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Salesloft Acquires Drift: The Race To AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
Salesloft Acquires Drift: The Race To AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
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Salesloft, one of the industry leading sales engagement platforms, has acquired Drift, the industry leader of conversational marketing (aka website chatbots). No financial terms were disclosed.

The merger combines Salesloft's AI revenue orchestration platform, including Salesloft Cadence, with Drift's premier AI chatbot. It's a move that - according to the official press release - will result in a powerful end-to-end AI revenue orchestration platform servicing the entire buying journey.

But what does this merger mean for the wider sales technology market? And what does it mean for B2B buyers?

What's our take on the Salesloft Drift acquisition?

Firstly, it's a sign from the market (and their investors) that individually they could not meet projected valuations and revenue outcomes, but when combined together, the synergies might stand a better chance. As Salesloft CEO David Obrand puts it, the acquisition "introduces to the market the first and only AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform."

Except they weren't the first. The category of AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform had already been claimed.

For years, other companies like 6sense and Demandbase had been building around the idea of combining the sales technology and the marketing tool stack into an all-in-one solution to automate workflows on top of. Similar to Drift, 6sense and Demandbase primarily focused on the enterprise.

Warmly was the first AI powered revenue orchestration platform purpose built for the SMB. And it does so by giving you the option to plug in your existing tech stack.

SMBs typically require more automation because they don't have the same access to marketing teams, sales people, and resources as enterprises do. So we adapted to that need.

We call it signal-based revenue orchestration.

Trends in Sales and Marketing Tech Stack Consolidation

The Salesloft Drift acquisition seemingly follows an ongoing trend of sales and marketing tech stack consolidation, where market leaders are trying to become the all-in-one unified go-to-market solution.

Here's what we mean.

SaaS Mergers: Improving Sales Development?

ZoomInfo acquired Chorus back in July 2021 for $575 million, allowing them to compete with Gong.io, the industry leader in call recording and intelligence. But it's part of their larger acquisition strategy to increase net retention revenue outcomes year over year by upselling existing customers on new offerings that keep them sticky to ZoomInfo's platform.

Apollo.io took a different approach of natively unifying the sales tech stack by building everything in-house. The company started as a B2B contact database, then combined that with email sequencing, and recently raised $100MM in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures in August 2023 to create the full-stack sales technology platform. 60% of the funds are invested into product development. They have a PLG sales motion which has saved them from having to invest as heavily into a large salesforce.

Hubspot, the SMB CRM of choice, went the reverse of Apollo and started as marketing automation software that then added CRM capabilities later. And in November 2023 Hubspot acquired Clearbit, one of the top B2B data providers. For the first time, CRM, B2B contact data, buyer intent signals, and workflow all came under one roof.

As Whitney Sorson, CTO of Hubspot, puts it, "Picture having complete data on over 20 million companies right inside HubSpot. All with over 100 rich data points about the companies and their decision-makers. Then imagine being able to easily find high-fit prospects natively within your CRM. Finally, imagine that once those companies and contacts are in HubSpot, being alerted when those companies are showing buying intent."

With the rise of AI and ChatGPT, you can start to see sales technology giants leaning into consolidating the tech stack not only to improve the entire customer experience, but also because it breaks down data siloes to seamlessly integrate data across systems.

Entering the Era of Revenue Orchestration

Data is the new oil. It's the lifeblood of the orchestration. But data alone is not enough to accelerate pipeline conversion rates.

It needs to be combined with action.

As we combine sales workflow, data, and AI and automation, we move into the new era of revenue orchestration. And that means an ongoing arms race to reach B2B buyers.

Drift and Salesloft: A Tale of Two Giants

Let's zoom into the Salesloft Drift acquisition for a second, because there's a deeper story here.

Back in in 2021, Vista Equity acquired a majority stake in Drift, which valued the buyer engagement platform at $1 billion. In 2022 Vista paid an estimated 23x multiple for Salesloft, which valued it at around $2.3 billion.

These were during the good times of SaaS. But SaaS has taken a turn for the worse as we headed into 2023.

Drift: The Hero of SaaS

There was a time when Drift was the darling of B2B sales technology. Initially, it was Intercom that started the real push of website chat, especially in B2B. But while intercom pushed more into support, Drift moved into marketing.

The eventually created the category and movement around conversational marketing and got chatbots to appear on all the websites. Their key pillar of its growth was B2B buyers from the SMB market.

Anybody could add a script tag to their site and you'd see the iconic Drift chatbot icon on the bottom right hand corner.

The Drift sales development team grew revenue quickly by doing one-call closes using their own product.

The sales team would chat directly to website visitors, post a Zoom Link in the chat, and close a $6,000 to $8,000 a year deal right on the website.

Drift grew from $6 million in revenue to $47 million in revenue in 2 years. It was insanity. It was around this period that that Vista Equity stepped in.

Enter Private Equity

After Vista Equity entered the proverbial chat, Drift was forced to move upmarket and stopped caring about SMB/the lower-middle market B2B buyers. SMB just isn't seen as a place to stay for an aggressive PE firm that wants predictable revenue outcomes. Small companies churned too quickly.

Plus, companies with high website traffic typically received the most value out of Drift, which by and large is a marketing tool designed to capture leads passively visiting the site. The more site visitors, the more leads.

Consequently, it was easier to prove ROI and justify a higher price tag. PE saw enterprise revenue as more stable, which meant a higher multiple could be attached to the conversational AI company.

Drift initially did have a vision to expand outside of its conversational marketing wedge and help service the entire customer experience from top of funnel marketing to bottom of funnel sales, as well engaging customer experiences post-sales .

But ever since Vista took over, Drift shut down all expansion and focused product development on enterprise features and sticking to the marketing use case.

Remember the days when you could add a Drift chatbot to your site for a couple hundred a month? Those are gone.

Today, Drift's lowest tier is $2,500/month ($30,000/year), which is ironically desc "For Small Businesses."


$2,500/month: Small Business?

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For Drift's Advanced and Enterprise tiers, we've heard our customers being quoted hundreds of thousands of dollars to upwards of millions a year. For Drift, the economics of the lower end of the market didn't make sense.

This showed in the product and buyer experiences as well. Complicated workflows, long implementation sessions, high price tags. It became a best-in-class point solution instead of an end-to-end platform, which put a ceiling on its growth.

There was a point where Drift wasn't even integrated in the CRM, a gap that Qualified exploited by building natively on top of the CRM to streamline the sales use case.

But moving up-market proved to be more difficult for Drift. Growth started to slow. And at the bottom, new entrants started popping up everywhere.


Chatbot software listed on G2

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At this time, sales technology company valuations dramatically decreased; many investors were told not to deploy capital and to hold; and B2B buyers stopped buying. And as a result, churn and downgrades increased across the board.

It's no surprise that Drift had layoffs, releasing 159 employees in 2023. Case in point: Drift's employee growth rate has regressed 20% in the last 2 years.


Drift's Employee Count For the Past Two Years

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Drift and Salesloft: A Merger of Equals

It made sense for Vista to combine Drift with Salesloft, two complimentary market leaders in sales development and customer engagement that are struggling to keep their dominance and justify their valuation multiples individually.

Salesloft has similarly come up against stiff competition from entrants like Outreach.io, Instantly.ai, Gong.io, Hubspot, ZoomInfo, and Apollo, all of which have their own sales prospecting capabilities that rival Salesloft's.

Tack on the fact that 93% of outbound emails these days are automated, with response rates generally reaching less than 2%, and it's obvious: the category of email sequencing is reaching a point of diminishing returns for its buyers.

Salesloft's acquisition of Drift, which we see more as a merger, is an opportunity for both companies to decrease costs, improve revenue outcomes, and leverage new synergies, especially fulfilling both company's initial visions of expanding beyond their own stage of buyer journey.

Salesloft CEO David Obrand posted on LinkedIn “[The acquisition] introduces to the market the first and only AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform that serves the entire buying journey. By closing the gap between sales and marketing, which has long been a major pain point in the revenue motion, go-to-market teams can now orchestrate a hyper-personalized, omnichannel buyer journey at scale.”

Typically, marketing tools don't cross over into sales, outside of ABX platforms like 6sense and Demandbase, so this would be one of the first acquisitions of its kind.

Naturally, it will take time to fully integrate the two sales technology platforms to create the AI-powered revenue orchestration experience that David Obrand has promised. And it won't be cheap: the point of consolidation is also to upsell offerings, especially if you're aiming at improving the entire buying journey.

What would that look like?

Sales reps could do things like sequence prospects via Salesloft, then continue the conversation with the prospect when they visit the website using Drift.

Drift can cookie and track session activity for all website visitors, and once a target company is identified, teams can use Salesloft to multithread the conversation with all key stakeholders in that target account by adding them all to sequences.

All of this orchestrated by Conductor AI of course.

Salesloft and Drift: Legacy Software Under Fire

As Salesloft and Drift are sorting through the acquisition, there will be a window of opportunity for new entrants to claim the AI revenue orchestration category for themselves by adapting to the changing landscape of how companies successfully go-to-market. We predict that these companies will move quickly to establish themselves.

There will be companies like Apollo.io who will opt to build the unified go-to-market solution natively in-house. This is better than the acquisition approach because data can move seamlessly across all their sub products.

And there will be other companies that will keep themselves platform-agnostic and act as the unified API layer that stitches together the sales and marketing tech stack, resulting in the entire customer experience becoming more coherent. Call it go-to-market middleware.

It's difficult for a single platform to be #1 at every use case. There will always be niche use cases that are better served by specific tools.

In this scenario, you would be able to plug in your favorite tools that you're already using.

Maybe you like ZoomInfo data better than Apollo's, Outreach more than Salesloft, 6sense more than Demandbase. It would give you the opportunity to mix and mash the best-in-class point solutions for your specific market and revenue outcomes.

I think Zach Howland, a sales tech stack expert who has implemented multiple CRM and sales tools across various companies, said it best.

"Flexibility is enhanced utility. The market needs to be more nimble for the coming scramble to modernize sales technology as AI becomes more robust."

Warmly, the Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform

Hi! We're Warmly, the signal-based revenue orchestration platform, purpose built for the SMB market that Salesloft and Drift are neglecting.

Instead of building everything natively or consolidating, we give you the flexibility to plug in your favorite sales and marketing tools.

We then infuse your tech stack with the best-in-class intent and enrichment data from 6sense, Clearbit, and Bombora to automatically orchestrate the right sales workflows at the right time.

We're AI powered. We're free to get started. And you can be fully setup in minutes.

And you can save yourself the $30,000/year because we built a Drift competitor chatbot natively into our platform as well.

Find out how D2DExperts closed $80,000 in revenue from Warmly in the first 12 days of use.

Warmly: The Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform
Warmly: The Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform
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This article is Part IV of the 4-part series on the shifting landscape of B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed.

Here, you can read Part III, which goes over what AI-powered revenue orchestration is and why it's important in the age of AI and automation.

As Part I of the B2B SaaS evolution explained, the world's digital transformation also transformed the importance of the website.

Some studies have noted that 70% of the buyer journey is completed by the time the prospect speaks with a salesperson.

Dark social, through the internet's scale and maturity, has created tons of word-of-mouth channels for recommending products that don't get tracked by attribution software and don't create intent data. 

These channels include social networks like LinkedIn, content platforms like podcasts, internal communications like Slack communities, DMs, and text messages. Word of mouth through dark funnel activities increasingly plays a more influential role in buying decisions.

The trickiest part is knowing when to reach out to the right person with the right question since buyers' attention always changes.

Sending out unsolicited emails and making random phone calls is like taking a shot in the dark, hoping to catch the buyers at the perfect moment. But people don't answer their phones these days, and their email inboxes are overflowing.

At some point in every B2B SaaS buyer's journey, they may not see our ad, they may not read our email, they may not see our G2 reviews, but they will go to check out our website. And for ~8 seconds when they hit our site, we know they're just thinking about us.

“The average digital attention span is 8 seconds, according to media analysts and data scientists,” says Aydin Senkut, Warmly Series A investor, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis. “So the opportunity to catch a prospect while they are actively engaged with your content is fleeting. There is no time to chat to the visitor, upload a lead into a CRM, enrich the data, and add to a follow-up sequence. Warmly provides real-time orchestration of these tasks within that 8-second window.”

From: Press Release: Warmly Series A Announcement

How do you ensure the right follow-up actions happen at this exact moment in time, every time?

We call the solution signal-based revenue orchestration.

The Issue With Most GTM Teams 

How often have you heard one of your sales reps use the phrase, “I just don’t have time for that.”?

This is one of the biggest issues among sales teams.

We’ve got all of these fantastic tools and a ton of great data to dig into, but we don’t really seem to get value out of it all.

Between firmographic data, conversation intelligence, and buying signals, sales reps have so much information to look at that it could take as much as an hour to absorb enough data to respond to a prospect with a sufficient level of context.

And by that time, a competitor has already responded and won the deal.

There is always a tension between speed-to-lead and contextual, personalized responses.

In most cases, speed wins out, especially since reps have lofty sales targets and activity goals. So they make mistakes. They don‘t do research as much as they could (or should). They stop personalizing outreach.

And, of course, conversion rates suffer.

The Last Defensible Marketing Moat Is Brand

In the hyper-saturated environments in which most companies operate today, brand is the last defensible marketing moat.

Competitors can copy and implement new features in weeks, if not days. Messaging can be replicated and improved upon even faster. So can the majority of your sales and marketing tactics and channels.

Brand is what distinguishes you from competitors. It's what creates an emotional connection with prospects before they are ready to buy. It's what allows you to influence buying decisions and to tap into the world of dark social and word-of-mouth referrals.

In our deep dive on warm leads, we spoke about a three-step process for driving qualified, high-intent leads to your site:

  1. Build a media brand (investing in content creation and distribution to position your brand as a leader)
  2. Create brand partnerships (working with likeminded brands in a similar space to increase reach and borrow brand equity)
  3. Engage with prospective buyers (get out there and talk with customers, rather than talking at them with outbound marketing communications)

All of these efforts lead back to one place:

The website.

Website As The Choke Point To All GTM Investments

The opportunity lies in the fact that as the world becomes more digitized, the website serves as the digital store, while the landing page acts as the digital shopfront.

Imagine you are the marketing team for your store. You invest significant money to attract foot traffic, hoping that people will pass by your store (website) and take a closer look at your shopfront (landing page).

If we have done a good job designing our shopfront, some people may enter our store. Some who enter may be our target buyers.

Our target buyers walk through our store daily, showing interest in what we offer. But no one's there to greet them. 

Instead, they are instructed to write down their information on a post-it note and wait for a response in a few hours or days, only to get a call from a rep who asks many questions but answers none of theirs. This is the typical process of filling out forms.

Or they are directed to a kiosk where they can provide their information and receive automated answers. Most chatbots operate in this manner, but this is not how people make purchasing decisions.

It's not surprising that, on average, only 3% of website visitors fill out forms.

Step one of maximizing marketing spend is figuring out which qualified accounts are visiting our website, and from there, the accounts are actually in-market for our product but not raising their hand.

Otherwise, how do we know what marketing efforts are working and where to double down?


~3% of your site traffic converts (and not always the traffic you want)

Quality Data Delivers Qualified Leads

When it comes to B2B buyer intent data, first-party data is always the most reliable source, followed closely by best-in-class third-party intent data from the likes of Bombora.


With these warm buyer intent signals in hand from website visitor behavior, you’re going after the lowest-hanging fruit because these are the companies that are familiar with your brand.

That’s why we’re starting with website intent because only 3% of website visitors fill out a form, so you’re missing out on a huge chunk of what could be qualified prospects,

As the state of signal-based revenue orchestration develops, we’ll be adding additional data sources like job change alerts and job posts.


Introducing Warmly: AI-Supported Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration

Warmly is our signal-based revenue orchestration, born out of the need to respond to warm leads fast and to ensure that as much context and personalization as possible are present at every touchpoint.

Warmly is designed specifically for the SMB, with a flexible pricing structure to suit. Most ABM and revenue-focused solutions are out of range for this market segment; they’re targeting enterprise buyers.

As such, those platforms generally take a human-first approach since enterprise companies with enterprise budgets for enterprise tools also have the budget for a huge GTM team.

SMB buyers don’t have that luxury.

So, we built Warmly with an AI-first approach. This way, you get the best out of what modern machines can offer (speed, scale, and data-driven contextual communication) and only loop your reps in when the human touch is needed to close the deal. This allows humans to focus on what they do best which is building relationships and being strategic.

These tools are also largely forcing customers into a specific ecosystem. ‎Salesloft acquired Drift and is focused on building an all-in-one GTM solution. Same thing is happening with ZoomInfo, and with the HubSpot acquisition of Clearbit.

But SMB buyers need flexibility. 

So, our approach to revenue orchestration is about being the middleware that orchestrates the best-in-class tools that you choose so you can have flexibility. 

How Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Works

You Run Demand Gen As Normal 

All of this begins with the various demand generation strategies you’re running.

Remember, only around 5% of your total addressable market is actually ready to buy. By the time they get to one of your lead generation devices, they’ve already done the majority of their research.

If you’re not present during that whole customer journey, educating the prospect and guiding their buying decisions at every turn, you’re unlikely to be in the final consideration set.

So, keep on doing what you’re doing. Build that content machine, publish and distribute, and drive traffic back to your website so prospects can learn about how you solve their common problems.

Warmly Deanonymizes Visitors To Your Website 

Once a potential buyer lands on your website, Warmly kicks into action.

This begins with website visitor deanonymization.

We can uncover 65% of the companies who visit your site and 15% of the actual people without you having to do anything.


In some cases, we can provide LinkedIn accounts and even email addresses for these buyers, all of which are then quickly synced back to your CRM and sales engagement tools.

Best-In-Class Data Integrations Help Identify Buying Committees 

We then pull in firmographic data from best-in-class sources such as Clearbit and 6sense, both at the company level and at the contact level.

This helps you to identify who might be on the buying committee and who else at that company might be responsible for the purchase decision.

For example, a marketing associate might have visited your website, but Warmly has identified (based on your ICP information) that the CMO would more likely be the decision-maker here.

This data is also routed to your sales tech stack, helping to build out the account and allowing you to understand more about who you need to talk to in order to influence a purchase.

This comes from a proprietary data waterfall strategy designed to ensure you have the best coverage and accuracy (better than anyone else). We layer together the best data for you so you don’t have to go through the headache.


Warmly Orchestrates Multi-Threaded Omnichannel Outreach 

Here’s where the power of AI really kicks into gear.

We’ve enriched your CRM and sales engagement tools with all of the account data related to the prospect in question. We’ve combined metadata and tech stack data with best-in-class buying intent data to translate buying signals into meaningful and actionable sales actions that can be automated.

We call this multi-threaded outreach.

By multi-threaded, we mean that our AI engine isn’t just communicating with one person.

It’s using powerful sales and marketing automation to push personalized email and LinkedIn messages to multiple stakeholders, all of which appear to be coming from a member of our sales team.

As all good revenue teams know, each stakeholder in the B2B buying team has different buying motivations. The CMO is going to want to see results or proof of concept that are different from what the marketing associate might see.

So, our AI outreach engine crafts contextual messaging based on those roles and the value your product can provide them.

All of this is orchestrated via a single platform connected to your existing sales engagement tech stack. It’s high-value work being done in the background that your reps don’t have to worry about.

Use Case Examples For Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration

Top of Funnel Orchestration

If a qualified ICP account visits the website for the first time without any associated CRM deal, we automatically create the account in the CRM. Then, we enrich new CRM fields to track the account's digital footprint and analyze trends. We automatically source the buying committee via Apollo, PeopleDataLabs, and ZoomInfo integrations.


The contacts are then synced to the CRM, assigned the appropriate account owner, and automatically added to an educational nurture sequence sent via email and LinkedIn (via our Salesflow integration).

As the buying committee members engage with the content, the signal on the account strengthens. Over time, we may see the account transition from the awareness stage to the consideration stage of the buying journey. And instead of just searching for your category in Google, they're searching for your brand.

Middle of Funnel Orchestration

The account's buying committee has started to show interest in your offering, as evidenced by repeat visits to your website from multiple IP addresses. They have shown interest in case studies and pricing pages and have recently engaged with marketing nurture emails. We bilaterally sync web activity associated with each buying committee member into the CRM, including the referral source, time spent on each page, and specific pages visited. This synchronization helps prioritize accounts, tailor experiences, and involve relevant parties.

As committee members are directed to your site via nurture sequences, we will send personalized messages through our AI chat. These AI chat messages are contextualized to the content consumed and the account's surrounding context. As the conversation progresses, your human seller will be notified through Slack and can engage with the prospect in real-time via video call on the website.


Bottom of Funnel Orchestration

When an account is in the decision phase and on your website, we alert the assigned Account Executive (AE) both audibly and via push notifications when these accounts visit our site. This enables the AE to meet the visitor where they're at, on the website via our live video chat. If the AE can't act immediately, the notification provides the phone numbers of the buying committee (when available) for a direct call.


Simultaneously, we draft personalized emails or LinkedIn messages using GPT and relevant data pulled from all integrated systems. The AE would approve these messages before they're sent, ensuring timely and relevant follow-ups with the prospect.

Lead Scoring & Revenue Orchestration

Signal-based revenue orchestration can (and should) be set up to run different playbooks based on the level of intent and warmth the prospect demonstrates.

Here’s how we score and route leads at Warmly, for instance:

As you can see, leads we judge as cold receive simple inbound chatbot workflows, whereas hot and medium prospects get a proactive AI chat playbook.

These distinctions are made using our proprietary warm lead scoring matrix.


A combination of ICP filters (for example, the size of the company) and intent signals (from third-party site activity and engagement on our own website) determines how hot the lead is, automatically filtering prospects into the relevant workflows.

PS. Our full-length article on Warmly implementation goes into detail on how to set this up.

Advantages of Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration

We only loop in sellers when an account is ready for a human conversation. Otherwise, we're continuing to deliver multi-threaded, omni-channel experiences across all your accounts automatically.

We think that human systems are inherently difficult to scale, especially as deals become more complex and involve more stakeholders, each with individual nuances.

The difficulty is in holding attention long enough to synthesize all the information collected on an account/individual to craft the right experience before their attention goes elsewhere. It takes time to research, time to draft, and time to send. When a rep reaches out, the window of opportunity might have closed, and the prospect is visiting a competitor's site. Or the rep never reaches out, and we would've missed an opportunity to build a relationship with the prospect earlier in their buying journey.

Orchestration's ability to reduce the relevant information from your systems into the right multi-threaded actions, combined with AI's ability to generate personalized messaging, has the following advantages over traditional Account Based Marketing:

  • Fit - To ensure that the best-fit companies (based on your ICP) get high-touch workflows, stopping low-intent leads from clogging up sales pipelines and speeding up sales cycles by acting as a filtering mechanism and stitching together various data inputs. 
  • Speed - To engage with the prospect through the right channel, with the right message in that ~8-second window when they're thinking about you
  • Scale - To engage with all accounts visiting your website across all stages of the buyer journey and across the entire buying committee, not just the person visiting the site at that moment
  • Consistency - To immediately mobilize and scale up an army of AI SDRs to deliver consistent messaging that would resonate with the right buyers so you can test and iterate what works best at scale
  • Personalization - To deliver the right messaging at the right time, via the right channel, AND being human while doing so
  • Reduction - To measure the value of each of the dozens of buying signals you have access to, and weight them based on how strongly they indicate intent, and reduce it to an overall intent score

Consolidate Tools to Create a Seamless Buyer Experience

To stitch together these event-driven systems, you would need ZoomInfo or Clearbit to enrich the data, 6sense to gather the website intent, and Drift to engage with them live on the website. Now you can do it all in one.

Layering data from disparate systems and reducing the complexity through orchestration leads to derived insights. You can skip analysis done by a human toggling between three screens and pinpoint critical moments in a buyer's journey. You don't need to ink deals with 6-7 vendors and spend time getting systems to talk to one another. You can focus on one core vendor and push them to innovate to create seamless buyer experiences.

That will allow you to save money on tech spend, repurpose reps' time on more strategic problem-solving for the customer, and have robust data to run models and AI against to automate processes further.

