026. Building a Demand Gen Strategy that Scales (Part 2)

My name is Emilio Garcia from Boundify and welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. Today we are going to continue our conversation on how to set up a demand generation strategy that scale this is part two. We had the first part in the previous episode and I will continue with some of the steps or general ways that you can break down your strategy to implement on your company. So in the past episode we talked about the first two components. I will remind you very briefly of them. They were the first step will be defining your ideal client profile slash buyer Persona. So you want to know who are you targeting to or working toward on your program or effort, and second, your content audit or auditing your digital assets. There are many different names for that particular process or step, but the general idea is once you know who you want to target to, you want to know what you already have. So you might have content in written form, videos, you might have case studies. You want to make an inventory of all the assets available to you to understand the gap between what you have and you want to accomplish. And today we are going to focus on the two other steps or big buckets. The first one is going to be establishing goals and KPIs and the final one, the fourth one will be creating the actual game plan or the actual implementation of the strategy for your goals and objectives. So let's jump right away into the topic and just do a quick reminder. I keep forgetting about this. If you are watching right now, put in the comments where you're watching from. You can drop a question and I can answer it at the end of the streaming or at some point later. I'll usually go and watch them. So feel free to put some comments there. I will be happy to answer whatever question you might have. So let us go into the goals and KPIs. This is pretty straightforward. Once you have who you want to target to and what you have, you want to make some goals in front of you so your team can start working on the right direction. However, I want to break down that idea into some components. The first one is that what makes demand generation different from other aspects of or methodologies around digital marketing is this idea that the job doesn't end when you get leads. I'm not saying that all marketers work only on that, but there are some efforts like brand awareness and actually lead generation itself, where the whole goal is just to put leads on the database or the CRM or the system of record and then the work of the marketing is done. Or to some extent that's how they are measured. It's not the same on demand generation. By definition, your goal is not only to generate leads, but actually to create opportunities actually help to close more business faster than if you weren't there. So your role is a little bit different and therefore your KPIs and goals will be also be different from the standard marketing perspective or even an inbound one. So one of the first things you want to do is that you want to map your buyer journey or you want to map your pipeline. So yes, you will have the usual steps and ratios that you have on marketing, right? So you want to have, you know, if you have multiple channels, you want to know the reach, the impressions, the amount of people that you touch through each of the channels, how many of those people actually engage with your content, meaning your website in terms of time on website, in terms of pages, how many, how many actually consume content, how many of them is actually scrolled. All that definitely conversions rates, right? For subscription newsletters, for content that you might have in the form of webinars, video being consumed, and definitely request a demo, request a consultation or just start the transaction process, depending on your industry. But you want to go beyond that. You want to actually map and have a conversation with the sales team on the pipeline itself. What happens once you have what you will consider a qualified lead that raised their hand or his hand and says I want to talk to sales. So you will have a. You will have a pipeline or a sales process in place that will actually help you to understand how many of those leads are actually qualified by the sales team or by the marketing team, depending on how they are handled and how many of them become opportunities clients, and even some of them, if they eventually purchase again or for how long they stay so you can get the lifetime value of your clients. So when you are going to define those KPIs and goals, think that for demand generation programs, marketing goals are not enough. Actual sales goals like revenue lead to opportunity conversion or lead to customer conversion, sales velocity or pipeline velocity are asked important as the marketing components that enable them. So that will be a special criteria that you have to keep in mind for those KPIs, for sure. Now the other challenge that I usually find when working with clients is, especially if you're establishing this program for the first time, is that there's going to be a lot of those numbers, especially conversion ratios between impressions and clicks and leads and opportunities and clients that will not be known. They will be. And the reason might be because you don't have a system in place that allows you to track those numbers or the system exists but nobody's using properly. Or there might be some other complications like silos on the technology or the processes. Right? You might have the marketing effort in a, in a platform or a system or an app and then you have the CRM in another one and all the reporting is connected manually. So there's a lot of challenges around that. The point is that usually you are in a place where you are able to map the process, but still you don't have your numbers, what I call your numbers. So that's the other big step that you want to accomplish here. You will not solve