072. Demand Generation Mistakes Marketers Make (And How to Fix Them)

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Welcome back to another episode of Demandion Studio. My name is Miranda Jenkins and I'm joined by Emilio Garcia. How are you this morning? Emilio?

How are you? Miranda? Doing great. Great to see you as always.

Yes. So today's episode we are going to be diving into a couple of the common mistakes that we see B2B marketers make when they're trying to generate demand. And then more importantly, we'll talk about how to fix those common mistakes. It's just kind of like setting the scene for the episode. It's important to remember first that these are common mistakes that we see. We're not trying to call you out on, you know, the mistakes you're making. And the truth is that most of the time it's probably not because the marketer might not know better, but it's because that they're, you're being measured the wrong way or you're being pressured to craft and complete tasks before taking the time to let really reel back and do the research behind it. So I don't know if you have any additional comments, Emilio, to kind of set the stage for our listeners before we jump into the first pitfall.

No, not really. I think it's a great topic and let us just dive into it.

Awesome. So our first mistake that we see demand generation marketers make is optimizing for NQLs rather than revenue. So typically we see this mistake when marketing and sales are aligned on what lead like a quality lead truly is. And maybe they don't have the same definition for their leads. They don't agree on, you know, the difference between a marketing qualified lead versus a sales qualified lead or potentially the marketer is incentivized to generate lead volume rather than truly the quality volume over quality. What are your thoughts on that?

