Name: B2B Demand Generation Playbook
Uploaded: 2025-04-02T15:42:03.891Z
Duration: 1 h 40 min 52 s
Description: B2B Demand Generation Playbook

Transcript for "B2B Demand Generation Playbook": Hey, everyone, and welcome to our, webinar that we try to host every quarter where we pick up the most challenging and most demanding topics and try to break them down into simple frameworks that you guys could replicate. Last year, of course, that's the, how to create your pilot ABM program in two weeks webinar, which had fantastic engagement this year. More specifically in q one, we have, heard a lots of, questions about developing or refining b to b demand generation. So what we decided to share with you today is the practical guide on how you can either build your demand generation program from scratch, especially if you are shifting, let's say, from sales led and lead generation, or you'll do a lot of practical examples how you can refine and enhance your demand generating strategy. I know that was the, popular question in the beginning. Can we have the recording? The answer is absolutely yes. I dropped the link in the chat. You'll be able to use the same login link that you have in your calendars or in email reminders and watch it on this platform. You guys are very welcome to ask any questions in the chat. The in the chat or there is q and a section, which is even better. So we'll make sure to cover all of these questions. And that being said, let us know where you're all joining us from. Let us know in the chat. We are again broadcasting from not so sunny, unfortunately, Spain. Let us know, guys, in the chat where you all joined from. It's actually quite sunny here in Valencia. And you see the difference. Yeah. Just six decourer winters. Rain, Michigan. Sunny Berlin. That doesn't happen that often. Rio De Janeiro, Yance, snowy North Dakota, Cape Town, Tel Aviv, New York. This is really all over the place. Manchester, Lebanon, Sussex, South Africa. So welcome, everybody. This is amazing. Poland, New York. We have a few neighbors from Valencia. Fantastic. Happy to host all of you guys again. You're very welcome to ask, your questions in the q and a section, and we'll make sure to, cover all of them. But before we'll kick off, let me ask you one question. What is demand generation? How you define it? Let us know in the chat. Write down what please, how you define or how do you think about demand generation. Let us know in the chat, please. Ginny, getting prospects to raise their hands. Love it. Who else? I see Julie Copenhagen, PONDAS London. Great. Tom, creating interest and opportunity to engage. What other definitions that we have here? Activity that support a strategic narrative tied to, business offering that create brand equity over time. Fantastic. Creating a need for a product or service when the consumer is in need. Wiki, then on whom you ask, marketing drive and demand. And, yeah, the chatters jump and suck and have an impact on inbound, educate on prospects on how to solve their needs, utilize highly targeted campaigns to generate qualified leads that can be turned into revenue, marketing strategy focus on creating awareness and interest to drive demand and sales. Fantastic reply. Thank you so much, guys. The key points here are if I'm reading it properly, there is no unified definition of demand generation. Nobody defines it in the in the same words. Right? Obviously, we can find the pattern. So it's all about creating awareness. It's all about making sure that your prospects want to raise hand and, buy your product. It's all about generating market and source revenue of pipeline. Also, for example, like, Aaron said, winning our potential customers by helping them realize that your product or service solve their problems. All of these definitions that you put in the chat are absolutely correct. And the truth is that there is no standard. There is no unified definition of demand generation. While you all put the I from my perspective, all the answers are absolutely correct and could be applied to demand generation. Here's the reality. Here is how b two b companies run their demand generation and awareness programs. And, in our case, we have never I mean, August, we were referring to our small niche, and we're not working with early stage startups. Right? So no mature or established b to b company ever said that they are not doing demand generation. They all say, of course, we do. We do print awareness. We post some updates on our company's page. We do some press releases. Our blog has optimized over our keywords. So we have our cadence of producing articles. We do white papers. We have gated content. We have webinar. So then, basically, we have all this demand captured. We transfer it to sales, and now it's sales job to, basically generate meet and send revenue. So while in a nutshell, all of this might make sense, the biggest problem is that this playbook is focused only on in market buyers. Right? Those that already came to the internal consensus that they want to buy a specific product. They build the requirements. They already already vetted vendors. And I'm just to be absolutely clear, I'm not talking about products, that are similar to Pipedrive CRM or Netflix subscription. Right? You don't obviously sell, like, 7 figure software the way you sell Netflix subscription or pair of shoes. Right? So we are not talking about those products, but the, there is no problem to pay with your credit card $15 and try the product. Right? We speak about $6.07 figure deals. So in this case, these accounts, we mean that these buyers are already in the market. They are already prioritizing different vendors because they came to internal consensus, and they know what what actually do they want. And the reality and the set reality of b two b playbook that this is the smallest chunk of your market. I think the next part where we'll dive a little bit deeper on the bit of demand, generalities will make more sense about the demand gen from the buyer's perspective. Excuse me. So we know that no buyer ever said, hey. I'm interested in becoming your MQL. Please send me your automated email nurturing sequence and transfer me to your sales rep. I would love to spend a few hours on next Tuesday on qualification call and then hang out with your account executive. It's a bit of, let's say, a joke, but, really, this is how a lot of people experience demand generation. A lot of buyers experience demand generation, very transactional. And like Andrei said, you are buying impulse purchase or, you know, below below 100 or whatever purchase in that way, but you're not going to buy complex products for b to b enterprise where you have multiple people who are involved. And what is the real what is the reality of the buying process? There was a big study, and I mentioned this several times and probably a lot of you already know this. There was a big study last year done by the TrustRadius and Pavilion, which is a large community of B2B professionals, marketers, salespeople, executives. And basically, one of the very interesting they had a lot of interesting findings, but, like, one of the interesting findings was that up to 86% of the buyers, especially, enterprise buyers, will shortlist the product they had discovered before they started their research process. So when we speak about demand generation, we can't really speak about demand generation without brand awareness. And this is probably the biggest missing part in a lot of programs, actually being relevant in creating awareness with the buyers that are not in the market, because that's actually where they discover you. 86% of the buyers, that's how they discover you. What else is true about the b two b buying process is that it takes many, many touch points. If you look at this study done by done by HockeyStack, between the first impression and the closed deal closed one deal, we have here more than 200 different touch points. And by the way, these are only the touch points that HockeyStack as a digital attribution platform can measure. And we all know that there are many other touch points. There are many other things that are happening outside your funnel. So how do the buyers actually buy these days, and what are the different, let's say, example touch points, that they might go through before they get into your, you know, into your CRM and and maybe, finally into your accounting software as well, is they will spend a lot of time, especially those buyers who are not in the market or not really looking for products. They will spend a lot of time on social where they might discover content based on a comment from somebody from their network. They might follow that person or a brand, check out their post and see, oh, they have interesting post. They decide to give them a follow. They might, share this internally in their private chats on their internal Slack on maybe they will just screenshot. Maybe you some some of your screenshot in some of these slides and sharing them with your colleagues. I wouldn't be surprised. And there is a lot of stuff that, as you can see, that happens, first of all, during the stage where we are not buying, where we are really consuming information to get educated, to build our network, to stay up to date with what's happening in our industry, where we are just engaging with our peers in the industry, following interesting content. There's a lot a lot that is happening in private chats, whether that's internal team selects or other private, you know, just like exchanging with your friends or or or or, you know, let's say work friends. And then also internally behind the closed doors, you know, maybe you, you know, a buyer can get a critical maybe they are considering your solution, and you might know about it. But what you might not know is that they got internal critical question from their colleague that they don't know how to answer, and they're not reaching out for you to, excuse me, to you for the answer. They're correct trying to figure that out on their own. And if they cannot, they might decide to move on. They might have another colleague that is lobbying for an alternative alternative direct competitor or maybe just a different way to spend the same budget, different priorities that are happening, etcetera, etcetera. So just to sum up, when we look at the way that a lot of companies do demand generation versus the way that we now are seeing how the b two b buyers buy. There is a big, big disconnect. So the question becomes, how do we actually build a process of the demand