There are two major motions in demand generation: You either (1) create demand or (2) capture it. The campaigns that create demand need to be highly experimental, and need to circulate and reiterate specific positioning statements to segmented audience segments. At a startup, it’s important to rapidly test messaging to each of these segments. This creates a cycle of iterative experimentation. At a minimum, a team will be able to identify what messaging isn’t resonating, and which is driving clicks. When an activity truly creates demand, a company will feel it. Because they will be able to capture it more efficiently, as inbound demand will increase.

The name of the game to create demand is rapid experimentation, iteration, and creating touchpoints with your addressable market. Reiterating the same, relevant language that reflects a company truly understands the customer’s reality and is the solution to a pressing problem is the way to succeed here. There are many channels that can be used to disseminate this messaging: Outbound email, webinars, customer management, paid advertising, etc. A good demand generation leader will experiment with many of these, particularly the ones their audience segment tends to spend time and engage with. 

Now, capturing demand can’t be done unless demand is created. The mistake of capture before creation is often made by early-stage companies that believe there is more demand for their product than actually exists. Go-to-market leaders at these companies feel pressure to generate leads and usually allocate the majority of channel or program spend towards this activity. But this strategy is often incorrect. The leads that come out of this are more often than not unqualified, or not ready to buy.

They don’t have a pressing pain that needs solving. They don’t have a project, they can’t sell your solution internally to other stakeholders, and they will not buy your product.

Let’s take for example a campaign that gives away a desirable item, like cool company swag, in exchange for a conversation with sales. When a person engages with this campaign by providing the company their information in interest of the swag, they are now a marketing engaged lead. For them to progress through the sales cycle, they need to meet specific exit gate criteria that indicate they are a good lead and are accepted to be worked by the sales team, often the SDRs. When the sales team accepts this lead, they become the primary drivers of a company's messaging and positioning. It is their job to prescribe the problem; To get to the core of the pain a company or organization is experiencing. When this pain isn’t present, there’s not much the sales team can do to progress this opportunity further. It’s lost, and go-to-market teams are often left scratching their head wondering what they’re doing wrong.

What’s wrong is they aren’t investing enough in generating demand for their product. Demand generation is often seen as a marketing activity, but it is a larger go-to-market initiative in sales-led buying cycles. 

Companies need to get good at enabling their sales team to help a prospect discover a pain, to understand the emotional and financial detriment of not solving this pain, and in creating a business case to drive the adoption of this new product at their current organization. A good sales organization can help an evangelist sell their product to the rest of their team. They can craft personalized business cases that progress the opportunity through the sales cycle. By doing this, they are generating demand. 

Before the sales team is able to do this, the marketing organization needs to disseminate messaging that informs key contacts at the companies within their addressable market that our company truly understands the prospect’s reality and wants to help them either save money, make money, or be more productive. The last point on productivity can arguably accomplish the first two. 

When a marketing organization does this, they create evangelists around their product. Word of mouth marketing is kick started. You close on new customers and use their stories to engage in social selling. This creates a fly wheel of demand generation, which in turn increases the amount of leads you are able to capture.

This is how a company grows, and how a demand generation motion succeeds.

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