Demand Generation switch to Conversation Creation
Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2024 4:42 am
Demand Generation shifts to Education, Uncontrolled Assets and Conversation Creation
How this led to a 283% revenue increase in 6 months
We all want to opt out because it's better for our prospects, but for internal reasons we don't.
Disclaimer: This post will not cover everything you need to know about demand generation and disabling content assets, but it is an attempt to share recent successes and the rationale behind our decisions.
Situation:
The company wanted to scale and my role was to grow MQLs. We were doing typical content offer downloads to lead qualified MQL. In my first week, I met with the sales team and they told me that all of our non-demo MQLs were garbage and they wanted me to filter them out. Hard to do when the CEO wants to see MQL volume increase. I wanted to start building a long-term education focused demand creation strategy but needed to solidify the demand capture portion first .
Steps taken…
Review
We needed to review what worked and what didn’t to figure out how to scale. We started by looking at our revenue by structured level, industry, and ICP activity. We wanted to know what deals were being closed and if there was anything we could reverse engineer to scale.
We found the Grand Canyon between our intent-to-buy prospects and those who armenia business email list requested a content offer. Not surprising since most of us face this problem. Hundreds of content offer MQLs per month were converting into a handful of Opportunities. This caused the sales team to waste a lot of time, energy, and effort, not to mention wasted ad spend.
Nurturing sequences weren’t working, but we controlled scoring and therefore volume. Marketing hit its MQL goal, but nothing was moving forward.
Reimagine
With our lead gen model efforts not generating quality for the sales team, we needed a way to generate conversations. We shifted our focus from MQLs to conversations, so we decided to begin the transformation from Scoring Leads to only those who raise their hand.
There’s no automatic lever to instantly push more demo requests and we can also make sure our process is as smooth as possible. We started by sending demo requests and pricing directly to AE and skipping the BDR step. We then set up Chilipiper to reduce the friction of booking a meeting. People could now schedule an appointment directly on AE’s calendar. No more wasting time going back and forth. These changes led to a higher conversion rate for purchase intent activities. There was also the benefit of freeing up our inbound BDRs and allowing us to focus them on educating and supporting our audience.
With our inbound BDRs freed up and conversation generation established as our new focus, we proceeded to learn what it meant to support our audience.
Learn
We used feedback from our product marketing team and conversations with our customers to understand how we could better support our prospects. We landed on several activities that would help us grow now while building for the future. We created a Podcast for our leadership persona and a newsletter targeted at our user persona to announce additional demand creation channels. We paid close attention to organic growth and journey optimization. We then needed to determine how we would create conversations with people who weren’t ready to book a demo or initiate a buying motion. We decided to use a call to action with the “better way” approach and show our prospects a comparison between “the old way” and “our way.”
Create
How could we deliver great content that could get our audience engaged and learning from us without creating busy work for our BDR team? We decided to create new assets that fit into three categories: problem awareness, solution awareness, and product awareness. When determining how we would deploy these assets, we decided to release them to share value and build awareness of a semi-new category. In an effort to manage internal expectations, we only released these assets through ads so that the high volume of organic traffic to our site would still have to fill out a form. After seeing some success, we began disabling all assets everywhere.
We created a podcast for our leadership persona and a newsletter targeted at our user persona to announce additional demand creation channels. We put a lot of focus on organic growth and streamlining the journey. One thing we could have done a lot better was repurposing our content.
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This isn't perfect, but hopefully it will light a spark that will help you achieve greater success. Hopefully, you can learn something from one of my experiences and create something new for your business.
How this led to a 283% revenue increase in 6 months
We all want to opt out because it's better for our prospects, but for internal reasons we don't.
Disclaimer: This post will not cover everything you need to know about demand generation and disabling content assets, but it is an attempt to share recent successes and the rationale behind our decisions.
Situation:
The company wanted to scale and my role was to grow MQLs. We were doing typical content offer downloads to lead qualified MQL. In my first week, I met with the sales team and they told me that all of our non-demo MQLs were garbage and they wanted me to filter them out. Hard to do when the CEO wants to see MQL volume increase. I wanted to start building a long-term education focused demand creation strategy but needed to solidify the demand capture portion first .
Steps taken…
Review
We needed to review what worked and what didn’t to figure out how to scale. We started by looking at our revenue by structured level, industry, and ICP activity. We wanted to know what deals were being closed and if there was anything we could reverse engineer to scale.
We found the Grand Canyon between our intent-to-buy prospects and those who armenia business email list requested a content offer. Not surprising since most of us face this problem. Hundreds of content offer MQLs per month were converting into a handful of Opportunities. This caused the sales team to waste a lot of time, energy, and effort, not to mention wasted ad spend.
Nurturing sequences weren’t working, but we controlled scoring and therefore volume. Marketing hit its MQL goal, but nothing was moving forward.
Reimagine
With our lead gen model efforts not generating quality for the sales team, we needed a way to generate conversations. We shifted our focus from MQLs to conversations, so we decided to begin the transformation from Scoring Leads to only those who raise their hand.
There’s no automatic lever to instantly push more demo requests and we can also make sure our process is as smooth as possible. We started by sending demo requests and pricing directly to AE and skipping the BDR step. We then set up Chilipiper to reduce the friction of booking a meeting. People could now schedule an appointment directly on AE’s calendar. No more wasting time going back and forth. These changes led to a higher conversion rate for purchase intent activities. There was also the benefit of freeing up our inbound BDRs and allowing us to focus them on educating and supporting our audience.
With our inbound BDRs freed up and conversation generation established as our new focus, we proceeded to learn what it meant to support our audience.
Learn
We used feedback from our product marketing team and conversations with our customers to understand how we could better support our prospects. We landed on several activities that would help us grow now while building for the future. We created a Podcast for our leadership persona and a newsletter targeted at our user persona to announce additional demand creation channels. We paid close attention to organic growth and journey optimization. We then needed to determine how we would create conversations with people who weren’t ready to book a demo or initiate a buying motion. We decided to use a call to action with the “better way” approach and show our prospects a comparison between “the old way” and “our way.”
Create
How could we deliver great content that could get our audience engaged and learning from us without creating busy work for our BDR team? We decided to create new assets that fit into three categories: problem awareness, solution awareness, and product awareness. When determining how we would deploy these assets, we decided to release them to share value and build awareness of a semi-new category. In an effort to manage internal expectations, we only released these assets through ads so that the high volume of organic traffic to our site would still have to fill out a form. After seeing some success, we began disabling all assets everywhere.
We created a podcast for our leadership persona and a newsletter targeted at our user persona to announce additional demand creation channels. We put a lot of focus on organic growth and streamlining the journey. One thing we could have done a lot better was repurposing our content.
-
This isn't perfect, but hopefully it will light a spark that will help you achieve greater success. Hopefully, you can learn something from one of my experiences and create something new for your business.