generation program, that will be aligned with the buyer journey and not skip the steps and be there from the beginning and at the time that a lot of buyers are actually discovering solutions all the way until the end. So, Andrei, maybe you can take a few a few moments to explain that. Absolutely. So, when you accept the fact, and this is the first thing, right, that you need, to achieve internally, there should be consensus that, we need to start selling and marketing the way our customers are buying. We need to make an alignment with our buyer journey. Then you need to follow two fundamental principles or build two fundamental models. First of all, accepting the fact that there are different levels of demand. From our analysis, we have defined three levels of buyer demand. Right? Obviously, this is not the silver bullet, and feel free to categorize it differently. But what we observe, there is demand for content, there is demand for solution, and there is demand for vendor. Right? Demand for content means that there is no low buying intent. This is the biggest, let's say, part of the buyer journey. So this is where the customers are not actively buying, but they are learning about the industry trends, about the industry best practices. They consume the content around about their jobs to be done, something that could help with their career, etcetera. And, basically, this is how they become aware of different solutions of different products of different vendors. And this is how they start prioritizing and vetting the vendors. Right? This is quite often when you can see the early, intent data signals or first party engagement, right, depending on the programs that you are running. But there is no buying attempt. So this this is the stage where your target buyers are just learning and checking different products out of curiosity. Oh, basically, shortlisting sorry. Shortlisting the different options. So from your perspective as a vendor, what should you do knowing and accepting this? Obviously, I need to accept that fact. So from that perspective, obviously, you need to make sure that they start following you. Why? Because on the previous slide, Vlad shared that we need to have multiple value added touch points to influence the buyer journey and create sales opportunity. And that means that we need to work on, maximizing these different touch points. Let's say, making sure that these people are signing up for your events if you are running on them. If you're on newsletter, that they are signing up for your newsletter, that they start to follow you, for example, on social. If you have community, they join your community, whatever. Making sure that you have multiple touch points out, outside of ads and sales outreach. Now the second stage is or the second level of demand is the demand for solution. So this is where the level of buying and temp is low but closer to the medium. And this typical cycle lengths, obviously, the longer your historical sales cycle, the longer this part of the buyer journey will be. But, typically, let's say, that could be three to six months. This is where the buyers start having internal conversations. This is where they see the inefficiencies. So this is where when the new strategic initiatives were approved, right, or were announced, this is where they start looking for different solutions. And we often especially this, this is really funny in, technology space. Whenever we speak with SaaS companies, they often say, hey. There are only two solutions, us or our competitors. But in reality, there could be multiple alternatives they could consider. Right? Even if I will ask you guys what are the ways to grow revenue. Right? You could name multiple ways how you can grow revenue outside of demand generation or account based market and or whatever. Right? And that means that different senior leaders in the organization that I'm involved in that that discussion, they might have different opinions. So from that perspective, this is where they start building the requirements and come into the internal consensus. Right? What might make sense? What would be the best solution for us considering our resources, budget, team benefits, right, and all of these factors. So from that perspective, what should be the goals of our program? Obviously, we need to make a we need to ensure that the bigger buying committee group becomes aware of our solution, and they understand the value of our product. Why? Because we want to make sure that we are considered or we are getting into the consideration set, and we are associated or recognized as a strategic solution to the challenges that this or the key initiatives that they are discussing internally. Right? This is where you start actually noticing high engagements, replies to maybe the outreach. Obviously, I'm not talking about the generic outbound. Right? This is where you can start, noticing the repetitive visits to high end pages on your website, maybe signing up for your events, etcetera. And lastly, we have demand for vendor. So demand for vendor occurs only when the solution was prioritized. Right? When the team built requirements and came to the decision, okay, this is the best solution. Let's say, in our case, we want to deploy account based marketing. Right? From that perspective, they start evaluating vendors. But guess what vendors are considered at this point? Those that actually influence the previous two levels of demand. Right? This is basically this is is where you see the sales opportunities. And, historically, all b two b companies, they track only this part. They think that this is our sales cycle length, but this is the shortest part of the buyer journey. Right? This is the key. So when you accept these facts that there are different levels of intent at different stages of the buyer journey, hence, your program goals should be different, then you can drastically improve your demand generation program. And for this specific reason, we combined all our experience with flat and created a holistic model that we usually deploy with our clients, and we'll share it on the next slide. So let's look at our b to b demand generation model. The first thing they will notice that is that we see here the three levels of demand. Demand for content, demand for solution, and demand for vendor that Andrei just explained. The reason we do this is because, of course, we want to align the different activities, content, and messaging with the level of the buyer demand because what we are actually trying to do is we are trying to align the way that we market to the way that customers actually buy, learn, discover solutions, and buy. If you remember previously, I shared the different things that are happening, some of them behind the closed doors, where your buyers are hanging out, And you will recognize that some of these are coming back in our model again for a good reason because we what we want to do and what everybody should be thinking about is, hey. You know, how are my buyers? Where are they hanging out? Where are they consuming content? Who are they following? And where are they interacting with their peers, etcetera, etcetera. You know? In our case, this is LinkedIn for a lot of b two b companies that's linked to, but it doesn't have to be. We had clients where we had to focus on niche communities and other places, associations, maybe in some more, conservative industries. Right? So what you want to figure out is where do my buyers, one, where do my buyers hang out and learn? Two, what are their strategic challenges? What is on top of their mind? What are they genuinely interesting interested in? Because remember, 86% of the buyers discover your solution, discover a vendor, or choose a vendor they discovered before they start, started buying process. So they're not buying. You need to be right at that stage, at that level of demand. You need to be relevant for those who are not in the market. That means you have to understand what are they interested in and then create top notch expertise content on those topics and not just, quick chat GPT content, but actual expertise content by leveraging your internal experts, maybe also collaborating with external experts, etcetera, etcetera. So that's the top left part. You see here demand for content, demand for solution. Here we go more into we start with product marketing, but very much focused with problem solution. Right? So we know that they have a problem and they're looking for a solution. There is some sort of buying trigger, something that happened in the business that is driving this priority, and that is what your content should be about. It's not necessarily yet they are kind of settled on, oh, you know what? We are actually looking for whatever the specific type of ABM software that has these features that no. They're maybe looking for a solution to their pipeline problem and considering different kinds of solutions. So it's more about connecting the dots. You know? One way to look at demand generation is building a communications bridge between your buyer's world and their problem and your world, your solution. Right? And that bridge has to start at their world, at their size, other at their side. Otherwise, they're not going to take it. Right? So this is the kind of the principle or the philosophy. It can take your mindset talking about the their priorities and problems and then showing the solutions where obviously you can start, let's say, for example, with guides, and and we'll we'll share more examples and and case studies, etcetera. You can start also embedding information about your product and kind of also sowing the seeds and and creating and and educate them about very important purchase criteria that later will help you also be chosen, during this state. And finally, you know, you have the demand for vendor. You're doing a number of activities here where it's all about showing how you're different and worth buying and building the trust and, also answering all the questions that the buyers might have about the implementation, about the integration, etcetera, etcetera, through different type of content. Now all of that are different activities and in different content that you will create for the different levels of intent. However, none of that is going to be useful unless you actually distribute that content, distribute those messages to your buyers. So that's why in the center here, you see distribution. And when you're selling to complex, enterprise or upper mid market accounts where you have multiple buyers, you