No, I love, I love this one. And as you know, I like to like roll back to business outcomes and impact. To be honest, there's just a handful of truly relevant KPIs for a business that are important not just for marketing, but for every department, meaning not just sales and marketing, but every other department. It doesn't matter if you know, human resources or even finance need to be knowledgeable of. And that handful of business outcomes are very predictable. Typically they they are around growth. And the reason this is super, super important is because growth is a great proxy for what truly a business wants. A business usually wants increasing profit margin. It wants to be a business. Usually you want a business that is as profitable as possible. Right. As profitable as morally possible. Right. Obviously we want to follow the rules. And you want to have a good business, but within those constraints, you want to, you want to make as much profit as possible. And the way that you typically accomplish that is that you grow revenue because that way you can dilute the fixed cost over a larger pool of income. And also, typically, you want to have the highest market share as possible before. Before or without becoming a mono. What is the word I forgot? You know, like a monopoly, because larger market share typically allows you to command a better price, which goes back again to being profitable. So growth is a great proxy for that idea. And obviously, unfortunately, we cannot ask all departments that can't directly influence 100% that outcome, right? Growth, profit margin, revenue share. We cannot tell them, you know, that's your metric. That's how I'm going to measure your performance. It makes no sense for human resources. It doesn't make sense for finance. They can influence or contribute to that idea, but it will be very hard to just use that number. They have specific numbers. And marketing is no different, right? We, we want to have for the department a couple of metrics that are a good proxy, a good approximation of a metric that aligns with that idea. So if we, if we go back into that process and say, well, typically, 1, growth, because we know that will help us, growth will come either from increased market share or from increased profitability or both. Therefore, we just want more revenue, it makes sense to say, we just want more revenue. And if you approximate that idea to the number of people that are inquiring about the business, it makes sense to say, well, if we are getting more inquiries from qualified buyers, kind of like what an MQL is, then it means that we should get revenue at the end of the day. And I think all of that makes sense. The only issue, obviously, is that for most marketers, either themselves or their bosses might lose a little bit of the connection with that idea. It becomes an optimization. By just optimization, you lose connection with the concept that that metric is just an approximation to what you truly want. And then you start, then you start focusing solely on the metric rather than in the true impact. I think that's the context that I want to add, right? That is that when you say, well, I'm really going to reward the team on MQLs, you can run into the. Usually the most typical scenario that happens is that because the definition of MQLs sometimes falls directly into the marketing department, then you start being broader and broader on what is an MQL. That's a mistake, right? The forgetting that MQLs are a proxy for the true impact, which is revenue. But probably for people listening to us, what matters the most is how it happens and how you know, what can you do to prevent it from happening or if it's happening already, how you can revert and really align yourself with that main goal. And I want to make a big caveat here. A big big caveat is you can go the other way as well, which is also wrong, right? It is, it is wrong to say I'm just going to optimize for MQLs. But it's also wrong to think that marketing's job is to bring revenue, right? Solely bring revenue or solely contribute to whatever sales goal has. They should be aligned. But it's not the same goal because they accomplish or they influence the business metrics in different ways because of the things they do. Right. So and I use as an example, obviously departments are not in line with customers necessarily like human resources or finance. You can say that those apartments as well should influence the big business outcomes. Profit margin growth, right? Do you want, you want as lower as possible cost of acquisition in terms of talent or maximizing the cash flow of the company. But, but it will be silly to reward them solely on revenue, for example because they are not, they do not exist just to support sales, which is silly for, for human resources or for finance. But somehow it feels like should be for marketing. And that's not true because there are things that marketing do or does that will influence revenue in the future, will influence business outcomes. Just that, not with the same speed and with the same scope that sales will have. And obviously the most important one is brand, right? So yes, at the end of the day, growing awareness of the brand, positioning the company in the right places, building reputation should impact business growth. Because if he's not doing it, then what is the point? But it doesn't happen in the same way that sales does. It will not necessarily. All of it will come this quarter, most of it will come months or years later. And if you start measuring marketing as you will measure the sales department, then you will take this short term thinking, which also is not helpful. So I want to make this big big caveat that yes, you shouldn't be measuring just by mql. You have to look at the business outcome. But super important to not forget that marketing is not a department that works for sales, right? It's client is not sales is biggest impact should be for the business. It's just that they should work together instead of separately. Right? So and align of course. So with that caveat. Let's dive a little bit into how that happens. Well, the first one again is just the definition of MQLs. If you start rewarding people for that metric, and I have said this many, many times, people will have incentives to hit the number. And one easy one is to change what MQL is so you can hit it faster, right? For example, if you say, well, MQLs are people that express commercial intent by filling forms, website forms, if marketing controls that, then there are incentives that you can put out there for users for them to fill forms, right? You can just create very entertaining content or valuable content for them to fill forms. That's great. But if you, if your initial idea was having a strong commercial intent, well, it's not the same someone that fills a form for a webinar or for an ebook or for any other premium or valuable content versus someone that is requesting a sales conversation, right? There's a world of a difference on that one. And if you start measuring MQLs but just by form fillers, then you are losing the goal. The goal wasn't to get just any form feel. It's important because then you can nurture them or have open a relationship where maybe over time you are always present and that person will express intent later on. So getting forms or getting a growing database of potential customers that get information from the company is important, but it's not necessarily the goal, right? It's the means to the end. So that's one way that it can be distorted. The other one, very similar, is that typically a true mql or at least one that approximates greatly with the outcome, is one where you have someone or a company that is expressing both intent and that also is a great fit for the company that matches the definition of an ideal client profile or a client that the company wants to address. And so if you start just rewarding intent but not fit to the organization, you end up in the same place. You are sending leads to sales that they will never close because it's not the type of customers that the company wants, right? So those are some of the opportunities in terms of the definition. The other big one is feedback, right? If, and this is typical, if you are working in an organization where the work of marketing happens in a technology set and processes that are completely separated from the ones that sales use, then you run the risk of not seeing what happens to your MQLs after they move into sales, right? So that situation happens because the CRM is not shared by the organizations. Or even if you say well, we don't want to share that information. There got to be a feedback loop from sales to marketing so they can keep adjusting their definition of MQLs and their true impact. Because again, if you are not asking what happened to my MQLs at the end of the day, then you are not aligning yourself with the business outcome. So I think those sort of some examples of how it can go in the wrong direction, if that makes sense.

Yeah. It's a common theme in our episodes that the more communication between marketing and sales, the more alignment between marketing and sales, the better off you are. I was going to say, if you want to hear an in depth conversation about demand gen metrics and kind of what we recommend that you should be tracking, that is our, that was our June episode. So if you want to go back and watch that, the June episode was demand metrics that drive business decisions. So you can check that one out. All right, well then I think we can jump into our next common mistake. We see. And that's just really focused around ICP definitions and defining your ideal client profile. Just around static definitions like a job title and not actual like buying behavior. So building your ICP around firmographics and not actually about how buyers are behaving across your journey. What are your thoughts around that?