Setup Warmly in Minutes, Not Months

Larger platforms may require weeks to months to set up correctly, involving multiple teams, onboarding sessions, and alignment meetings. The hidden cost of setup starts to eat away at the ROI.

For Warmly, you can begin receiving hard ROI in 20 minutes by:

  • Adding a code snippet to the site
  • One-click authenticating into your systems (Hubspot, Outreach, Apollo, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.)

You can immediately start to improve conversion rates by de-anonymizing and enriching the traffic coming to your site, sync this data back into your CRM, and then routing hot accounts to the right rep.

Then we would set you up for an onboarding call with our CSM for 30 minutes to help you define your ICP accounts and buying committee personas in Warmly so that we can set website prospecting on auto-pilot by turning on AI chat and AI prospector. This would run all hours of the day to line up conversations for reps even as they sleep.

An example: within the first 8 minutes of turning on AI chat, Kandji was able to book two qualified meetings. You can read more about Kandji's case study here.

Read more about what our customers have to say about us:

The Rise of AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
The Rise of AI Powered Revenue Orchestration
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This article is Part III of a 4-part series on the shifting landscape of B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed.

You can read Part II, where we introduce account-based marketing and how it improves the buyer experience to get past the noise explained in Part I.

In the previous two parts, we talked about the problems facing revenue teams today and how we got there. Account-based marketing is a step in the right direction, as it adapts how companies engage with buyers depending on the stage of their buyer's journey. 

Right message, right person, right time, through the right channel.

However, having implemented ABM solutions ourselves and talked with many current or former users of ABM, we've seen that there are hard setup and maintenance costs, as well as difficulties in running such a complex operation effectively - particularly speed, coverage, and consistency.

People are influenced into deals rather than pushed into them like before. Demand creation and dark social are starting to become a key part of people’s strategies.

Understanding Demand: Creation vs. Selling

‎(Image Source: Freepik)

Demand creation focuses further up the funnel at the awareness and consideration stages of the buyer's journey. It's about finding ways to get our brand in front of the 97 to 99 percent of our total addressable market who may not be actively in the market but have the potential to become prospects in the future. This involves utilizing channels like LinkedIn, Reddit, ads, webinars, blog posts, and influencers to educate and engage with our target audience.

Demand capture is about capturing the buyer in the decision and purchase stage. Again, only 1 to 3 percent of people are currently in the market and showing purchase intent. This is where all of our sales team's efforts should go. There's typically a high cost for sales spending time on accounts that are not in-market.

The need to split between demand creation (mostly marketing, though there can be some assistance from sales) and demand capture (mostly sales but with some marketing influence) is to fulfill the buyer journey experience.

One common mistake companies make is the tendency to allocate most of their budget towards demand capture, even though 70% of the buying journey has already occurred by the time a seller is involved. By then, the buyer already has a top 5 list of vendors they are looking to evaluate.

By neglecting demand creation, we risk commoditizing ourselves among competitors and miss the opportunity to distinguish ourselves as a leader.

If we truly solve a problem, our buyer will be in the market for our solution one day. And if we did demand creation right, they'll be googling for our solution via branded search terms rather than typing our category name, where we may not even rank in the first four search results.

The Importance of ICP Creation

When we look at the difference between high-performing and low-performing SDR teams, there’s one thing that stands out across the board:

The best teams are getting fed with better pipeline.

That is, the leads coming through are of higher quality. They’re a better match for the company’s ICP, so they have an easier time closing deals and waste less time on leads that would never close.

For this, you need to have your ICP clearly nailed down and ensure your demand-generation activities are tailored to that specific audience.

It is not just about finding a fit on demographics, though.

You also want to know that the company is growing. Do they have NRR over 100%? Are they retaining customers? Is revenue increasing?

If these signals are all met, it means you’re less likely to have churn issues in the future because the buyers got laid off.


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Wasting Time on The Wrong Activities 

The other problem with many low-performing SDR teams is that they aren’t focusing on the right actions. Only 20% of their time goes to activities that create progress. The other 80% is just wasted time.

They aren’t working on the right deals at the right time, with the right people, through the right channels.

Revenue orchestration helps sales teams prioritize the best leads and deprioritize the worst ones so they can work on the activities that actually move the needle forward.

Advantages of AI-powered Revenue Orchestration

Fit 

AI-powered revenue orchestration helps ensure that the leads that do make it through to a conversation with sales reps are highly aligned with your ICP.

Instead of funneling all potential prospects through to a demo (like a standard chatbot or meeting booker would), a revenue orchestration solution:

  • De-anonymizes the site visitor.
  • Enriches your CRM data on that account with other firmographic info (such as identifying who else might be on the buying committee).
  • Extracts third-party buying intent signals from external providers to understand where the prospect is at in their buying journey.
  • Understands the current health of the company by pulling publicly available growth metrics.
  • Matches that collection of data against your ICP construct to determine what conversational path to put them down.
  • Orchestrates communications across email, social, and live chat.
  • Nurtures the prospect until they demonstrate a sufficient level of intent, triggering an alert for a salesperson to take over.

This means those website visitors you aren’t a fit for your ICP don’t clog up your sales teams’ meeting pipeline, which translates to faster sales cycles and stronger conversion rates.

Speed

When a target company exhibits buying intent, the window of opportunity that the buyer is thinking about you could be seconds.

If a buyer visits the site and has a question about the product but is unable to meet with a rep until a day later, that may be too late if the budget discussion is tomorrow. By the time a sales rep reaches out, the moment may have passed, and the buyer has gone to a competitor.

Here's an example of how orchestration could solve this.

The VP of Marketing tells a B2B marketing manager at SaaS Co. to research an intent solution to get more in-market leads. SaaS Co's marketing manager asks the Pavilion Go-to-market community for alternatives to 6sense because 6sense is so expensive. Someone mentions Warmly.

The marketing manager visits Warmly's homepage, the case studies page, and the pricing page. On the pricing page, the chatbot pings - it's an AE at Warmly asking if they have any questions.


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The marketing manager doesn't realize he's speaking to an AI. But by now, the actual AE has been notified and jumped in to take over the conversation, initiating a video call. They arrange to catch up again after SaaS Co's budget meeting (that's tomorrow). The marketing manager notes the solution in his deck and calls it a day.

But the orchestration doesn't end there.

  • Immediately after, the SaaS Co.'s CFO receives a LinkedIn connection request. It's the Warmly AE, enquiring about their precarious financial position. They detail exactly how Warmly integrates into SaaS Co's existing tech stack and maximizes the ROI of marketing spend. The CFO ignores the message but keeps Warmly in mind.
  • The rest of the buying committee (the VP of Marketing, CRO, VP of Sales, and Head of Sales Development) receive custom emails addressing all the risks Warmly would help eliminate.
  • The CRO finds a surprise in her message - an explanation of how Warmly eliminates revenue leaks, a topic they had recently read up on. The CRO clicks on a link in the email, arrives on the Warmly homepage, and reads case studies about how Warmly solved revenue leaks with SaaS Co's competitors.

The orchestration system automatically generated these experiences immediately after that initial call. AI carefully selected the message, buying committee members, and channels based on the surrounding context and historical data.

In the past, such an analysis and outreach would have taken hours. This took minutes. Plus, the call recording was synced to the CRM, transcribed, and processed alongside all other relevant data collected on the account.

So, onto that all-important buying committee meeting. What do you know? Warmly is top of mind.

The marketing manager reaches out to Warmly's AE to schedule another call with the VP of Marketing, CRO, and Sales. The AI, always doing more, includes the CFO on the call because they're deemed vital.

And in less than two days (there could be just 24 hours between the initial website visit and that buying committee meeting), you've got a prospect ready to buy.

Scale

A similar story plays out a hundred more times during the working day as companies visit the site, are qualified in or out, and the orchestration platform delivers the right experience. A single rep can only handle one account at a time, but an orchestration platform can simultaneously service every single account at every stage of the buyer journey.

The previous example discussed a possible experience delivered to the account if they were in-market.

What about those that aren't in-market?

They receive demand-creation experiences, like display ads or personalized emails that route to educational blog pages or videos.

When the target accounts finally enter the "buying window," Warmly's content has already shaped their opinions. The account is primed, and we move to demand capture involving the sales team.

The target accounts arrive on Warmly's landing page, the AI qualifies them as in, notifies the rep when a human needs to be in the loop, and the cycle repeats.

Flexibility

‎The best AI-powered revenue orchestration solutions give GTM teams the flexibility they need to plug into their existing tech stack and coordinate sales and marketing activities.

That’s not the case across the board, though.

Right now, we’re seeing a consolidation of the GTM tech market.

Salesloft bought Drift. HubSpot bought Clearbit. Leedfeeder merged with Echobot to become Dealfront.

You’re also seeing tools like Apollo.io and ZoomInfo build out unified GTM suites in-house.

Others, like Warmly, are more platform-agnostic. They focus on integrating with a wide variety of tools so you can plug into the tech stack you’re already set up with and orchestrate effective GTM campaigns powered by AI.

Zach Howland, a sales tech stack expert with a ton of experience implementing CRM and sales tools, has a great point on this:

"Flexibility is enhanced utility. The market needs to be more nimble for the coming scramble to modernize sales technology as AI becomes more robust.”

Consistency

Take this example.

Based on data in the orchestration platform, the leadership team finds they're losing deals based on price to competitors, specifically to companies in B2B SaaS at the Series A stage.

So, the team tweaks the orchestration platform to show 20% discounts to in-market B2B SaaS accounts at the Series A stage. The AI also integrates this promotion into the company's messaging while keeping the price the same for all other prospects.

Normally, this type of change would take multiple training sessions with SDRs, as reps leave, are onboarded, or return from vacation. In the past, reps might have tested messaging and pricing on their own.

Now, everything is standardized. This change is implemented immediately and fed through the platform.

Personalization

The other problem with those stock standard sales conversations that lack context?

They’re exactly the opposite of what today’s buyers say they want.

86% say personalization plays a major role in their purchasing decision.

For many companies, especially SMBs, personalization is a great concept but can be difficult to achieve.

Most businesses add a dynamic name section to their email chains and call it a day. As if their name is what customers are talking about when they say they want personalized buying experiences.

A quality revenue orchestration platform provides companies access to the tools they need to deliver personalized experiences.

Again, it starts with quality data (you can’t personalize anything if you don’t know a thing about the person you’re speaking to), coordinated using a combination of AI and automation to identify opportunities to personalize aspects of the conversation.

It's not just about showing that you know their company's name or their role. Revenue orchestration can go as far as customizing the marketing messaging and even the sales assets that customers receive based entirely on the demographic and intent data you have on them.

Adaptive Systems and their Multiplier Effect

When the whole go-to-market functions of demand creation (marketing) and demand capture (sales) play together harmoniously and the experience is delivered correctly, buyers are happy because they feel like it's being done for them, not to them.

When data no longer lives in siloes and is combined to create derived insights that feed back into the platform, the system continuously delivers better experiences to each account.

Advancements in AI, like vector embeddings, can extend LLMs to have long-term memory for the surrounding historical context and experiences delivered to not just one account but every account being tracked in the CRM. This allows the system to create highly customized experiences that extend across the life cycle of the buyer's journey. Like Amazon and Netflix, millions of buyers don't receive templated emails; they receive carefully selected personalized experiences.

The Non-linear Nature of B2B Purchasing

B2B buying doesn’t play out in any kind of predictable, linear order. Instead, buyers engage in what one might call “looping” across a typical B2B purchase, revisiting (for example) six buying jobs at least once.

There's a multiplier effect when all the pieces work together and adapt in real time to the ever-evolving ecosystem of B2B buying.

‎(Image Source)

Redefining the Role of Human Interaction

Go-to-market teams have already been downsizing and learning to be just as effective with fewer headcounts.

It's gotten so difficult to get someone on the phone that when they finally pick up, after 100 dials, we end up word vomiting just to have them hang up again. It's a horrible experience for both the buyer and the seller.

In the very near future, sellers will move further away from these manual, repetitive tasks because of the increased sophistication, efficiency, and effectiveness of these new adaptive systems. SDRs and AEs can get back to focusing on solving complex customer problems and building long-term relationships. And marketers can spend more time building empathy for the people they are seeking to serve.

And because AI has become quite good at synthesizing data into something humans can understand, we can drill down into the system and reveal important answers to questions like: Who is our ICP? Where are the bottlenecks? Why did we deliver certain experiences? What's been working or not working? Why?

That's the magic of AI-supported revenue orchestration. It gives us the power to be more creative and strategic.

We do what we do best, and leave the rest to automation.

Read on for Part IV on Warmly: The Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform.

Interested to see Warmly in action? Book a demo.

The Future of Account Based Marketing
The Future of Account Based Marketing
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This article is Part II of a 4-part series on the shifting landscape in B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed next.

You can read Part I, in which talks about the evolution of sales and marketing pre and post-pandemic.

TL;DR:

  • The reduction in force in 2023 has accelerated the need for agile organizations in B2B buying and selling.
  • Account Based Marketing (ABM) has shifted the focus from individual leads to the account level, improving efficiency and relevance.
  • Understanding the buyer's journey and using automation and AI can increase sales velocity and conversions.
  • However, there are limitations to ABM, including the challenge of data silos and the need for speed, coverage, and consistency.
  • The next phase in demand capture and demand creation is Account Based Orchestration (ABO)

Headcount Reduction Accelerating the Agile Organization

As of August 2023, almost 300,000 workers in US-based tech companies have been laid off.

Just as COVID was a massive accelerant to the digital buying process, the 2023 reduction in force, because of uncertainty around the economy, was a massive accelerant to the new age of agile organizations.

Dynata conducted a 2023 study across 500 business leaders in the US, Germany, the UK, and France across all industries. Participants included heads of sales, revops, and marketing. A few findings:

  • 75% of organizations expected flat or reduced revenue growth this year
  • 58% expect to have less personnel to drive sales

So, there is less staff, potentially the same pipeline coverage needed to hit your quota.

As a result, sales and marketing organizations learned how to operate smaller, more agile, and more efficiently. Revenue teams began partnering with the most innovative technologies that used automation and AI to help them execute operational downstream activities, which allowed them to focus on key insights and personalization.

Shift Towards Customer Centricity and Account-Based Marketing

In the past, most go-to-market tooling was focused on helping the seller and marketer get more leads. The experience of tooling wasn't necessarily tailored toward the buyer (e.g. carpet bomb email and relentless cold calls).

There are two options to increase revenue:

  • Increase leads
  • Improve pipeline conversions, cycle times, ASPs

It seemed easier to get more leads, so many organizations chose that. But it wasn't. It was the more expensive option that had diminishing returns. More leads to sift through and follow up on meant sellers weren't allocating their time as effectively.

The problem was that 3% of your TAM was in-market to buy (Sticky Branding).

Spending time on non-target accounts that were not in-market to buy was a huge waste of time and money for both the sales and marketing teams.

The Importance of Efficient Growth and Timing

Companies like 6sense keyed in on the importance of efficient growth, relevance, and timing. They introduced the idea of account-based marketing (ABM), which took the focus off the individual lead contact and brought it up to the account level.

Understanding the Buyer's Journey

The vision was to break your target ICP accounts into four key stages of the buyer journey:

  • Target: Not ready to buy
  • Awareness: Waking up to the problem
  • Consideration: Learning how to solve the problem
  • Decision: Engaging with vendors
  • Purchase: Ready to buy

Then, align the sales and marketing team to work together towards delivering the right experience at the right stage in the buyer's journey. Sellers needed the marketers to figure out which leads were in-market. The marketers needed sellers to engage those leads. ABM teams typically align on the same ICPs and metrics to build qualified pipeline together.

There are thousands of potential leads that a seller could follow up on, but they should just prioritize the ones with the highest ROI, and leave the rest to AI and automation.

Here's an example 6sense workflow:

  • Awareness: Marketing identifies the best accounts via the buyer's digital footprint on the web, finds the buying committee, and then adds them to social ad campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn
  • Consideration: Marketing adds the buying committee members into nurture/education campaigns to provide value
  • Decision: Landing pages and chatbots are personalized to the buyer. Target accounts are routed to the right sales rep
  • Purchase: CRM, marketing automation systems and the website capture buying signals. This is when the account is in-market to buy, and sales should chase

Understanding where the buyer was in their journey made marketers and sellers more relevant and customer-centric in their outreach timing, targeting, and messaging.

Taking a multi-threaded approach where everyone on the buying committee was engaged increased sales velocity, conversions, and ASPs.

Sales and marketing were going to market together, which boosted overall ROI.

ABM started to work and cut through the noise:

  • The first person in the conversation is 70% more ready to buy (6sense)
  • 85% of marketers say ABM significantly benefited them in retaining and expanding their existing client relationships (Triblio)
  • An ABM strategy can increase B2B revenue by 208% (Warc)

According to Lars Nilson, VP of Business Development at Snowflake, who ran a 200+ sales development team, when account-based marketing and account-based sales orchestrate, script, and strategize together, they saw a 3x lift rate on their meetings booked.

Limitations of Today's Account-Based Marketing

In spite of the lift from running an ABM motion, companies are still finding difficulty capturing demand. Deals are becoming increasingly complex, with more steps involved and more people to convince. The status of deals is constantly changing and faster than humans can react.

There are also fewer humans to react, period, because of the headcount reduction. Sales reps are working double-time to engage quickly and effectively with more accounts on increasingly complex deals. People are fried.

Sometimes it could take weeks, months, quarters to fully implement an ABM solution. It could take a while before sales and marketing and in full alignment on their ICP and agreed upon processes. Takes time to find a dedicated owner of the ABM tool. People are constantly shifting, so the CMO that brought on the ABM solution may leave midway through implementation. And the sales team that was onboarded today may not be the sales team that uses it tomorrow.

A strong signal on an account that's in-market to buy is only useful if it's acted upon, and better yet, acted upon immediately. Speed kills sales. Drafting a personalized email to a hot account a day after may be too late.

Human systems do not scale well, especially as organizations and the number of leads to keep track of gets larger.

The Challenge of Data Silos and Integration

The market is starting to consolidate tooling; however, you still have 5 to 6 solutions that need to work in tandem to execute effective ABM. For example there's conversational intelligence, sequencing, email, LinkedIn, Slack, CRM, buyer intent, etc. Humans still need to toggle between three screens to conduct analysis and pinpoint key moments in a buyer's journey. Revops needs to manage multiple vendors, which oftentimes have duplicate features.

But the biggest issue is having multiple data siloes to manage. With systems needing to integrate back and forth, it can be difficult to have a single set of robust, accurate data to automate workflows or run AI models off of.

The problem compounds as the size of the organization and prospect base grows.

Pretty soon there are processes to maintain processes, and, depending on your time horizon, the upfront setup and maintenance cost may introduce more harm to the team rather than the ROI promised.

The Need for Speed, Coverage, and Consistency in ABM

For ABM to work well, you need speed, coverage, and consistency.

Most sales teams are not set up to react in real-time, which breaks them out of their workflow. It takes significant orchestration to complete the ABM motion successfully at every step.

If there is a big marketing campaign that drives traffic, there may not be enough rep coverage to engage all the buyers.

In both cases, there is a revenue leak in the funnel because speed, coverage, and consistency fall short.

It means you're not engaging or fast enough with your in-market target accounts (3% of your TAM) who are in the decision/purchase stage, which costs you deals today.

You're also missing out on the opportunity to build relationships with target accounts that are not in-market (97% of your TAM) in the awareness/consideration stage, which will potentially cost you even more deals tomorrow and beyond because those accounts may be building an early relationship with your competitors.

Up Next: The Era of Account-Based Orchestration

Read Part III, where we'll delve into the evolution from account-based marketing to account-based orchestration. We'll explore how this transition enhances the speed and precision of delivering a tailored buying experience to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

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How The B2B SaaS Sales Funnel Has Changed
How The B2B SaaS Sales Funnel Has Changed
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This article is Part I of a 4-part series on the shifting landscape of B2B buying and selling, how revenue teams have adapted, and where we think the market is headed.

TL;DR:

  • B2B SaaS experienced a golden era with an influx of capital and a focus on go-to-market strategies.
  • The traditional sales funnel and data-driven processes became the foundation of go-to-market understanding.
  • The market saw an explosion of SaaS solutions and an increase in email deluge, leading to declining conversion rates.
  • The pandemic brought about significant changes in buyer behavior, with a rise in digital communities and increased reliance on content consumption for decision-making.
  • The digital transformation paradox emerged as conventional funnel metrics struggled to capture evolving buying behavior, leading to the need for companies to adapt and evolve.

The Golden Era of B2B SaaS: 2018-2022

The years from 2018-2022 could be called the Golden era of pre-AI startups. B2B SaaS was living its best life. Startups were bathing in cash. They were getting their rounds pre-empted because deals were becoming that hot.

image

(Image Source)‎

I remember just two years back in 2021, there was a saying in the startup community that it was easier to raise money than it was to hire great talent.

The Capital Influx

Initially, we saw the influx of capital into SaaS businesses often channeled into go-to-market strategies. B2B SaaS companies hired like nobody’s business: sales reps, ad spend, sales reps, marketing tools, and more sales reps. Resource bloat accrued because of the mounting pressures to produce in order to meet valuation expectations.

This forced the hands of many B2B SaaS startups to hire too many employees to hit those targets. As the economy has continued to recede in 2023, shareholders, boards, and VC firms alike are asking nearly every startup to surrender to a RIF - aka layoffs - to reduce the bloated, unproductive staff.

GTM Strategies

The traditional construct of going to market was that of the sales funnel. Tools like ZoomInfo and Outreach would make one sales rep feel like the power of ten sales reps. But instead of cutting back, companies went all in, flooding the market with outbound — more dials and cold outbound calls, and more mass emails out the digital door.

With so many bodies, predictability and structure became the name of the game. I remember being curious about sales and asking Larson Stair, an expert sales founder in our Techstars batch.

"What makes a salesperson great?" — Alan

"Process." — Larson

Sales with a process is a science, which makes it more predictive. Without a process, it was emotion, which made it less predictive. VCs have historically pushed for predictability, which pushed for certainty in measurement. What is the best visualization of this predictability? The Marketing-to-Sales Funnels with conversion rates at every step.


image

(Image Source)‎

At the same time, with the explosion of data, whatever could be measured was measured. Everything became seemingly quantifiable when the funnel was the foundation of go-to-market understanding, turning GTM into a science, and sales and marketing as “the scientist” executing the experiments.

The SaaS Startup Explosion: the 2020s

As venture capital continued to flow into the 2020s, the SaaS market saw an influx of tools, thanks also to the commoditization of API software development. Competitor apps could be spun up overnight with just a handful of developers. The availability and affordability of cloud service helped ensure that the entrepreneurial developers sitting inside a B2B SaaS company could develop revenue-producing applications to their heart's content.

Carina, Zack, and I built one such competitor tool during our time at Techstars without knowing anything about the space.

Everyone started building and buying everything. Then, the capital and the revenue started coming in - and it was good. However, when everyone starts making money, good decisions start going out the window. Lots of shelfware was created and sold to consumers who were sold something that didn’t deliver value.

The Email Deluge and Declining Conversions

Inboxes exploded from the deluge of emails. Eventually, Google started throwing certain domains into spam. Whole cottage industries emerged just to warm emails to improve deliverability so companies could send more.

Conversion rates started declining.

But the pressure mounted. What did people do? More hands on deck. 5% closed won conversion last year, 1% conversion this year? No problem. Pump up the top of the funnel to sustain revenue growth.

If your job was on the line, why fix something that wasn't broken? Plus, who had the bandwidth to innovate when the existing system was barely afloat? Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Lots of hungry reps to feed right now. Where are all the MQLs, form fills, white papers, and link clicks? Because of the short time horizon of CROs, the whole go-to-market team needed to operate on a similar timescale.

The Pandemic's Impact on Business

Then 2020 ...

The pandemic changes everything.

It completely disrupts B2B SaaS marketing, in ways that are still being felt today.

And it all started with B2B SaaS buyers.

The Buyer's Evolution

Let's talk about what happened to the buyer.