can't just be thinking about general distribution. You have to be thinking about the different members of the buying committee and how you're going to reach them. And you have to leverage different kinds of distribution, organic paid one on one using sales also for one on one distribution. But also, we are partners, communities. Essentially, we we are people and brands that your buyers actually all trust and follow. Right? So this is going to also help you reach those buyers that otherwise might be difficult to reach. And finally, there is at the bottom here, what you see is the demand capture, where we are actually obviously we want to we want that one, we don't want to, fold on a royal flush. Right? So we want to make sure that we are actually capturing that demand. And the way that we do this, a lot of companies are only focused on this, like, little part here, what we call inbound demand capture on things such as high intent channels. You know, these directories such as g two to retargeting. But actually, there is a big piece that is often being missed, and that is what we call all bound demand capture. We'll talk more about it. So align the content messaging and activities with where your buyers are and their level of demand and the level of demand or or buying intent. Make sure you're leveraging different distribution channels to get to the different members of your buying committee, and then do holistic demand capture, not just kind of quote unquote passive or inbound, demand capture, but also, all bound. They will tell more about it. So that is the model that we use. And for each of these elements in the model, we wanted to share a few concrete examples. So that's what the rest of the presentation is. We wanted to make it practical, hands on, give you concrete examples so that you know in your head, you will have a very clear idea about how you can build a model like that for your business. Let's move to the examples. So first of all, the core principle here is that you don't need to run multiple, let's say, 50 different programs in parallel. Right? I will quickly come back to this model. You'll see that in this, let's say, frameworks, we have different activities mentioned. That doesn't mean that you need to do, like, 10 activities for, satisfying demand for content and then 10 activities to satisfy or influence demand for vendor and then, like, multiple activities for content distribution and then 10 different playbooks to capture the demand. This is the biggest fallacy that we observe. A lot of b to b teams, they think about that they need just to do more. And this is why we're so observed and linked in that trend that there is a need to do more with less. Actually, you don't need to do more. And especially, if you have limited resources, small team, the key point is that you need to define a couple of programs that would fit each of these quadrants to build a holistic model. And the second principle is that you need to excel at them, which means that you are doing you are running these activities much better than your competitors, and you differentiate yourself. You do it differently. You don't, basically, you don't follow the follow-up that b two b stands for b two b stands for b two b stands for b two b. Right? You need to stand out. You need to differentiate, and that's the key. Now and during the next part, we'll share with you a few practical examples what we do. And I think it would be fair enough to say that, our demand gen team is also small. It's just four people, me and Vladimir, who are the executors of the entire program. Then we have Dagmarah, who is the, let's say, project manager slash technical assistance, and we have Alira, who is our designer. That's it. Right? We don't have big team, and we execute all of these activities that you and, obviously, way more than you just see on the on the next examples. So first of all, you start with defining core brand awareness programs, right, to satisfy demand for content. When we just started with flat, we defined two core activities. And then later, we built on them, our entire demand gen function. These two pillars are really simple. It's the set leadership content on LinkedIn and our weekly newsletter that we send every week. And I deliberately made a screenshot not of specific email, but just of stats because we often hear the, statement that newsletter said that SUD leadership is dead, marketing is dead, everything is that. I don't know what is not that. But the key point is, we always refer to two factors. One, one, we know where our buyers are, where they prefer to consume content. And in our case, this is LinkedIn. So we create the, best possible content, address, and the jobs to be done of our target buyers. This all this content is based on customer research, customer interviews, and our discovery calls. We know what's happening, what's needed, and we talk about this. And our newsletter is our microblock. We also have block where we produce really in-depth guides. But our newsletter is a microblock where we pick up one specific, topic that we receive more and more questions, and we try to provide our best in-depth answer. And when I hear the statement emails or email newsletters like that, I'm just, replying to this with one question. Guess what one thing your virus check every single day? And you know the answer. And the only reason here that, oh, sorry. The key factor here, you need to be, you need to get the right to be read. You need to be welcome to the inbox of your people. So, obviously, if you spam them, obviously, if you send them newsletters that like, hey. Here's my newsletter. There are five links to my blog. Go and read it. This is a low value newsletter. Nobody is going to read it. Right? And if you'll ask us why it's, print awareness program, because there is no intent, and people usually subscribe out of curiosity because they love to consume more. And, for example, and for this specific reason, we switch to Substack that kinda enables us to build the community so people can share these articles, and from that perspective, we started to grow. So this is, the two kind of two core activities that we do for brand awareness. And for demand for solution programs, we define two other core activities. One of them is this quarter webinars. One of them I already mentioned, the pilot ABM that we hosted last October was probably, 500 people. Today, we have, this, demand gen playbook. Right? Again, comprehensive webinar with more than 500 people signed up. That's the first activity. We're trying to present, complex topic in simple format, Samsung, that you can use and build internally. And the second activity, right, the the so August is demand for solution. The in this way, we present our framework. Right? Well, if you'll ask why it's not the demand for vendor, because there could be multiple ways since, how you built your demand generation strategy. We never claimed that only what FullFunnel.io SaaS is the kind of the silver bullet and all the rest is not true. Right? There are multiple ways I saw in the chat the comments how, like, how people have experience of crow and the early stage startups. As I'm saying, so every company is unique, and you can have different strategy. Right? But in our case, we share what we know works for us and for companies that we work with. It'll be companies with long sales cycles and high ACV products. So that's the first one. And the second one is our ultimate guides, right, which are similar to webinars plus in-depth interviews with our customers. We saw there is a huge demand to learn from people who are in the trenches. Not, let's say, people who just talk about account based market and what is ABM, what ABM is not, how important ABM, etcetera. So there are a lot of people who do this on LinkedIn. The problem though is that often you don't see practical case studies. Right? So in our from our experience, one of the, the most engaged content that we have ever produced is when we invite our clients to our live podcast and invite our community so everybody could jump, join that episode, jump, to the q and a section, ask live questions, etcetera. So from this perspective, right, we have the webinars and in-depth guides where we present our frameworks, and then we have proof for that, let's say, solution coming out from our customers. So these two activities that we do to satisfy demand for solution. Now let's talk about demand for vendor and, content distribution activities. Alright. Just wanted to highlight very interesting comment from Chris. He ran a winter study. Top three desired content formats, short form video, podcasts, and newsletters. So newsletter, definitely not that. So when it comes to demand for a vendor, you're in consideration stat said they're considering I I don't know whether they selected it or not. We can't ever know, unless we speak to the buyer, but let's say they are they are considering you and checking you out vetting you as a vendor. And what you really want to do here, most important thing is to give them the answers to the questions that they have to give them the product tours and product information. Give them like our client here is here on demand part of the tour and the free trial they give. In our case, we give information about our service because it's more intangible. Right? But we break it down and give this information. We you want to make sure also that there is, as as as least friction as possible in your in your funnel. So especially when it comes to buyers who are actually trying to maybe book a call with you, you want to make that frictionless. They should immediately get a calendar and being able to book there. There's other questions that come up, and that's why customer research is so important. And when I say customer, not just buyer research with tools like Wyntr, but actually introducing your customers to understand what is the top information that buyers are looking for, both like interviews, but also obviously studying the sales deals, and the information that you might have in Gong or CRM about what are the kind of the top questions that come up. So, you know, if you're selling some sort of software product, it could be the info the information about integration, security, etcetera, etcetera. At this stage, your buyers might also be checking third party reviews, you know, on this website such as g two. So focusing on that to build that, credibility is important. Having transparent pricing is a big thing. The worst thing that can happen to your buyer is having to jump