Yeah, that one. It's an opportunity in terms of targeting for some types of campaigns and efforts and also conveying readiness to purchase. And it comes from this idea that we have discussed in previous episodes, right? Is you have an ideal client profile, right? You have a set of companies that represent the industries, company sizes, demographics. Demographics that are your potential clients or the ones that you want to work with. And within those, there's a buying committee, right. A group of people that will be involved to some degree in the decision. That's great. Gives you, it gives you the, the subject on the sentence, this is who we are targeting. However, you cannot just work out with the subject. You need action. And that action is the behavior of those potential buyers. And it matters because we have discussed in order in other episodes, most of that group of people and companies are not in market at any given moment. If it was a small percentage, if it was, you know, 10%, 5% of them, then we could ignore the fact that not all of them are in market. But it's a huge percentage. It's 95% of your target market. So when you are thinking, where should I put my resources? It's not that you're going to ignore the set that is not in market. It's Just that you have to consider that for your actions, right? So as much as possible that you can get when you are targeting, you want to know what level of engagement or behavior you have behind it to adjust your strategy. Because most of the waste comes from ignoring that fact, right? So great examples that we have discussed in previous episodes are that typically for brand efforts, you can go across pretty much the whole spectrum. You know, maybe just ignoring the 5%, because the 5 within the 5%, there's a smaller fraction that is really aware of your brand at the moment. They know about you in this moment, so you don't need to present the brand for the first time. They're real knowledgeable. So for brand efforts, you can go pretty much to everyone that is not in market. But as you start narrowing down and putting more resources behind it, then you really need to focus on the people that are engaging. Because the work, and this is a personal view, the work of marketing on users is to nudge to action, right? I find it hard that you can actually, you know, extreme situations make someone actually do something that they don't want to, but you can nudge to action, right? Lower the barriers for taking action just maybe to the next stage, right. Sometimes it happens someone is ready, right? And goes from not knowing you to not knowing what you do and not knowing if you can be trusted and not knowing, you know, what will be the total cost of action and all of that. And you can trigger them to actually start purchasing or engaging with your brand. But more often than not, that's not what happens. What, what you can accomplish with way more, you know, way less effort is to nudge them to the next action, right? Learn about me. Learn a little bit about what we do. Learn about the, the people and the companies that have worked with us and what else, who else tells good things about us? And maybe then, then it makes sense to engage in a conversation to learn more about your products and services. So using that information, I think Miranda, is crucial because that's, that's something that digital do better or does better than traditional media. Not that traditional marketing efforts don't do that. They can surface some behavior. But digital is very good at measuring that, especially if you're using your own data from your website, from your subscription lists, from third parties, from social media. So I think that's the opportunity there, right? Ignoring behavior into your mix.

Yeah. And I'm sure listeners know, but we are a HubSpot agency and a great tool in HubSpot to do that, to, you know, achieve that is setting up your Vayern 10 signals in the CRM. And then also setting up a lead scoring model where you can actually assign point values, you know, to different aspects of your icp. So then you quickly see, you know, when a new company comes in, how they rank on your, you know, level of how, how well they fit in your icp. I was going to ask you too. How often would you recommend that a company kind of like review and audit their ICP definition? Is that something that should be happening more frequently than you would think?

Yeah, to be honest, I think it should be something that doesn't happen quite often because. And maybe someone listening to us will say otherwise. But I believe that ICPs are, are tightly connected to positioning. And the positioning of your company should rarely change. Right. Maybe at the beginning as you are trying to find what they call market fit. Right, or product fit. Sorry, it's not market fit. Product fit. Right. When you have a product or a service that I'm developing for the first time and kind of like finding the right market for it, then it makes sense to start testing your positioning in different forms and see what works. But once you have a defined positioning, your ICP shouldn't change that much. What does happen is that sometimes you start with a broader ICP at the beginning, and as you go along, you discover there are certain industries that benefit more from your product or service just as it is. And then you can start refining that ICP and create multiple versions of them over a broader one. Right. You can say, well, we, we just work with SMBs, right. With the small and medium businesses, that's quite broad. You can maybe narrow it down to B2B. You, maybe you can narrow it down to the US but over time, you might discover there are some industries that benefit the most about your products and service. So you are not building a new icp. You are building smaller ideal profiles where you can tell a more specific story. The only exception to that will be if you truly discover that one of those smaller icps is truly what works for you very well, and you decide to narrow down into that one, and that will be a big change in positioning and therefore you revise your icp. So hopefully I'm answering your question. I don't think that often. And the sources of changes are if your products or service are, you know, working particularly well to a subgroup or a group of adjacent clients, or if you, obviously, if you introduce, if you want to introduce a new product or service into the market, you want to go into a new demographic or filmographic Then that's when it will make sense to update your icp.

