. You’ve got to understand your buyers along with their buying journey — and find the leading metrics that your campaign is getting traction. 

Stage 2: Document and create a calendar

Documentation helps you keep track of the flow and scripts, the reports and metrics on how a specific campaign sources the pipeline, and the results of that campaign. Then you can start making adjustments.

Stage 3: New pilots campaigns

Again, we strongly advise against doing all of these things at once, especially if you don’t have enough experience or enough resources! Otherwise, it will be a waste of time and resources.

Patience is key.

Another important point in operationalizing and scaling B2B demand gen is to integrate demand gen into a revenue report.

This is the bottom line of your campaign; in other words, this is how you are measuring the success of this program in the long run. You may ask yourself the following question: how did you link the activities you implement to the revenue?

It definitely makes sense to look at the things like early indicators found during the pilot campaigns. It is also important to share some anecdotes and qualitative feedback that you get from concrete accounts that are being engaged. 

Here again, there are some little quick stages to follow, about reporting.

First of all, break down all the metrics that contribute to the revenue, including input of SQLs, opportunities that are coming into the pipeline, and the value of that pipeline. But here, you might need to track separately marketing-sourced opportunities.

Even if demand generation should have marketing-sourced opportunities and revenue as a direct result, your sales outreach should become more efficient, your win rate should start increasing because at that stage your buyers are becoming more educated. That means that you should be getting more sales ratio, more opportunities, and better-fit accounts.

Takeaway?

In a nutshell, you’ll be measuring:

• The input into the pipeline;
• The actual marketing-sourced customers and revenue — whether it is net revenue or total revenue;
• The win rate with buyer enablement contact — along with nurturing;
• The sales cycle;

When you’re measuring these, you’re not just measuring the individual numbers from month to month but also the trends. By trends, we mean win rate, AVC, sales cycle, etc.

The next important metric is to define engagement thresholds — not to be confused with sales opportunities. Here, customers are rather considered as MQLs that can be transferred to ABM programs where accounts research is further run. 

At the end of the day, together with your sales team, you can personalize the marketing campaigns to these accounts.

After you have run pilot campaigns, and figured out channels and effective approaches, the ultimate step is to hire the right people for the job.

However, always remember that you do hire for a process that already exists. That said, you’ll be looking for people who will either maintain and scale the processes that have been proven and defined or hire them to refine and improve those processes. 

Again, keep in mind that you should always leave room for experimentation.

How do you do that? Focus 80% of your resources on proven channels, proven techniques, and proven approaches; and experiment with the remaining 20%. 

Recap

In 10 stand steps, here is a summary of how you can launch and scale a demand generation function at a B2B company with high ACV:

1. DEVELOP A DEMAND GEN STRATEGY

Demand gen is not a bunch of organic and paid tactics. Make sure you have:

• A Clear ICP;
• A Marketing message;
• Goals and resources

2. CUSTOMER RESEARCH

Run customer interviews and analyze the digital behavior of your buyers to understand:

• What channels do your buyers use for education and research;
• What are the questions and topics they are interested in;
• What are their KPIs, “jobs to be done” and the typical challenges they face;
• Who do they follow and trust;
• What communities/associations do they engage with?

3. TOPICS CATEGORIZATION

Categorize demand topics and put them into 4 buckets.

• Business triggers that push your buyers to start looking for solutions like yours;
• Demand triggers: what can attract their interest and motivate them to learn more about the problem or an opportunity?
• Discovering and evaluation;
• Decision-making: what can influence their decision?

4. PRIORITIZE CAMPAIGNS

Map out all demand campaigns you believe make sense to launch.

Prioritize by:

• scope;
• budget;
• resources;
• easiness of launching;
• potential impact.

5. DEVELOP OR REFINE DEMAND CAPTURING

Before launching a pilot demand gen campaign:

• Reduce friction points (long forms, pricing unavailable, etc.);
• Define one process of demand capturing (retargeting of engaged accounts, intent data, etc.)

6. SELECT AND LAUNCH PILOT CAMPAIGNS

Don’t push all of your resources into the pilot campaign. Instead:

• Define the goals and align them with sales and execs;
• Define a small pilot team (2 people max)- Reduce KPIs/reallocate revenue targets;
• Select only one channel and one program. Don’t do multiple things in parallel;
• Create a clear timeline and leading metrics to track progress.

7. OPERATIONALIZE PILOT CAMPAIGNS

After your campaign gets traction, document the process and onboard or hire a team member to maintain the campaign.

8. CREATE A DEMAND GEN REPORT

Add a mix of self- and digital attribution (digital analytics + How did you hear about our product?) to show the impact of marketing on revenue.

9. GROWING FUNCTION

Gradually launch and document new demand generation and demand capturing campaigns.

10. BUILD A DEMAND GEN TEAM

Don’t hire for the process that doesn’t exist in the beginning. Bring people to maintain the existing campaigns, refine them and give some space for experimentation.

Additional details you need to launch demand generation at a B2B company:

• The success of an ABM campaign is highly related to the quality of the list you build;

• If you do not have enough engaged accounts, start with demand generation before diving into Account Based Marketing — because ABM works in a cohesive model with a demand generation strategy. 

Read Aslo: How to blend ABM and Demand Gen to boost your revenue engine?

You can score your accounts on different dimensions :

• Score the match of the leads with your ICP (define the standard thermographics, the buying committee and the account qualification and disqualification criteria);
• Score the engagement (number, length and nature of engagement);
• Score according to the target accounts segments (Tier one – Tier two – Tier three).

One caveat:

Don’t get too excited about launching 20+ programs.

In reality, 6-8 programs and 2-3 channels where you excel at will be more than enough to grow your brand presence, generate demand, and marketing-sourced revenue.

Would you like an ABM playbook that will help you land sales opportunities with your dream clients in 6 weeks or faster? Check out our 6-week ABM playbook now.