through all the hoops of booking the demo, waiting for that meeting, being on a call with the SDR, who can't really give them the information before they book them for the AE to only then learn about the pricing that is maybe out of their budget. So the sooner you can communicate that, the better. Again, there are many different ways some of our customers are running products related courses, in-depth documentation, product webinars, etcetera, etcetera. But the point here is answer the question, allow them to do their evaluation as much as possible. Next, once you have as I mentioned previously, once you have all these different levels of demand, what you want to do is you want to sorry. Content for the three levels of demand. What you wanna do is you want to make sure that this content is being distributed. And I already mentioned you want to create for each piece of content, you want to have a content distribution plan. This is just a rough example that we used, for our guides. It doesn't really the what's written here and how we distribute used to distribute these guides doesn't really matter so much. What's really important or the point that that that we are trying to make here is have this clearly documented, make sure that people know exactly who needs to do what. So what you might notice is that there will be some organic promotion. We are not doing that much paid promotion because we do have, a sufficient organic reach, but obviously, paid is going to be an important part of that. But also one on one promotion. You you see here the last point, direct message or email target accounts from CRM with a short article summary and ask if they would be interested in reading it. So that's an example of that one on one community. And maybe I've noticed a lot of examples that we shared, we have created these documents and guides and webinars and what whatnot, like last last week, we ran ran a summit. And you have noticed that we did it together in partnership, with, our customers, with other people in the industry who are buyers of following. And that is also kind of like built in distribution because, by doing a contact collaboration, you, quote, unquote, step into the audience of the, of the partner of the person or the brand that you're collaborating with. So this is how you distribute it. And very important, we have created this content, we have distributed content. What happens next is we need to capture the demand. So, Andrei, do you wanna share a few words about that, please? Yeah. Absolutely. So first of all, I would love to avoid the mistake that we did in the past because we used to create longer decks and we couldn't allocate enough time to answer all of the questions. So we'll just accelerate a little bit here. Vlad mentioned, obviously, that's, that are kinda standard inbound demand capturing programs. Right? This is where you can start building the presence on, let's say, review platforms if you know that your buyers are there. This is the standard retarget, and so we don't need to spend a lot of time. I think this is the process that most of the companies have in place. And if you don't, obviously, this is something that you need to consider. But, what is really essential is defining the core signals that you need to capture together with sales. Right? And when it comes to capturing the signals, there are a couple of things that you need to have in place. You need to sit down with sales and agree what each of the signals mean. Right? To what level of demand it belongs, what client intent it demonstrates, and what we can do. What playbook should be aligned with that buyer journey. Right? So the as you know, the engagement, let's say, sign up for this webinar and book in a discovery call with us. These are two different levels of intent. Right? And you need to treat them accordingly. And the same, like of, let's say, a post on LinkedIn doesn't mean the same intent as repeated visits of, let's say, book a demo or price and page on your website. Right? But, unfortunately, a lot of companies, because of the board pressure, right, they just read everything as the plan intent, as the plan signal, and this is where it's broken. So whether I just pull we have spoken about these different levels of demand and the goals for your program. So the key point is you need and if you'll ask us, August, what are the right playbooks? The right playbooks are those that work for you. So that would be as simple as that. But you need to sit down with sales and create them. Again, don't try to capture a lot of signals. We're so there is a huge trend, again, on LinkedIn and talk talking about signal, let's go to market, whatever. So there are so many marketing definition that sometimes they can close a track of what people are talking about. But, again, there are vendors, for example, common room. They say that the platform enables you to track more than 100 different signals, which from one hand is fantastic. But from another angle, who has the capacity to track 100 signals and maintain meaningful playbooks? In reality, most companies can't. So from that perspective, you need to sit down, right, and make sure that you define what are the most important signals for us, what we really must tracking, and what should be our next meaningful actions, how we as marketing and sales can influence the buyer journey and help them in their journey and move them to the next journey stage. That's the key. So on the screenshot, we'll share it with you a few couple of, examples. And, this is what, if you'll make one takeaway from this workshop, from this webinar, you need to sit down together with sales, define these levels of demand, define these core activities for each level of the of demand, define the distribution tactics, define the core signals, and then make a playbooks that are aligned with that level of intent and demand. Now we want to end up, the webinar before we'll start the q and a section. We want to share with you basically the practical step by step approach. How can you build this model? Right? How should you start? So let's go through the nine step process fast. Very important when you're starting, if this is really, the first time you're doing this is to create a pilot program. Instead of trying to run before learning how to walk, start with the scoped down program that will include one or two key channels and activities for demand, generation, for capture, for creating awareness, and focus on a specific account class. We always advise to focus on a specific account cluster that is, say, a set of accounts or segment of, let's say, your target accounts that have shared challenges, shared use cases. And the most important success factor here, success factors, I would say, here are having a dedicated pilot team and having managing expectations correctly. You want to define not only the KPIs KPIs, but also the leading indicators that you will track, that will help you understand, okay, is this going in the right direction? Are we getting the early traction, early signals that this is a success? And then also, like or communicating on the early wins, that's also going to be very helpful. I think, like, another key there is if you can get some engagement, and collaboration with sales here, this is going to drastically improve the results of that program and make sure that you are actually then, getting the buy in to, you know, to scale this up. Once you have the program, that's step number one, creating the pilot program strategy. Step number two, I kind of, like, bundled this into one step defining the the key activities. You'll need to get the internal buy in. The the what the best way to get the internal buy in is it presenting your program as a solution to a specific high priority business problem, you're essentially doing internal sales. And the best way to do that is by presenting an internal business case. You know, what is the cost of doing nothing and what can we, what are the metrics that we can improve, with this program? We have making sure that, like I said, managing the expectations right, you will need to be able to do that. You'll also need to set up reporting and attribution to make sure that before running the program, you have at least the basic way of attributing, the, you know, opportunities and and and engagement to the activities of of the program, to have the dashboard and close, like I said, not just the KPIs, especially if you have long sales cycles, you know, expecting to get revenue within a quarter if this is that you're just starting and you have six plus, month sales cycle is not realistic. So we need to get a more meaningful, leading indicators, making sure that that's part of your dashboard. And then like very important for demand generation, having a dedicated content resource, making sure that you're actually producing relevant content that is also backed by real expertise. So having an internal or external SME, like usually, we like to work with an internal one, and having that workflow to be able to produce your content in a consistent way. And then obviously, like launching the pilot program, to maintain it, we always advise to run weekly review meetings of the program. So where you can, when whenever necessary, tweaking the program, deciding on where you wanna focus, for example, like previewing the accounts that are being engaged and then adapting maybe your content and the next steps to those accounts, sharing the wins that you want to collect from your team and then share it also with the with the management team because they will have a short memory. They will forget, like, constantly, like, sharing those, wins, but also, like, cross sharing the insights between the team members, especially getting those insights from sales about the top challenges of those accounts, so they can actually create meaningful content. Next, after having run a pilot, you want to run and present, run the retrospective, and present it and get the buy in for the next steps for scaling. Right? You want to give an overview of the results or the key activities, and, you you want to then also, like, in the next steps include both operationalization, which is number eight, where you're basically going from a one off pilot program to a more evergreen ongoing consistent program where you'll be where you will have to have a more repeatable documented processes and tables, before you can scale. And with scaling, you'll you'll usually launch other programs and also integrate very importantly, your demand gen program with account based