Forget B2B SaaS products for a second. For the first time, during the pandemic, buyers were building entire teams without ever meeting face-to-face with their new hires.

As a result, B2B SaaS providers had to learn how to connect with buyers that were increasingly connecting with peers, potential clients, and sales teams entirely online.

The Rise of Digital Communities

Demand for community skyrocketed. Reddit, Discord, and Zoom engagement shot up. And in the wake of all this, professional communities like Pavilion started sprouting up everywhere. LinkedIn evolved into a real professional social network.

Suddenly, buyers, who in the past, would meet each other maybe once or twice a year at conferences to exchange ideas about B2B SaaS solutions, can poll thousands at a time, globally, for advice on whether to use Outreach or SalesLoft, Hubspot or Marketo in a single post, and get curated answers back within minutes.

Content Consumption

With social media engagement at an all-time high, consumption of marketing content like e-books, blog posts, podcasts, influencer endorsements, and peer reviews soared.

In 2020 alone, media uploads increased by 80% YoY, driven by an influx of social media marketing in the SaaS space. How-to videos, explainers, pre-recorded sales pitches: B2B buyers were absorbing it all.

The increase in content consumption meant that demand generation became a key factor in the B2B SaaS business model.

B2B Decision-Making

As well as consuming more and more content during the buying process, the way organizations decided on when and why to purchase a SaaS product also changed.

In particular, partnership programs - for example, Hubspot and Salesforce's app ecosystem - started gaining traction as a go-to-market channel, with buyers increasingly making purchase decisions from trusted B2B software vendors.

The Digital Transformation Paradox

Consequently, B2B SaaS underwent a digital transformation overnight.

The change was swift. But, ironically, as the world digitized, conventional SaaS metrics struggled to capture the evolving buying behavior.

Private Slack chats, influencer endorsements, or old-school phone calls - the funnel couldn't track these. The same large quantity of SaaS vendors still existed. It's just now the buyers could see them all a bit more clearly.

The Dark Funnel and Its Impact on B2B Marketing

In the past, companies could track customer interactions through traditional marketing automation platforms. However, with the rise of third-party marketing channels like podcasts, events, influencer marketing, and organic social media, companies are unable to track these interactions effectively. This lack of tracking has led to a major shift in the distribution of content and communication between companies and their customers.


image

(Image Source)‎

The software vendor landscape was vast, but now, buyers had a clearer view. The competition between vendors became fierce, with countless "Top X tools for Y" lists and regular Gartner and G2 matrices to guide buyers.

Still, the traditional sales and marketing model that drove buyers down the funnel persisted, even as it was seeing diminishing returns. A decade of conditioning led ingrained these large processes of generating Leads to MQLS to SQLs, as well as the people who maintained them.

The Informed Buyer

But here's the twist: Buyers were leveling up. They were more informed and more savvy. At least that's what they thought:

  • 70% of the buyer’s journey is done digitally before talking to a salesperson (Sirius Decisions)
  • 80% of B2B purchasers said that they would not even speak to a salesperson until they had done their own research (The Corporate Executive Board)
  • 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get company information from a series of articles versus an advertisement. (B2B PRSense)
  • 84% of B2B decision-makers begin their buying process with a referral. (Sales Benchmark Index)
  • 86 percent of buyers use peer review sites when buying software (G2)

The number of people in the SaaS solution buying committee was also becoming much larger. Each member has their own needs that must be met before the purchase can go through, so that means different messaging and timing for different personas.

It was like wringing water from a rock and suddenly finding yourself in a desert. That's okay because the VC well always had more rocks to pull from.

Navigating the New Demand Landscape

Post-pandemic, B2B SaaS companies faced a fresh challenge: the funding bubble began to deflate. Buyers tightened their belts. Sales quotas were missed.

Traditional methods seemed outdated in this new reality.

While many clung to old strategies, successful B2B SaaS organizations recognized the need for efficiency and adaptability. They shifted focus from lead generation to efficient demand capture and demand creation, emphasizing trust and authenticity in an informed buyer's world.

"How can I sell you something," no longer works. The approach must be proactive: "What does my customer need from me." Companies like Aligned have built the digital sales room to create better buying experiences.

In this evolving landscape, it's not about who spends the most - on sales teams, marketing campaigns, or SaaS tools - but who adapts the best.

Now that you're keyed up on the changes in the B2B market pre- and post-pandemic, read on for Part II, the future of account based marketing.

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Cognism Pricing: Is It Worth It in 2024?

Cognism Pricing: Is It Worth It in 2024?

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Alan Zhao

Cognism’s pricing is notorious for being opaque, confusing, and expensive. Assessing whether it’s worth the cost is no easy task.

In this guide, we’ll explain Cognism’s pricing policy, including the factors that influence the total platform costs.

Once you have a clearer picture of its pricing, you’ll know if Cognism is a good match for your business or not. In case you don’t want to go ahead with your purchase, we’ve got you covered in that department as well.

We’ll offer an alternative solution that ticks all the boxes Cognism doesn’t, giving you another option to consider.

But first, let’s dig into the key subject - Cognism pricing options.

Cognism Pricing Plans

While Cognism offers custom pricing plans for your business needs, the customization is done on top of its two core packages: Platinum and Diamond.

  • The Platinum Tier offers essential features and is under a price bracket of $1,500 to $10,000 annually.
  • The Diamond Tier is priced between $2,550 and $25,000 per annum and comes with advanced features and AI capabilities.


Both plans offer huge pricing flexibility, making Cognism suitable for companies with a mid-sized team to an enterprise.

Cognism Pricing Factors to Consider

When considering Cognism's pricing, several key factors can significantly influence the overall cost and service offerings.

1. Contract Structure

Cognism typically operates on an annual contract basis. It ditches credit-based systems that limit viewing and exporting data, monthly caps, and resets, leading to unexpected costs and scarcity mindsets.

With Cognism, you subscribe to a contract and never get interrupted by limits. The contract amount varies based on your team size and required features.

So, as the business grows and headcounts increase, the contract value increases significantly. But in the end, the contract is limitless and favors large-scale enterprise operations.

2. User Licenses

The pricing model includes a flat platform fee plus a per-user fee. The platform license fee covers data maintenance, setup, onboarding, and support services. However, it varies depending on your plan.

For example, the Diamond plan has a higher per-user license fee ($2,500) than the Platinum plan ($1,500) due to its additional features. 

3. Feature Inclusion

While the Platinum tier offers essential features like Lead Builder, Insights, and Data Enrichment, the Diamond tier includes premium features like AI segmentation, Intent data (Bombora), and on-demand phone number verification.

👀Note: Increasing capacities, such as the number of contacts needed, and additional features like data enrichment incur further costs.

4. Integrations

Unlike other data providers on the market, Cognism does not charge extra for integrations, and its Diamond and Platinum tiers integrate with all leading CRMs and sales tools, including: 

  • Pipedrive
  • HubSpot
  • Salesforce
  • Microsoft Dynamics
  • Zapier

5. Discount Opportunities

There are potential discounts available through negotiation tactics, such as leveraging end-of-quarter incentives or competing offers from other providers, which can lead to significant savings (up to 29% in some cases).

How Does Cognism Pricing Work?

Cognism offers personalized pricing plans. You can customize a plan according to your unique data needs and team workflow requirements.

There’s also a platform fee with each pricing tier. It covers data maintenance, set-up, onboarding, and 24-7 live chat support.

While Cognism doesn’t deal with credit-based pricing, it still allows you to include credits in your plan for operational workflows where a couple of people generate data for other users. 

Cognism credits are distributed across all account holders, with the option for admins to limit credit share for individual users. 

Apart from that, Cognism pricing is simple and based on two paid subscription plans, including a free trial. 

Cognism Free Trial


Cognism offers a free trial of 25 targeted B2B leads. Unlike what a traditional free trial entails, Cognism provides a sampled database to test out the tool's capabilities.

To personalize the trial experience, Cognism lets you chat with a data expert to ensure you get sampled data that matches your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Post-trial, you've Cognism Platinum and Diamond plans to choose from. 

Both plans offer:

✅ Unrestricted views and page-level exporting. 

✅ Access to global customer data — emails, mobile numbers, firmographic data, technologies, and sales trigger events.

✅ Access the Cognism web app, Chrome extension, and third-party integrations.

Now, let's discuss the nitty-gritty of Cognism pricing plans and which is ideal for your business.

Cognism Platinum Plan


The Platinum plan is designed for businesses with 200 to 1000+ employees who need core sales and marketing acceleration features and are looking to balance cost and functionality. 

The Platinum tier offers access to up to 25 million contacts, costing $1,500 per user per year and a flat-platform fee of $15,000. 

Here are the features you get with this plan:

  • Contact data: A repository of consumer contact information, including email, direct dial, mobile number (not verified), title, location, and skills.
  • Company data: For B2B prospects and lead gen, get access to industry, location, revenue, employees, founded date, technologies, trigger events, and more.
  • Unlimited access: Unlike credit-based pricing systems from other vendors, Cognism offers unrestricted views and individual and page-level contact exporting (up to 25 records at a time, subject to fair use).
  • Access to global database: Access data from local and international markets — EMEA, NAM, APAC, etc. Choose your region, size, industry, and more parameters.
  • CSV enrichment: On-demand and scheduled enrichments of outdated prospect lists whenever needed. Just upload your CSV, and Cognism fills in the missing information.
  • Integrations: Native integrations with popular CRMs and sales tools (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot, Zapier).

Limitations 

❌ Limited contact access (compared to Diamond tier).

❌ Mobile numbers you get aren’t verified.

❌ Lacks AI capabilities for database search and segmentation.

Cognism Diamond Plan


The Diamond tier is available at $25,000 access fee + $2,500 per user annually. 

You get a 2x contact access limit (50 million), up from 25 million in the Platinum plan. If we talk about features, it offers much more than the Platinum tier:

  • Integrated AI: Advanced AI-driven segmentation capabilities for more refined targeting.
  • Diamond data: Access to Cognism's phone-verified mobile numbers dataset with a high accuracy rate (98%). You can expect a 3x improvement in connect rates compared to the industry average. 
  • Intent data: Cognism's partnership with Bombora gives it access to Bombora's community of 5,000+ B2B websites to track topic interest and identify purchase intent. These sources include user groups, websites, B2B publishers, analyst groups, review websites, and lead-gen networks.
  • Diamonds-on-Demand service: On-demand research assistants from Cognism help you anytime with prospecting and customer research.
  • Priority support: This plan provides a dedicated customer success manager so any platform issues you face are resolved on the highest priority.

Cognism's Diamond Plan is perfect for large organizations that need extensive global contact access and advanced insights on ICP for sales and marketing teams. 

Is Cognism Expensive?

Short answer: Yes

Long-answer: 👇

Cognism is an enterprise-grade platform, but it is not ideal for small businesses, freelancers, and individual marketers. 

Since Cognism does not disclose specific pricing publicly, budgeting is challenging for users. 

All we know is that it has a one-time platform fee ranging thousands of dollars, plus the per-user pricing model increases team usage significantly.

Compared to other Cognism alternatives like Warmly, the platform is expensive for businesses with small-scale operations and limited prospecting needs.





Warmly - A Better Alternative to Cognism


Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that reveals website visitors, detects prospects most likely to buy right now, and gives you options for engaging them while they’re still hot.

Let’s face it: Cognism isn’t transparent with its pricing, and most probably, you will end up paying thousands of dollars per month to use it.

Instead, with Warmly, you get:

  • Transparent pricing with no hidden costs.
  • No expensive add-ons.
  • No extra charges for integrations.

Features

There are three primary Warmly features that make it a better alternative to Cognism:

  • AI Prospector
  • Sales engagement
  • Lead enrichment

Let’s drill down on these three features:

1. AI Prospector

Warmly’s AI Prospector is called Orchestrator – AI SDRs that auto-prospect for you. The Orchestrator triggers personalized sequences via email and LinkedIn based on the visitor’s engagement activity and intent signals.


The Orchestrator does what your SDRs do, but it does the process 24/7. This saves time for your SDRs to strategize how to do better prospecting and automates a labor-intensive process of sending hundreds of sequences a day.

The AI Prospector is highly configurable, allowing you to specify WHO the AI Prospector should focus on, WHAT it should do, and WHEN it should do it:


Watch Orchestrator in action. 

2. Sales Engagement 

Warmly has two sub-features that help you with Sales engagement — AI chat and Warm calls.

The AI Chat feature in Warmly enhances customer interactions by automating conversations through AI-powered chatbots. 

This feature can assist you in responding faster, automating customer support, and improving engagement by handling common inquiries or initiating conversations based on customer data. 

It also helps manage leads more efficiently so you can engage prospects in real time, thus enhancing your demand generation efforts.


If you head to the ‘Warm Calls’ section of Warmly’s dashboard, you’ll see the people and businesses visiting your website in real time.

Next to each identified visitor, you can find a detailed overview of all the data Warmly has on them, from firmographics to intent data. This enables sales reps to easily determine how well they fit into your ICP and how warm they are.

From there, reps can go for one of two options:

  1. Send leads a chat message, specifying they’re talking to an actual person and making it personal by mentioning the page they’re currently on, their company, location, or other relevant insight Warmly revealed.
  2. Engage them in a video call.

In both cases, the intelligence your reps will have on every lead will help them design a more personalized, tailored approach that’s more likely to result in a conversion.

3. Bombora Buyer Intent

With Warmly’s Bombora buyer intent, you can see the leads who are ready to buy your product. You can then get in front of them before competitors do via the Bombora integration.

With Bombora, you can see what topics your leads are researching. The tool has the power to measure prospects’ digital journey across 5,000+ premium B2B websites and has exclusivity agreements with 87% of the sites.


You can combine this 3rd party intent with your website activity and demographic data to know which leads are ready to buy right now.

Pricing

Warmly comes with a free plan that lets you reveal 500 leads on your website every month that might be interested in buying from you. But if you want more leads to be revealed, you can choose from the paid plans we offer.

Startup plan: This plan costs $700 per month and reveals 10,000 website visitors, offers 1,000 orchestrator credits, and 5,000 AI chat credits per month.

You can onboard 2 team members for free, and then it will cost you $25 per month to onboard more.

Business plan: With this plan, you get to reveal up to 100,000 website visitors. The plan costs in the range of $1,440 to $1,740 per month, depending on the number of visitors you want to reveal. 

With the Business plan, you get 10 seats for free and a dedicated customer success manager.

Enterprise: This is a custom-made plan for established teams who want to reveal more than 100,000 visitors and want enterprise-grade customization, security, and support.

You get 20 seats, advanced AI personalization, custom integration, and many more features than the Startup and Business plan.


👀 Note: All plans are billed annually.

Wrapping Up

There’s no denying that Cognism is a great tool for mid-sized and enterprise teams.

It offers a great set of features and 2-paid plans, giving you access to millions of contacts.

At the same time, it can’t be said that Cognism is an affordable solution. Its hefty platform fees, coupled with per-user pricing, make it over budget for most teams.

So, if you want access to in-depth intent data sourced from world-class providers, accurate website visitor identification, and lead engagement options without worrying you’ll break the bank - Warmly might be what you’re looking for.

Our clients agree:


‎Jessica Z., Verified G2 Reviewer

Its straightforward pricing leaves no room for doubt and worries while giving you all you need to enhance lead generation and increase conversion rates.

What is the best way to find out if Warmly is your kind of solution? 

Sign up for its free plan and give it a try firsthand. 

Or, if you’d prefer to see all of its features in live-action first, book a personalized demo with our team.

Warmly Product Walkthrough

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12 Best Demand Generation Examples for Inspiration [2024]

12 Best Demand Generation Examples for Inspiration [2024]

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Demand generation examples and channels are the mediums you can use to convert a lead into a prospect. 

From organic content to paid ads, every channel you use to convert a prospect into a buyer is a channel in the demand generation funnel.

This article goes over examples of demand generation and channels you can use to generate more leads.

TL;DR

  • If you want your demand generation campaign to be a success, you need to take care of three key components: setting clear goals and metrics, identifying your audience, and crafting content that educates.
  • Creating value-based content of any form that your audience can consume is the best way to get quality leads for your business.

Key Components of Successful Demand Generation Campaigns

Demand generation requires a strategic approach that focuses on attracting, engaging, and converting prospects. 

Here are some key components of a successful demand-generation campaign:

1. Set Clear Goals and Metrics


Source

Defining clear goals is the first step for a successful demand generation campaign. These goals should be SMART:

  • Specific.
  • Measurable.
  • Achievable.
  • Relevant.
  • Time-bound.

Once you've established your goals, shortlist key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your progress and measure success.

💡 Pro tip: Consider using the SMART framework to define your goals. For example, a SMART goal could be to increase the number of leads in your sales pipeline by 50% in the next quarter. Then, KPIs like the number of opportunities, sales-qualified leads, etc., will be analyzed. 

2. Identify and Segment Your Audience

Before creating a demand generation funnel, understanding your target audience is a must.

You should know your audiences’ demographics, pain points, interests, and buying behaviors. This will help you tailor your campaigns and offerings to resonate with their demands.

To do so, use segmentation.  

Segmentation allows you to refine your target audience further and deliver more personalized content.

💡 Pro tip: Use buyer personas to represent your ideal customer. Use demographic factors, like age, gender, and location, as well as psychographic factors – interests, values, and behaviors. Segment your audience based on these factors to deliver hyper-targeted content.

3. Build Content that Educates and Engages

Creating high-quality, valuable content is at the center of any demand-gen campaign.

Focus on creating content that educates your target audience, addresses their pain points, and provides solutions to their problems. This could include content like blog posts, articles, ebooks, webinars, videos, etc. 

💡 Pro tip: Create a content calendar to plan and schedule your content. Research topics relevant to your target audience and address their needs. Use SEO best practices to improve your content's visibility in search engine results. Experiment with different content formats to find what resonates best with your audience over time.

12 Proven Demand Generation Tactics with Real-World Examples

1. Create Value-Based Content

Value-based content focuses on educating prospects via useful, actionable, and informational content without being overly promotional.

The content should be such that after reading it, your prospects must get answers to the problem they’re searching for and be guided to the right solution instead of being pushed to buy your product.

Why Is Value-Based Content Important?

Value-based content plays an important role in demand generation as it aligns closely with the buyer’s journey (especially in the awareness and consideration stages).

When you put forth value-driven content, you have the opportunity to build long-term relationships with your prospects.

What’s more, it also establishes credibility, attracts organic traffic, and nurtures leads.

For inspiration on how to create value-based content, you can look at HubSpot Academy – a place to learn all things marketing. HubSpot Academy has a series of courses you can take for free to become a HubSpot-certified marketer.


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Creating value-based content is great, but it’s better when you have a tool in your arsenal that can help you kick things up a notch by automating processes and tracking content-based metrics.

You can do so with Warmly. With our software, you can turn anonymous website visitors into revenue by proactively reaching out to them.

Warmly lets you:

  • Integrate data sources and access them all in one place.
  • Automate sales conversations with website visitors on your sales rep’s behalf.
  • Automatically create or update records in your CRM with enrichment, engagement, and buyer intent data to power the rest of your inbound orchestration.

2. Interactive Tools and Calculators

Interactive tools and calculators offer a unique and effective way to engage website visitors and drive conversions. They provide interactive experiences that make your content more engaging.

These tools can range from simple quizzes to complex calculators, but regardless of their complexity, they offer a way to provide value to your audience. 

For example, a product comparison tool can help visitors make informed decisions, while a pricing calculator can help with instant cost estimates.

Why are Interactive Tools and Calculators Important?

Interactive tools and calculators have several pros, the major one being that when visitors can actively interact with your page, they spend more time on your website, becoming more interested in your brand.

For example, the brand Xoxoday, an AI-powered reward and payment platform, has several interactive tools and calculations on its website. 

These tools help users track and estimate metrics like leads generated, engagement on social media, customer acquisition cost, and more.


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3. Offer Free Trials

A free trial is a limited-time offer that allows quality prospects to explore a product before making a purchase. 

It's one of the lowest-risk ways for customers to evaluate whether a product solves their pain points.

Why are Free Trials Important?

Free trials give leads a chance to test the waters of your product for free.

It’s the closest and most efficient way to convert a free customer into a paying customer. When customers have the opportunity to try a product for free, they are more likely to feel confident in their decision to purchase.

Here's an example to give you an idea of how effective free trials can be.

GetResponse, a leading email marketing platform, A/B tested the “Buy Now” and “Free Trial” buttons on its homepage side-by-side. 

The free trial button generated 158% more account creation than the Buy Now button. Read all about this in a success story by VWO.


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4. Send Personalized Gifts

Personalized gifts are thoughtful gestures that can strengthen relationships with your prospects. 

Gifts show that you value prospects, that you've taken the time to understand their needs, and that you will go the extra mile to meet them.

Why is Sending Personalized Gifts Important?

Sending personalized gifts works wonders not only in one's personal life but also in the corporate world. 

They show that you care about your audience’s preferences and have made an effort to make them feel special.

At the end of the day, it’s humans that receive gifts, not robots. When they feel valued and appreciated, they are more likely to try your offering. 

If they like it, it’s quite possible they’ll convert into paying customers. They might also recommend your products to others. 

This creates a positive impression about your company through word of mouth.

According to Giftpack, when you send gifts to your prospects, you can see up to 70% reduction in their response time.


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5. Guest Blogging and Influencer Partnerships

Guest blogging and influencer partnerships involve collaborating with other businesses or individuals in your industry to create content. 

This can involve writing guest posts for other blogs or partnering with influencers to promote your brand. 

Why are Guest Blogging and Influencer Partnerships Important?

When you collaborate with influencers and thought leaders in your market sector, you have the potential to expand your brand's reach, improve your search engine rankings, and generate new leads.

It’s like hosting a party, and you invite all your friends and their friends. Suddenly, your party is buzzing with new people and opportunities. That's essentially what guest blogging and influencer partnerships do for your brand.

This strategy allows you to tap into new audiences, build relationships with other industry experts, and increase your brand's credibility.

ClickUp, a popular project management tool, often collaborates with productivity influencers and blogs to share tips and best practices for effective project management. 

These partnerships help ClickUp reach a wider audience and establish itself as a leading authority in project management.

You can take a look at their latest influencer partnership in this LinkedIn post.


6. Host Webinars and Q&A Sessions

Webinars and Q&A sessions are online events that allow you to connect with your audience in real-time. They can be used to educate, inform, and engage existing customers and prospects.

These create an engaging and personalized experience for your audience since you’re interacting with them in real-time.

Why is Hosting Webinars and Q&A Sessions Important?

These online events help you attract new leads, nurture existing ones, and gather valuable feedback from them. 

What’s more, such events provide a platform for you to share your expertise, answer their questions, and demonstrate the value of your product.

Clearscope regularly hosts webinars and Q&A sessions on topics related to content marketing and SEO. 

These events attract a large audience of prospects and allow Clearscope to showcase its expertise in content marketing.

The Q&A sessions help Clearscope collect valuable feedback from its audience, which it can use to improve its products and services.


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7. Case Studies and Success Stories

Case studies and success stories show real-world examples of how your product has helped customers achieve their goals. They provide social proof and are a powerful tool for driving demand.

You can leverage case studies to attract new leads interested in learning more about your solution and how it can help them solve the problems they face.

Why are Case Studies and Success Stories Important?

Sharing real-world examples of how your product has helped customers achieve their goals helps build trust and credibility.

These stories provide tangible benefits of your solution, making it easier for prospects to understand how your product can help them.

If done correctly, case studies can shoot your “book a demo” CTR through the roof.

Salesforce often publishes case studies featuring customers who have used Salesforce to improve their sales processes and customer relationships.

They use these case studies to highlight specific use cases, such as salesforce automation, lead management, or customer service.

The real-world results achieved by Salesforce customers are able to attract new customers and build trust in their platform.


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8. Quizzes for Demand Generation

Quizzes are interactive content that can be used to engage potential customers and collect their information. They are a fun and effective way to generate leads.

Why are Case Studies and Success Stories Important?

Creating interactive and engaging content increases visitor engagement and collects valuable information from them.

