Three B2B demand generation swing factors to ignore…at your peril
Product? Check. Customer love? Big time. Value prop? Nailed. So why aren’t you generating the leads and pipeline you need? Lots of CEOs blame their demand generation person or program. But it’s not that simple.
TL;DR: The three swing factors that make or break demand gen are: 1. ideal customer profile; 2. message; and 3. offer. Take the time to understand ICP fully. It’s the most valuable thing you will do, with ripple effects across your business. Be crisp, clear, and distinctive in your message, and for God’s sake, make it about the customer (and not you). And set the bar high for an offer that’s actually helpful and builds trust.
Assuming you actually do have a quality product and solid value proposition, your success in creating opportunities depends on five things: brand, program, ideal customer profile (ICP), message, and offer. Brand-building is necessary but not sufficient, and programs are all mechanics and execution. The real swing factors? ICP, message, and offer. Let’s look at those.
Ideal customer profile
The first, and most important, swing factor is your ICP. When you look through your qualified leads or early pipeline, how confident are you that the names on that list have a high probability of closing? What would it mean if you could tell the difference between an 80% opportunity and, say, a 50% one? Or a 30% one? What if you could fill your pipeline with mostly the 80%-ers while reducing the lower-probability ones? You wouldn’t just close more business; you’d close it faster. Which means you’d grow faster. Which means your company would be more valuable. Which means you’d attract high-quality employees. Which means you’d have less turnover. In short, it’s everything.
Defining your ICP is the most valuable thing you can do. Every last minute you spend to hone your understanding of your customer is worth it. Yet, do we spend the required time to understand what makes an opportunity right? Right for us? Right now? Right under these circumstances? We don’t. Instead, we seem to trade off getting the right opportunities in our funnel for getting lots of opportunities in there. That’s the wrong way of thinking, and if we could just agree — between sales and marketing, the revenue and exec teams, and execs and the board — to focus on, measure, and reward quality over quantity, we’d be SO. MUCH. BETTER. OFF.
What goes into ICP? Go beyond factors like vertical, size, and buyer role. Understand your customers, who they are, where they’re going in their careers, how they’re measured, who their stakeholders are, where they stack up in the pecking order at work, what their view of success is, whether and how they could rise up the ranks, and what your solution does for them. Leave no stone unturned! What happened before they purchased? What made now the right time? What was the compelling event? What else was going on in the organization? Who was coming and who was going? Who were the stakeholders and influencers, and what did each gain or lose from doing the project? Which other technologies were purchased or projects kicked off around the same time, and what were their relationships to yours? What technologies were being decommissioned or wound down? What did you replace, and why? What project and budget line item were you a part of? Was it an easy sale or did it take an act of God? How did the buyer make the argument? Take a “five whys” approach to your ICP — including the dynamics and characteristics of the customer’s situation — and don’t stop until you’re satisfied you understand it fully.
Here are a few examples of vendor ads that nail the ICP. Investing site Wealthfront cleverly (if un-subtly) targets “career-launching” companies as breeding grounds for ideal clients. Design site Canva has its finger on the pulse of who one of their key target customers needs high-quality design help—in this case, political organizers. And equity management company Carta is doling out fundraising advice because they know that’s when new companies are most likely to need their service. Each of these addresses the right customer at the right time.
After you figure out all of the signals that make up an ICP, shift that knowledge back in time and incorporate it into your demand gen plan so you’re not spending on leads you don’t want in your funnel, but instead you’re carefully defining which leads to pursue, and targeting them through segmentation, messaging, and timing.
Message
The second swing factor in demand gen is your message. Yours should be all about your customer (and not you!), well-written, and consistent. See how project management software maker Monday and DevOps platform JFrog do it? A pithy call to action aimed directly at the customer.
How about productivity application maker Coda? A hilarious pun that relates perfectly to the pain point. Yesss!
Notice how great messages almost never contain an “ing” verb. Can you guess why? Here’s a fun game: Find a company or campaign message whose first word ends with “ing.” Now remove the “ing.” See what happens? Chances are the message goes from being about the company to about the customer. Take the tagline for a digital experience monitoring company, “Advancing user experience.” Not exactly inspiring. Now remove the “ing:” “Advance the user experience.” See what I mean?
And if that’s bad, take a look at the security industry’s use of “securing” in their corporate and campaign messaging. Here are a few gems:
- “Securing enterprises”
- “Securing the enterprise”
- “Securing enterprises everywhere”
- “Securing the modern enterprise”
- “Securing enterprise [insert any d*mn word here]”
- “Securing enterprises globally”
- “Securing businesses” (See what they did — swapped “enterprises” with “businesses?”)
- “Securing enterprise security” (Really? Securing security? Jeez.)
- …and thousands more
And, for God’s sake, write consistently. Not to kick security while it’s down, but in my research I found a security leader had written “enterprise-grade security” four different ways on the same web page. Ai ai ai!
Haven’t quite shored up your messaging? Here’s your essential guide for core messaging, plus a core messaging template to get you started.
Offer
This brings us to our third and final swing factor in demand gen: your offer. Assuming you understand your customer and their challenges clearly, you know exactly what to provide. Whether it’s a free trial, explainer video, useful tool, or research report, and no matter where it appears in your cadence — as a way to capture new leads or a hit in your nurture line-up — your offer must be pitch perfect. It needs to be something that helps your customer do their job and must also earn their trust. A friend who was an executive of an observability company established a norm early on that guided all product and marketing decisions — that every time a user interacted with their product, they should get $2,000 of value in the first two minutes. Regardless of the value bar, we should take the same approach in demand gen offers: provide value no matter what — even if the target never becomes a customer.
I love this example from content platform Path Factory. Knowing that the days of web cookies are numbered, the company developed and shared expertise on the topic, and how to adjust. It’s a great give — thoughtful, credible, and totally useful to the customers they target.
Another good one is this must-have metrics how-to from AI-based IT service management leader Moveworks. What IT leader doesn’t need a checklist to assess their virtual agent (or to measure success in an evaluation)? Sure, it’s self-serving, but for someone who actually cares about this topic, it’s a can’t-miss.
And how about this report from account engagement company 6sense? Kind of a tease, but super compelling. What marketer wouldn’t want to know what accounts are hiding in their “dark funnel.” Also? What the heck is a “dark funnel?” It’s irresistible!
What makes these offers so on-the-money? They come from a place of really knowing who their ICP is, they address the customer’s pain point with a crisp, clear message, and plainly articulate the value the customer will get from the offer.
Summary
Now you know the three big swing factors to demand gen success: ICP, message, and offer. Next time your funnel needs a little pick-me-up, don’t guess. Instead, troubleshoot these three things. Chances are they’ll lead you to the answer.