Any other solutions for that ICP definition mistake that marketers make?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think we want to always, always be thinking about the buying cycle all the time. Right. That's what will get us out of the static subject part and remind us that, yes, we have a population that purchase, but that purchase doesn't happen in one action. It happens over time through a series of steps that are not linear. Right. People can go forward, go backwards, stay in that stage for a long time, and then move very quickly. But we, if we always think about when we are doing our strategic thinking, I want to identify my buyer and I also want to understand how they purchase and how they don't purchase. That's another key thing. Right. Is what stops them from changing. So that buyer journey, if we have that in mind and we keep an updated model of both, they will be always be looking for behavioral changes that we can take advantage of. Because I wanted to finish with this. Behavior is similar to what I was telling about the feedback with sales for the other mistake in the sense that you can use it to better your strategy around campaigns, but it's also a great feedback tool. Right. If I'm running two campaigns and I want to again get a sense of performance, yes, I can look at the final outcome. Maybe I'm looking for forms or conversions, but behavior is a great proxy for the final outcome. Because I also want to make sure not just that I'm just getting more forms or I'm getting more inquiries, but that I'm getting the. The forms and inquiries from the right people. Right. And once I have identified my ICP and and defined the behaviors that I consider positive, then I can go and see if the populations or the demographics that are taking the behaviors that I want belong or not to my ideal client profile. Right. Always assessing that combination of fit and intent.

Yeah. And going off of that, you could use tools in your CRM like Breeze, if you have HubSpot or Clearbit, to kind of enrich your data to show more buying signals. And then another step further is to really audit your win data in the CRM, looking at the companies that you've actually closed one and start to try to see the similarities between the enriched data that you see on companies that you actually closed versus just the companies that you engaged with. Yes. All right. Well, we can go into our last mistake that we see dimension marketers make, and that would be launching paid ads without doing positioning and bio research. First. So typically the cause of this is that teams have to move quickly into actually getting into execution and don't have the time to really step back and test that messaging ahead of time. But because of that, it leads to building more generic ads that maybe don't resonate with your high intent buyers. And I feel like my experience I've had with building paid search campaigns for our clients is there's always a balancing act that I found with writing the ad copy between like including the keywords that you need to, that you want to include and target in the ad campaign and including kind of the overall messaging that the company has on their website and on the like specific page that you're going to include with the campaign. But then also keeping the copy from being too feature heavy or like oriented more towards a company's product and not as much oriented towards like buyer pain points and you know, problem statements. It's more like solution oriented. So a fix for this is to really focus your ad copy towards the buyer's pain points and kind of more the words that your buyers are actually saying rather than the words that you're saying sales team would say to fix their pain point. And then you can create a dedicated landing page for the ad campaign that reflects that copy and that keyword tailored more towards those pain points. So I don't know what your thoughts are around launching paid ads before you do your positioning in bio research.