When prospects take a quiz, they are more likely to provide their contact information in exchange for personalized recommendations and results. This is a highly effective way to generate leads and build relationships with your target audience.

Intercom uses quizzes and questionnaires to engage prospects and collect their information.

The brand often offers a quiz to help visitors identify their customer support challenges. Through this, visitors provide their contact information and receive personalized recommendations.

This is a creative and effective way for Intercom to generate leads and provide value to their audience.


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9. Run Email Campaigns

Almost all B2B SaaS companies leverage email campaigns to reach out to prospects. Once your lead opts in to receive emails, you can nurture them and then promote your product.

You can use email campaigns to share valuable content, such as blog posts, webinars, or case studies. This can create a strong brand recall down the road.

Why are Running Email Campaigns Important?

Sending targeted emails to warm leads allows you to build relationships with them, increase brand awareness, and drive conversions down the line.

According to email marketing benchmarks by Mailchimp, the Software and Web App industry has an average email open rate of 28%. So, email campaigns can be a highly effective way to reach out to your target market.

Pipedrive is known for its effective email marketing campaigns. Its platform allows it to send targeted emails and newsletters to its leads and existing customers, helping it nurture them and drive conversions.


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10. Run Ad-Campaigns for Look-alike Audience

Look-alike audiences are custom audiences created by identifying users who share similar characteristics with your existing customers. This type of targeted advertising helps you reach prospects who are more likely to convert.

Why are Running Ad-Campaigns for Look-alike Audience Important?

Targeting users who share similar characteristics with your existing customers:

  • Increases the likelihood of conversions.
  • Expand your reach. 
  • Improves the return on investment of your ad campaigns.

This strategy allows you to focus your marketing efforts on leads who are more likely to be interested in your product. 

Like other B2B SaaS platforms, Freshworks uses look-alike audiences to target customers who are similar to its existing customers.

By analyzing the characteristics of its existing customer base, the brand is able to identify users who are more likely to be interested in its product. 


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11. Creating Data-Driven Reports

Data-driven reports provide valuable insights into your demand-generation efforts. B2B brands commonly analyze key metrics and trends to identify areas for improvement and optimize their strategies.

Why is Creating Data-Driven Reports Important?

Analyzing key metrics helps you optimize your strategies and measure the return on investment of your activities.

These reports provide insights into the effectiveness of your demand generation efforts that further allow you to make decisions backed by data.

Here’s an interesting case study of how Responsify helped ScholarChip increase its sales through data analysis and content strategy. The case study shows Responsify's ability to generate high-quality leads through targeted content and calls to action.


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12. Run Retargeting Campaigns

Retargeting campaigns allow you to show ads to users who have previously visited your website but didn't take any action. This is a powerful way to re-engage potential customers.

Why is Creating Data-Driven Reports Important?

Showing your ads to users who have previously visited your website can increase brand visibility, nurture leads, and improve conversion rates. 

This allows you to stay top of mind with your prospects and remind them of your product. 

Adobe creates compelling ads that resonate well with its audience. It has also effectively used retargeting campaigns to increase demand.

They use a variety of retargeting tactics, like remarketing ads on Google Display Network and social media platforms, to reach users who have visited their website but haven't taken any further action.


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Convert More Visitors into Buyers with Warmly

Expanding your demand generation to multiple channels as you grow bigger is a great way to scale demand generation and consistently generate high-quality leads. 

Try to explore all the channels we mentioned above and find the ones that are right for your business and where your target audience hangs out the most.

When you explore and post content on multiple channels, you might need a tool that:

  • Prioritizing leads to focus on.
  • Engaging and nurturing leads with automated campaigns.
  • Enable reps to reach out to hot leads straight from your website.

Our tool, Warmly, lets you do that, so sign up for Warmly’s free plan and see if you like it.

Warmly Product Walkthrough 

Related reading:

How to Build a Demand Generation Strategy

Growth Marketing vs Demand Generation


‎

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What is Demand Generation - A Comprehensive Guide for 2024

What is Demand Generation - A Comprehensive Guide for 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Demand generation is the entire marketing and sales strategy that you and your business use to move your target audience down the funnel and convert prospects into buyers. 

It’s no secret that demand generation is tough. In this process, you have to convince people that your product or service is the best solution to their problems. 

There’s no shortcut you can take with demand generation. You have to create a funnel that drives revenue, or your business might die.

TL;DR

Read these pointers if you don’t have the time to read the whole guide:

  • Demand generation is a marketing approach that organizations use to create awareness, interest, and desire for their products or services.
  • There are three phases of demand generation – awareness, brand activation and engagement, and conversion and optimization.
  • Moving a lead down the funnel is an art. You have to capture the interest ⏩ nurture the captured prospects ⏩ convert them into opportunities ⏩ close the deals ⏩ retain and expand.
  • To know if your demand generation is working, track KPIs and metrics like the number of opportunities generated, customer acquisition cost, sales pipeline value, and more.

What Is Demand Generation and How Does It Differ from Lead Generation?

Demand generation is a marketing approach that organizations use to create awareness, interest, and desire for their products or services.

It focuses on driving demand by engaging the target audience, educating them via value-based content, and establishing your company as a trusted authority in your market segment.

There are many tactics marketers use to generate demand:

  • Content marketing.
  • Brand awareness campaigns.
  • Lead nurturing.
  • Email and ad campaigns.
  • Etc.

With demand generation, you can successfully qualify leads, push them to your sales pipeline, and try selling them your product.

However, executing a demand generation strategy accurately requires your sales and marketing teams to work in tandem so that the interest generated is efficiently converted into revenue and long-term relationships.

Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Generation

Marketers often use demand generation and lead generation interchangeably. But they are not the same thing. Here are the differences you must know about:

1. Both Have Different Purposes

Demand generation is all about creating awareness and interest. It aims to attract a broad audience by positioning your product as the best solution for their pain point. 

The primary purpose of demand generation is brand awareness and thought leadership.

Lead generation focuses on getting contact information from prospects who have shown interest in your product. 

The purpose of lead generation is to convert these prospects who are aware of your product into buyers.

2. Both Engage Different Types of Audiences

Demand generation focuses on engaging a wider audience, mainly with ungated content (blogs, videos, images, etc.), as it helps build trust and brand authority.

Lead generation starts further down the funnel, often with gated content (white papers, eBooks, etc.), which requires users to provide their contact information to access.

3. Both are Associated with Different Stages in the Demand Generation Funnel

Demand generation takes place at the top of the marketing funnel, where the focus is on generating interest among a broader audience. It’s about educating potential customers and building long-term brand loyalty.

Lead generation happens after interest has been established further down the funnel. It works to capture qualified leads that can be nurtured into making a purchase.

When it comes to running a business, both lead generation and demand generation work in tandem. You can’t move your target audience down the funnel without doing both.

The Three Phases of Demand Generation

In a B2B demand generation funnel, there are three phases that serve as the key stages through which prospects move from initial interest to becoming loyal customers.

1. Awareness

The primary goal of the awareness phase is to increase brand visibility and market presence among your target audience. 

At this stage, your prospects might not be aware of your brand and the solution you offer.

The focus in this stage is mostly on educating your target audience about the pain points and sharing content that surrounds your product. 

You can do so with multiple content types:

⏩ Blogs.

⏩ Social media posts.

⏩ Videos.

⏩ Thought leadership pieces.

To know if your awareness stage is going as expected, track KPIs and metrics like website traffic, social media engagement, content views, and more.

2. Brand Activation and Engagement

In this phase, the goal is to deepen engagement with your audience who knows about your brand. With deepened knowledge, you can persuade your audience to take some sort of action – downloading gated content, attending a webinar, or anything else.

If you decide to go down the route of content marketing, this phase relies heavily on gated content.

Generally, you might end up using channels like:

⏩ Email marketing.

⏩ Personalized webinars.

⏩ Case studies.

Track KPIs like lead capture, lead engagement, email open rates, and more to measure brand activation and engagement.

3. Conversion and Optimization

This final phase focuses purely on converting leads into paying customers. At this stage, the marketing and sales teams align their efforts to ensure that the prospect is ready to purchase from you.

You can do so by lead scoring, personalized demos, free trials, and retargeting ads. 

👀 Note: At this point, your prospect should be fully aware of the brand’s solution and see you as a top contender.

KPIs to track:

📊 Conversion rates: The percentage of leads that take a desired action, like filling out a form or making a purchase.

📊 Deal velocity: The speed at which potential deals move through the sales pipeline, from lead to closed deals.

📊 Customer acquisition cost: The average expense incurred to acquire a new customer, including marketing and sales costs.

📊 Customer lifetime value: The total revenue expected from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship with your business.

The Best Demand Generation Channels You Need to Know

There are many channels you can leverage for demand generation, but here are the three best channels we think can help you the most.

1. Thought Leadership Content

Thought leadership content is used at the top of the funnel in demand generation to build authority and act as a credible source of information for your target audience.

Since demand generation is all about building brand awareness, thought leadership pieces clubbed with the right SEO strategy can go a long way.

With thought leadership content, you can show your target audience that you’re an expert on the topic and really understand what problems they are facing. More importantly, you know how to solve them. 

If your content is highly valuable, and your customers resonate with what you have to say, there’s a high chance of your audience converting into a marketing-qualified lead.


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2. Webinars

Webinars help you engage with your audience in real-time, thus increasing the chances of their conversion. By hosting webinars, you can educate your prospects about industry trends, pain points, and specific solutions.

Webinars are also a great way to demonstrate your product live so that prospects can see how effectively your solution solves their pain points. This hands-on experience is a pivotal asset in a buyer’s journey.

Choosing a specific topic for a webinar is super important. To choose a topic, look at what your prospects are talking about on social media channels and forums. 

3. Email

‘Email marketing is dead’ – we’ve been hearing this for a decade or so, and still, 50% of marketers say it’s the most effective channel for demand generation 🤷.

This proves that email marketing has never been more alive.


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However, you must be careful when doing email marketing. Sending bulk, generic emails might just land your messages in the spam folder, or even worse, Google can block your email ID.

When creating an email campaign, keep these three principles in mind:

✅ Frequency: Start slow and slowly ramp up the number of emails you send out, or you will definitely end up in the spam folder.

✅ Segmentation: Always segment your audience and send each segment a personalized email. This will keep your emails relevant and increase open and click rates.

✅ Call to action: Ensure that every email you send out has a clear call to action at the end. This will simply help you increase conversions.

How Do You Move a Lead Down the Demand Generation Funnel?


Source

Here are the five steps that help you move a lead down the demand generation funnel:

Step 1: Capturing Interest (Top of Funnel)

This stage is all about attracting and engaging your audience. 

When capturing interest, make sure that your messaging addresses the pain points of your audience and, if possible, try introducing your product as the solution.

Tracking metrics like website traffic and content engagement at this stage helps a ton.

Step 2: Nurturing Captured Leads (Mid-Funnel)

After capturing interest, your goal should be to nurture the captured leads by taking engagement a step further. You can nurture leads with lead magnets like eBooks, case studies, webinars, etc.

What’s more, personalize the experience with tailored content and follow-ups to foster trust and build stronger connections.

Track metrics like content downloads, webinar attendance, and email engagement rates.

Step 3: Converting into Opportunities (Bottom of Funnel)

When you’re at this stage, prospects should be qualified and ready to engage with your sales team. 

Use targeted strategies like personalized demos, free trials, and retargeting ads to drive conversions. Lead scoring becomes critical to ensure only high-potential leads move forward. 

The aim is to transition leads from marketing-qualified to sales-qualified, monitor opportunities, and track KPIs like conversion rates and sales appointments.

Step 4: Closing the Deal (Sales Alignment)

The marketing and sales teams collaborate here to convert qualified leads into paying customers. 

Sales teams leverage marketing insights to offer personalized outreach, address objections, and provide final incentives like discounts or exclusive deals. 

Step 5: Retaining and Expanding (Post-Sale)

After closing the deal, focus on customer retention and expansion. Nurture customer relationships through onboarding, personalized follow-ups, and customer success initiatives. 

Continuously engage clients with product updates, exclusive offers, and value-added content. 

You must aim to increase customer lifetime value and generate upsells with KPIs like customer satisfaction, retention rates, and expansion revenue.

Demand Generation Metrics to Track in 2024

1. Number of Opportunities Generated

The number of opportunities generated is a demand generation metric that tracks the total number of sales opportunities you can create in a specific time period. 

These opportunities are qualified leads who have shown significant interest in your product and have entered your sales pipeline as prospects.

Why Track the Number of Opportunities Generated?

  • Tracking this KPI lets you assess the success of your marketing campaigns and determine whether you need to tweak them to achieve maximum effectiveness.
  • Knowing the number of opportunities generation can help you pinpoint which marketing channels or campaigns have brought you the most leads.

Calculating the number of opportunities generated is a simple addition:


2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC measures the total cost incurred by your business in acquiring new customers. It takes into consideration all the expenses related to marketing and sales efforts aimed at converting prospects into buyers.

These costs can be:

💰 Advertising spend.

💰 Marketing campaigns.

💰 Teams salaries.

💰 Software.

Why Track CAC?

  • CAC can help you allocate your budget effectively as you know how much it costs to bring in new customers.
  • By comparing CAC to customer lifetime value (CLTV), you can assess the profitability of their customer acquisition strategies. A lower CAC relative to CLTV means a healthy ROI.

Here’s the formula to calculate CAC:


3. Sales Pipeline Value

Sales pipeline value represents the total potential revenue from all active deals and opportunities that are currently in your sales pipeline. The metric quantifies the monetary value of your prospects at different stages of the sales funnel.

Why Track Sales Pipeline Value?

  • Tracking sales pipeline value will help your business predict future income based on the potential deals in the pipeline.
  • It enables your sales team to prioritize high-value opportunities and allocate resources more effectively.

You can calculate this metric in two different ways. Here are both the formulas for doing so.


Common Mistakes to Avoid in Your Demand Generation Strategy

When creating a demand generation strategy, mistakes are bound to happen. But rectifying them before it’s too late can save you from a big mishap. Here are some common mistakes you must avoid.

1. Over-Focusing on Vanity Metrics

In demand generation, it’s often tempting to fixate on vanity metrics. Numbers like website traffic, social media following, email open rates, etc., might look impressive, but they offer little insight into actual business performance.

Keeping your eye on such metrics all the time might just divert your attention from more important metrics such as conversion rates, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, etc.

To avoid this mistake, prioritize actionable metrics that align with your business objectives so that your demand-generation efforts drive real results.

2. Neglecting Lead Quality

Blindly generating a large number of leads is a bad idea. There’s a difference between a lead and a high-quality lead. So keep in mind that quantity doesn’t guarantee success.

The leads you generate must be qualified enough to resonate with your product and eventually buy it. Poor-quality leads often overwhelm sales teams and reduce their efficiency.

Lead quality is directly related to the quality of your demand generation funnel. 

If you create high-quality content that explains to your target audience how to resolve their issues, you will generate high-quality leads that have a higher chance of converting.

3. Misalignment Between Marketing and Sales

When your sales and marketing teams are not on the same page, your demand generation funnel will not work as you want it to. 

When both these departments work in silos without a shared goal, you often face issues like:

❌ Inconsistent messaging.

❌ Mishandling of leads.

❌ Losing revenue opportunities.

Maybe your marketing department is generating leads that the sales team deems unqualified. This disconnect hampers both teams' effectiveness and undermines the overall strategy. 

To avoid this mistake, ensure that your sales and marketing team collaborate when generating demand for your business. 

Establish shared metrics to track, open communication, and join planning sessions.

Best Practices for Scaling Demand Generation

✅ Define clear objectives and KPIs: Set SMART goals for all your demand generation efforts and identify the KPIs that will make or break your business.

✅ Buyer persona and market research: Craft a detailed buyer persona to capture the demographics, behaviors, pain points, and motivations of your ideal customers. 

Conduct market research later and analyze customer data to refine your understanding of your target audience.

✅ Create quality and valuable content: For every stage in the demand generation funnel, create high-quality content that educates, informs, and solves your audience's pain points.

✅ Multi-channel marketing: Use a mix of channels, such as email marketing, social media, SEO, and ads, to impact your demand generation efforts. 

But don’t get into all the channels at once. Start with a couple of channels and scale as you grow.

✅ Nurture leads through the sales funnel: Craft lead nurturing campaigns that give your prospects relevant information about your brand in every stage of the funnel. 

A good practice is to use segmentation to tailor messages to different audience segments based on their interaction.

Boost The Demand of Your Business with Warmly

We hope that this demand generation guide helped you understand how to get started and excel at demand generation. If you want a tool to help you with things like:

  • Prioritizing leads to focus on.
  • Engaging and nurturing leads with automated campaigns.
  • Enable reps to reach out to hot leads straight from your website.

Sign up to Warmly.

Warmly Product Walkthrough

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B2B Demand Generation Funnel: Definition & Best Practices [2024]

B2B Demand Generation Funnel: Definition & Best Practices [2024]

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Creating a B2B demand generation funnel for your business is the most important operation, as this can make or break your business. 

A perfect demand generation funnel will: 

  • Make your audience aware of your product.
  • Persuade them to consider your product.
  • Convert prospects into buyers.
  • Retain customers.

In this article, we will explain what a demand generation funnel is, its stages, how to create one, and the challenges you might face when creating one.

TL;DR

  • Every business, no matter the industry, will only be profitable when its demand generation is profitable. Doing demand generation for your business is not optional; it's mandatory.
  • Converting a prospect into a buyer is an art; you need to get the prospect down the funnel, from making them aware of your product to telling them how it solves their problems so they buy from you.
  • You should track metrics, such as sales qualified leads and cost per acquisition, to determine whether your demand generation is effective.

What Is a Demand Generation Funnel?

A demand generation funnel is a strategic process that guides potential buyers through stages of awareness, interest, consideration, and decision.

The funnel focuses on creating demand by educating and nurturing prospects at every stage so that they are well-informed and engaged at all times.

Demand generation is so effective that B2B marketing leaders worldwide spend a significant chunk of their marketing activity budget on it. 

Time to clear the air.

Some people might confuse demand generation with lead generation, but both are a little different.

The major difference between demand and lead generation lies in their objective and approach.

Demand generation focuses more on building awareness, interest, and long-term relationships with your audience. This awareness might then convert into prospects showing interest in your product and wanting to buy.

Lead generation is more about capturing potential customers' contact information to move them directly into the sales pipeline. It is more of a short-term conversion.

Here’s a table that compares demand generation with lead generation:

👀 Note: In SaaS, you do demand generation for an audience that’s still figuring out the solution for their problem or for an audience that doesn’t even know they face the problem you’re solving. However, you do lead generation for prospects who already know the answer to their problem; they are just finding the right software that can solve the issue.

Types of Demand Generation

There are three major ways you can do demand generation:

1. Inbound Demand Generation

Inbound demand generation focuses on bringing in customers via value-driven resources that align with potential customers’ needs. It focuses on driving high-intent leads, pipelines, and revenue by putting buyer preferences at the forefront. 

When we say value-driven resources, we mean:

  • Blogging
  • Search engine optimization
  • Social media content
  • Webinars
  • Ebooks

And more such content.

2. Outbound Demand Generation

Outbound demand generation is comparatively a more proactive approach, where you or your team reaches out to potential buyers. You can use techniques like email marketing, cold calling, paid ads, and direct mail to reach out.

3. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM is a highly personalized demand-generation tactic where marketing and sales teams get together to target high-value accounts. The ABM campaigns are specifically designed for individuals or small groups that are tailored to a very specific pain point.

What are the Stages of a Demand Generation Funnel

There are four stages of any demand generation funnel:


1. Awareness

At the awareness stage, there is a high chance your potential customers might not know you or your product. They might not even know that they have a problem you’re trying to solve. 

So, the primary goal at this stage is to increase visibility and make your target audience aware of your existence.

  • Objective: Get your target audience’s attention so you can introduce your product.
  • Strategies: Leverage content marketing (blogs, videos, infographics), social media marketing, and advertising campaigns.
  • Outcome: Generate interest and attract visitors who might eventually become leads.

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, your audience is aware of the problem they face and is actively looking for solutions. They evaluate multiple options based on features, pricing, pros, and cons. One of the solutions they evaluate might be yours.

Your demand generation efforts at this stage are intended to nurture these prospects by equipping them with valuable information that positions your brand as the best solution for their problem.

  • Objective: Educate prospects about your product so they know it’s the best solution to their problem.
  • Strategies: Offer in-depth content like whitepapers, webinars, case studies, and email marketing.
  • Outcome: Move prospects closer to a purchasing decision.

3. Conversion

At this stage, your prospects are ready to choose a solution. If you’ve nailed the first two stages of demand generation, you will be good here. 

The efforts will tip the scales in your favor by explaining to prospects how your product is the perfect solution and better than your competitors.

  • Objective: Convert a prospect into a buyer.
  • Strategies: Provide free trials, demos, personalized support, testimonials, and competitive pricing offers.
  • Outcome: Acquire new customers.

4. Retention

The retention stage is all about keeping your existing customers engaged and satisfied so they don’t leave you and go looking for another solution. 

In demand generation, retaining customers is more important than acquiring new ones because loyal customers often become brand advocates.

  • Objectives: Maintain and build long-term relationships with existing customers.
  • Strategies: Implement loyalty programs, offer exceptional customer service, send personalized follow-ups, and provide updates and upgrades.
  • Outcome: Increased customer lifetime value, repeat purchases, and word-of-mouth referrals.

How to Create an Effective Demand Generation Funnel?

There are five steps that will help you transform a prospect into a buyer in your demand generation funnel.

Step 1. Define Clear Objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The first thing you want to do as a business is shortlist a bunch of smart, measurable goals for your demand generation efforts. For this, you must know what demand generation metrics and KPIs to track and analyze.

Best Practices to Follow

  • Ensure that the goals you set are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound [SMART]. Example – Increase qualified leads by 30% in the next quarter.
  • Your demand generation objectives, such as revenue targets, must be aligned with your business goals.
  •  Compare your KPIs against industrial benchmarks.

Step 2. Understand Your Audience and Develop Buyer Personas

Next, conduct thorough research to know what your target audience needs for your product. You also must create a buyer persona that represents your ideal customers. 

The persona will guide your content creation and marketing strategies so that they resonate with your audience.

Best Practices to Follow

  • Conduct a thorough market research by leveraging surveys, interviews, and analytics. This will help you gather data on customer demographics and behavior.
  • In your buyer persona, include information like age, job title, pain points, goals, and buying habits.
  • Always segment your audience. Divide them into distinct groups based on characteristics or behaviors – whatever’s best for your business. 

Step 3. Create Value-Driven Content That Aligns with Buyer’s Journey

Content creation plays a major role in how buyers perceive your product. If you’re not able to hook your audience with content (text, image, or video), it's tough for your sales team to convince them to buy from you.

Craft high-quality content that serves your audience irrespective of their stage in the buyer’s journey.

Best Practices to Follow

  • Use data analytics to determine which platforms your target audience is active on the most and create content to engage your audience there.
  • Keep your brand voice and messaging uniform across all channels you create content on so you can build trust and be a leader in your industry.

Step 4. Implement Multi-Channel Marketing Strategies to Distribute Content

Content distribution can help boost engagement with half the efforts you put into content creation. 

ReferralRock conducted a survey that interviewed marketers worldwide. 46% of these marketers accepted that repurposing content to different channels generated more leads.


Source

Many marketers just stop after publishing content on one channel. Don’t be that person. 

Here’s what your approach should look like:

Publish a blog post.

⬇️

Share that as an email newsletter.

⬇️

Repurpose the blog post into short-form content for social media.

⬇️

Create a webinar around the topic.

Best Practices to Follow

  • Leverage data analytics to determine which platforms your target audience uses the most.
  • Streamline content distribution and analysis with automation software. Analyze the effectiveness of email campaigns, social media posts, blog posts, and ad campaigns.
  • Use a mix of paid ads and organic content to maximize your ROI.

Step 5. Nurture Leads and Convince Prospects

Getting leads interested in your product is one thing, but keeping them hooked until they make a purchase is a whole other story. 