it from the beginning. On the first day, that will be. If you already have it, that will be impossible. Because even if you set up the right systems, it will take a little while to accumulate data. But the point that I want to stress at this stage is that you have to start. So it might take a few weeks, it might take a few months depending on the amount of data, right? So usually the ones at the top of the funnel will be the fastest. You will get quick information about your CTR and lead conversion rates because you have a lot of data. And the ones at the very end will be the slowest, right? Your opportunity to customer rate or your lifetime value will be the slowest if you haven't been accumulating that data from the beginning or if you are especially in B2B if your volume of opportunities and business is small. But you have to start. And the other recommendation that I have is that while you build up your numbers, you can use benchmark data. That's the only occasion when I think is perfect or highly recommended to use competition or competitors data to your advantage. If you don't have that information, you can just go and search online for what's a decent or or expected conversion rate for your industry. Usually that information is available by industry and you can start there. That way you don't get paralyzed or stop by not having numbers. But at the same time, while it allows you to move forward defining some goals if you lack any. But at the end of the day what matters is that you build your own numbers. Because benchmarks are great for that kind of comparison. But your company will have unique goals in terms of business and revenue goals that necessarily matches what your competitors are doing. So don't get swayed away on what your competitors are doing. What matters is the internal goals that you have for your company. Once you have map not only the marketing path but also the the sales path or the pipeline and start to either measure your own numbers or use some benchmark numbers from your industry, then you are in a position to define the goals and the KPIs that you want to use. And obviously here there are way too many options that you can use. My general recommendation is that is great to have two or three KPIs, even goals for goals. I will even go for just one or two strategic ones that you want to accomplish for the year. And after you have set up just a handful of them, no more than three for sure, then you can define more KPIs that give you an idea if you are on track to accomplish your revenue goals or your business goals. So you might have a couple of lagging indicators that you actually measure the outcome, like sales. And you may have one or two leading indicators that allows you to do something about it if for whatever reason you are not going in the right direction. So it will give you time to actually influence the result before it's too late. But in general, even when we can build very complex dashboards with technology available today, I don't recommend that you have more than, you know, more than seven KPIs, because if everything is important, then nothing is important. You really need to narrow it down to the key goals for the business. And in that sense, some recommendation, of course is that generally they are around around revenue in different forms can be just raw revenue growth, can be market share growth. But also there are other values that are related to that. Like for example, as I was saying, especially for marketing, is important to know the ratio of leads that convert into opportunities. You want to know that's important because again, while sales usually says say that they want leads, they don't really need more leads. What they really need are more opportunities. So if we have as a metric or a KPI, the success ratio of the leads that we generate, the to opportunities, we will tune our strategy in a way where we don't necessarily privilege volume, but actual results. So that will make you align your buyer Persona, your ideal client profile and the content to the audiences that really are paying attention and they have the intent and they are the right target for your company. So that will be a great metric to have. The other one will be obviously the win ratio itself. Again, because you don't only want to get people that have the intent to become opportunities. You want to actually have people that to some level will be at the right time, will have the budget that they are the decision makers. And all those criteria you can match only if you measure or track Closely your win ratio. And finally, probably the hardest aspect to measure with accuracy, but that is relevant is your pipeline velocity, right? So when you want to increase revenue for a company, you have two or three levels levers that you can pull, right? One is just increase the raw number of people that are going through the funnel, right? So that's where you go into just bringing more leads into the funnel so you can bring more opportunities. That's the kind of like brute force approach is the one that costs most in terms of resources because usually you have to have more people to manage all that extra volume, but that's a possibility. The other one is that you change your deal size, right? And that's usually out of the scope of a person that is focused just on marketing is more in the realm of the product manager or the product marketing person. But the other way that you can change your results in terms of revenue is that you just make bigger deals either because you bundle, you package, you upsell, you cross sell. There are different ways that you can go around it. So that way you can have the same volume, but just just that your deals are larger. But finally, again, the one that is the hardest to actually accomplish, but that can also influence heavily your your revenue goals is just reducing friction or eliminating or just reducing friction across the whole process. So you're pipeline works faster, right? Being