Lessons in Demand Generation for Building a Growth Engine

Janelle Amos [00:00:00]:
At any point, a company should assess whether or not they need to invest in marketing at what percent they should, based on, like the revenue targets and what they want to invest, what they want to get out of it. And then the next step is, where’s your audience? Where should you be investing that? Is it even worth the time? 

Jeffro [00:00:22]:
Welcome back to digital dominance. When you start looking at marketing for the first time, you’ll notice there are a ton of acronyms and terms that can feel overwhelming. As a business owner, you don’t have to become an expert in all things marketing, but if you understand some of the terminology, you can make better decisions and avoid getting swindled. We’ve talked a little bit about lead generation before, but today we’re going to talk about demand Gen. Demand generation is more of an umbrella term, but if you want to build a brand, then it’s critical that you understand how it works. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Janelle Amos. Janelle helps businesses create a comprehensive demand gen strategy that drives brand awareness, customer acquisition and revenue growth. She’s passionate about keeping her promises to her clients, and she has a great track record of producing results with her company.

Jeffro [00:01:08]:
Elevate growth. So thanks for being here. Janelle, welcome to the show.

Janelle Amos [00:01:11]:
Pleasure is mine. Thank you so much for having me.

Jeffro [00:01:13]:
Definitely. Well, right off the bat, Janelle, I want to make sure that everyone listening knows what we’re talking about here. Can you give us your definition of demand gen?

Janelle Amos [00:01:22]:
I love that because I feel like if you ask any other demand gen marketer or any other like demand gen, quote unquote expert, it kind of is just a really, I don’t know, jargon D buzzword right now. And just like a really loose topic that not everybody is certain of. So what I define demand Gen as is a go to market strategy. It cannot work if only marketing is deployment. You have to have it within marketing, sales, leadership, customer success. So I label it as a larger umbrella, as a go to market strategy, which then falls in the bucket that marketing actually works to deploy it so loosely define demand Gen is a go to market strategy that enables the businesses to put their customers first. So what that looks like, instead of creating a piece of asset that allows them to just create a lead form that submits them into a lead nutrition bucket and nobody ever hears of them since. But thumbs up, they mqled.

Janelle Amos [00:02:16]:
That’s not building a brand, that’s not building the longevity of a good customer experience. And so flipping that lens, the demand gen is saying, what’s the purpose we’re creating this asset for. Does it actually educate our customer? What’s the next step thereafter? And ensuring that any step within that brand from marketing, sales, customer success at engaging just with that piece of content, whether it’s know, ebook, webinar experience, whatever that is, is simplified and unified throughout all the go to market teams.

Jeffro [00:02:46]:
That was a very concise and clear definition. So thank you for that. And I did catch another acronym in there and MQL is a marketing qualified lead. There’s different types of leads, we’ve talked about that before. But if it’s qualified from a marketing perspective, that’s one step in the process in the pipeline before it gets handed off to the next step. So I mentioned we’ve talked about lead Gen before. So obviously with demand Gen being that kind of bigger scope and strategy, lead gen can be a piece of that strategy, right? Generating leads. So how do you distinguish or where does lead Gen fit in underneath a demand gen strategy?

Janelle Amos [00:03:22]:
Yeah, it fits in at the point where essentially you generate a lead, like what that lead definition is or how you want to go about the handoff with sales. All of those, everybody’s going to have a different opinion on. My two cent is that you have the initial brand awareness stage. Nobody has ever heard of your brand. They may or may not know that they have a need or know that your product or your service identifies that need. And then they have the next step of educating themselves. Like oh man, I got a cold, I need to go to the doctor. Let me find a doctor near me.

Janelle Amos [00:03:54]:
That’s the next step. Like let me find somebody who can help prescribe me something that I need. And at that point they’re looking at different doctors offices, they’re looking at the radius difference between that. They’re looking at price, whether or not take insurance. Same if we flip it on over to a service business, same if we flip it on over to a SaaS business. Everybody’s going to go through that next stage. They’re going to read your articles, they’re going to look at the reviews, they’re going to do the online digital presence, and from there they’re going to take the next steps to talk, call and make an appointment with the doctor, or they’re going to do a book, a demo form. And that’s going to be the indicator that they’re interested in talking to somebody.