Lead nurturing is often a time-consuming and difficult process, but it is also a crucial one.

In this step, you must engage your prospects via personalized communication and marketing. You must:

  • Keep them hooked with content related to your business and product.
  • Send them target emails to grab their attention.
  • Talk to them and build long-term relationships.

Best Practices to Follow

  • Keep your brand voice and messaging consistent throughout the nurturing process across all channels.
  • Craft a content calendar so as to interact with your prospects consistently and keep them engaged.

Warmly is a tool that can help you nurture your leads and successfully move them down the funnel from consideration to conversion.

It’s a revenue orchestration platform that identifies website visitors, detects their buying intent across channels, and helps convert them via automated, semi-automated, and human-operated functionalities.


You can nurture leads with Warmly via outbound outreach. Here’s how:

  • See which leads are more active and engage well with your content to try to push them down the funnel first.
  • Integrate your CRM with Warmly and monitor your leads' job changes to send them personalized emails and LinkedIn messages.
  • Get notified the moment a prospect clicks through an outbound email and arrives on the site. Chat with them on the site, and when the time's right, transition to video.

What are the Best Demand Generation Tools in 2024?

There are a lot of demand-generation tools. If you go on a hunt, it’s no surprise that you might be overwhelmed with the sea of options you get. 

So here are the top three tools we recommend you try to see if they’re right for your business.

1. Warmly


Warmly helps teams see a buyer's journey from start to end and automate engagement with the right prospects at the right time and in the right context. The software gives you access to best-in-class enrichment and intent data to power your automation.

Features

  • With Warmly, you can identify 15% of contacts and 65% of companies that visit your website. Sync this data back to your CRM to power the rest of your GTM motion.
  • Get details about the companies ready to buy from you and start nurturing them to convert such companies into buyers via Warmly’s Bombora integration.
  • Our tool allows you to monitor your prospects’ job changes and send them personalized messages based on their designation.
  • Warmly integrates with tools like LinkedIn, email, and chat platforms to automate personalized communication across channels. This ensures every prospect interaction is timely and relevant.
  • By leveraging AI, Warmly orchestrates automated workflows based on buyer intent data. This feature lets you convert high-intent visitors into qualified leads by triggering actions when key decision-makers show interest in your site​.

Pricing

Warmly offers a free plan that lets you reveal 500 people and companies on your website every month. 

Apart from the free plan, it also offers three paid plans to choose from:

The Startup plan lets you reveal up to 10,000 visitors per month (excluding bot traffic). It also offers 1,000 Orchestrator Credits and 5,000 AI chat credits per month. The startup plan is best for small-scale businesses that want to test the waters with Warmly. The plan will cost you $700 per month.

Next in line is the Business plan that lets you reveal website visitors in the range of 10,000 to 100,000. Perfect for mid-sized businesses, the pricing of the plan changes with the number of users you want to track. 

It gives you access to all the features you get with the Startup plan, plus you get a dedicated customer support manager. The plan will cost you anywhere between $1,440 - $1,740 per month.

The last plan Warmly offers is the Enterprise plan, which gives you access to features like advanced Al personalization, customer RevOps buildouts, customer integrations, and more.


👀 Note: All plans are billed annually.

2. Pipedrive


With Pipedrive, you can track your sales pipeline, optimize leads, manage deals with AI, and automate the entire demand generation process. 

The software is an old player in the industry and is trusted by 100,000+ companies worldwide.

Features

  • Offers a dashboard where you can visualize your sales process. It lets you add deals, their value, win probability, and expected close date.
  • Lets you automate every step in your sales process, from scheduling sales calls to sending them automated emails and follow-ups.
  • Allows your sales team to communicate directly with website visitors, providing instant assistance and capturing contact information.

Pricing

Pipedrive gives you a 14-day free trial with every paid plan it offers:

  • Essential: $14 per seat per month.
  • Advanced: $29 per seat per month.
  • Professional: $59 per seat per month.
  • Power: $69 per seat per month.
  • Enterprise: $99 per seat per month.


3. Leadpages


Leadpages is a lead generation platform designed to create high-converting landing pages, pop-ups, and alert bars to capture leads effectively. 

It aims to help businesses grow their demand-generation efforts.

Features

  • Comes with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that you can use to design high-converting pages optimized for capturing leads.
  • Allows you to test several page variations to maximize conversions.
  • Connect with tools like Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Salesforce for lead nurturing.

Pricing

Leadpages offers a risk-free trial for 14 days, after which you must upgrade to one of the paid plans it offers:

  • Standard: $49 per month.
  • Pro: $99 per month.
  • Conversion: $697 per month.


How to Measure Demand Generation Success? 

Tracking KPIs and metrics is a must to measure the success of your demand generation. Here are the top demand generation metrics and KPIs to measure to know your strategy’s success.

1. Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a prospect who has been vetted and deemed ready to engage in a direct sales conversion with you. They have successfully progressed through the marketing phase and have a clear intent to make a purchase decision.

SQLs are not just interested in your product; they are now ready to have a more focused conversation about how it meets their needs and solves the pain points they face.

You must track SQLs because:

  • SQLs show a clear intent to buy, and focusing on them shortens your sales cycle.
  • Your sales teams can focus on prospects who have already gone through the marketing funnel and are now in the decision-making stage.

To calculate SQLs, it's essential to have a clear handoff process between marketing and sales. 

The criteria for SQLs should be well-defined, based on both lead scoring and the explicit actions prospects have taken to signal their readiness to buy.

2. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Cost per acquisition helps you measure the total cost of acquisition from a particular campaign or channel. 

It mostly tells you how much money you need to spend to acquire a single customer or to complete a desired action (filling out a form, signing up for a free trial, or making a purchase).

Tracking CPA is important for understanding which campaigns or channels get you profitable customers. By tracking CPA, you can:

  • Better allocate your marketing budget to the most cost-effective channels.
  • Optimize campaigns with high CPA.
  • Measure channel effectiveness.

To calculate CPA, use this simple formula:


Common Mistakes to Avoid In The Demand Generation Funnel

It's not rare for your sales and marketing teams to make mistakes when crafting a demand generation funnel. But rectifying them on time matters the most. Here are some common mistakes to avoid when designing your demand generation funnel.

1. Getting Your Target Audience Wrong

Choosing the wrong target audience could significantly negatively impact your demand generation funnel. 

Focusing on the wrong audience leads to wasted resources, low engagement, and ineffective messaging. 

Isn’t it obvious? 🤷 

A misaligned target audience will, of course, have low conversion rates as you won’t have many MQLs and SQLs.

To avoid this, invest time in buyer personas and market research, ensuring your messaging aligns with the pain points and needs of your true potential customers.

2. Poor Lead Qualification


Source

If you aren’t able to qualify leads the right way, it can be bad for your sales team as they will be overwhelmed with prospects who aren’t ready to buy from you or, even worse, not even looking for the product you’re trying to sell.

Refine your lead scoring criteria and align it with your target audience to ensure only high-quality leads progress through the funnel. 

This helps optimize resources, improve sales efficiency, and enhance the overall effectiveness of your demand generation strategy.

3. Ignoring Lead Nurturing

Most businesses make the common mistake of not nurturing leads after the initial engagement. Lead nurturing is essential for building trust and guiding prospects toward a purchase decision. 

Without it, potential customers will lose interest, drift away, or be swayed by competitors. 

To avoid this, implement multi-touch nurturing campaigns through personalized content, follow-ups, and consistent communication to keep your brand at the forefront of their decision-making journey.

Wrapping Up

We hope that after reading the guide, you have understood what a B2B demand generation funnel is and how to create one that gets you millions of dollars in revenue. 

If you want a tool to help you with things like:

  • Prioritizing leads to focus on.
  • Engaging and nurturing leads with automated campaigns.
  • Enable reps to reach out to hot leads straight from your website.

Sign up to Warmly for free.

Warmly Product Walkthrough

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B2B Prospecting: Ultimate Guide for 2024

B2B Prospecting: Ultimate Guide for 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

B2B prospecting is a no-brainer for every B2B company looking to generate quality leads and convert them. 

But with the countless sales prospecting techniques available, choosing the right strategy for your business can be tough. 

The constantly changing buyer behaviors and fierce competition add to the above challenge.

To help you, we’ve put together this guide to walk you through everything you need to get you started on your prospecting journey.

Here’s all we’ll cover: 

  • Four recent changes in B2B prospecting and how you can capitalize on them. 
  • Six most effective strategies that drive results.
  • And some B2B prospecting challenges and how you can solve them.

So, whether you want to improve your approach or overhaul your strategy, this guide will equip you with the information and B2B sales strategies you need.

Ready? Let’s get right into it. 

What is B2B prospecting?

B2B prospecting is the part of the sales cycle where you identify and engage with potential customers to convert them. 

Prospecting helps you classify your target audience into two core sections: people who want what you sell and those willing to make purchases. 

This is important because you may find people who want what you sell but are unwilling to purchase. 


Furthermore, prospecting is a sales strategy where you don’t randomly reach out to potential buyers because you feel they need what you sell. Instead, you take time to understand their pain points, how your business can meet those needs, and the best way to reach out to them. 

This is crucial as people don’t just buy; they buy from people they connect with. 

So, to make sales, you’ll need to find a problem they need to solve, connect with them, and provide solutions. This way, you don’t come off as salesy but as a savior in distress. You get the drift, right? 

Here’s how it works: 

  • Your company hires sales reps. 
  • These sales reps find and qualify leads.
  • Next, they engage with prospects (qualified leads) and turn them into customers. 

Sales reps help you reach out to prospects and talk about your company and how it can solve their problems. 

So you can’t downplay the importance of sales prospecting because that’s where you seal the deal with your potential customers. The goal is to find potential buyers and move them down your sales funnel. 

Beyond B2B lead generation, prospecting is more targeted and direct in converting qualified leads. 

How has B2B prospecting changed from traditional methods to modern approaches?

B2B prospecting has shifted from traditional methods, which were seller-centric and focused on immediate sales. Now, the recent approach emphasizes relationship building and a high level of personalization. 

So, how much has really changed in recent times?

How has B2B prospecting changed in recent years?

Just as modern ones replace most traditional methods, B2B sales trends continue to evolve. 

In recent times, expert sales reps have developed new strategies that will help them drive better results. Below are some notable changes: 

Use of digital prospecting techniques 

Thanks to online channels like LinkedIn and email, you can access prospects via multi-channels and reach them where they are most active. 

With the current digital platforms and advanced analytical tools, you can access customer data from different sources. With this, you can efficiently identify the leads that qualify for prospecting. 

After identifying and qualifying your leads, you can use AI to automate your outreach process. 

With AI, your sales team can efficiently handle repetitive tasks like follow-up emails, lead scoring, and data entry while focusing on high-value engagements. 

Changes in buyer behavior and expectations 

Most B2B buyers conduct research before purchasing any product or service. This means they spend quality time reading product reviews and comparing vendors online before contacting sales. 

As a result, buyers tend to favor companies that provide educational and valuable content about their services, such as case studies, white papers, or expert insight. 

Also, buyers have higher expectations from outreaches. They expect highly tailored and relevant messages and ignore messages that seem generic. 

Plus, sales teams need to prove they understand buyers’ pain points and are not just out to sell their products. 

Rise of account-based marketing (ABM) 

Improvements in data analytics and automation tools have made it easier to identify and target accounts, thus the rise of ABM. 

ABM focuses on specific, high-value accounts rather than spreading thinly across multiple accounts. This means you only pay attention to accounts with higher conversion potentials and allocate more resources to them. 

This strategy aligns marketing and sales efforts, enabling them to deliver tailored offers that directly address prospects' needs. 

Account-based prospecting is highly targeted and drives better engagement and higher conversion rates than traditional marketing strategies. 

Many companies use this method to maximize ROI by concentrating resources on accounts with the greatest potential for revenue growth.

Rise of social selling and content marketing


Platforms like LinkedIn have become important tools for B2B sales teams.

They help you to build relationships, demonstrate expertise, and engage with prospects before performing a formal outreach. 

Additionally, social selling enables you to monitor buyer intent and engagement signals, which can aid you in creating a more strategic outreach. 

In the same way, high-quality, value-driven content plays a central role in attracting and nurturing prospects. Materials like case studies, whitepapers, blogs, and webinars serve as a medium to instill trust in your prospects. 

Plus, with the above content types, you can position yourself as a thought leader in your field. This approach enables you to nurture prospects by offering valuable insights rather than direct sales pitches.

We’ve seen how much has changed in B2B prospecting methods in recent times. 

Now, what exactly can an effective B2B strategy afford you?

What are the benefits of effective B2B prospecting in 2024

Whether you’re a great seller or offer outstanding products or services, if you can’t find your ideal customers and get them to buy, you don’t have a business. 

Below are some benefits of adopting an effective B2B prospecting: 

  • Sustainable Sales Pipeline Development: Effective prospecting ensures you constantly have new leads in your sales pipeline. This way, you’ll consistently close new deals and maintain a healthy pipeline for long-term success.
  • Building Strong Customer Relationships: B2B sales thrive on long-term relationships with customers. With prospecting, you can proactively engage with potential clients, build trust, and establish a strong foundation for lasting partnerships.
  • Faster close rates: Sales prospecting enables you to turn a lead into a loyal customer with as little as one conversation. This can sometimes be faster than inbound lead generation.
  • Gaining a Competitive Edge: Effective prospecting enables you to connect with potential customers before competitors. 
  • Understanding Customer Needs: Prospecting enables you to learn about the pain points of potential customers.
  • Maximizing Resource Efficiency: B2B prospecting helps you focus on the right leads that need your offers. 

Let’s see some of the most effective strategies you can use for your prospecting process. 

What are the most effective B2B prospecting strategies for 2024?

Below are some sales prospecting methods that can improve your prospecting game and keep you ahead of the competition: 

#1 Use LinkedIn for social selling


LinkedIn is your best friend for B2B marketing. 

LinkedIn provides an effective B2B prospecting platform where you can identify, connect with, and build relationships with potential clients. 

Unlike traditional outbound methods, which can feel cold and impersonal, LinkedIn provides a personal touch to conversations. 

The platform enables sales professionals to engage with prospects long before presenting any sales pitch. This means you connect with your potential customers and build relationships before shooting your shot. 

For an effective LinkedIn prospecting, you need to: 

  • Optimize your LinkedIn profile
  • Research and identify prospects
  • Engage with relevant content– comment on posts, share relevant stories, and participate in discussions. 
  • Personalize outreach– avoid sending generic messages to prospects. 
  • Focus on nurturing relationships. 

Here’s an example of how you can reach out without appearing spammy: 


#2 Cold calling and emailing

Even with the rise of digital communication, cold calling and emailing remain effective methods for B2B prospecting.

Cold Calling involves reaching out to prospects who haven’t indicated interest in your product or service. 


If you’d like to improve your chance of receiving a positive response, you’ll need to research prospects beforehand to ensure they fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). After that, you can place a call across.

On the flip side, cold emailing uses emails to reach potential leads instead.

And just like in cold calling, you need to ensure they fit your ICP before sending them emails. 

Additionally, personalization and relevance are key. You’ll need to tailor your message to address specific pain points to improve response rates.

Below is an example of a cold email: 


#3 Use content marketing to attract and nurture leads

Content marketing involves creating valuable, relevant, consistent content that attracts potential leads and nurtures them over time. 

This is effective In the B2B space because they conduct thorough research before engaging with sales teams.

Plus, content marketing helps you build long-term relationships and establish your business as a thought leader. 

The goal is to engage leads throughout their buyer’s journey by providing educational material to build trust and address their pain points with the aim of driving them toward making a purchase decision.


You can achieve this by offering resources like blogs, whitepapers, and case studies. This way, you can establish trust and demonstrate expertise, encouraging prospects to engage further.


Here are some examples of brands that use content marketing to generate leads: 

  • HubSpot publishes in-depth blog posts and offers downloadable resources like guides and templates for lead generation. 
  • Salesforce creates informative eBooks and hosts webinars to provide value and educate leads on their solutions.
  • CoSchedule uses long-form blog content to nurture leads, with a focus on marketing topics that align with their products.

#4 Incorporate AI lead generation and automation for scalable outreach

This strategy uses AI and automation to make prospecting easier and more efficient. 

AI can help you identify potential leads, customize messages, and send those messages at the right time. 

Plus, you can use automation to handle repetitive tasks like follow-up emails so your team can focus on building relationships. 

To get started, use AI tools to personalize email outreach, set up chatbots for real-time lead engagement, and integrate AI into your CRM to predict the best time for follow-ups and manage tasks automatically.

You can use tools like Warmly to automate your outreaches and engagement with potential customers. 

The platform uses data from different sources, such as CRM systems and website traffic, to identify when prospects are most engaged with an outreach. This way, you can automatically send timely and personalized messages to prospects across multiple channels. 

Check out how Warmly can boost your B2B prospecting efforts. 

Below are examples of companies that use this strategy: 

  • Warmly uses conversational AI to engage visitors on websites and qualifies leads in real-time. 
  • Reply automates multi-channel outreach across email, LinkedIn, and calls, using AI to suggest the best times and ways to reach out to prospects.

# 5 Focus on ABM (Account-Based Marketing)

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a focused strategy where marketing and sales teams work closely to engage specific high-value accounts. 

Unlike broader approaches that target many prospects, ABM zeroes in on key accounts with a higher chance of converting. This method involves personalized content and outreach tailored to each account’s unique needs, often using multiple channels like social media and email to reach decision-makers. 

To incorporate Account-Based Marketing (ABM), start by selecting high-value target accounts that match your business goals. 

Next, create personalized marketing campaigns tailored to each account’s specific needs and pain points.

Afterward, collaborate with sales and marketing teams to develop a strategy that delivers targeted content to engage decision-makers

Finally, track engagement and performance metrics to adjust strategies to optimize interactions and drive conversions for each account.  


You can check out Salesforce’s comprehensive guide on how to create and execute ABM campaigns.

#6 Referrals

People often prefer personal recommendations, and it is little wonder referrals have a 30% higher conversion rate when compared to leads from other methods. This isn’t surprising as these prospects are already willing to buy. 

You can encourage your loyal customers to refer their friends and partners to your brand. This can earn you new B2B prospects who are more likely to convert. 

Plus, you can offer incentives like discounts or exclusive offers to encourage more referrals.


We’ve seen some effective prospecting techniques that can help you convert leads and drive revenue. However, these strategies aren’t free of challenges. 

Let’s see a few of them. 

What are the common challenges in B2B prospecting and how to overcome them?

B2B prospecting is essential for generating leads and closing sales, but it comes with some challenges. 

Here are some prospecting obstacles that may come up during your B2B prospecting process and the best ways to deal with them: 

Identifying quality leads


Many sales teams struggle to find leads who are not only interested but also qualified. This can lead to wasted time and resources spent chasing prospects that are not a good fit.

The way out:

  • Develop Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs): You can use factors like industry, company size, and purchasing behavior to create your ICPs. This will help you to accurately target the right audience.
  • Use Data Tools: CRM and data analytics tools are used to gather information about your potential leads. Next, you can use your findings to refine your targeting strategies. This way, you’ll ensure that the leads you pursue are more likely to convert.

Low response rates


Many sales emails go unanswered, and this can be frustrating for sales teams.

The way out:

  • Personalize Outreach: Tailor your messages to address the pain points and core needs of each prospect. You can use information from your ICP to create messages that resonate with them.
  • Experiment with Different Channels: Test various communication methods, such as social media, phone calls, and email, to see what works best. Plus, A/B testing different subject lines and content can also help to refine your approach.

Overstuffed sales pipeline

Sales teams often fill their pipelines with too many leads, and this can dilute focus and result in missed opportunities with high-potential prospects.

The way out:

  • Implement Lead Scoring: Use a lead scoring tool to prioritize leads according to their potential to convert. This will enable your sales teams to focus more on leads with higher potential. 
  • Regularly Review Your Pipeline: Conduct periodic pipeline reviews to re-evaluate leads. 

High competition


The B2B space is highly competitive as there are so many brands competing for customers’ attention. This means you need to stand out to get prospects’ attention because they receive countless pitches for similar products or services.

The way out:

  • Differentiate Your Offering: Clearly communicate how your product stands out from the competition. You can include things like case studies, reviews, and testimonials. 
  • Build Relationships: Focus on building relationships and not just selling. 

Long sales cycles


B2B sales cycles can get lengthy and complex, and this makes it pretty difficult to maintain engagement with prospects.

The way out:

  • Map the Buyer’s Journey: This will help you understand the buyer journey of your prospects, so you can tailor your outreach accordingly. 
  • Use Technology to Streamline Processes: You can use tools that automate follow-ups and reminders. With this, you’ll ensure that no prospect falls through the cracks. This can help maintain consistent communication and push deals forward more efficiently.

Improve your B2B prospecting process with the right strategies

The B2B space is quite competitive. 

To stand out from the screaming crowd, you’ll need to stay up-to-date with the most recent trends and strategies. 

You can get started with the strategies we’ve shared here. This way, you’ll gain quality leads with higher chances of converting. 

Also, remember you’ll need to evaluate your prospecting results to see what’s working and what isn’t. 

And if you’d like to increase your rate of converting prospects, you can include Warmly in your strategy.

The platform will help you boost your prospecting efforts by enabling you to identify and engage with prospects until they move down the sales funnel. 

Want to see how it works? Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and convert your prospects in no time.

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Best 12 Demand Generation Metrics & KPIs in 2024

Best 12 Demand Generation Metrics & KPIs in 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Demand generation is an important business operation that keeps the business running and profitable. It’s tough but necessary. 

There are numerous ways you can do demand generation and uncountable metrics related to the process you can track. There’s a high chance that the sheer number of demand generation metrics and KPIs might overwhelm you.

In this article, I will tell you the best demand generation metrics and KPIs you must be tracking, why it’s important to track these, and how you track them.

TL;DR

  • You must measure demand generation metrics and KPIs as they will tell you how effective your marketing and sales efforts are.
  • Analyze all the factors listed below. Every business is different, so the factors listed below might or might not be valid for your business. Ultimately, choose metrics and KPIs that affect your business the most.

Factors to Consider When Choosing Demand Generation Metrics that You Must Track

1. Metrics’ Alignment with Business Goal

When shortlisting a metric for demand generation, double-check that it directly supports your company’s BIG goal. This big goal could be:

  • Increasing revenue
  • Improving customer retention
  • Doubling top-line revenue, etc.

Align metrics with specific marketing objectives, such as lead generation, customer segmentation, content performance, and more.

2. Relevance to the Sales Funnel

Choose metrics that correspond to different stages of the buyer’s journey – awareness, consideration, decision, and loyalty. The metrics you choose must be able to track how efficiently each customer moves down the funnel.

3. Data Availability and Quality

When shortlisting demand generation metrics and KPIs to track, data availability and quality are crucial factors that significantly influence the effectiveness of measurement and analysis.

This factor ensures that the metrics you choose to track are accessible, reliable, accurate, and timely.

4. Actionability

Select metrics that give you clear insights into performance and can tell you ways to improve a certain marketing or sales campaign to get your numbers up. Focus on KPIs that, when improved, will have a significant impact on business performance.

5. Timeframe Considerations

Have a balance between the type of metrics you track – short-term and long-term. Determine how often each metric should be reviewed based on its relevance and the pace of your campaigns.

What are the Best Demand Generation Metrics?

This section consists of the best demand generation metrics that a company must track and calculate. This is a ranked list, meaning that the first metric is the most important, and the last is the least important. 

  1. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
  2. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) 
  3. Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
  4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
  5. Return on Investment (ROI)
  6. Marketing Sourced Pipeline
  7. Signups and Activations
  8. Close Rate per Channel
  9. Average Deal Size
  10. Contribution to Total Revenue
  11. Marketing Cycle Length
  12. Content Performance and Engagement

Let’s now discuss each metric in detail—what it is, why it is important to track it, and how to do so.

1. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

A marketing-qualified lead is a prospect who has engaged with your company’s marketing efforts at a certain level, which indicates he/she might be interested in buying your product. 

Remember, they aren’t someone ready to buy from you immediately. It will take some nurturing for you to convert them into customers.

