A winning demand generation program can often be a key to success for a Software as a Service (SaaS) organization. There are many factors to success in any program including proper audience identification, a mix of valuable content that speaks to your identified customer profile, proper budget allocation, and so much more. Through my years of marketing SaaS organizations, I’ve learned that launching a successful demand generation program requires extensive and careful planning and attention to detail. However, before you plan your first lead-generating campaign, here are three critical considerations when launching a new demand generation program to set you on the path to success:
1. Collaborate with Sales for Seamless Lead Flow
To have the best chance of success bringing in revenue at any organization there has to be a good relationship between the sales and marketing teams. Consequently, one of the first steps a marketing leader should take when developing a new demand generation program should be a meeting of the minds between the two teams. Everyone needs to be on the same page.
During initial meetings between sales and marketing teams, come to an understanding of what each stage of the lead funnel is and what they mean at your organization. Come up with answers to questions such as, what is required to create a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), will you need to create a classification for Sales Accepted Lead (SAL), what qualifications are needed to move a lead into Opportunity status, and so on.
These answers will likely be different for each organization, but the important thing is to make sure all these questions are addressed and that you all agree on them. You should formalize the steps and definitions and make them widely available to everyone involved.
Once you have all the lead funnel stages defined and agreed upon, you’ll need to determine what the handoff looks like between teams. The answers to these questions are usually highly dependent on the size and sophistication of the sales team. Examples of the questions you want to address include, how much you want to nurture via email lower quality MQLs, do you want the sales development team or the account executive team to engage with demo requesters, how far will the sales development team advance a prospect through the funnel before handing off to an account executive, etc. Finally, you should spend some time establishing service level agreements (SLAs) between the sales and marketing teams to introduce accountability to the process.
2. Track All Activities to Your Defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Success in demand generation hinges on knowing precisely what success looks like. When launching a new demand generation program, you should spend time defining your key performance indicators (KPIs) clearly and how you’ll measure, track, and monitor them accurately. Which KPIs you should measure is a large conversation that I’ll discuss at a later date. For this article, I want to emphasize the importance of ensuring each activity you take for your campaigns is tracked in a way that works with your established KPIs. Know what, when, and how you are going to track an activity.
For every activity that your demand generation team performs, you should plan clearly how you are going to track the effectiveness back to an established KPI. For example, when conducting a webinar, are you going to use a webinar platform to track the registrations and attendees using their built-in process or are you going to build a landing page/form with your marketing automation tool to track registrants? When launching email campaigns are you going to track only prospects who have performed the desired call-to-action or are you going to set up a lead scoring model to rate people who have opened multiple emails higher? When attending tradeshows are you going to place all the leads you gather into email nurtures or mark those matching your buyer personas as MQLs and immediately send them to the sales team?
Different organizations will likely have different answers to each of these scenarios, but the important thing is to come into the process with a general understanding of how you’ll handle each type of situation at your company. This will help you when you begin planning and executing campaigns, making sure you don’t overlook tracking success and then have to backtrack.
3. Standardize Naming Conventions for Consistency
Maintaining consistency in your demand generation efforts is crucial, especially as the company grows and the campaigns grow more complicated. This may sound simple and intuitive, but you can’t imagine how quickly assets become ‘lost’ when you don’t have clear naming conventions established from the get-go. With multiple people working on different pieces in the demand generation process, you soon get an unmanageable mess of convoluted names. When trying to piece together different prospecting lists for a campaign at one company, I quickly found out that our CRM contained dozens of segmented lists containing viable prospects, each named in a manner that made sense to someone at some point. It required great effort to manually review each list to find those that could be used in the campaign.
When you launch a new demand generation program take time to think of intuitive naming conventions for major items such as prospect lists, email templates, landing pages, URL parameters, and more. Naming conventions may vary based on the specific needs of different organizations, but some of the naming elements to consider include timeframe, customer segment, buyer persona, product line, etc. You should think through all the different ways you may want to search for or categorize your asset in the future and include those items in the asset’s name.
Properly thought-out naming conventions create order in your processes, making it easier to analyze results, troubleshoot issues, and scale your efforts. They also ensure that your team members are on the same page when discussing and executing campaigns.
In conclusion, launching a demand generation program at a growing tech organization requires a strategic approach. By collaborating with sales, defining how you’ll track success, and implementing standardized naming conventions, you’ll lay the foundation for a successful and scalable demand generation engine. If you are looking to bring a new demand generation focus to your business, Fractional Boost can help. We provide fractional marketing support (Fractional CMOs, directors, and managers) for your organization at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time equivalent employee.
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