Yes. Yeah, as you said, common mistake. Understandable as well. Again is that delusion of mechanizing marketing activities. Right. Going is great because allows you to scale, to bring volume to the things that we do. But the flip side of it is that it loses track of the purpose of the thing. Right. And we have seen it in many other things where marketers, we, you know, grind down a little bit. Something that was good at the beginning. Right. Take blogging for example. You can, you can start saying, well, I'm going to ride for something that I feel passionate about or as a company, something my own unique point of view. But then you can make it a numbers game very quickly by saying, well now I'm going to go for the very high volume keywords and I'm just going to see how many visitors I'm getting and then I'm going to put something there to get a ton of leads. Great. But what was the point? Because. Because the point is not just, you know, publishing as many publications as you can and getting as many visitors as you can and getting as many form films as you can. If you're not getting the right, the right buyers into it. There's a authority component to it that justify that effort. But, but you can quickly go into the wrong direction if you, if you forget what is the problem purpose. So the same happened with advertising. Right. If you. As you were saying for ads. Yes. The, the. The very visible thing that we have are the keywords. And it's very tempting to say well, I just will make copy that replicates those keywords because I know that if I want to be relevant I have to mention them as well. And then you can go quickly into well, I will have them on the landing page because then we'll be completely aligned. Great, great. That's great. Those are best practices. But that's not the purpose. The purpose is not to build a machine that just matches keywords to copy to landing pages. The question has always been and it doesn't matter if it happens on Google or if happens on AI or it happens on a in person conversation. The question has always been what are the questions or how is that my buyers learn about products and services like the ones that I sell. Right. And if you can confidently say as you were saying, Miranda. Right. These will be the phrases. This will be the queries that a buyer will use to learn or get answers about about products and services like the ones that my company offers. If you have that alignment, then those are the keywords that you have to pursue. And the copy and the offer should have the flavor and the position of your company not necessarily matching the keywords used for the search. Yes, it helps if you can put them there. Of course. Right. Because that's the way that the in this case that platform measure alignment and relevancy. But at the end of the day, if you want to get more humans, right. And if you want again, if you want to get the ones that are matching your icp, the ones that have the right behaviors or that had the need for the product that you offer, then it matters. It matters more that the copy the offer reflects your company positioning and it caters to what you consider are your potential buyers. After that, all of it is implementation. But. But that's in general the mistake. You can go for broader terms that in paper are bringing you a lot of clicks at very low cost and a lot of conversions that are very cost effective but produce zero business because they are not the right buyers or, or if they're right the buyer they are not have the right intent. And so I think that's, that's a little bit and eventually shows up. That's the as we were saying, on that scale you can get away with a campaign that is not aligned with buyers and their behaviors for a long time. Because, because you will be able to report great numbers at the marketing scale, right? Look at all the impressions, look at all the clicks, look at all the conversions. But if over time you start asking, well, what will what had been the business impact of that activity? Eventually someone, usually the one that is, you know, putting the money into it will question that and pause the effort. Yeah.

And unfortunately I must say it is really hard to create good copy for your ad campaigns if you haven't talked to a customer recently and you don't have that like direct answers from in depth customer research. And we understand, like, we know that doing that in depth buyer research is difficult and has a lot of, you know, you have a lot of roadblocks. You have to actually get your customers to answer. A couple ways you could do it is set up, you know, four or five of the most important questions for you to get answers to and either send them out to a handful of buyers and if you can provide like a small incentive for them to answer them for you, it's always going to be better if they can give you 10 or 15 minutes of their time to hop on a call and you record the call. Another one that I saw recently on ins on LinkedIn that was interesting was a company that they put out to their all of their customers that they wanted to feature a new customer in each of their newsletters, every like month's newsletter. And so they had like three questions outlined of that the customer answered to then be featured in the newsletter. And they had just like a little section with the customer logo and their name and then their answers to that question of like how they chose that company as their solution. And well to the customer it seems like, oh, they're like they want to represent me, like I'm going to be included in the newsletter, I'm going to get visibility, that kind of thing. But for, for you that's, you know, that's higher research, like you're getting the answers to that, those bio research questions.

I agree, I agree.

All right, any last tips or solutions for your paid ad positioning, BIOR research, all that?

No, just obviously testing again. That's definitely the general recommendation that even what I'm saying right now, and you know it applies to everything. What matters really is what you are able to test. But it's always good to have this great framework of let us start with the buyer, let us start with how they buy and then adapt the tools, advertising or any other one to do that idea to that concept.

Awesome. All right. Well, I think that wraps up this month's episode. So hopefully we didn't call you out on your mistakes and we actually gave you actionable, you know, solutions to keep in mind. And we will see you in next month's episode. Thanks for joining.

Thanks, Amiranda. Bye. Bye.