Tracking this metric isn’t as easy as it sounds. None of your prospects would tell you they’re MQLs; you have to track certain metrics to know which prospects stand out as MQLs.

Start by tracking data points like:

  • Content downloads from your website (blogs, e-books, reports, etc.)
  • Subscribers to your newsletter.
  • Repeat visitors to your website.
  • Time spent on the website.

Why Track MQLs?

By tracking MQLs, you can optimize your demand generation strategy. Here’s how:

  • When you focus on leads that have more probability to convert (MQLs), you allocate your sales and marketing resources efficiently.
  • There’s a better chance of an MQL moving down your sales funnel than a cold prospect.

To calculate MQLs, you need a proper lead-scoring system in place. This system will evaluate and rank leads based on their interactions and attributes.

2. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) 

SQL is a prospective customer that your sales team has qualified to receive sales materials and buy your product. Unlike MQLs, SQLs exhibit behaviors that indicate a strong likelihood of becoming your paid customers.

Their qualification involves meeting specific benchmarks related to budget, authority, need, and timeline (aka - BANT criteria).

Just like MQLs, you track SQLs by tacking important factors related to your website, like:

  • Repeated visits to your pricing page.
  • Booking a demo.
  • Signing up for a free trial or free version of the product.
  • Have items in their checkout cart.

Why Track SQLs?

Tracking SQLs can help you optimize your sales process and maximize revenue. Here’s how

  • Identifying SQLs will help you increase your conversion rates as they have a better chance of becoming your customers.
  • SQLs are high-quality leads; when you focus on converting them, you have a chance to maximize company revenue.

Like MQLs, to know if a lead is SQL, you must assess all potential leads against predefined criteria.

3. Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

In simple terms, cost per acquisition means the money you are paying to acquire a customer. It considers the cost of a campaign divided by the number of conversions it generates.

Why Track CPA?

  • CPA helps allocate marketing budgets more effectively by identifying which campaigns yield the most cost-effective results.
  • It acts as a benchmark for evaluating the success of different marketing campaigns.

Here’s a formula to calculate CPA:


Total marketing spend: Includes all costs associated with the marketing campaign – advertising expenses, content creation costs, agency fees, etc.

Number of acquisitions: Total number of conversions from your marketing efforts. 

👀 Note: A conversion could be a sale, a lead, a subscription, or any predefined action that signifies acquisition.

4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

Customer lifetime value is a predictive metric from which you can estimate the total revenue your business might get from a single customer during your relationship with them.

It is important for any business to have an increasing CLTV throughout its life. This can only be done by retaining existing customers and making them loyal to your product.

Why Track CLTV?

  • Measuring CLTV allows you to analyze how much you can spend on acquiring new customers (CAC) while remaining profitable.
  • By identifying customers with higher CLTVs, you can focus retention efforts on your most valuable customers.

Here’s how to calculate CLTV:


Let’s look at an example to understand it better:

Suppose your business has the following data:

  • Total revenue over a period = $100,000
  • Number of purchases = 2,000
  • Number of unique customers = 500
  • Average customer lifespan = 3 years

Step 1. Calculate Average Purchase Value (APV)

APV = $100,000 / 2,000

= $50 

Step 2. Calculate Average Purchase Frequency (APF)

APF = 2,000 / 500 = 4

Step 3. Calculate Customer Value (CV)

CV = $50 X 4 = $200

Step 4. Calculate CLTV

CLTV = $200 X 3 = $600

5. Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on investment is a financial metric that measures the profitability of any investment relative to its cost.

In relation to demand generation, ROI measures the efficiency of your marketing campaigns by comparing the revenue generated against marketing-related expenses.

Why Track ROI?

  • ROI offers a tangible measure of how effectively your marketing efforts convert into revenue. By calculating ROI, you can determine which marketing campaigns deliver the best returns.
  • When you know the ROI of every campaign you run, you can make quick and accurate data-driven decisions.

To calculate ROI, use this basic formula:


Where:

Net profit is the total revenue generated from your marketing campaigns ‘minus’ the total costs.

Cost of investment is the money spent on running these marketing campaigns

So, if you spend $10,000 on a LinkedIn ad campaign that generates $30,000 in sales, your ROI would be:

[(30,000 - 10,000)/10,000] X 100%

= 2 X 100% = 200%

6. Marketing Sourced Pipeline (MSP)

Tracking your marketing-sourced pipeline gives you the number of overall leads generated from all your marketing efforts.

For any business, it's important to know the impact of their marketing efforts on sales, right? MSP does just that. 

It lets you know if your marketing efforts are a success or going in vain.

The metric counts every deal where marketing can be credited as the primary source of conversion—leads generated via content marketing, webinars, paid ads, email campaigns, events, etc.

Why Track MSP?

MSP gives you a tangible measure of how marketing efforts contribute to your company’s revenue goals.

To calculate MSP, identify and add up the total value of all sales opportunities that originated from marketing efforts within a specific time period.


7. Signups and Activations

Signups and activations measure the total number of people creating an account on your website to try your product for free or pay a fee for a monthly or yearly subscription. 

Both these metrics signify a customer’s basic level of interest in your product, meaning that users are willing to invest some of their time and money to explore it.

Why Track Signups and Activations?

  • When you know the monthly or quarterly signups to your website or product, you can measure the success of your marketing efforts in attracting new customers.
  • Measuring activations gives you insights into how well the new users are engaging with your product after signing up.

Here’s how you measure signups and activations:

Signups


Activations

Start by defining what activation means for your business (subscribing to your newsletter, signing up for a free trial, downloading content, etc.). Once defined, you can calculate it:


Bonus


8. Close Rate per Channel

The close rate helps you measure the effectiveness of every sales and marketing channel. It measures the percentage of leads from a specific channel that are converted into customers.

Why Track Close Rate per Channel?

Measuring the close rate for each channel will help you identify your ‘hero channel’ to convert prospects into buyers. 

Suppose you generate your leads via two marketing channels – LinkedIn and email marketing. By measuring the close rate for each of these channels, you can know which one converts better.

Here’s a formula you can use to calculate close rate per channel:


If you get 200 leads from LinkedIn in a month, 50 of those get converted into customers, your close rate is:

[50 / 200] X 100 = 25%

This means that 25% of the leads coming in from LinkedIn convert into customers.

9. Average Deal Size

The average deal size tells you about the revenue generated from a single customer transaction. The metric gives you valuable insights into the effectiveness of your sales strategies and the overall health of your revenue streams.

Why Track Average Deal Size?

  • Tracking average deal size helps you predict future income as it establishes a baseline for expected revenue per deal.
  • Knowing the average deal size for different customer segments helps your sales team focus on sales that will increase the deal size month over month.

👀 Note: When tracking average deal size, remember that you might have different average deal sizes for various product lines or customer segments. For example, you might have a lower average deal size for a basic paid plan of your tool and a higher one for an enterprise-grade plan with all the features.

Formula to calculate average deal size:


10. Contribution to Total Revenue

Contribution to total revenue is a metric that you must measure when you have taken care of all other demand generation metrics from this list. 

The metric gives you a perspective into the bigger picture of what percentage of business an individual channel brings in.

This individual channel is a specific source that gets you customers—a marketing channel, product line, or customer segment. 

Why Track Contribution to Total Revenue?

Tracking contribution to total revenue helps you understand which specific sector or channel brings in the most and least revenue for your company.

Calculating this metric involves identifying the revenue generated from a specific channel and expressing it as a percentage of the total company revenue.

For example, if I want to find out the contribution of a certain marketing channel, the formula would be:


11. Marketing Cycle Length

The marketing (or sales) cycle length is the average amount of time you take to move a prospect down your sales funnel and convert them into a buyer. This metric tracks the entire duration of a customer’s marketing journey. 

One way a marketing journey could flow is this:

The first interaction with your website

⬇️

Checking out the pricing page

⬇️

Adding the product to their cart or filling in the signup form for a free plan

⬇️

Upgrading the free plan to a paid plan

Why Track Marketing Cycle Length?

  • Knowing how long it typically takes to convert a lead into a customer allows you to forecast sales and allocate resources accordingly.
  • Knowing the time it takes for lead conversion gives you insights into buyer behavior, which can, in turn, help you make important business decisions.

Here’s a formula you can use to calculate marketing cycle length:


12. Content Performance and Engagement

Let’s face it; it's a rare chance your business might only be using one form of content to bring in all the conversions you get. 

No matter the type of content you use – video, blogs, illustrations, case studies, etc.- there are quantitative ways to measure its success, depending on how you distribute it.

For example, if you want to track how your social media content is doing, you can easily track the impressions, likes, shares, comments, and more to know the performance of your posts.

Several email marketing tools can help you analyze your email copy and subject line, giving you a sneak peek into your email content's performance.

Similarly, for every type of content you use online, find a SaaS tool that quantitatively measures content performance and engagement.

Why Track Content Performance and Engagement?

  • It provides valuable feedback on what types of content your audience engages with, allowing you to tailor future content to their preferences and needs.
  • Engaging content is more likely to capture attention and encourage prospects to enter your marketing funnel. Knowing what content keeps your audience hooked will increase lead-generation opportunities.

To calculate content performance and engagement, track some key metrics like:

  • Page views and unique visitors: Total number of times a page is viewed and the number of unique individuals.
  • Average time on page: The average time users spend on a specific page of your website.
  • Bounce rate: Percentage of users who leave your website after viewing only one page.

And more.

Create More Demand with Warmly

Tracking and analyzing all demand generation metrics manually is not easy. 

If you are an extremely small business that tracks only a couple of metrics, you can do it manually. But, when you have multiple demand generation channels with several metrics and KPIs to track and analyze, you need a tool like Warmly.


Warmly is a revenue orchestration platform that identifies website visitors, detects their buying intent across channels, and helps convert them via automated, semi-automated, and human-operated functionalities.

Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and discover firsthand how it can fill your pipeline with qualified leads.

Or book a live demo to see it in action first.

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What is SaaS Sales: In-Depth Guide for 2024

What is SaaS Sales: In-Depth Guide for 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

There were times when software was a product, something you installed on your computer locally after purchasing a license – a one-time purchase and lifetime use, like Microsoft Office, Oracle, etc.

As the technological world evolved, software became an important aspect, so much so that it had to be flexible and scalable, which led to the development of SaaS: Software as a Service. 

SaaS offers more agility and scalability regardless of your business size. Despite this, it was hard to sell SaaS perpetually since there was no hard product value associated with it. So, there came a need to derive sales methodologies for selling software as a service.

In this article, we'll introduce you to SaaS sales, what it is, how it works, its types, key metrics, and the best practices.

What is SaaS Sales?

SaaS sales is the process of selling cloud-based software through a subscription model.

Unlike traditional software sales, which were one-time affairs with fairly simple sales funnels, modern SaaS sales require a more recurring effort on one buyer.

Did you know that the SaaS industry will be worth ~$318 billion by the end of 2024?


Source

Traditional software sales had short, rigid sales cycles involving – Awareness, Discovery, Evaluation, Intent, and Purchase. A prospect would pass through the sales cadence once in the software lifecycle, get a perpetual incense, and never look back.

Since the traditional funnel ends as soon as you make a deal or purchase, there is no purpose in retargeting a converted customer or expecting recurring business. 

This scenario changed with subscription-based SaaS pricing models.

Product teams now focus on making the product indispensable while the SaaS sales teams sell this indispensability, an inherent need. 

Is SaaS Sales More Rewarding than Traditional Software Sales?

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: 👇

Subscription-based SaaS sales models are major cost savers for customers who can't afford hefty license fees, allowing them to pay as they go monthly or annually.

It's more like renting software rather than purchasing it. 

As a SaaS owner, selling your software on a subscription-based model allows for:

  • Easy Scalability: As and when the need arises, businesses are free to upgrade or downgrade their feature requirements and usage anytime they deem necessary, leading to more efficient operations, which boosts customer trust and product reliability.
  • Cloud-First Environment: Unlike traditional software, SaaS is easy to maintain, fix, or upgrade over the cloud without disrupting customer business. Businesses don't have to worry about system bugs, feature breakages, or security updates. 
  • Value Pricing: Most SaaS products have dedicated features made for different customer segments, defying the one-size-fits-all theory. A smaller business may operate on the lowest price plan, while an enterprise could choose exhaustive and expensive plans to absorb it all.

How Does SaaS Sales Work? 

SaaS sales emphasize long-term customer relationships and recurring revenue to distinguish itself from traditional software sales. 

Here's what the typical SaaS sales funnel looks like 👇

Lead Generation (Awareness Stage)

Awareness generally results from marketing campaigns run for the product. Here, the prospect has learned about your product and is interested in engaging with and exploring your offerings. 

⬇️ 

Personalized Reach Out (Engagement Stage)

This stage is necessary for subscription-based or enterprise pricing models (more on this below). Here, you engage with the leads via digital channels of your choice: an email, a phone call, or a targeted ad.

This stage is beneficial to push new buyers down your sales funnel and requires you to:

  • Position your product for a use case for their business
  • Build trust by showcasing genuine testimonials 
  • Engage more on digital and social channels 
  • Be accommodative towards pricing and plans

⬇️ 

Customer Onboarding

The stage wherein you Acquire the prospect and onboard them to your product, introduce them to the functionalities and training material they might need.

Accompany this process with a dedicated POC to help them feel secure and attended. On top of that, you can:

  • Offer a consulting or Q&A session to engage
  • Allow them a free trial or demo of your product 
  • Present the value your product offers via customer success stories

⬇️ 

Customer Retention

SaaS sales focuses on maintaining long-term relationships with customers. This, in return, helps you build a recurring business. 

You can achieve this by incorporating customer success strategies. Provide ongoing support, regular updates, dedicated account representatives, and engage with customers to ensure they derive maximum value from the product.

What are the Cycles of a SaaS Sales Process?

A typical SaaS sales cycle has six key stages. Here's a quick breakdown:

Phase 1: Prospecting

This involves identifying potential leads that align with your ideal customer profile (ICP) to effectively target the right market segments. Techniques such as content marketing, social media outreach, and referrals are commonly used to generate interest and attract prospects. 

Phase 2. Lead Qualification

The leads generated from prospecting consist of both qualified and unqualified buyers. That is buyers who are just curious about your software and those who are genuinely interested in purchasing it. 

Moving a lead through the qualification process is more like two-factor authentication. It ensures that your sales team is presented with qualified leads with the highest likelihood of conversion, thereby reducing sales cycles and customer acquisition costs.

Phase 3. Need Analysis

This stage is about building trust and rapport with your prospect. You establish interactions with them, understand their needs, and value their expectations of your software. 

This stage looks different for every company since SaaS sales cycles can vary wildly depending on the type of product on offer.

Phase 4. Proposal

After understanding the prospects' needs, sales teams present a tailored proposal that outlines how the software can address those needs effectively. You demonstrate product features, pricing options, and potential ROI.

However, this is the stage with most objections. 

Prospects might counter your proposal with common objections, such as high pricing, fear of commitment, competitor offers, and more. 

The key to winning your proposal is being an active listener. Hear out your prospects and counter them with something better. 

For example, if they say:

  • Expensive pricing: Show them your product value
  • Fear long-term commitment: Offer a free trial or 30-day money-back guarantee
  • Not the sole decision maker: Ask for a conference set up with all key stakeholders. 

Do all, and make sure your proposal makes an impact. 

Phase 5. Closure

The hours before signing a deal are filled with anxiety and doubts. You still need to get them onboarded, retained, and set up the eventual upsell.

If your prospects are on the verge of their free trial or product demo, then you could try a few things to make them commit to a subscription, such as:

  • Offer a likable discount that doesn't cut into your profits
  • Create urgency by adding a 'Valid till today' tag
  • Give them one or two months for free if they decide to bill annually

Additionally, proactively approach them for any last-minute questions, concerns, or objections they have; this might be the pivotal point in decision-making.

Phase 6. Onboarding

Once you've closed the deal, you'll need to get the user through onboarding.

According to Zendesk, more than half of the customers who buy online would switch to a competitor after just a single bad experience.


This way, you have better chances of cross-selling and up-selling co-products and add-ons. 

The ball is in your court. But how can we improve customer onboarding exactly?

As such, investing in self-service support systems always proves beneficial.

  • Automate onboarding flows like welcome emails and getting-started guides
  • In-app guidance and documentation
  • Help guides and troubleshooting content

Do all, and ensure that fresh signups don't huddle any obstacles.

What is the Best Structure for Building a SaaS Team?

At its core, a professional trying to sell software as a service requires unique skills, like product knowledge, consultative selling (soft selling rather than hard selling), and technical know-how.

However, your SaaS team structure highly depends on your business size and the human resources you can employ. 

For early-stage companies with 1 to 20 employees, a lean structure is essential. Typically, this includes:

  • Founder (CEO): Drives vision and strategy.
  • CTO: Manages technology and product development.
  • CSO (Chief Sales Officer): Responsible for sales strategy and execution.
  • CMO (Chief Marketing Officer): Handles marketing efforts to generate leads.

As the company grows, roles can become more specialized, adding positions like customer success managers and dedicated sales representatives.

In later-stage companies with 50+ Employees, the team structure becomes more complex:

  • C-Suite Executives: Including CFO, COO, and CPO to oversee various departments.
  • Sales Team: Comprising account executives, sales development representatives (SDRs), and customer success managers.
  • Marketing Team: Product marketers, content marketers, and demand generation specialists.
  • Product Team: Featuring product managers, UX/UI designers, and QA engineers.

This structure allows for clear role definitions and accountability across departments. 

What are the Key SaaS Sales Models?

Choosing the right SaaS sales model can make or break your business.

Essentially, you can choose from three types of SaaS sales models:

  • Self-service.
  • Transactional.
  • Enterprise sales.

Let's have a closer look at them.

The Self-Service Sales Model


Source

This model works best for low-cost, high-volume products.

Instead of having dedicated sales executives, this model relies on marketing to generate revenue. That is, creating product awareness via educational content, blogs, white papers, and interactive demos and allowing potential customers to complete a purchase autonomously without ever interacting with a sales rep.

This is common for lower-cost B2C or B2B products that don't necessarily require much customization beyond offering tiered pricing models that make it easy to land and expand the customer base.

However, this requires that your customers be willing and able to service themselves, able to understand the product value, and curious to use it. 

Freemium pricing models and free trials are common pricing strategies to attract customers. Some SaaS businesses using this model are Zoho and Dropbox. 

Transactional Sales Model


Source

This model works best when you have a high-cost SaaS product.

Let me get this straight.

The most human thing is to hesitate at least once when taking a risk, maybe with your decision or money. And when that happens, the urge to interact with a human behind the desk is surreal. 

The transactional sales model combines elements of both self-service and enterprise sales models. 

It works on a hybrid model with an in-house sales team assisted by marketing content to build awareness and convert potential clients into customers. 

In this model, marketing plays a crucial role in nurturing and feeding qualified leads into the sales pipelines. Then, sales and support executives take up a more personalized sales approach through various channels, including phone calls and emails, to convert sales.

This way, the entire revenue generated is split between the sales and marketing departments while also testing out the synergy between teams. 

The sales cycle in this model tends to be shorter than in enterprise sales but longer than in self-service models. It involves multiple touchpoints with potential customers to build trust and address concerns.

Usage-based pricing or a Pay-as-you-go pricing model is a great fit for a Transactional Sales Model in which customers are charged per transaction or usage event.

Enterprise Sales Model


Source

The model is reserved for big-ticket clients (enterprises) who require extensive customizations and support before becoming your customers. 

Enterprise companies often require sophisticated solutions that integrate seamlessly into their existing tech stack.

That said, these organizations are willing to invest heavily in your product. Since the deal size is big, the sales cycle for enterprise SaaS can extend from several months to over a year due to the product complexity and the need for thorough evaluations by various decision-makers within the organization.

Besides, this model requires a dedicated sales operation to identify, nurture, and build new business relationships, as well as close and support customers on hefty annual contracts. 

What are the Challenges in SaaS Sales?

Closing a SaaS sale isn't always rewarding. Like every other product sale in the market, it has its challenges and limitations. Let's look at some common challenges in SaaS sales and how to overcome them.

1. High Chun Rates

Did you know that the yearly churn rate of a SaaS company targeting SMBs can be as high as 58%?


Source

Churn is one of the biggest challenges for SaaS companies. These days, customer churn happens because it's extremely easy to opt for a new product, especially with a dedicated migration team to move all your data.

Customers may leave due to dissatisfaction with the product, lack of engagement, or better offers from competitors. High churn rates severely impact revenue.

How do you overcome high churn rates?

To reduce churn rates:

  • Invest in customer relationship management techniques.
  • Lead out customer success initiatives that focus on smooth onboarding, ongoing support, and engagement strategies.
  • Showcase proactiveness with regular check-ins and provide excellent customer service to ensure customers derive maximum value from the product and stay loyal in the long run.

2. Lower Customer Retention

SaaS sales are not a one-off process; they are recurring ones instead. After a newly acquired customer exhausts the free trial or subscription plan, the sales cycle starts from net zero. 

Yet again, you need to convince them to buy in, run follow-up campaigns, or engage directly via email or call. Although time-consuming, retaining existing customers is 5 times less expensive than acquiring new customers.

In fact, your business can grow by retaining your customers because you are more likely to upsell annual contracts, new features, upgrades, and new products.

For example:

James has just exhausted his monthly subscription to your software. He's now looking for a certain feature that your competitor is offering, but you're not. An ideal customer retention strategy, in this case, would involve offering James an upgraded plan with this feature coupled with a generous discount for being a loyal customer. 

How to improve customer retention?

Prospects frequently raise objections related to cost, integration, and software effectiveness. Proactively addressing these concerns will help maintain momentum in the sales process.

Understanding customer retention in the SaaS realm is paramount. Regularly analyze usage patterns, feedback, and engagement levels to refine offerings and enhance retention strategies. In essence, quantifying retention provides actionable insights to bolster long-term client relationships and product sustainability. - Ajit Pathak, VP Sales

3. Lengthy Sales Cycles

Several variables, such as software cost, customer intent, and product complexity, determine the length of the SaaS sales cycle. 

The average sales cycle lasts 84 days. For an Annual Contract Value (ACV) of less than $5K, the cycle will last around 40 days. If the ACV is over $100K, the cycle will last 170 days—around five and a half months.

In the enterprise world, with a bad lead, these could amount to a serious expense!

How do you bail out from long sales cycles?

Sales reps don't have much control over the sales cycle length. But if you're a SaaS business owner, you can take some steps to shorten it.

  • Consider cutting down on a 30-day free trial to 14 days.
  • Promote a hybrid sales approach, giving prospects access to self-help resources and educational content.

What are the Key SaaS Sales Metrics to Track?

Overall, five key SaaS sales metrics are commonly used to gauge SaaS sales performance and growth:

1. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)


Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total revenue or profit generated by a customer over the entire course of their relationship with your business.

By measuring CLTV time-to-time, SaaS businesses can:

  • Keep churn rate low and increase revenue per customer over time.
  • Build cross-sell and up-sell strategies. 
  • Boost customer loyalty and retention.
  • Reduce customer acquisition costs since existing customers are retained.
  • Identify issues and phases in the lifecycle and improve the product or service offerings.

Here's how some SaaS brands improve on CLTV.

  • Zendesk focuses on expanding its product suite to increase LTV. They optimize for cross-selling and upselling to existing customers. 
  • Shopify offers a large ecosystem of apps, plugins, and premium store themes to increase customer lifetime contribution to business revenue. 

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)


Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total sales and marketing cost incurred to acquire a new customer.

As a SaaS business owner, calculating CAC is crucial for your business because it helps determine how much you can afford to spend on cultivating new customers—and still make a profit.

A high CAC means that you're spending more on acquiring new customers than their lifetime value. If you have low CAC, it means that each customer is bringing in enough revenue to cover the total cost of acquiring them.

3. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)


Monthly Recurring Revenue is the total expected revenue generated from all active subscriptions on a monthly basis. 

Put simply, it's the sum of monthly payments agreed upon by contract between the client and the SaaS provider.

For example, if you've 10 accounts and each pays $50/month, your MMR equals $500/month. 