Janelle Amos [00:04:29]:
So at some point that capture needs to happen, right? So however people want to define that, as some people say, oh, that’s legion, some people say that’s demand capture. Other people have different jargon and buzzwords in the industry. So you have the brand awareness, right, and kind of like the product need fit. And then you have that actual capture of the exchange between the person that you’re trying to go after from a business standpoint and the business collecting the information from a person standpoint thereafter. Then you have the actual experience and the journey. If I walk into that doctor’s office, what does the office look like? Is it dirty? Is it clean? Is there tv? Is there music? Is there toys? That’s all the same experience. Same as if we flip it to a service or a SaaS model. If I’m having that very first phone call with an individual that does not absolutely understand anything about what they’re selling or about me as being like, the target Persona, it leaves more of a sour taste.

Janelle Amos [00:05:30]:
Or I guess this is kind of a pain in the B two B SaaS world, is I submit that form. Nobody ever calls me. Where did it go? And so it’s the actual delight. And then afterwards, during that doctor’s visit, if I walk away, was I happy? Did that experience give me what I needed? Did I feel heard? Did I feel listened to? Am I going to come back? Should I make that my primary doctor? Same thing as if B two B SaaS or service businesses, right? Like, did I ultimately get what I need out of that transaction, out of that exchange? And will I be coming back to do future business? So those are the three buckets that I label it under. And that’s why it’s a go to market experience, because it involves more than just marketing and the handoff to sales. I mean, there’s got to be more that takes into consideration under all those.

Jeffro [00:06:15]:
Well, a lot of the audience have service businesses. So instead of maybe an office that someone goes to, it might be how you show up at their house. Could be your uniform, could be your truck. The way you present yourself, all of that experience, like you mentioned, that’s all part of it. It’s not toys in the waiting room. It’s just how you interact with them. And do you bring shoe covers? Right. To go inside their house and assume you’re ready for that type of stuff.

Jeffro [00:06:39]:
That’s all helpful. And I also wanted to point out that as we talk about this, we’re talking about marketing and sales as different roles, because they are. But for a small business, you might be doing the marketing and sales yourself right now if you don’t have a big team yet. But it’s helpful to think about it in these different roles. Because that will allow you to focus on what you need to do in that particular role at that time. So if you’re talking to someone on day one, don’t be trying to close them yet. You need to be maybe teaching them more about your service or getting more information from them and progress as you go. And that way, when you do get to the point of having a team, you know exactly what you’re handing off and you understand it a lot better.

Janelle Amos [00:07:21]:
Absolutely.

Jeffro [00:07:22]:
So that brings me to the next question. Does everyone need demand gen? And if not, at what point should a company start looking into it?

Janelle Amos [00:07:28]:
The straight answer is no. There’s tons of people who have built businesses off of just word of mouth. Or, for example, if you move to a new area and all of the roofing constructions are older folks, they’re looking to retire. They’ve kind of done it all. Nobody is right now in market offering to repair roofs. And so if you come in and you find that radius, I probably don’t think you need demand gen too much, because word of mouth will spread really quickly. You don’t even need marketing. You need to invest in it.

Janelle Amos [00:07:58]:
If at some point, you exhaust that radius. Yeah, let’s talk about either expanding your radius. Let’s talk about adding a new service. But does that mean that’s demand yet? No, that’s business building. So I think at any point, a company should assess whether or not they need to invest in marketing at what percent they should, based on the revenue targets and what they want to invest, what they want to get out of it. And then the next step is, where’s your audience? Where should you be investing that? Is it even worth the time?

Jeffro [00:08:24]:
Yeah. So you need to understand, just because that company is doing it doesn’t mean I have to go do it. You need to know. All right. I’m good with the amount of leads I have. I don’t need to expand the company. This is good. So what about if you decide? All right, I do need a demand gen strategy.

Jeffro [00:08:40]:
I’ve exhausted my radius, or I want to grow bigger. How long does it typically take to put a good strategy in place and start making it work normally?

Janelle Amos [00:08:48]:
And this is just based on my client experience. So I’ve been three time head of demand gen in house at B, two B SaaS companies, and I’ve been running my own consulting firm for the last three years. So based on the collective, like, 13 companies that I’ve helped successfully do this, the average time is about, like a four to six week between strategy. Like, I need to get underneath the hood of your systems, we need to figure out what we’re working with. We have to identify what the company goals are, how are we going to measure success. Look at the tech stack that we have to work with and see if that’s even enabled to allow us to scale before we just open some of the floodgates, like do we have anything that catches the fish? And so doing kind of that foundational work first. So about four to six weeks to really do a lay of the land and tee up a lot of the items from there on after, you could get live probably within the end of those six weeks with at least an initial campaign or two. Marketing will always be a test.

