Why don’t demand generation programs work? I get this question from CEOs all the time during my Office Hours. They tell me about all the great things that they’re doing and all the campaigns that they’re running, but tell me that they’re not meeting their MQL goals, or their SAL goals, or their SQL goals, or their whatever goals. Why? When I ask them these three questions, they typically do not have the answer for me:
- “What are you doing to generate awareness about your brand?”
- “What are you doing to generate interest for your brand, and your products, and your services?”
- “What are you doing to create intent to buy?”
If you can’t answer these three questions, then you shouldn’t be running a demand generation program.
Why This Matters
Being able to answer the three questions above is important because it’s built on your brand strategy, your go-to-market strategy, and your extremely deep understanding of who your customers are — what they want from you, what they need from you, and what their motivators are. You need to unearth all of these things in order to put campaigns together that are actually going to resonate with your customers.
So if you’re not doing those things — creating awareness, interest, and intent — your demand generation program is definitely not going to work. It’s just going flounder around, and you’re going to waste a lot of time and money trying to figure out why.
The Bottom Line
If you want to look at cracking the nut on demand generation differently, the first thing you need to do is back up. Make sure that you’re doing those three other things extremely well. Once you do that, it’s going to grease the skids in creating demand.
So, go figure out awareness, figure out interest, and figure out intent.
If you need help, book an office hours, and let’s do some brainstorming together and figure it out.
Giddy up!