marketing so that, again, you're getting more bang for your buck. You're getting more return on your investment. And, essentially, the best way, forward is building cross functional teams. This is the most effective way that we found, to get the maximum ROI of this program. So starting with the pilot, including very limited activities focused on a specific segment, making sure you get the buy in and realistic expectations, running your program, making sure they're collecting and sharing all the wins, and then getting the bind for the operationalization and scaling. That will be a quick overview of the steps that we usually take. And I think another way to look at that is to look at the plan, and I think, Andrei, prepare something interesting for you to share. Absolutely. And I would love to emphasize that what Vlad has presented, it's not limited to building demand gen from scratch. If you want if you're on some activities and you want to grow your demand generation function, but you don't have sales support, let's say, for this demand capture and playbooks, or you don't have buy in or support for some, let's say, print awareness activities that you want to run, you still need to apply the same framework. Right? The the the approach would be the same. You still need to run small scope pilot. You still need to get the buy in for this. And only then when you operationalize, you can when you have the proof that it works, you can start scaling. Obviously, when you'll come to a leadership, you can't come with this slide and say, hey. From tomorrow, we are going to build our demand generation model. You need to turn it into an actionable plan. And what we'll have to do, because every client will develop the thirty six to ninety days launch plan. Right? You define a practical list of activities. You break down everything into small tasks where you present who will be involved, how much time it suppose, this task, will take. Right? During what weeks you are going to work on it. And this way, you turn the abstract of demand generation program or specific activity into actionable plan. Right? Never come and say, hey. Tomorrow, we want to engage content, because the next question would be, okay. How are you going to recompensate the pipeline? Because, okay, we know that MKL model is broken, but still, we got some kind of opportunities out of this. We want to run we want to launch a podcast. We want to do a newsletter. Right? It all sounds good, but what are exact steps? Right? What are you going to do? What are you going to talk about? So you need to turn it into small scope plan that is broken down into tasks, responsibilities, timeline, involvement, and deploy deployment of that program across one quarter. Why one quarter? Because if you have long sales cycle, one quarter is the kinda bare minimum timeline time frame to get some actionable results, some wins that you can present. And at the same time, it's, the timeline that enables you to not only capture the first signals, but also making sure that the function is growing, that the team understands what you are doing. You have time to operationalize it and present it as a structured program, not just a random act of marketing or how people call it, throw and spaghetti, the wall and see what sticks. Right? That's the key. And before we'll move to the last part, let us, ask you guys what pillar of your demand generation program can be improved? Print awareness and visibility, demand for solution, activities, demand for vendor activities, content distribution, all bound demand capture, and all of them, none of them were great. We are doing fantastic. Let us know in the chat here as to see, what do you think could be, refined, what could be what could be done better at your company. So let's run this call for a few seconds to see what wins. My guess that it would be all about demand capture and what would be your bad flood? Brand aware well, I we kind of, like, have a preview. Brand awareness is another big one. I think that a lot of companies might miss, and it seems like our audience is also very well aware of that. Aware of brand aware of of of awareness. Yes. Yeah. That's yeah. Absolutely right. I said that print awareness and visibility wins. And this is kinda the top challenge that we always hear from the sales teams. They often complain to us that they lack of awareness among strategic accounts. So fantastic results. Thank you so much. And, hopefully, before I move to the last part, let us know how did you like this webinar. Was it insightful? Did you learn something new? Are examples helpful? Let us know in the chat, and I will stop the poll, and we can move to the last part, create an information. Yeah. We wanted to also make sure that, we share this with you because, we do get these requests all the time from people about, you know, having maybe more guidance, diving deeper. I know we share a lot of the information already on LinkedIn, in our webinars, in our podcast, But we always get these requests. So that's why we regularly take the time to document everything in-depth, all the models, but also frameworks, but also the playbooks that we use. So that's the time of the year again to share another course that we have prepared, another on demand, self paced course that we have prepared, and we have also a special launch pricing. I think Andrei will also drop the link in the chat where you can check it out, check out more information. But basically, it goes into details through the models, sharing the specific activities, giving you a bunch of different I think I have here a bunch of different resources and templates, that a lot of people have found helpful and that we use in all our projects and ourselves. And, in the case that that interests you, check out the link that Andrei shared. As always, we make it very practical. We, I think, like, maybe I don't have the information here. But, like, at least click on, yeah, you can click probably on the link and, show the structure. Alright. Let, Yeah. I will share the link with you. The quiz though because it's not loading for me. I don't know why. Yeah. You can check it from the message. Thank you. Nope. If you can share the screen, please, because I'm just not getting it. I don't know why it's not loading. That's that's the way it goes. Right? Whenever you wanna present something, a demo or something when it's live, you'll get, a silly problem. But, okay, I think I have it loaded. So I just wanted to maybe quickly share kind of a house tour. Share. Share. Share. I managed to get it. Okay. So, yeah, I wanted to give you an overview. I think we didn't want to overwhelm, so we made sure that we include the essential, videos and, never go longer than necessary to really give you all the all the steps. So cover the complete playbook from, the overview through the different levels of demand with detailed activities there, demand capturing, including metrics and reports, much more details about how to start and how to build the demand gen function with examples and the slides that you can use to create an internal presentation, business case examples, and also what to do afterwards. So we actually also have included some bonus sections on paid demand generation capturing that we have created with our partners. And, we even have another bonus that I don't have here. I can't show you right away where we also break down all of our playbooks in a lot of details where you get really behind the scenes of all of our playbooks that we are using and give you a step by step there as well. So if that's something that interests you, check out the check out the link. Otherwise, Andrei, if you don't have anything to add, I just wanted to I will add one thing. I will add one thing. I just wanted to take an opportunity to thank everybody because that was amazing, amazing interaction and and a lot of good questions that we should come to as well. So we need to thank everybody if, people are logging off. So I would just add one more thing that we have added the model cover and the most popular question. What if my buyers are not active on social? And this is the majority of our clients that we work with personally. So we just created a separate model on how to create the demand for companies or if your target buyer personas are not hanging out on LinkedIn, are not hanging out in Slack market and communities, etcetera. So I just wanted to drop few some few Samsung days. So it's time for q and a. We'll make sure the to answer all the questions. Will the recorded be be shared? Absolutely. Yes. Just use the same link. You have in reminder emails or you have in your calendar, and you can rewatch at any time. That was easy. That's the most popular question. Right? Yeah. I think we can, move on to the next questions. For example, here, Andrei is asking what campaign types, and in this case, what he means by that channels for best for demand generation and what content types? Best for no accounts stuck in awareness or for white space. So accounts stuck in awareness, I would assume that, you're talking about those accounts that are not actively buying. Alright. So let's address very quickly. We shared a bunch of examples. But to give you an overview, first of all, what you want to do, and I think Chris shared this. He ran, winter panel to understand where his buyers are actually consuming content, what type of content they want to consume. So the more you understand where your buyers are hanging out and learning and discovering solution like yours, what type of content they like to consume, the better. I would also include when we talk about channels with not a lot of people talk about it, but it's important to also consider that people are channels too. So who do they follow? You know, what people and brands do they follow so that you can potentially collaborate with them in future, including co marketing activities? These are all the channels that, you should consider, the channels where your buyers are. We like to include either a social or community channel. Why? Because when you are, you know, in kind of an old school way of creating content where you were, you know, doing the keyword research and then publishing content, waiting to see it will rank, it will if it will generate leads and then waiting to see if those leads will convert. The feedback loop was very long. With social first approach, you can very quickly get feedback about what is resonating with the buyers. You can immediately turn, also get feedback whether this content is leading to conversations, whether