Hey ,

Demand generation became a buzzword that everybody talks about, but you rarely see people sharing practical examples or case studies.

For many marketers, demand gen is all about running ads to ungated content with occasional thought leadership content, podcast, and newsletter.

While these activities should be included in your demand gen mix, they do not constitute the full strategy.

Look at B2B demand generation as a demand waterfall that has 3 pillars: 

• demand activities
• distribution 
• demand capturing 

To demystify B2B demand generation, Andrei had a talk with Fran Langham, Head of Demand Generation at Cognism, about their shift from lead gen to demand gen, and covered:         

• How Cognism made the transition from lead gen to demand gen, and the bottlenecks they faced during the journey.
• ​An overview of Cognism demand gen strategy, and its key pillars.
• ​How Cognism measures and tracks demand gen program’s efficiency.

What triggered the shift from lead gen to demand gen at Cognism?  

It all started when some members of the lead gen team started listening to Chris Walker's podcast. Then they looked at the results they were getting from their lead gen model and realized that they were generating leads easily, but it was hard for them to turn those leads into revenue. 

So they set out to implement some tips and tricks from Chris Walker who always talks about splitting the funnel. And it opened their eyes to why the demand gen approach would be a better way to go. 

Basically, they split the funnel and found that they needed 25 direct inbound demo requests to secure one deal. For content leads, who are leads from events or from a white paper or ebook, they needed 500 of those to generate or close one deal.  

How does Cognism define lead generation? 

They use ebooks as the basis of their lead generation strategy. Here's how they do it: 

• They work on an ebook. 
• They add the ebook to their landing page. 
• They add some paid social and paid forms, like a lead gen form.
• They collect that data and move them to their CRM (Salesforce) and pass it on to sales.
• Then they call the leads and follow up. 

That was their typical lead gen approach.  

While this approach served them quite well for some time, at the end of each month, they were getting very few deals from all those leads. Why? Mainly because there was no intent to buy in the first place. And sometimes, it’s after 6months that they might close one or two deals from an event, or from an e-book.  

What were the main bottlenecks during the shift from lead gen to demand gen?

Generating leads used to be the comfort blanket of the lead gen team at Cognism. That's what they were used to. The sales team was used to seeing hundreds of leads coming through Salesforce, and the marketing team was used to delivering that amount of leads. 

So the biggest issue they ran into was getting the buy-in from sales initially. It was not easy to find the right approach to educate them on the switch. And also, there was a lack of patience. Because when you initially switch to a demand gen approach, you don't suddenly get loads of inbounds overnight. It does take time. 

While making the switch there will be a decrease in leads. But what matters is quality, not quantity. That can be a little bit difficult and that’s why you need to educate your teams internally early on. 

Cognism demand gen strategy and its core pillars.

For all demand gen strategy, the main goal is serving your audience where they are and where they like to hang out, and being value-driven. So one of the core pillars of Cognism’s demand gen strategy was around subject matter experts.

They engage and get subject matter experts on board so they can add value to their audience. 

Their core personas are marketing and sales. And for example, they had Ryan for sales. He is a big name and they brought him on board to spark excitement and engagement within the sales community. By having Ryan on board, he helped them create real value content, sales scripts, and tips. 

Ryan is also a superstar cold caller. He's cold-calling every day. And that's what resonates with their sales audience. So, they ran live events regularly with him because they got a lot of engagement from that. 

The main thing here is to think about how you're serving your audience in an educational way first and then in a product-focused way. 

PS: Fran Langham shared more tips during the interview which have been condensed for clarity. The full podcast is available here.

How does Cognism measure and track the efficiency of demand gen programs? 

To measure the success of a campaign, they report on their Spotlight campaign.  They look at positive sign indicators like engagement and platform metrics which indicate if the campaign is doing well. 

They have a dashboard that showcases the funnel. They report on that weekly Spotlight campaign to report on, and they have a paid acquisition team as well to help them report on the success of the channel they split. 

As an example, they do the same for Facebook in the bucket, like thought leadership content products. 

It's really hard to compare them against each other because they all have different objectives. 

But if they want to capture demand, they look at metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and cost per lead. 

For the thought leadership bucket, they look at things like video views, scroll deck at the time on page, qualitative feedback, and comments. 

The biggest challenge when it comes to measuring the efficacy of your demand gen program comes from trying to attribute the program to revenue directly. 

Because different campaigns have different goals. You can’t just say that this month I posted  10 times on LinkedIn and I got one direct message asking about our product or setting up demos with SDR. This doesn't mean that, if next month, you do 20 posts, you'll get two inbound requests. You can get 10, you can get 20, or you can even get zero. So nobody has an influence on it. 

So they set up different metrics for different campaigns but at the end of the day, you have the revenue report which is all about the market and source pipeline. This is what we all care about at the end of the day: how many accounts did we bring to sales and how many of them converted into revenue? 

Best Shares From Trenches Community

• B2B companies that focus on business triggers and ignore demand triggers in their marketing campaigns usually see high CPL and poor results. Here is why
• Step-by-step, 7100-word guide to the modern B2B buyer journey, and how to influence it with full-funnel marketing
• How to measure B2B marketing and make the right decisions about what works (and what doesn’t)
• Six demand generation processes that generated 72 five-figure inbound opportunities in a year

Job Opportunity 

Gradient is hiring a B2B marketer to join their team.

What skills and experience should the candidate need to get the job done:

• 3 to 8 years of experience in a B2B content marketing role.
• You can work independently whilst aligning with the broader team on goals & expectations.
• You’ve got a positive and flexible personality, the ability to cope with changing scopes, and solid problem-solving skills.
• You’ve got a proactive, entrepreneurial, results-oriented attitude with the ability to work effectively in a fast-paced organization.
• You have solid experience in content creation, the desire to really understand what drives the customer, and the skill to describe complex things in simple words.

To learn more and apply, click here.

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See you in Trenches 😉

Adechina ODJO