Janelle Amos [00:09:44]:
Learn and iterate from six weeks on into 20 years in, the market’s always changing. Your audience will always be changing. There’s always new social media channels that you need to keep up with. It’s never going to be a one and done, but in terms of how quickly it is to get started, assuming you partner with somebody who’s done it before, or can help you if you don’t have that experience, my expectation would be about four to six weeks from the initial strategy and then just a partnership and iteration thereafter.

Jeffro [00:10:11]:
Yeah, that’s actually a little faster than I was expecting. So that’s good to know that it can be up and running pretty quickly if someone knows what they’re doing. So then the next natural question is, if you want to measurably reduce your marketing costs or measure how effective this is, what does that look like? After the six weeks are up, you go live and you’re like, okay, how do I determine, is this working? How much am I spending on it? And all that?

Janelle Amos [00:10:35]:
Yeah, that gets a lot more granular. So in the six weeks we get the strategy and maybe one or two campaigns, in order to really call something as like an efficient marketing engine, I would say that’s six months, nine months, maybe even a whole year, depending on sales cycles, how long it takes, how long customers actually stay with you, how much you want to grow, what you’re putting in from a budget standpoint, and yada, yada. So there are a lot of factors that come into that. But afterwards, once we go live, what I like to do is identify the specific metrics per channel, because everything needs to have its own way of identifying success. Otherwise, one, we’re going to lose sight of why we did it in the first place, and we’re going to be upset with the results because there was no conversation of what we were expecting. Out of it. So to set that expectation clear from the jump, we have to know what that hypothesis is. And what are we going to determine, a success or a failure after that.

Janelle Amos [00:11:31]:
Then when enough time comes, which at the point of conversation, we will identify how long it’s going to take. If at that point we make any type of learnings or key iterations, we will then identify the next step of that phase two of a hypothesis. Right. So then at some point we look back and we say, okay, we’ve given this three months, or for business jargon, like one quarter. What does that look like in terms of what our expectation was from the jump? And what does that look like in terms of rois and dollars exchanged from there? You can either deem it a failure or you can take some key iterations and say, we’re going to try the next hypothesis. That’s why marketing is kind of always evolving, right?

Jeffro [00:12:08]:
Well, yeah, marketing is a little bit of art and also a lot of science. They work together. I had a question for you that I was going to ask, but this is really helpful to give an expectation of how long this should take. Right. Know that you’re committing to something long term, even if you’re up and running quickly, and it might start to bring in business, it won’t be an overnight success in most cases. Right?

Janelle Amos [00:12:32]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Jeffro [00:12:34]:
I remember my question. So in terms of the metrics that you decide to use, are there some universal ones that should apply to every company? And then how do you decide what additional ones you would want that are specific to that particular industry?

Janelle Amos [00:12:47]:
Yeah. So what I like to do is I say that I reverse engineer your strategy. And so from there we talk about what the business objectives are. Are we looking to do a percent increase of the business growth year over year? Are we wanting to do a specific number of leads? Are we wanting to do a specific number of opportunities or marketing sourced pipeline or revenue? At the end of the day, there’s going to be a leader involved, whether that’s a CEO wearing all the hats for a small business, or whether that’s like a B two B SaaS company that has the distinct departments and you have a marketing leader that says, I’m responsible for, say, 30% of overall pipeline. We have to identify what measures success based on the partnership that we’re working together. That will vary depending on who that person is. Right? After that, we backtrack a strategy. We reverse engineer it to identify how we’re going to get that KPI.

Janelle Amos [00:13:37]:
You have to identify what that North Star is otherwise the relationship is just going to go south and your marketing is just going to be just a money pit. So identifying what that is, and then from there, then you look at the specific channels and then the channel goal and then the specific campaign goal. And what I mean by that, if we take LinkedIn ads, for example, say your audience is only on LinkedIn, maybe email or webinars or whatever else you’re doing. But in terms of like a paid advertising, we’re going to go after LinkedIn if we want to do a brand awareness campaign, if we want to do a video ad campaign, if we want to do a specific lead gen, like create a lead gen form within LinkedIn and use that to capture email addresses. All of those have different overarching KPIs. And to run a brand awareness campaign with the objective to drive leads is going to set it up for failure. And if anyone’s going to come back and be like, how did the ROI turn on with that invested dollars? And how many leads did we get out of it? It’s destined to have that conversation to be like, pull the plug. We got no leads from it.