those conversations are leading to sales qualified opportunities, etcetera. So this is definitely something that we always include. And another bit that we always also like to include is some type of an event as well during the pilot because, it really helps focus some of the execution during the pilot, whether that's an online webinar, you know, or an in person event or maybe something that you run with the customer or partner doesn't really matter. It really helps also show the traction and quite frequently started these discovery calls and in some cases, even pipeline. Sometimes that happens also during the pilot. But, these are the two kind of from the top of our, from the top of my mind. We shared a bunch of other examples will be also available. Wanna take another question, Andrei. Yeah. I just started them by, upvotes. So this one is the most upvote by Venita. I have worked across MNCs, midsized companies, and startups. In my experience, it's often easier to experiment with and implement this approach in small organizations. But in large enterprises or MNCs where things move quickly and when they assume that they already have brand awareness sorted, there is typically more pressure on ABMers to deliver leads. These companies often rely heavily on field marketing. And when it comes to digital, they focus mostly on gated content and also face integration challenges across platforms. Is there any study, a success story, or data point that can help make a case the CMOs, for adopting a six, eight months nurturing cycle, especially for accounts showing low or no buying intent. So I would structure my answer into several parts. First one, I came from enterprise world. So I never ever worked for a start up or small company aside from FullFunnel.io. I'll best lose luck. My entire experience is related to enterprise marketing and sales where I spent, almost ten years before moving to consultant. And you're absolutely right with what you are saying, but it doesn't change the, concept of the pilot program and these nine steps that we have shared with you. The first thing first, you need to have a couple of things in place. First, you need to find, Alice, if you will, in the corporate world because corporates, this is completely different story. Right? This is all about corporate, corporate policy and corporate games. You need to find a few Alice who also create that the current, playbook is not enough or it's outdated. It's broken. And this would be your, let's say, candidates for the pilot program. That's the first thing. The second one, you need to enter your your customers. Talk about their buyer journey. Talk about, the process. How did they become aware of you? How they built requirements? How they made a decision? Solution they want to take, how did they evaluate the vendors, how they decide why they decided to work with you, how long did they did it take. Obviously, if, I would recommend to talk with the recently acquired customers while it's relatively fresh in their heads. And you need to mix these insights with data. Ideal, let's say, solution for you in this case would be purchase on software like TrimData or HockeyStack that gives you end to end analytics that captures all of these touch points. Combine the data, from end to end analytics and customer interviews, and that would be your best use case. Also, you can talk with, you can talk to sales, the account owners who closed these deals. Right? What were the main touch points? What were the requests and questions during the sales process? Right? So you can, capture all of this information and presents your internal use case. And if you want to have an external information in the beginning, we'll have shared the report created by TrustRadius and Pavilion Community, where we had the slides about 86% of enterprise buyers prefer to select the vendors they became aware before the sales cycle. So try to Google it. Try to find that it's, it was created by TrustRadius and Pavillion, the state of brand awareness or the state of brand, something like this. So combine those three, and that would be the best use case. But don't rely only on external information that, from my experience, that rarely helps to get the internal buy in. Make sure that you have customer interviews. Make sure you have conversations with your analysts, and make sure you have end to end analytics plus sales entrees. That would be the best way to fix it. Alright. So let me share another one. Sorry. Share from Laura. How do we measure this? This is a very frequent question. There's kind of, like, multiple things that she's asking here. So let's first cover the big question. So what are the ways in which you can measure the effectiveness of your program? The way that we look at it is, you have two types of, reports and metrics. First thing you want to do is you want to use blended attribution attribution, which is to say you might use a tool like HockeyStack or data. DreamData, which are, like, full account based, analytics that try to track as much of the touch points and link all the different touch points to an account and provide you this kind of a journey overview. It's not necessary if you don't have a budget for a tool like that. If you maybe have some standard analytics, maybe come with your CRM or marketing automation system such as HubSpot. That's good enough to start with. But when we say blended, what we mean is make sure to include also, self reported attribution. That is to say when customers, prospects book a call, with you, book a demo, ask an open ended question. Where did you first learn about us? Where did you hear about us? It's not scientific, but it does give you a very good in combination with analytics, it does give you a very good idea about what seems to be at least remembered by those buyers, what is making an impression on them. So we always, advise to use that. In addition, every time you're speaking to customers, entering customers, reach researching your customers, If you can ask that question also during your sales calls, discovery calls, this is the right moment to ask. How did you hear about us? What made us stand out? Really helpful to understand. And what we observe a lot of times is that people start mentioning, you know, I've I've seen your content. I've seen, you know, this is what happened. And then this is what happened. This is how I discovered you. And this kind of anecdotes are always very, very interesting, very good to also demonstrate the effectiveness. With these different kinds of attribution, what you want to end up with is two type of report. You want to end up with the report that is linked to the program, which will be different for different kinds of programs that you're running. So if you're measuring let's say, if your program consists of, let's say, some LinkedIn organic, and paid, and maybe an event, then you will be measuring some leading indicators that will, show you, for example, how many target accounts are being engaged, what is the level of engagement of those target accounts with these different activities, as I mentioned, maybe LinkedIn and, and your, webinar event or whatever. So these are engagement metrics, that will show you more the early direction, but always make sure that you're not just tracking the number of likes, comments, sign ups, but you're actually checking what is the how does that relate to my ICP accounts? In other words, how many accounts are we actually being able to engage with this program of IC that fit our ICP criteria? And one last thing that I wanted to say about this is we always advise to also create an integrated revenue and pipeline, velocity report, where you can really break down the, you know, the incoming, inbound and outbound and referral and all the other lead services together and how they impact the pipeline, how they impact not only the number of inquiries and leads and, sales qualified opportunity, but also their sales velocity. That is to say, what is the size of those deals? How quickly we can close them or how quickly are the salespeople able to close them? And what is the win rate? So what is the percent of the deals that are being closed like that? Ideally, after, you know, with a good demand generation program, you will be getting more qualified opportunities that are easier to win. They should be a better fit with your ICP, if you if you're running a good program, and you will be able to demonstrate the impact on the on the pipeline. So that's all I we have the time to say about metrics, for now. Awesome. So, let's pick up this question from Andrei. I promised in the chat to answer this. I'm of the mindset we need to do demand gen as well as lead gen marketing. Can you speak to how this looks for a campaign and where to see lead gen playing a role in ABM? My best reply to you would be sit down with your sales and leadership and define the definition of lead, what lead means for your company. If lead means a a company and account with the declared buying intent, that it means that, yes, I want to buy from you. That would be one story. If lead means, you know, accounts that you put in your outbound, cadence, people who download your gated content or sign up for the webinar, that would be completely different story. And our playbook is not likely to help. That being said, if you mean by lead generation marketing, I don't know, MKLs or outbound is not marketing, but let's say MKLs or whatever, then you need just to, take a sane look at your performance of this playbook. In our example, I, clearly remember the onboarding call we had with one enterprise client was what where when marketer proudly claimed that they generated above 16,000 MKLs in 2023. And when we're asked how many of those MKLs were converted into discovery calls, they said 16. So probably not a huge win. Right? You just need to understand that it's, if this is, if this is your performance, then probably your playbook is misaligned with the buyer journey, and that's the key. You need to have this internal conversation. That being said, if, let's say, if you mean paid performance or whatever we described, right, there is a place for everything. Just make sure that, let's say, direct advertisement or targeting is not your alone tactic that you use. Right? And the same as outbound. Obviously, you are welcome to do outbound. But, again, if you just, build, you know, like, list of thousands of accounts and just spam them all, then look at the performance of this playbook. Right? If you do more personalized engagement and outage, and I'm not talking