able to influence in a faster way when someone has shown intent, how we improve the chances that they request a demo, when they have requested a demo or want to talk to a salesperson. How we improve the chances of going faster to the process of qualification in the right way though, so we can create an opportunity. And the same goes for the actual opportunity phase, right? How we discover faster, how we present a proposal with scenarios that will allow a person to make a decision faster. How do we handle objections in the right way? So a prospect or an opportunity can make a decision faster. Not all of those activities are of the influence of marketing, but that might be another KPI that you might have in mind so you can influence it. Like for example, might be that a given industry or a given buyer, usually when they are part of the process or you target that particular industry, your pipeline velocity is faster for that one. So that will be something that from a marketing perspective you can influence and it will be worth exploring. So that's for the goals and KPIs, again, kind of like making a summary of it. My recommendation would be map the whole path, not just marketing, but also sales, meaning your pipeline. And this is a great opportunity to Have a conversation with the team and even ask if your pipeline makes sense for the effort that you're going to do or for the ideal client profiles they're going to focus on. Understand and define your numbers, right? Your ratios of conversions from the beginning of the path until the end in terms of revenue. If you lack information, use industry standards in the meantime while you build up your own numbers. And finally, define 1, 2 critical goals for the year that management is aligned to. And based that, define three or four KPIs with a combination of lagging and leading indicators so you can act early before it's too late. So now that you have worked out your goals and KPIs, you are ready to build your plan, right? Your demand generation plan that will actually describe what you will implement and the execution that you will do. So here an interesting way to have a concept of what you want to build is that the first thing that you want to lay out is that based on the content audit that you did, you will have themes. Sometimes they are called programs. There are a bundle of efforts to promote a specific outcome. So for example, let me put this more specific on your marketing plan. You might decide that yes, you want to influence revenue for the year, but it's not for all products and services that your company offers. It's more about a specific product or services or service might be a specific product line that you want to improve. It might be also a specific segment or market that you want to influence either because you want to increase the business that you do there or, or if it's something related to going into a new market. They might be a specific location. It might also that you want to be present to a specific group of buyers that you are not well known to. So there might be different themes, but the general idea is that that theme will encompass the second layer will be the actual campaigns. So imagine for example that you said that you want to improve. I'm going to made up this. But imagine an app development company and so they want to work with entrepreneurs around app development. And they are envisioning here a series of efforts to touch all the different layers of the funnel. So you might have some webinars that you are thinking of, some case studies that you want to build to promote some. Some articles you want to build specific for entrepreneurs that they might be interested on. You might also want to define some criteria to prioritize and nurture those leads. And so you build all these program around that specific buyer and their particular need around developing an app, right? So Once you have the program, then you break it down into the campaigns and the driven for the campaign will be that in a campaign you are way more specific. You have a specific outcome in the form of an offer. And that offer matches the buyer stage of your ideal client profile. So what you are going to offer matches where your buyer is in the stage, right? You don't want to offer a case study to someone that have never heard of you because the level of trust is too low. They might not have the right intent. But also you don't want to go the other way around and being just, you know, not specific or just being broad. When someone is ready to make a commitment, right? If they want a demo, if they want to talk to a salespersons, you want to be able to provide a person right away so you can start a sales conversation. So the campaigns will do that, right? So for example, if you're an advertising, you will be able to define a goal. You will have a specific offer which might be a piece of content, a case study, an article, depending on again, on the path that you are, you will have a specific audience that is in a specific stage. And usually for that campaign, you will have a specific goal that builds upon your larger or bigger KPIs and business goals, right? So here's where you go for. Well, I want to improve reach, I want to improve brand lift, I want to improve engagement through web traffic, actual leads, making people return to the website or restart a business conversation in the case of sales sequences and nurturing programs and something like that. And finally on that structure of programs and campaigns, you want to lay out the marketing channels where you're going to actually implement those efforts, right? So based on your understanding of your ideal client profile and the content that you already have and how your buyers consume content, you will define what marketing channels make sense for each of the efforts. Are you going to use primarily organic channels or are you going to use paid channels? Or you're going to do a mix. And if you're going to do so, are you