Hey ,

Here are 05 checklists to merge ABM & demand gen

1. Foundations

Align both activities on:

☑ ICP: Are your demand gen activities landing ICP accounts? Is the win rate and ACV higher than average?

☑ Message-buyer fit: Are you using segment-specific messaging and case studies?

☑ Buyer journey: Do you know where and how your buyers learn, discover, and evaluate solutions like yours?

☑ Buying committee: Are you addressing everyone involved in the buying process?

☑ Content: Is your content addressing the key questions and objections your buyers have as they move through the buying journey?

2. Generate demand

Educate your buyers about your category, your approach, the benefits of your solution, and purchase criteria through e.g:

☑ Frequent, native content on target channels and communities

☑ Podcasts

☑ In-depth guides and case studies

☑ Webinars, micro-events, and (online) conferences

☑ Content co-creation

☑ Newsletter

3. Scoring

Demand generation creates a pool of engaged accounts interested in your solution.

Scoring helps you select accounts for ABM warm-up plays.

Score the target accounts by:

☑ ICP fit (segment, buyer role, (dis)qualification criteria)

☑ Account penetration

☑ Engagement threshold and intent

☑ Account tiers (you cannot run the same plays for a 5k ARR and a 300k ARR account)

4. Capture more demand with ABM plays

Add accounts that meet your scoring criteria to the appropriate ABM warm-up play for their account tier. E.g:

☑ Content co-creation with buyers

☑ Micro-events and 1:Few webinars

☑ Social engagement

☑ Proactive content distribution

☑ Account penetration (including other buyers from the engaged accounts)

☑ Account research & personalized outreach

5. Go Allbound

☑ Involve sales in demand generation to turn engagement into conversations, and collect insights about target accounts and buyers

☑ Involve marketing in activation by running account research and personalized activation plays to land more opportunities.

☑ Use the collected insights to refine your activities and create content to influence buyers in different stages of their journey.

☑ Never stop nurturing - switch plays, involve in other demand-gen activities, and keep engaging on social.

"ABM or demand generation?" is a wrong question to ask.

Both of these activities need to become an integral part of your full-funnel marketing operations and be based on a deep understanding of your best customers' buying process.

6 demand gen processes that generated 72 five-figure inbound opportunities in a year

1. Continuously learn about our buyers and customers

- We start every consulting project with an in-depth dive into the goals, challenges, and bottlenecks of our clients

- Embed customer interviews after the successful sale and after delivery

- Run quarterly surveys about the challenges our buyers have with ABM, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy

2. Keep our ICP and positioning updated and validated

- Use these insights to update the account (dis)qualification criteria, our ICP, and our messaging

- Test and validate the positioning of our products

- We validate all our major content pieces by posting about the topics on LinkedIn first

3. Focus on the operationalization of our awareness and demand gen activities

- Invest 80% of our effort into proven channels and content formats and 20% in experimenting with new ones

- Commit 100% to a calendar of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual marketing activities

- Prioritize repeatability and improvement over time, instead of wasting time obsessing over individual actions

4. Obsess about plugging the leaks in our funnel

- Never launch a campaign or a program without having proven demand capture and activation processes in place

- Regularly refine our buyer's experience, our sales process, our proposals, and other buyer enablement content

5. Plan and prioritize ruthlessly

- Take a couple of days per quarter (and a whole week each year) to reflect, prioritize and plan

- Then ruthlessly prioritize the execution of the strategy over the constant barrage of new ideas, tactics, channels, partnership offers, and other opportunities

6. Gradually introduce new programs and activities

- Never commit to a new channel, activity, or program lightly, because it takes sustained effort over time

- Start with a pilot, focused on learning, validating assumptions, and looking at early traction signals

- Next, focus on operationalization and repeatability, before thinking of scaling and adding new people

- - -

There are many tactics and gotchas that go into building a demand-generation machine that repeatedly generates inbound opportunities.

But the key to success is nailing the foundations and installing repeatable processes.

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