even about account based market, and you can still if you want to focus on tier three accounts that comes with the lowest revenue, potential. You can absolutely do it, but make sure that this outbound is way more personalized. And if in parallel, you'll be doing demand generation, your outbound activities will produce much better results. So that's the key. Here is a popular question about gated versus ungated content, focusing on free given value, especially in the age of GPT, from Wiki. So maybe surprise you, but we are not a guest on gated content. In a way, you could say that this webinar was gated. Of course, you need a way for to register people and send them the information about how to join the webinar. Right? But, there is definitely a place for gated content. I think the most more important question is, first, what are the kind of the bad practices with gated content versus the good practice? The bad practices are what Andrei just was mentioning, basically trying to drive MQLs that unfortunately don't convert into sales, and then especially driving MQLs, via downloads of gated content and then sending that to sales and treating that as buying intent. People who download a piece of content potentially want to learn more about the topic, they don't want to be approached by your sales. If they want it to be a pro if they want it to have a sales meeting, they they know how to book it. I mean, everybody knows, like, people are smart enough to be able to do that. So what are the good practices? The good practices are to basically make sure that you're using essentially sign ups or downloads. Right? We use webinars, we use email courses, we use content hubs or email courses in our newsletter. Right? You could see that as gated content. First of all, you want to make sure that you understand, are these accounts or are these people who do are we working for the accounts that are a good fit? Are they, what is their revenue potential? So we usually, you know, look at accounts based on some criteria. You can establish whether they are higher or lower. Let's say you're selling HR software that is related to number of employees. So okay. So probably larger companies have larger revenue potential. So this is what I mean. Understanding. So, the revenue potential and the ICP fit essentially segmenting the accounts and then doing what we call progressive profiling. Progressive profile, I mean, it's not the term that we invented, but it's essentially with different, leveraging different marketing touch points, whether that's via email, but it can also be via, I don't know, for example, due today, we had a poll during the webinar. This gives maybe some information about, where your priorities are when it comes to demand generation. Right? So this is part of what you consider you could consider progressive profiling. Right? Maybe the salespeople could engage with peep with, with your buyers ask them ask them questions. Maybe you could invite them to contribute to, you know, a post that you're creating, ask them questions in the context of that collaboration, and get more information. So deep there are different ways in which you could do this progressive profiling. And the whole idea here is that you're doing two things. You're, a, in introducing multiple meaningful touch points, and you're nurturing that account and nurturing those buyers. And, b, you're actually figuring out, do they even have a need? And if they really have a need, we we have some insight and we believe that they are, they we unless they say and raise their hand, we can't really know if they're buying, but we can, based on their based on this information, we can see whether there is a need for a product or the whether there is a challenge that we can help them solve, then this would be a signal that we could use to prioritize those accounts and try to basically engage them on one on one way and and create a sales qualified opportunity. So in other words, you use gated content. If you use it, you use it as a part. It's you use it basically as as one of the signals. You integrate this with all bound demand capturing, and you also make sure that this is not the only thing that you're doing. Because if all you're doing is gaining content, you're missing out big time on the awareness activities. It's very difficult to do proper brand awareness activities, unless you're kind of creating content that is optimized for in channel consumption. That is to say, like, you know, native LinkedIn posts, community content, events, etcetera. Long answer to a simple question. Oh, let's pick up another one from Juliet. What data can you recommend to get leadership on board with support and the move to more awareness content? So, the first thing first. You don't create awareness content instead of, let's say, content for vendor of of the the content that kinda set of satisfies demand for vendor or demand for solution. You simply need to have this alongside this. Now, what content can, basically, what what data can, prove it? So the best data from my experience is, simply the, results of your customer research. If you'll be able to enter your customers or you'll be able to collect this data via, let's say, polls or surveys. Or if you don't have access, you can use a couple of people mentioned winter platform. So you can run panel and market research on winter. Simply ask questions, right, define your ICP and ask questions. What content do you prefer to read? And, definitely, you'll see you'll rarely see the answers. I love, you know, information about the products. I love to watch product demos, etcetera. Right? Rarely, you'll you'll hear these answers. So you can, ask, for example, a couple of you'll be doing, live customer interviews. You can ask a couple of questions. What are the main channels or sources of professional information for you? Who do you follow? Why do you follow these people? Right? So here are a couple of things, and, you can ask, like, for example, what is the recent report or piece of content or article you enjoyed most? So you need to get evidence from your customers. Executive leaders executives, leadership, they don't believe anything aside from the direct, let's say, output from from your customers. So that would be the best way to per se them. Alright. There was an interesting question. It's a bit philosophical, but I think it's interesting to answer it because I've seen a lot of people post this on LinkedIn. It's impossible to generate demand. We have to wait for the buyer to identify our problem. The the demand is not created. It can only be captured. I think the this is important to understand that, obviously, what you cannot do is and I think Derek asked the question the right way. K. The fact that somebody is, let's say, a CMO or head of marketing doesn't mean that they're in the market for Martech, for sure. Even they might have a challenge that you can help them solve. But you know what? Actually, most of us have challenges and are dealing with those challenges every day. That's actually why they pay us the money that they pay us to deal with these challenges. So, just to say that, yes, for the majority of the time, the buyers are not actually buyers. And it's usually when something happens in the business that shapes their priority. You know, in our case, it may be that they miss the revenue targets or that they want to grow, faster. The the grow has slowed down or the pipeline has dried up, whatever it's happening in the business that makes suddenly, the the shift that priority. Right? So that kind of a business trigger that's or the trigger event as Derek calls it. Right? Now there are several things that you can do. First of all, like I said, like, a lot of companies and a lot of people live with the status quo, But you can kind of sow the seeds. So you can be talking about the status quo and showing them that there is a better way and kind of calling out the status quo and showing the better way of dealing with that better solutions and, showing them what's possible. And, again, that doesn't mean that you're going to suddenly because they saw that post or email, they're going to say, oh, yeah. Yeah. That's your you're right. I'm gonna buy. But, for example, I'll give you a concrete example. We had an emailed inquiry from somebody who said, hey, we started an ABM program. So they were fine. They were, you know, they started it on their own. They decided to do it on their own. But you know what? I've been reading your newsletter and, about the mistakes that companies make. And it seems like they're making all of these mistakes. That's why I decided to reach out to you and book a call. So you see how this works. Right? So even when they're not really in the buying mode, you can still kind of sow these seeds and they have been following you for a while, etcetera. This can still lead to, you know, some disengagement and maybe even to sales call opportunity. But second, what's really, really important is remember they discover, the discover vendors, before they start a buying process. So creating awareness during this stage is super, super important. Basically, becoming a top of mind brand. When it comes to IBM, I'm thinking about FullFunnel.io. When it comes to messaging validation and, you know, just messaging in in general, I'm thinking of Wynter or Paypalaya. Right? So if whenever I you need messaging validation or re or by a research platform, I will think of winter. Right? Next, even if you're not creating a demand, if you're tapping into, let's say, existing problem in demand from the buyer, they're like you said, they have a problem that they're it's a priority problem that they wanna solve. You still have to demand generate demand for your solution. I mean, there's still so so the demand generation is still important because there you're generating demand for your solution. And if you start early enough, right, you're not only going to make them aware that your solution is one of the many options and that it's kind of a commodity space where I can choose out of hundreds, which is the case for many categories. But, actually, if you have been doing this consistently from the beginning, you're actually going to start impacting their, purchase criteria. You can make them aware about, you know, the specific, characteristic of what what is, like, the good solution versus a bad solution. We do this all the time in our content. Good ABM versus bad ABM. Alright? There is an example. Right? Again, you're teaching them, and this is also like positioning yourself. These