This blog is a quick overview of what defines B2B demand generation and some of the approaches your company can take to succeed.
What is B2B demand generation?
It’s about giving marketing a sales quota, so let’s start by defining what it’s not. B2B demand generation is not about branding, awareness, positioning or value propositions. These can be important and even critical, but demand generation is not about things that you need a research team or survey to measure.
It’s about giving marketing a sales quota, because buyers now digest an average of 10.7 pieces of content before finalizing their purchasing decisions. So, you need a sales content strategy that supports your inside reps and supports how the buyer buys.
B2B demand generation and lead generation mean different things:
- Demand generation is the marketing and inside sales machine that put deals in and moves them through the pipe.
- Lead generation is the measurable output.
B2B demand generation’s job is to drive and close business. Demand generation sources maketing qualified leads, takes leads from marketing qualified to sales qualified and then engage, nurtures leads not ready to buy (until they are), and supplies the closer with content required to take to proposal and close.
Successful B2B demand generation requires sales content that educates, verifies and finally convinces the customer to transact, along with the right technology to track digital consumption and content repurposed and pushed across media types, all leveraged by a well-trained inside sales team. B2B demand generation is about your reps and marketers having the right conversations and sharing the right information in the right channel at the right time in the customers buying cycle. Demand generation is about taking the content you created to support your reps and repurposing it across digital platforms and social media, so your customers can find you and you sales reps have third-party verification ground cover. Your B2B demand generation engine needs a seamless sales process that integrates sales reps, leverages digital content and improves sales results with the right sales technologies stack.
Here is what a sales driven B2B demand generation process looks like:
First, you put prospects in the pipe using reps, tools, SEO, SEM and social media. You then profile, qualify and engage your prospects. Next, you address one sales objection or buyer stage need at a time. Finally, you push content or nurture until business is closed.
Here is what a mature demand generation ecosystem looks like:
As your buyer move through their buying process (and your sales process) through your initial offers, your inside reps, product specialists and senior talent help the buyer buy seamlessly. You need to do things this way because if you are not making it easy for the buyer, you are not taking competitive advantage of every opportunity you have for sales and marketing ROI efficiency.
To compete, you need to align your teams around how the buyers buy, provide feedback loops to your marketers, create content efficiently, and re-leverage that content every way possible.
How do you sell faster? More effectively? Grow your business? You have two options:
#1 Take up to two years to build your own.
or
#2 Pick the right sales team and sales marketing team to fill your gaps.
Gabriel Sales build machines from scratch or turns around stalled efforts. We specialize in taking existing products into new markets and taking new products into existing markets. We have a diverse B2B sales and marketing team experienced in selling to multiple verticals with solutions for companies selling to both the Fortune 500 and SMB markets that need to sell into sales and marketing, IT, operations and HR and legal budgets. With expertise taking technology, media, SASS data and professional service solutions and products to market.
With Gabriel Sales, your B2B demand generation process can be up and running in as little as two weeks. We can have you set up with a B2B demand generation team and marketing operations deploying a repeatable sales process that is accountable to targets and metrics, selling to your buyer the way they want to buy.
As a B2B demand generation agency, we can help you with:
- Sales strategy and speed to market
- A managed and transparent process
- Smart and authentic sales content creation, production, digital production and distribution
- Staff that executes seamlessly
- Sales tools and all the metrics to maximize ROI
Services range from full-time sales and marketing operations, consulting, staffing, and digital execution, along with a sales and marketing process designed for your specific needs and challenges. To see if Gabriel Sales can help you ramp your sales faster, please contact us.