Janelle Amos [00:14:44]:
When in reality, hey, the goal wasn’t leads. The goal was impression shared to our audience. The goal was to see how many of them clicked to the website. Are we getting our audience learning about who we are and what we do and our value prop and our differentiator? That for me is a success. Right? If nobody ever cares, if we don’t get any impressions to our audience, that’s a failure. If nobody saw those ads and not one clicked to a website, I would want to test some new creatives. Right? So part of that, it’s like you have to have the specific KPIs allocated to not only the channel level, but then also specifically the campaigns at a micro level as well.

Jeffro [00:15:21]:
Well, you’d also need to understand how often you should be checking the key performance indicators and what type they are. Because there’s leading indicators and there’s lagging indicators. It wouldn’t make sense to check those lagging ones right up front and be like, it’s not working right. You need to know. Okay, I got to wait three months, six months before those mean anything.

Janelle Amos [00:15:37]:
Yeah, great call out. Great addition. Thank you.

Jeffro [00:15:40]:
Do you have a case study that you could share as an example of what this lead gen strategy could look like? Someone comes in, says, hey, we got to get this rolling. You come in, take a look and kind of move them forward and get them on the right path.

Janelle Amos [00:15:52]:
Yeah, tons.

Jeffro [00:15:57]:
Pick a good one.

Janelle Amos [00:15:58]:
I mean, that’s kind of what I do, just getting companies, and most of the time it’s working with just one head of marketing who just doesn’t have the bandwidth or the background in demand gen and just partnering with them closely to do that expansion. But to give you one example, partnered with a company, they were responsible for driving 30% of marketing sourced pipeline. And before I had joined, there was, let me see if I remember that correctly, maybe like 16%. It was just under about 20%. So they were under the initial KPI, and in a six month timeline, we got them into the 30% of marketing source, and then with the year thereafter, we actually hit as high as 67% marketing sourced pipeline. So not only do we hit that, but we helped them exceed it.

Jeffro [00:16:42]:
Right. That’s impressive. What does that process look like? A little more granular. I know you come in and you help. Do you brainstorm with them? What if they already have something in place? Do you say, hey, this doesn’t line up with your mission statement or any of that stuff? Kind of walk us through it.

Janelle Amos [00:17:01]:
Yeah. So I actually have a proprietary framework, words that is a seven step process that I follow for any client, any company. And essentially I use that as my first step. It’s an audit. I come back and I have the initial conversations and then I rank that company based on the seven steps of what’s needed to create an efficient marketing engine. That step involves having conversations with the marketing leader, the sales leader, the customer success leader, any other stakeholders thereafter, doing research on customers in the industry, listening to sales calls, seeing if there’s any actual customers that want to talk to me or can talk to me, and doing just that own market analysis. That audit ranks them both based on the level of investment that’s needed as well as the priority for impact. So if you have low investment and high priority, that’s a really quick win.

Janelle Amos [00:17:48]:
We should be doing that like ASAP. So that framework process takes about like three to four weeks or so, depending on calendars and everything. And then after that, that’s the roadmap for us to build. That’s like, okay, this is what we need to put. We put our hats on, we roll up our sleeves, and we start just like cranking that out to get them that engine. But it starts with just having the conversations and doing the research and understanding their personas and then mapping that over to their north star, and that calls out, hey, you’re doing this. But that’s actually entirely unofficient. Maybe your audience is on LinkedIn, but you’re doing the complete wrong strategy based on X, Y and Z.

Janelle Amos [00:18:27]:
So it comes with those specific findings in terms of ways to pivot. And candidly, I’ll just kind of throw out the shameless plug. That audit is something you can take as a playbook and use with or without me. That’s the value of it is it’s so granular and so detailed that it’s like, hey, I just need a pulse, check my marketing engine, come rank it. And so I’ll come in and I’ll do those findings and take it or leave it. Now, if you need help with execution, it’s a whole nother conversation and we can talk about what the findings are and what’s needed from an execution standpoint. And those are my monthly retainers thereafter in terms of building, because those take a lot more time, effort and work and a lot of fun, I’ll add.