are the differences, and these differences are important. These these things are very important, to integrate it's important to also integrate ABM in demand gen, and not a lot of other people are talking about it. So, again, when the time is right, they'll not only think about you, but they will be also using these learned criteria, as they're evaluating other vendors. And this way, you're going to stack the odds in your favor to be kind of a preferred vendor. So long answer to another question, but I think it's important because you will read that a lot on LinkedIn. Maybe not these days. We are all around with HTTP posts. But I I at the certain moment, there was a lot of posts around that it's impossible to create demand. Well, okay. We wouldn't be here if that that was true. Okay. So, let me pick up another question. I see a few technical questions, but, yeah, let me pick up this one from Benita again. I have observed that many marketers focus on LinkedIn ads despite the high cost and the mail market in which often suffers from low open rates. However, few seem to leverage the potential of display ads using platforms like Sixense or Demandbase, which can target high traffic sites effectively. From my experience, these platforms have significantly boosted pipeline and revenue growth by up to four, times. What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of display ads compared to traditional channels like LinkedIn and the mail? So, I would be fully transparent with you. For FullFunnel.io, we don't run display ads. And for the majority of our clients, we recommend not run display ads until they can actually afford it. Several associated problems to it. First, you need to pay annual license for these platforms. If you don't have robust ABM motion and if you don't have all other ads in place, then you basically put put a rope near your neck and ask your your photos there with the gun near your head because then you'll need to justify the results from your investment. And this investment would be way more than 200 k dollars a year. Way more. So, if, obviously, you have robust demand gen motion, ABM motion, you have big budget, then display ads, there would be a create add on to your demand gen program. Right, or in some way accelerator. But if you are only starting out, if you don't have all of the preconditions that I have mentioned, please don't do it. Otherwise, you are likely to end up in the camp in the camp that blames those vendors on LinkedIn saying how bad is the platform, etcetera, while, the problem is not the in the platforms. We know both vendors, they're actually good. Are they expensive? Yes. That's absolutely true. But if you can't afford it, start with more, let's say, budget friendly solutions. Right? And never try to ramp up your game with enterprise solutions without building an effective motion first. That would be my best advice. We have a question about what other platforms can be effective to distribute content or promote the brand other than LinkedIn or email. I think, we mentioned several, but I think it's worth repeating because I'm sure that a lot of people have this question. I mentioned people are, channels too. So collaborating with people and brands that your part that your customers trust, that your buyers already follow. So to give you an example, you know, again, I I use this example in the in the past. Maybe you have some sort of an HR software, and it integrates with applicant tracking systems or it it integrates with this enterprise, softwares HR softwares there, and these are very natural partners for you. Right? These, platforms that you integrate with, they have your audience. They want your audience. So in a way that you're partnering with them, maybe running an event, or we do this all the time. We run events, or even co collaborating our content with companies such as Dealfront and Demandbase you were mentioning. And we had also 6sense and Sendoso and a lot of the market, Martech vendors who collaborated with us, or we collaborated with them, let's say, because they are promoting the same event. We are promoting the event. So we kind of, like, exchange audiences in that way. Right? You know, thought leaders, industry leaders, again, maybe your people your buyers are not active as much on LinkedIn, then maybe especially when it comes to technical audiences using specific communities can be super effective. Like, you will see that a lot of developers, for example, or other type of technical, and this is not that active on LinkedIn. But when you go to these niche communities, you will see they're very, very active there. Of course, very important there is you're not going to be dropping the links. You make links and and and promoting your product. You will either, have your experts participate and educate in those communities, answer questions, share content, or sponsor those in those communities. That's another way you can do this. Associations in more conservative industries, that's another channel, quote, unquote, that you can use to reach the the target buyers. So there are different ways, to reach your buyers. In some cases, I've we were mentioning events. So I I was just thinking of a client who organized a local event. Like, why local? Because they know that in a specific geography, in a specific around the specific city, there is a high concentration of their target buyers. So for for example, in that case, they were active in the government contracting space, so they organize an event close to Washington DC because that's where a lot of government contractors, bidding for the, federal contracts are going to be located. Or, you may, let's say, partner with the local somebody who is a local, quote, unquote, influencer or somebody who is famous people in that city and do it. Maybe there is a trade show when you can organize an adjacent event or an executive dinner or something for the trade show attendees, etcetera, etcetera. Again, going back to understanding where your audience is is how you figure out where to where to distribute the content and promote your brand. And, maybe let's pick up the last question because we already spent more than hour and a half. And, again, we have questions. The the time for question, we need even more than the time for the webinar itself. So maybe one day, we just need to host q and a. But jokes aside, let's answer this question, which could be relevant to the majority of our listeners. What if your target accounts, multiple shared use cases, which is fairly common in the enterprise segment? How they go about building clusters in this case? That's absolutely true. We see it also quite often. So for this specific, situation, what we recommend, if you build if you want to launch a pilot program, if you are starting from scratch, always start with your bread and butter use case. Always start. If there is no alignment on what is our bread and butter use case, then, unfortunately, you need to do some workarounds here. So what we recommend is to extract extract the revenue data for the last twelve to eighteen months. If you have larger set of data, that's also fantastic. And then you basically need to do the cluster analysis. We didn't include it into this deck, but, actually, in the course that we have shared, we have the detailed exercise and the report explaining how to do this. In a simple words, what you need to do, first of all, you need, obviously, classify all your deals or all your clients by the use cases they belong to. Then you extract the data and you need to look holistically at this analysis. First, where do we see high win rates? Next, what is our sales cycle lengths per cluster? What is our average contract value per cluster? How many successful customer stories, we have for, implementations, if you will, for this, use case for this cluster we have. And maybe a couple of other parameters that's, you might consider are relevant. So never just look, never look only on the total revenue because this is where you can, make a mistake. Right? Let's say, you can get the biggest revenue coming from a higher ACV coming from one, use case, but it's just because you whatever. You had two enterprise deals and that's all. In reality, you don't have a proof motion proven motion to generate these types of deals. It also depends on what are your strategic goals. Right? If you want to build awareness, if you want to become kinda a strategic, a known strategic solution for that specific use case, that would be one story. And in this case, I would prioritize clusters with, shorter sales cycles. Doesn't matter what is the average contract value. So I would, and shorter sales cycles and maybe higher win rates. The same, by the way, if you need to show quick results, right, if you need to generate faster pipeline. If it's more about this trend and strategic, let's say, narrative, then I would look at or if there is, an initiative to go upmarket, then I would prioritize those, clusters where you have larger deals, bigger revenue. So that that would be the key. But when you craft your pilot program, right, you prioritize one use case. If you have bigger team, then you can create micro teams and literally how you scale this demand gen function. Right? Every micro team, runs the cluster program for the cluster they are responsible for or the use case they are responsible for. If you have smaller team, then every quarter you prioritize. They will want to focus on this use case. The next quarter, they will want to continue this use case, or they will want to run a new program for a new use case cluster? So that would be the key. We answered more than 20 questions faster, and we can stay forever with you guys, but I think everybody already got tired. So first of all, thank you so much for spending this hour and forty minutes with us. If, we didn't answer your questions, feel free to follow-up via email or on LinkedIn, and we're happy to cover your questions. Thanks a lot for your feedback. Happy to hear that you guys enjoyed this webinar. We tried to provide, our best answers and explain how to build or refine, dimension motion with the simple frameworks and steps. Thank you so much, and I still see that a lot of people are with us online. Appreciate it. And stay tuned. The next webinar probably will be closer to September. I think so. But we'll continue our live full funnel podcast, and we'll we'll invite you. Thank you so much, guys. Have a great rest of the week, and, hopefully, we'll see you during one of our FullFunnel.io live episodes. Take care. Cheers. Bye.