MRR is a powerful metric for companies that use a subscription-based business model. It allows them to predict future revenue, identify growth trends, pinpoint problem areas, and make strategic decisions.

4. Churn Rate


Churn Rate is the rate at which users stop using your software (cancel or don't renew) during a particular period of time. It's calculated by dividing the total unsubscribers by the total users at the start of the period and multiplying the result by 100.

The churn rate is crucial for SaaS businesses due to its impact on other key metrics like CAC and CLTV. The higher the churn rate, the lesser the customer lifetime value and the more frequently your business would incur CAC.

According to Baremetrics, both small and large SaaS companies saw monthly churn rates of around 3.5% through the first quarter of 2024.


What are the Best Practices for SaaS Sales in 2024?

To ramp up your SaaS sales, you must adhere to these 2 best practices:

1. Leverage Automation Tools

Automation tools like Zapier and HubSpot automate lead collection and scoring. You can use them to trigger follow-up emails, schedule appointments, centralize user objections, and create custom workflows using trigger and action elements to automate literally any SaaS sales process.  

“The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a useful sales account management and analysis tool, and the added AI capabilities make it better. Tools like Discover Org or contact search tools like Lusha are good armory for a sales representative or leader.” - Akhil Minocha, VP of Sales, CAST.

2. Personalize Messaging

By using insights from customer interactions (like website behavior or social media activity), sales reps can initiate conversations that feel relevant and timely, triggering emotions and immediate action from customers. 


“Personalizing offers based on customer needs, preferences, and behavior increases the relevance and appeal of your cross-sell and upsell campaigns. Utilize tools like dynamic content, chatbots, and recommendation engines to customize messages and offers. Incentives such as discounts, free trials, or bonuses can enhance the perceived value. Ensure that personalization is balanced and does not compromise profitability.” - Stacey Carachure, Client Relations Expert.

Increase Your SaaS Sales with Warmly

We hope this guide gives you an in-depth understanding of what SaaS sales actually is. If you want a tool to help you with things like:

  • Prioritizing leads to focus on.
  • Engaging and nurturing leads with automated campaigns.
  • Enable reps to reach out to hot leads straight from your website.

Sign up to Warmly.

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Growth Marketing vs Demand Generation: What Are the Differences? (2024)

Growth Marketing vs Demand Generation: What Are the Differences? (2024)

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Growth marketing vs demand generation - which strategy should you focus your efforts and resources on first?

To answer this question, you need to have a thorough understanding of each approach, its goals, and how it aims to achieve them.

And that’s exactly what you’ll learn in this article, as we’ll:

  • Break down both demand generation and growth marketing.
  • Explain their key differences in detail.
  • Help you figure out when to use one and when the other for best results.

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a holistic and dynamic strategy that focuses on the entire customer journey - from acquisition to retention - with the ultimate goal of driving sustainable business growth. 

Unlike traditional marketing, which usually focuses on top-of-the-funnel activities such as brand awareness and lead generation, growth marketing addresses every stage of the customer lifecycle.

As a result, growth marketing has a few unique characteristics that make differentiating it from traditional approaches much easier, such as:

  1. Reliance on experimentation - Growth marketers often employ A/B testing and other data-driven methods to determine the most effective strategies for optimizing user engagement and conversion rates. This experimental mindset lets marketers quickly identify what works and what doesn’t.
  2. Continuous improvement - Instead of focusing all their efforts on a single, large-scale campaign, growth marketing is more intent on deploying smaller-scale strategies, which they constantly test and refine over time. 
  3. Specific tactics - Growth marketing aims to cover all stages of the marketing funnel, from lead acquisition to nurturing and final conversion, which is why it uses a wider variety of techniques compared to traditional marketing, including:
  • A/B testing, i.e., testing different variations of content, ads, landing pages, and more, to identify what drives the highest conversion rates.
  • User acquisition strategies, which encompass developing targeted campaigns to attract new users, often leveraging channels such as social media, SEO, and paid advertising.
  • Retention campaigns to keep existing customers engaged, such as personalized email marketing, loyalty programs, and in-app messaging.


The one thing that makes growth marketing an important strategy to include in your marketing arsenal is its impact on long-term customer growth and revenue.

By optimizing every touchpoint in the customer journey, growth marketers increase the efficiency of their marketing efforts and foster stronger customer relationships. 

Consequently, this leads to higher customer lifetime value (CLTV), improved retention rates, and more predictable and scalable revenue growth.

What is demand generation?

Unlike growth marketing, which encompasses the entire marketing funnel, demand generation is a strategy with a much narrower focus.

Demand generation aims to create awareness of your brand, nurture leads, and ultimately convert them into loyal customers. 

Therefore, at its core, demand generation focuses on building awareness first and foremost. 

The goal is to ensure your target audience knows who you are, what you offer, and why they should care. 

Beyond awareness, demand generation emphasizes nurturing leads, which is critical for turning initial interest into genuine intent to purchase. 

By providing valuable, relevant content and experiences that address specific pain points or needs, marketers can move prospects further down the funnel, fostering a stronger connection to the brand.

Finally, the end goal of demand generation is to convert prospects into customers. 

This requires a carefully thought-through approach that aligns marketing and sales across levels, ensuring that leads are captured and effectively guided toward making a purchase. 

Demand generation involves a mix of strategies that enable marketers to achieve these goals, such as:

  • Content marketing - Creating and distributing high-quality content, such as blog posts, white papers, and videos, that educates your audience and drives engagement.
  • Lead magnets - Offering valuable resources, like eBooks, templates, or checklists, in exchange for contact information, which helps capture leads for further nurturing.
  • Social media engagement - As everyone’s on social media today, it’s an excellent place to drive brand visibility and build meaningful contact with potential customers.
  • Webinars - Hosting educational or informational webinars that provide value to attendees while subtly positioning your products or services as solutions to their challenges.

Just like growth marketing, demand generation has a crucial role in your overall sales and marketing strategy.

Namely, demand generation helps keep your brand top-of-mind for potential customers by maintaining a steady flow of valuable content and engagement opportunities. 

This consistency ensures that when prospects become ready to make a purchase, your brand is one of the first they consider, increasing your chances of achieving conversions.

How do growth marketing and demand generation approaches differ?

Given their different goals, growth marketing and demand generation significantly differ in focus, overall approach, and outcomes.

Let’s look at each strategy a bit closer.

Growth marketing 

Growth marketing is proactive and experimental by nature.

As such, it is characterized by a fast-paced, data-driven approach where marketers constantly test and refine their strategies to achieve quick wins. 

The primary goal is short-term optimization, that is, maximizing conversions, boosting engagement, and improving customer acquisition metrics as quickly as possible.

As a result, growth marketing often centers on specific, measurable goals, such as increasing website traffic, improving click-through rates, or enhancing user retention.

So, to achieve these goals and ensure that the entire funnel is optimized for pushing prospects further down toward conversion, growth marketers run A/B tests, experiment with new channels, and tweak campaigns continuously to uncover what drives the best results.

In addition to testing and experimenting, growth marketing involves other tactics and approaches, such as:

  1. Creating highly targeted campaigns for each customer segment, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
  2. Referral programs that enable you to create a strong lead acquisition pipeline using existing customers.
  3. Improving user onboarding experiences to improve overall user experience and boost retention rates.
  4. Email marketing to attract, engage, and nurture leads throughout the funnel.
  5. Loyalty programs like special discounts or exclusive offers to long-term customers to improve customer retention.
  6. Paid advertising and retargeting campaigns to engage and re-engage leads.


While this focus on short-term success makes growth marketing ideal for startups or businesses looking to scale rapidly, it could also lead to overlooking the wider picture - the importance of establishing a strong brand presence.

Demand generation

In contrast, demand generation takes a more nurturing and long-term focus. 

While growth marketing seeks to optimize every touchpoint quickly, demand generation is about laying the foundation for sustainable brand growth over time. 

It involves building awareness, nurturing long-term relationships, and guiding prospects through the buying journey to convert them into loyal customers. 

Therefore, the main goal of demand generation is to create consistent and enduring demand for the brand across markets, which requires a more strategic approach that focuses on the entire customer journey - including post-purchase engagement.

This is why demand generation efforts are typically slower to yield results.

At the same time, they are crucial for establishing a strong brand presence and nurturing leads that may need more time to be ready to convert.

Some of the most widely used techniques that help raise brand awareness and generate demand include:

  1. Content marketing and SEO are the best combination for establishing thought leadership within the industry and gaining potential customers’ trust.
  2. Webinars can also position you as an industry leader and let you directly engage and interact with leads.
  3. Social media engagement adds a more personal note to how leads interact with your brand.
  4. Customer testimonials to build trust by showcasing positive experiences other people have had with your brand.
  5. PPC campaigns to display your brand in front of potential leads.


Which metrics matter in growth marketing vs demand generation?

To track the efficiency of demand generation and growth marketing, you need to keep a close eye on vital metrics and KPIs.

The difference between growth marketing and demand generation goals and focus translates into the metrics you need to track for each.

Namely, growth marketing is often more short-term, focusing on quick optimizations that can drive rapid business results. 

As a result, its key metrics can provide immediate feedback on how a certain strategy works, enabling marketers to quickly refine it.

On the other hand, demand generation has a longer-term focus, aiming to build a steady stream of qualified leads and ensure sustainable growth over time. 

Therefore, its metrics are critical for understanding the cumulative impact of marketing efforts on the sales pipeline and overall business growth.

Here’s a quick overview of the key metrics you must monitor for each strategy.

Growth marketing metrics

As mentioned above, growth marketing is typically focused on rapid experimentation and optimization, which requires tracking specific metrics that provide immediate insights into the effectiveness of various tactics.

Therefore, some of the most important metrics and KPIs include:

  1. Customer lifetime value - CLV measures the total revenue a business can expect from a customer throughout their relationship with the company. In growth marketing, understanding CLV helps marketers identify the most valuable customer segments and tailor their strategies to maximize ROI from these segments.
  2. Customer acquisition cost - CAC calculates the cost of acquiring a new customer. Growth marketers closely monitor CAC to ensure that their acquisition strategies are cost-effective and sustainable. A low CAC relative to CLV indicates a healthy growth strategy.
  3. Conversion rates - Conversion rates track the percentage of users who take a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or downloading an app, converting from a prospect to a qualified lead or a paying customer. This metric is critical in growth marketing, where the goal is often to optimize specific touchpoints in the customer journey to increase conversions.


Demand generation metrics

Demand generation, on the other hand, emphasizes building brand awareness, nurturing leads, and driving long-term growth, which is why it prioritizes metrics that track the effectiveness of these activities over time. 

Key demand generation metrics include:

  1. Marketing-Qualified Leads - MQLs are leads that have shown a sufficient level of interest or engagement to be passed on to the sales team. Tracking the number and quality of MQLs helps demand-generation teams understand the effectiveness of their lead nurturing efforts.
  2. Lead-to-customer ratio - This metric measures the percentage of leads that ultimately convert into paying customers. A high lead-to-customer ratio indicates that demand generation efforts effectively nurture leads and guide them through the sales funnel.
  3. Pipeline contribution—Pipeline contribution assesses the impact of marketing efforts on the overall sales pipeline, including the number of opportunities created and their revenue potential. This metric helps demand generation teams demonstrate the direct impact of their activities on the company’s bottom line.


How to choose between growth marketing and demand generation?

When deciding between growth marketing and demand generation, you should consider several key factors, including:

  1. Company goals - If your primary objective is to scale quickly and gain market share, growth marketing may be the better choice due to its focus on rapid experimentation and optimization. Conversely, demand generation might be more appropriate if your goal is to build brand awareness and cultivate long-term customer relationships.
  2. Customer lifecycle - Growth marketing focuses equally on acquisition and retention, meaning that it can be used throughout the customer lifecycle to ensure optimal results. Demand generation is more suitable for the top and middle stages, as it helps both raise brand awareness and create interest in your product.
  3. Industry type - Fast-paced, highly competitive industries, such as tech startups or e-commerce, often benefit from the agility and speed of growth marketing. In contrast, industries with longer buying cycles, such as B2B services or high-value products, may require demand generation’s more deliberate and relationship-focused approach.
  4. Sales cycle - Growth marketing is well-suited for shorter sales cycles where quick wins and rapid scaling are possible. Demand generation is ideal for longer, more complex sales cycles where building trust and nurturing leads over time is crucial to closing deals.


However, it’s important to understand that demand generation and growth marketing are not mutually exclusive.

In fact, a hybrid approach combining elements of growth marketing and demand generation can often be the most effective strategy. 

For example, a hybrid approach might involve using growth marketing tactics to quickly acquire new leads and then applying demand generation strategies to nurture those leads through the sales funnel. 

This lets you capitalize on quick wins while ensuring sustained growth over time.

Overall, when deciding on an approach, you must align your marketing strategy with your primary goals to ensure that your efforts will actually move you in the right direction.

What are some examples of successful growth marketing and demand generation campaigns?

Finally, the best way to understand demand generation and growth marketing is through practical examples of companies successfully deploying them as part of their overall sales and marketing strategies.

Growth marketing strategy: Airbnb

A few years back, Airbnb built one of the most successful growth marketing strategies, which enabled it to increase bookings by 25% in some markets.

The company achieved this by leveraging a tested and tried growth marketing approach - referral programs.

They incentivized existing users by offering them the possibility to earn up to $100 for every person they invited to the platform.


Source

But it didn’t end there. 

Airbnb also offered $25 off their first trip to new users who have been invited to encourage them to accept the invitation.

Moreover, Airbnb applied another growth marketing technique - A/B testing.


They experimented with different email copy and design, emphasizing different angles of the overall messaging to see which resonated better with existing and prospective users.

This approach resulted in a significant increase in new users and bookings made on Airbnb, making it a resounding success.

Demand generation strategy: StraightIn

StraightIn is a LinkedIn marketing agency that was looking to drive demand for its services by cutting through the noise of similar solutions.

The agency used several key demand generation tactics - email marketing, social media engagement, and paid ads - in an effort to drive traffic to its website, which was optimized for conversions.

However, although this multichannel approach yielded excellent results, with StraightIn’s website generating thousands of visitors per month, its team quickly realized its strategy had a flaw.

Namely, they were unable to capture most of the leads landing on their website, as not everyone was keen on filling out forms or downloading materials.

This is when they decided to implement Warmly into their system.

Warmly enabled them to identify the companies and individuals visiting StraightIn’s website, in addition to providing relevant B2B and intent data on each.

This way, StraightIn’s team was able to:

  1. Identify website visitors and determine which of them fit their ICP the best.


  1. Pinpoint and prioritize leads most likely to convert based on intent level and focus their nurturing efforts on them.


From that point, StraightIn’s approach evolved into a more hybrid strategy, as its team leveraged Warmly’s intent insights to segment users according to their interest level and add them to personalized outreach campaigns.

Thanks to Warmly’s Orchestrator, they put this process on autopilot, ensuring that no quality leads fall through the cracks.


The results?

  1. An overall increase in email engagement rates.
  2. A reduction in LinkedIn Ad spend.
  3. Closing two deals worth $10k in total in under two weeks.

Next steps

Your primary business goals will be key in choosing between growth marketing and demand generation.

Both are efficient and useful in their own way, with one focusing on immediate results and the other on building long-term relationships.

In most cases, a hybrid approach might work the best, ensuring you won’t miss out on any opportunities.

Ultimately, you know your business best, and with all the info you picked up here, making the right choice won’t be as tough.

Remember, though, that your website is an essential part of all marketing strategies, so it's always a good idea to put effort into unlocking its optimal lead acquisition potential—and Warmly can help with that.

Want to find out how?

Sign up for Warmly’s free plan and start filling your pipeline with qualified leads within minutes.

Related reading:

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Demand Generation Vs Demand Capture: What are the Differences (2024)

Demand Generation Vs Demand Capture: What are the Differences (2024)

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Ever wondered which marketing strategy is right for your business: demand generation vs demand capture?

While both concepts drive sales, each focuses on different stages of the customer journey and uses unique tactics. 

Demand generation includes the things you do to create demand for your service or product among potential customers.

Conversely, demand capture is a marketing strategy that targets customers who are already in the market and ready to buy.

In this article, we'll explore the difference between demand generation vs capturing existing demand. We'll also share how they complement each other to improve your marketing results. 

Ready? Let's get started! 

What is demand generation?

Demand generation focuses on strategies you use to create interest in your product or service to convert potential customers into paying ones. 

It covers everything you do to capture the attention of audiences who are unfamiliar with your brand and its offerings. This approach involves identifying the pain points of your target customers and providing solutions.

The process involves building or increasing awareness and creating demand for a product or service. You can achieve this by providing valuable information that highlights the need for what you offer. 

So, what's the role of demand generation in creating market awareness?

How does demand generation target potential customers? 

Demand generation targets potential customers unaware of a product or service by creating awareness and interest through strategic marketing efforts. 

It involves selecting a target audience, understanding their needs, and using the information to create relevant content that will resonate with them.

This content is distributed through various channels like social media posts, blogs, and infographics to educate potential customers about the benefits and value of the offerings.

Additionally, demand generation uses tactics like SEO and influencer outreaches to increase visibility and attract new audiences.

This means you can create informative and engaging content to guide your potential customers through their buying journey and convert them into paying customers.

Here's an example to help you understand what demand generation does to create awareness about a product: 

When a SaaS company creates a new type of project management software, they often find ways to create a demand for the tool.

They can decide to launch a content marketing campaign and create a series of blog posts, eBooks, and webinars that highlight the challenges of managing remote teams. 

These resources educate potential customers on the advantages of using project management tools to improve workflow and team collaboration. This way, the company builds awareness and interest in their software, creating demand among businesses looking for solutions to improve their remote work efficiency. 

Now, what are the effective tactics you can use for demand generation?

What are demand generation tactics for targeting potential customers? 

If you want to reach your potential customers, build interest for a service or product they aren't aware of, and drive customer acquisition, try out these key tactics:

It deals with creating informative and valuable content like blogs, videos, infographics, and other content types to attract the attention of an audience and educate them about your offerings. With this strategy, you can establish your brand as a thought leader on the subject you're focused on and earn the trust of your target audience.

This method helps capture prospects' interest and stirs up the desire to learn more about your brand.


Hubspot offers free resources to its prospects. 


Surfer provides free SEO resources via blog posts.

  • Search engine optimization (SEO): SEO puts you in the face of your potential customers. It's a lead generation strategy that focuses on optimizing content for search engines so your potential customers can easily find you.

This formula works by using relevant keywords and improving your website structure so you can increase your visibility on the search results pages and attract users who are already searching for solutions that are related to your products.


Mailchimp targeted the keyphrase “Content marketing” for demand generation. 

  • Social media marketing: Another effective demand-generation method is social media marketing. You can use your social media platforms to reach a broader audience. You can achieve this by sharing engaging content and interacting with your followers and page visitors. This will enable you to build a community of loyal followers around your brand.

Also, social media lets you perform targeted advertising so you can effectively reach a specific demographic.



Sharing engaging and relevant content can help you generate demand. 

  • Influencer outreach: In this strategy, you partner with influencers in your niche or industry to project your brand's message and reach.

These influencers can introduce and promote your brand as a solution to a specific problem (or problems) in your niche. This way, they will build interest in their followers and persuade them to subscribe to your service or buy your products.

This strategy works well because their followers can easily relate to them and trust their recommendations.




Examples of influencer marketing. 

What is demand capture? 

Demand capture deals with the actions you take to make prospects choose you over your competitors.

It's a marketing strategy focused on converting potential customers in your target market actively seeking what you offer.

The goal is to capitalize on existing demand and generate revenue from low-friction prospects ready to buy.

This method seeks to increase ROI by efficiently converting warm leads into short- to medium-term revenue.

Demand capture integrates seamlessly with the sales funnel by focusing on the later stages of the buyer's journey.

Here's how: 

In demand capture, you look for prospects that need what you have to offer. At this stage, you're not about to convince them to recognize a need. Instead, your goal is to make them choose you over your competitors. 

Unlike demand generation, demand capture is about converting existing demand into revenue by engaging with prospects actively exploring their options.

How do you find these ready-to-buy prospects?

This is where Warmly steals the show. Warmly enables you to identify and classify the individuals and companies that visit your website. The tool scouts different sources to provide you insights on potential leads who have shown interest but have not yet converted. This way, you can send them personalized follow-up messages, special offers, discounts, and other promotional deals.



What are the key tactics to adopt in demand capture?

  • Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: PPC is lead conversion-focused and lets you target specific audiences based on locations, relevant keywords, and demographics.

This method ensures you target the audiences actively searching for what you offer, and this can increase your chances of converting them almost immediately.



Examples of PPC advertisements in Google search


  • Retargeting: You can retarget prospects who have previously visited your website or engaged with your posts on social media. With retargeting, you'll repeatedly remind them of your offerings, encourage interaction, and increase your chances of converting them into customers.

This method works by displaying your ads to these audiences via different channels to remind them of their initial interest and persuade them to complete a purchase. 

Additionally, retargeting increases your brand visibility and keeps your business top of mind of your target audiences. This way, prospects are more likely to choose your brand when they are ready to buy.


An example of a Clickup ad on Youtube. 

  • Conversion rate optimization (CRO): This involves optimizing various aspects of your website to enable you to convert a higher percentage of your visitors. You identify and eliminate things that can prevent conversations and tailor your website experience and offerings to meet the needs of your audience. 

For example, you can optimize your landing pages and call-to-action (CTA) strategies to increase your lead conversion. Furthermore, you can also experiment with other strategies and see how they perform in terms of lead conversion.

  • Social media advertising: Social media marketing provides tools to monitor your engagement metrics, conversion rate, and overall campaign performance. This will help you learn how well your strategies are performing and point out the areas to make necessary adjustments to improve their performance.

Also, social media provides a channel for promoting special offers, discounts, and other promotional deals. You can create urgency through time-sensitive deals and motivate prospects to take immediate action.



Examples of social media posts that promote discount offers. 

What happens when you integrate both strategies? Let's find out.

How do demand generation and demand capture complement each other? 

Demand generation and demand capture are both effective marketing strategies that can significantly boost the effectiveness of your business's sales funnel.

Demand generation has a sole aim– lead generation and demand capture focuses on lead conversion.

When combined, demand generation and demand capture provide a holistic marketing approach that addresses every stage of the customer journey. 

Let's explain further how they complement each other.

Engaging customers throughout the buying journey 

As stated earlier, demand generation seeks to build awareness, attract potential customers, and educate them about their needs and the solutions available to help.

This phase is crucial if you're looking to build or increase your brand recognition and establish trust.

For instance, you're adopting demand generation when you use content marketing, social media campaigns, and influencer outreach to create interest in audiences who are yet to recognize their need for your product or service.

On the other hand, demand capture targets prospects who are already aware of their problems and actively seeking solutions. This strategy uses tactics like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and retargeting to engage these high-intent individuals.

With these two strategies, you will engage with prospects at every stage of their journey, from initial interest to final purchase.

So, demand generation creates a steady flow of new leads, while demand capture ensures that those leads are effectively converted into sales.

Creating a sustainable pipeline

Demand generation helps you to build a pipeline of potential customers. As you constantly educate and nurture leads, you'll maintain a consistent flow of prospects who may turn into customers.

This long-term strategy will help you avoid stagnation, expand your market reach, and prepare you for future opportunities.

Conversely, demand capture deals with turning these leads into actual sales. When you target individuals who are already interested and ready to buy, you can make immediate sales needs and also benefit from the groundwork and effort of demand generation.

With both approaches, you'll gain sustainable growth by balancing the need for short-term revenue with the importance of building long-term customer relationships.

Maximizing marketing efficiency

Integrating demand generation and demand capture strategies will enable you to achieve a higher return on your marketing investments. 

Demand generation expands your audience reach via creating awareness and interest, while demand capture ensures that most of those interested prospects are converted. 

This way, you don't need to over-rely on one strategy but smoothly transition audiences from awareness to purchase decisions.

Balancing short-term and long-term goals

Demand capture often delivers quicker results by converting leads who are ready to make a purchase. This immediate revenue generation is vital for business sustainability.