Jeffro [00:19:09]:
Yeah, well, especially as you’re building this, that roadmap shows you where you’re going. So, yeah, that can be a lot of fun, but it’s very helpful to have that outside perspective, too. I think a lot of us who run our own business, we’re too close to it, right? We might have ideas. Once you come in and say, hey, this doesn’t make sense, you’re like, oh, yeah, thanks for pointing that out. You need that other person to come in and look at it. So that’s a really great way to start. What are some mistakes that business owners make when it comes to this demand gen and this roadmap that you create for them? Let’s say you hand it to them and they go mess it up somehow. What are they going to mess up?

Janelle Amos [00:19:47]:
Most of the time I find, and I’ll caveat this with, like, my audience is B, two b SaaS companies, but I have dabbled in professional services as well. So it’s based on my limited survey data of that, if you will. But what I find is that because they’re smaller in budget from a marketing standpoint, they want to just diy it themselves. They just want to do it themselves. They may not know what is needed to create an effective LinkedIn campaign if they’re going in to create it themselves. They may not know how to run Facebook ads. They may not know that when you need to go and send an email, hey, you need a know, that’s HTML, you need a designer. And they get to those parts where it just falls off the rails, where they never actually did it because they don’t know how.

Janelle Amos [00:20:27]:
And so not bringing somebody in to help them execute it or at least guide them as a strategic advisor, telling them what they need to do. That’s mostly what I find is cool. They get the insights. They get stuck because their background is not in marketing. Their background is what they specialize in accounting content or creation or anything else. And they just struggle with what it’s like to get that engine up with what’s needed as a granular level, which only comes from somebody who’s been in the business long enough.

Jeffro [00:20:56]:
Right. So if you’re not in marketing or don’t have that background, it gets lost in translation, or you’re just too busy with other parts of the business and you’re like, kind of get it done. I got it. But it’s not working right. And you’re not spending the time on it to do those split tests or new creatives or whatever you might need to be doing. Because if it didn’t work the first time, I think a lot of people just fall off the wagon and move on to the next shiny thing. So that all makes sense. Do you have any? Well, before I ask that, I just want to say thanks for being here today.

Jeffro [00:21:27]:
We are coming up on the end of our time. So this is fascinating stuff. You’ve given us some great insights. And I think there’s a lot of practical takeaways that people can take from this. Even small business owners who don’t have that team yet. It can at least give them the right expectation and framework of when you’re looking to do this and grow, you want to do it the right way. Otherwise you’re going to be burning money for a long time. So, guys, if you’re listening, you can go connect with Janelle on LinkedIn.

Jeffro [00:21:51]:
You can check out her website@elevategrowth.com, elevate growth and see she’s got her audit listed there and other ways she can help with you. And those links will be in the show notes. But final question for you, Janelle, is what’s one takeaway that you want the audience to remember?

Janelle Amos [00:22:06]:
Don’t diy marketing. If you don’t know how. That’s okay. Ask for help. I’ve come in too many. It’s so much easier to get it right the first time than it is to break it trying to do it yourself and then hire somebody to come in and fix it. Because maybe you didn’t get the right tech stack, and maybe there’s just so much that you need to pay in order to fix it from not even just like paying a consultant or somebody else to actually do the work, like actually switching platforms or doing an upgrade in some of your features, there’s just so much basic setup fees or setup, I don’t know, foundations that’s needed that if you switch and all of a sudden you built your business in one direction and now it’s like, that was wrong, actually, we should go over here or yada yada. It can get expensive and get frustrating.

Janelle Amos [00:22:56]:
And so if you’re interested in expanding on a marketing front, partner with somebody who actually has done it before and knows what they’re talking about and do it with them strategically first before trying to do it yourself and mess it up. Because the implications, I feel like, are bigger than the overall investment.

Jeffro [00:23:12]:
Right. Because in the short term you feel like you’re saving money, but in the long term you’re not. It’s worth doing it. Right. Well, thanks again for being here, Janelle. Thanks to all of, for listening. Keep growing and I’ll see you back here for the next episode.

Janelle Amos [00:23:23]:
Thank you.