going to do only digital, you know, offline, traditional advertising or marketing channels, A mix of them too. So again, all of that will make sense based on the audit that you have done. Because there you will find what have been successful and not also on the pipeline that you have made, you will discover them. Some channels are faster or have higher conversion rates and obviously you will not start from scratch. You will have already a mix of marketing efforts and budgets. So you can make adjustment based on your strategy. But again, on that game plan you want to make sure that you break down not only by programs and campaigns, but by the marketing channels that you're going to use to actually make this happen. And finally, you want to include on the game plan how you are going to move those leads. Are you going to get on those programs into sales opportunities? And there are two components here that you want to be aware of. One will be lead scoring or prioritizing your leads. This is relevant for companies that have programs and campaigns that generate a lot of volume at different stages, right? So it will not be wise to send a lead that just subscribe to a blog post or to a blog newsletter or even that's only watch a video that is you know about the company itself to a salesperson. And it also but obviously also doesn't make sense to lose the opportunity to engage with a prospect when they have requested conversation with sales or when they have downloaded content that is at the bottom of the funnel like case studies or information about what you have done with previous clients. So lead scoring is a portion of the marketing or demand generation efforts that will allow you to prioritize. And in general I think I will dedicate an episode on that on the future. But my general recommendation on lead scoring is that having this good balance between automation and complexity and rules and actual intent, right? So what I have seen is that you can go in the path of creating these complex formulas to judge when someone wants to talk to salesperson. And especially if marketing is being measured by marketing qualified leads is tempting to stretch the algorithm a little bit and just pass leads that marketing will consider marketing qualified to sales just to reach your numbers while that person not necessarily have clear intent. So that is one of the reasons you want to make sure on your goals and KPIs you include actual lead to opportunity ratios, win rates and revenue. Because that will incentivize the marketing team to actually pass leads are ready to talk. And not just use lead scoring as a way of pushing leads that sales has no chance to close. And in a similar manner on the on your game plan, just as you have to prioritize. This creates another problem when you have tons of leads to handle. And is that yes, you will pass to sales the ones that are ready to talk to a sales rep. But what will happen with all the other leads that are not ready right now that might be on the right icp, Right. They are your ideal client profile. It's just that they are not ready to buy for whatever reason. Usually for example, one of the reason might Be that even when the person is the decision maker, even when they have the budget, it's just simply not the right time. There are a lot of B2B buyers that make buying decisions at the end of the year when they are working on their budget. There's no reason to push a zelle once the fiscal year have started because they have already made a decision, they already have a contract. But that doesn't mean that that you're going to disappear for months and just show up again at the beginning of the budgeting process. Do you have to have in place as part of your game plan a way of nurturing those leads that are not ready to buy so that you might be still present on them? So that might be traditional email, right? So sequences and or email marketing campaigns where you continue to educate about your services, about the problems that your prospects have through email marketing. You can also nowadays of course use digital advertising, matching your list of the information that you have on the CRM so you can be present on the digital channels that your buyers might be spending time. And obviously you can use organic channels also to accomplish that. But in general the recommendation would be that because if you implement this correctly, you will increase the volume of leads that you don't forget to first prioritize what kind of leads you want to pass to sales and of those that are not ready to buy what you have in place to make sure that you keep being top of mind, you are top of mind to your prospects until they are ready to raise their hand and and ask for a salesperson. And finally, on the game plan, obviously as we were saying, on the goals and KPI section, you want to make sure that you have a strong foundation on your web analytics and in general your tracking, right? You have a system of record that might be your CRM or a similar tool where you have measurement and tracking and then you use that system to schedule series of reviews. It can be some core day to day metrics that you review on a weekly basis, some more business oriented ones that you check monthly or quarterly. And obviously you have the grand goal for the year and you reset the whole plan at the end of it. So it's obviously really important you set up that cadence on the game plan that you have conversation with the stakeholders or with the people that is going to be influenced or interest or on the demand generation program ahead of time so they know what to expect. And you schedule that in time on your calendar so you can follow up and do changes as the strategy unfolds. And so that's all that I have for today. I hope as always, that you find this discussion valuable and if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. I'm mostly active on LinkedIn and you can always comment on one of the shows and have all a great day.