But, relying solely on demand capture can lead to a narrow focus that neglects the need to nurture future customers. 

In contrast, demand generation emphasizes the need to build long-term relationships by constantly educating potential customers. With these sustained relationships with potential customers, you can ensure steady streams of leads over time.

A balanced approach that combines both strategies lets companies achieve immediate revenue while also investing in future growth. This balance is crucial to help you stay ahead and relevant in the market.

Sales funnel optimization

While demand generation fills the top of the funnel, demand capture converts the bottom of the funnel.

Demand generation ensures the top of your funnel remains consistently full. This strategy provides a steady inflow of prospects, and demand capture focuses on not letting interested prospects slip away without converting.

And if the top of your funnel is underperforming, demand generation helps boost visibility and lead generation.

Plus, if the middle or bottom of your funnel is where leads stall, demand capture optimizes conversion efforts through tailored campaigns to convert them.

Let's see an example of how they work together:

Let's say a retail software company, Xenia, uses demand generation strategies to publish how-to guides on optimizing multi-location staff scheduling, attracting interest from retail managers who will learn about the importance of staff scheduling software and become interested in trying out the software.

As these leads show intent, demand capture uses strategies like free trial offers or discounts to speed up their conversion process by letting them try out the software's features.

Examples of successful integration

Several businesses exemplify the successful integration of demand generation and demand capture:

Simultaneously, they use targeted PPC campaigns (demand capture) to convert leads who are actively searching for marketing solutions. This dual approach not only builds brand awareness but also drives conversions.

You can check out how Hubspot creates great ad copies. 

  • Salesforce: Salesforce uses a comprehensive approach by providing valuable resources and tools that educate users about CRM solutions (demand generation). 


Salesforce offers educational materials to attract prospects. 

They also use targeted email marketing campaigns to engage leads who have shown intent to purchase (demand capture), this ensures that interested prospects receive the information they need to convert.

  • Adobe: Adobe adopts an integrated strategy by offering extensive tutorials (demand generation) to attract users to their software. Once users are engaged, Adobe uses targeted ads and personalized follow-ups (demand capture) to convert these leads into paying customers.


Adobe offers free resources to attract users. 

When to focus on demand generation vs demand capture?

You'll need to know when to focus on demand generation vs demand capture to optimize your marketing strategies effectively. This is because each approach serves distinct purposes and is influenced by factors like business goals, marketing priorities, industry trends, and customer behavior. 

Below are some scenarios that will need you to focus on demand generation:

  • When you launch a new product: When introducing a new product or service, you need demand generation strategies to create awareness and educate your potential customers about the product's benefits. This is primarily important if the product addresses a problem that your target audience is yet to identify.
  • When expanding into new markets: If you plan to enter a new geographical area or demographic, you'll need to generate demand to build brand recognition and attract a new customer base that may not be familiar with the offerings and their benefits.
  • When you aim to build a long-term brand image: If you want to establish your company as a thought leader in your industry, you should focus on demand generation. This includes creating valuable content that educates and engages potential customers and builds trust and loyalty.
  • When you notice a change in customer behavior: If you notice a shift in your consumers' preferences or behaviors, you can adopt demand generation tactics to help you re-engage customers and inform them about new solutions that meet their current needs. 

Let's see the situations that will require you to focus on demand capture:

  • High-intent prospects: When targeting individuals or businesses that have already shown interest in your products or services, you need to use demand capture strategies. This strategy focuses on converting leads already set to buy, thus shortening the sales cycle.
  • Established products in competitive markets: If you sell well-known established products, especially in industries with many competitors, you can focus on demand capture to drive immediate sales. In such industries, customers are already actively looking for products or services similar to what your company offers.

With demand capturing efforts like running targeted ads, and optimizing landing pages, you can attract these ready-to-buy customers who are set to make purchase decisions and make faster conversions.

  • Seasonal promotions or time-sensitive offers: Demand capture is highly effective at conversion during certain periods like holidays, seasonal events, or promotional campaigns (like Black Friday or a product launch). You can use highly targeted marketing campaigns like limited-time offers, discounts, or exclusive deals to capitalize on the urgency or heightened interest during these times.
  • Post-engagement follow-ups: After you win the initial interest of your potential customers through demand generation efforts, you should pivot to demand capture to nurture these leads and convert them into customers. You can effectively follow-up your leads with tools like Warmly. Warmly automates outreach through various channels like Email, LinkedIn, and Chat. With this, you can engage with prospects across the channels they prefer. Plus Warmly can also help you send personalized messages and follow-ups automatically.


Demand generation vs demand capture: how to get started.

Choosing between demand generation vs demand capture depends largely on your business goals, industry, and customer behavior.

However, you need an integrated marketing strategy to strike a balance and avoid relying extensively on one approach as both strategies complement each other.

You can evaluate your current strategy to see if you need to make some adjustments.

If you're yet to figure out how to start the whole process, you can connect with companies like Warmly to help you get started with your demand generation and demand capture process.

Related Reading:

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The Warmly Movie: How and Why We Did It

The Warmly Movie: How and Why We Did It

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Alan Zhao

Meet Jack. 

‎Jack’s got a real big problem. The salesperson’s worst nightmare, in fact. 

→ He’s on track to miss quota.

→ And the CEO is breathing down his neck. 

His reps are looking to him for leadership, but he doesn’t know where those all-important KPIs will come from. 

He’s got all the tech, a super passionate team—and no idea. 

Although Jack’s problems are very real, Jack himself isn’t. 

Jack’s the star of Warmly’s brand-new feature film, Quota Crushers. 

But before we unveil the movie, a bit of background. (You’ve got time to get the popcorn going.) 

Why We Made the Warmly Movie

This is actually more of a two-parter. 

  1. We wanted to explain Warmly's perspective on where we think modern B2B sales are going wrong (and how to change that). 
  2. And bring the Warmly brand to new audiences in a new way.

We envisaged the movie as the story of Warmly, told with our trademark humor and a hefty dose of our expert GTM perspective.

See, B2B sales are only getting more complicated. Everyone’s building the next big thing and competing for shorter attention spans. 

Budgets have been tightened. Revenue expectations are the same (or, in many cases, higher.) 

And B2B buyers? They’re not making purchase decisions like they used to. Sales funnels have gotten more complex, and buying teams have expanded. 

Yet, sales teams still rely on outdated tactics primarily focused on volume over quality. 

Why? Because sales teams have repeatedly been told this is just how we do things.

But cold outreach doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to heat things up—by focusing on warm signals.

When your prospect spends a decent chunk of time looking at your pricing page, makes multiple visits to your product pages, or actively researches your competitors, they’re showing warm signals. 

Focusing on these intent signals will help your sales reps work smarter by prioritizing the leads most likely to buy from you.

We know signal-based selling works, too. Warmly has seen a 3x conversion rate with warm signals. 

But signal-based selling doesn’t work without visibility into who is on your website and the ability to conduct automated, personalized outreach based on intent signals. 

That’s the story of Warmly. And it’s a story we wanted more people to hear. 

How We Made Quote Crushers

Our Co-Founder and Head of Customers, Alan Zhao, has been a long-time movie fan. 

He saw an opportunity to tell the Warmly story in the most visible (and most Warmly) way possible: a feature movie starring the Warmly team. 

Our inspiration was Melissa Rosenthal, ex-CCO at ClickUp, who created some of the best B2B video campaigns with her in-house creative team. We wanted our media to prioritize humor, authenticity, and creativity in a uniquely Warmly way.

So, we flew the entire team to Mexico City for a company offsite and shot our movie with a local video crew as part of team bonding activities.

Image Source‎

We partitioned off a section of OpenHub, Mexico’s WeWork, for the set, auditioned team members, and chose roles based on energy and fit. 

So, the cast is 100% Warmly: from our Head of Sales, Jack (the Software Cowboy himself, Keegan Otter), to the hero of the hour, Rev Ops man Steve Murphy (Warmly Co-Founder and CEO, Maximus Greenwald). 

Image Source‎

The budget? $15,000. The deadline? One day to film it all.

But our genius exec producer, Connor Lewis, planned and pulled it off expertly, while Alan assisted with the script and directing. 

We flew home with all the footage ready for post-production edits, which we did ourselves.

Finally, for the music, we used Artlist and also contracted the rights to “Hitting the Phones” by Ding Zheng (Sales Rapper) (an amazing song; look up the full version.) 

Presenting Quota Crushers: The Warmly Movie

‎So, grab your popcorn—it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for 🍿

Presenting… Quota Crushers: The Warmly Movie. 

"In a world of outdated GTM tech and old-school spray and pray tactics, one forward-thinking RevOps leader takes it upon himself to change the way his team does prospecting... and crushes quota."

A huge thank you to the production team and cast who put their all into making this.

Starring: Keegan Otter, Katherine Barnes, Maximus Greenwald

Directed and Produced: Connor Lewis and Alan Zhao 

Music: Hitting the Phones - Ding Zheng (EventShark)

Cinematography: Juan Carlos Lelo de Larrea 

Are you struggling like Jack right now but don’t want to admit it? You can get started with Warmly for free in just a few clicks.

Want to speak to one of our star reps before they inevitably leave Warmly for the glittering lights of Hollywood? (Just joking.) Book a demo of Warmly.

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SaaS Demand Generation: Ultimate Guide for 2024

SaaS Demand Generation: Ultimate Guide for 2024

Time to read

Alan Zhao

Demand generation is one of the key areas SaaS companies must focus on to build a consistent sales pipeline.

Why?

Well, because SaaS demand generation ensures that you’ll:

  • Create and perpetuate interest in your product offering.
  • Build lasting relationships with potential leads by educating and nurturing them.
  • Fill your funnel with qualified leads prepped up for sales to take over.

Sounds good, right?

However, building a strong SaaS demand generation strategy can be challenging, especially if you’ve never done it before.

In this detailed guide, we’ll explain all the SaaS demand generation essentials, helping you understand what you need to do—and how—to craft an efficient and resilient SaaS demand generation strategy.

What is SaaS demand generation?

So, what is SaaS demand generation in the first place?

Demand generation for SaaS is the process of creating awareness, interest, and desire for a software product throughout the buyer's journey. 

Therefore, this strategy focuses on:

  • Driving interest among your target audience.
  • Nurturing them over time.
  • Getting them to a point where they are ready to convert into paying customers. 

Also, due to the subscription-based nature of SaaS offerings, SaaS demand generation often emphasizes ongoing engagement, as the need to build strong and lasting relationships is more prominent than with traditional product sales.

This point underscores the importance of having a well-structured demand generation strategy if you’re a SaaS company. Namely, generating sustainable interest and demand for your product is critical to long-term business growth and customer acquisition. 

And since SaaS businesses rely heavily on scalability, creating consistent demand is essential for staying competitive and continuing to grow.

That’s exactly what having a solid demand generation strategy enables SaaS companies to do, as it helps:

  1. Attract quality leads.
  2. Nurture them consistently and effectively, building trust and brand loyalty.
  3. Increase the likelihood of conversion.
  4. Retain customers more efficiently.

How demand generation differs from lead generation

The definition of SaaS demand generation might make you wonder how exactly it differs from lead generation, especially as the terms are often used interchangeably.

However, they actually serve significantly different purposes, making them distinct - yet complementary - marketing strategies in the SaaS space.

Demand generation encompasses creating awareness and nurturing potential customers through various stages of the sales funnel.

It's all about creating demand for a product, regardless of whether or not a direct lead is immediately generated. 

Lead generation, on the other hand, focuses specifically on capturing potential customers' contact information, usually after they’ve shown interest in the product. 

This typically occurs once demand has been generated and prospects have engaged with some form of content, like signing up for a webinar or downloading an eBook.

So, although they’re two entirely different marketing approaches, demand generation and lead generation are closely related, as one helps boost the efficiency of the other.

Demand generation helps create a strong foundation of awareness and interest, making it easier to convert leads later, whereas lead generation focuses on harnessing the interest created by demand generation, aiming to turn engaged prospects into actionable leads ready for the sales team.

B2B SaaS demand generation vs. B2C

It’s important to note that SaaS demand generation strategies and approaches differ depending on whether you have a B2B or a B2C business model.

In B2B SaaS, the sales cycle is typically much longer and more complex, as B2B purchasing decisions often involve multiple stakeholders, all of which must be convinced of the product’s value. 

As a result, demand generation in this space focuses heavily on personalized and educational content that informs and guides these stakeholders through the decision-making process. 

Therefore, common tools for nurturing B2B prospects over time include whitepapers, case studies, in-depth product demos, webinars, and ABM.

On the other hand, B2C SaaS demand generation has a much shorter sales cycle, as decisions are usually made by individual consumers or small teams, which means that B2C demand generation must capture attention and build trust quickly. 

Consequently, B2C demand generation content is often more streamlined, focusing on product benefits, convenience, ease of use, or entertainment and highlighting how the product improves the consumer’s personal life. 

Tactics like freemium models, limited-time offers, tutorial videos, social proof, and social media engagement are usually most effective in moving consumers quickly from awareness to purchase.

Why is demand generation crucial for SaaS companies?

In case you’re still wondering whether you should invest in demand generation, here are some of the key reasons why you should most definitely include demand generation in your sales and marketing efforts.

For SaaS companies, demand generation goes beyond simply filling the sales funnel with leads.

It focuses on building awareness, trust, and authority within the target audience, which is essential in a highly competitive digital market. 

Namely, in the SaaS business model, which often relies on subscription renewals and upsells, retaining existing customers is as crucial as acquiring new ones, if not more so.

This means that customers need to be continually reminded of the value they are receiving, which is exactly what demand generation enables you to do.

On the one hand, demand generation helps you differentiate yourself from the competition and position yourself as indispensable to your audience by:

  • Educating potential customers about your product’s benefits.
  • Addressing their pain points.
  • Highlighting your software’s unique value proposition.

On the other, it helps with driving loyalty and reducing the risk of churn by:

  • Maintaining continuous communication with customers through personalized content and social media engagement.
  • Providing how-to videos, product tutorials, rich resource centers, and customer success content that helps users get the most out of the product.

Finally, demand generation helps you keep leads and customers satisfied and engaged throughout the buying cycle. 

As a result, it makes it more likely for customers to become brand advocates and refer your product to their peers, which can lead to additional organic growth.

Key components of a SaaS demand generation strategy

A successful SaaS demand generation strategy integrates various marketing techniques to create awareness, generate interest, and guide prospects through the sales funnel, including the following:

1. Content marketing

No demand generation strategy can be complete without content marketing, and the same goes for SaaS.

SaaS products often solve complex problems - such as accounting automation or financial risk assessment - and customers need to be educated on how the software can benefit them. 

A well-executed content marketing strategy involves creating informative, valuable content that addresses pain points, demonstrates product value, and nurtures prospects throughout their buyer’s journey.

Types of content that are highly effective in SaaS demand generation include:

  • Blog posts to drive organic traffic through SEO and educate prospects.

  • Whitepapers and eBooks to offer in-depth solutions and capture leads.
  • Case studies that showcase customer success stories.
  • Webinars and video tutorials that explain product features and use cases.

For best results, each piece of content should align with different sales funnel stages and provide value that leads prospects one step closer to conversion.

2. SEO 

SEO is essential for driving organic traffic to a SaaS website. 

SaaS buyers usually begin their journey with a search engine query, so it's crucial to ensure that your content ranks highly for relevant keywords. 

Therefore, efficient SaaS demand generation requires:

  • Keyword research to identify high-value search terms related to your product and industry.
  • Optimizing website pages, blogs, and other content for short and long-tail keywords.
  • Implementing on-page SEO best practices, such as optimizing meta tags, headers, and content structure.
  • Building backlinks through partnerships, guest blogging, and high-authority publications.

Moreover, consistent SEO efforts can save you money, as you won’t have to rely as heavily on paid advertising to get a steady stream of qualified prospects.

Pro tip: Use a website visitor identification tool like Warmly to capitalize on both organic and paid website traffic.

This way, you’ll know exactly who’s visiting your website, how they interact with it, and how interested they are in your product.

3. Paid advertising and PPC

While organic search is important, paid advertising can speed up your demand generation efforts by providing immediate visibility.

PPC campaigns on platforms like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook enable SaaS companies to target specific audiences based on intent, demographics, and behaviors. 

Some of the best ways to use paid advertising for optimal results include:

  • Creating targeted ads based on buyer personas.
  • Running retargeting campaigns to engage visitors who have interacted with your site but haven't yet converted.
  • A/B testing ads and landing pages to optimize conversion rates.

4. Social media engagement

Social media offers SaaS companies an opportunity to build brand awareness, engage with prospects, and drive traffic. 

Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook provide channels for distributing content, connecting with industry influencers, and interacting with potential customers. 

To engage your prospects on social media, focus on:

  • Sharing thought leadership content that positions your brand as an industry expert.
  • Engaging with followers through polls, Q&A sessions, and discussions.
  • Leveraging paid social ads to target specific demographics and interest groups.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to nurture leads and guide them toward conversion, and SaaS is no different.

In a SaaS demand generation strategy, email campaigns should be highly personalized and segmented based on prospects' stages of the buyer’s journey. 

Effective email marketing includes:

  • Drip campaigns that gradually educate and build trust with potential customers.
  • Product announcements to highlight new features or updates.
  • Personalized offers and discounts based on user behavior and engagement.
  • Onboarding emails that guide new customers through product setup and early usage.

6. Account-based marketing 

ABM focuses on creating highly personalized marketing and sales strategies for specific companies or decision-makers, making it essential for doing SaaS demand generation right.

Key elements of ABM include:

  • Developing customized content that addresses the unique needs of each target account.
  • Coordinating efforts between marketing and sales to create a seamless approach.
  • Using personalized outreach, such as tailored email campaigns, direct mail, or customized product demos.

Moreover, ABM enables you to focus resources on accounts with the highest potential for long-term value, helping you save time and money otherwise wasted on low-value accounts.

How to create a high-converting SaaS demand generation funnel?

Having a well-structured demand generation funnel helps SaaS businesses attract qualified prospects, nurture them with valuable content, and ultimately convert them into paying customers. 

Let’s explore some of the key tactics to apply in each funnel stage:

1. Top-of-Funnel (TOFU): Building awareness

At the top of the funnel, the goal is to attract a broad audience and create awareness of your SaaS product. 

The top-of-funnel stage is all about attracting visitors, creating awareness of your SaaS product, and piquing your audience’s interest to set up the foundation for further engagement.

To achieve this, focus on educating potential customers about their challenges and explaining how your product can help solve them. 

Several tactics work best in this stage, including:

  • Content marketing - Publish blog posts, how-to guides, and explainer videos that address common pain points in your industry. 
  • SEO - Ensure that your content ranks for relevant keywords to increase visibility in search engines.
  • Paid ads and PPC - Use Google Ads, LinkedIn, and Facebook to target specific personas likely to be interested in your product.
  • Free trials and freemiums - Offer a free trial or a freemium version of your product to allow prospects to experience the value of your SaaS firsthand.

2. Middle-of-Funnel (MOFU): Nurturing leads

The middle of the funnel is about building relationships and positioning your SaaS product as the ideal solution.

Namely, once prospects know about your product, the middle of the funnel focuses on nurturing those leads and guiding them closer to a purchasing decision. 

At this stage, prospects evaluate your product’s features and compare it to competitors. 

So, the key is to provide deeper, more detailed content that builds trust and educates leads on why your SaaS solution best fits their needs. 

Effective MOFU tactics include:

  • Webinars and case studies - Offer in-depth webinars, product demos, and case studies that showcase real-world use cases and customer success stories.
  • Email campaigns - Use automated email sequences to deliver personalized content to leads based on their behavior and interests. 
  • Product comparisons and whitepapers - Provide detailed whitepapers and product comparison guides to help leads understand how your solution compares to alternatives.
  • Interactive demos - Offer prospects the chance to see your product in action through personalized, interactive demos, allowing them to experience key features firsthand.

‎

3. Bottom-of-Funnel (BOFU): Driving conversion

The bottom of the funnel is where decisions are made, so it’s essential to remove any barriers to conversion and clearly demonstrate the value of your SaaS product.

At this stage, leads are nearing a decision, so the focus shifts to encouraging them to take action and convert into paying customers by providing the right incentives and demonstrating ROI. 

Key strategies for this stage include:

  • Personalized demos and free consultations - Offer one-on-one product demos or consultations tailored to your prospect's specific needs. This lets you address their unique challenges and highlight the most relevant features of your SaaS product.
  • Limited-time offers and discounts - Provide exclusive deals, discounts, or extended trial periods to create a sense of urgency and incentivize immediate action.
  • Customer testimonials and reviews - Showcase customer testimonials, success stories, and third-party reviews to build credibility and trust. Seeing how your SaaS product has benefited others can help prospects feel confident in their decision.

  • Clear and simple onboarding - Ensure that potential customers will receive seamless onboarding support to get up and running quickly. A strong onboarding process minimizes friction and enhances the likelihood of conversion.

4. Retention and upsell: Post-purchase engagement

When it comes to SaaS companies, the funnel doesn’t end after conversion. 

Retaining customers and expanding their usage over time is key to maximizing customer lifetime value (CLV). 

Therefore, post-purchase engagement focuses on ensuring customer satisfaction, reducing churn, and creating opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. 

Effective retention tactics include:

  • Customer success programs - Provide ongoing customer support and resources to help users get the most out of your product. Proactively engage with customers to address their needs and concerns.
  • Regular product updates and feature announcements - Keep customers engaged by introducing new features, updates, and improvements to the product.
  • Upsell and cross-sell opportunities - As customers become more familiar with your product, offer them additional features or higher-tier plans that can enhance their experience.

What are the best practices for SaaS demand generation in 2024?

As the SaaS market continues to grow and evolve, demand generation strategies must adapt to new trends and technologies to stay ahead of the curve, which will only get steeper.

This means that companies will have to stay dedicated to constantly refining and optimizing their strategies.

We'll share a few of the best SaaS demand generation practices to help you ensure that your demand generation approach stays as efficient as possible in 2024 and beyond.

1. Customer-centric approach is the way to go

The era we live in is all about providing highly personalized brand experiences fitted to each customer.

SaaS buyers expect tailored experiences that cater to their unique needs, pain points, and interests. Thus, generic messaging and one-size-fits-all content have become big no-nos.

Instead, SaaS companies need to:

  • Develop detailed buyer personas to ensure messaging and content resonate with specific audience segments.
  • Use behavioral data to deliver personalized content, emails, and offers at the right stage of the buyer’s journey.
  • Incorporate dynamic content into marketing efforts, such as personalized landing pages and targeted email campaigns that adjust based on user behavior.

This way, SaaS businesses can create deeper connections with prospects, increasing the chances of conversion.

2. Don’t shy away from AI and machine learning 

AI and machine learning have already transformed almost every industry, and SaaS is no exception. 

Namely, AI and ML enable SaaS companies to make data-driven decisions and, as a result, create more precise and effective marketing campaigns across levels.

For instance, AI engines can help:

  • Automate personalized content recommendations based on customer behavior and preferences.
  • Predict customer intent by analyzing user data, allowing marketers to proactively target the right prospects at the right time.
  • Optimize ad campaigns and budgets, using machine learning algorithms to determine which channels and messages yield the best results.
  • Improve lead scoring by analyzing a wider ranga of data attributes, ensuring that sales teams focus on the highest-quality leads.
  • Make chatbots smarter and better at engaging and qualifying leads.

3. Test and improve strategies over time

The digital landscape has become so fast-paced that what works perfectly well today may fail miserably tomorrow.

That’s why continuous optimization and testing are critical to maintaining a successful demand generation strategy. 

Therefore, modern SaaS companies need to:

  • Conduct A/B testing on email campaigns, landing pages, and ads regularly to identify what resonates most with their audience.
  • Use data and analytics to monitor campaign performance, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven adjustments.
  • Focus on customer feedback to understand what aspects of the demand generation process are working well and where potential gaps might exist.

Common mistakes to avoid in SaaS demand generation

To get demand generation right, it’s crucial to understand some of the most frequently made mistakes that can slow you down and compromise the efficiency of your strategies.

Let’s list the most common mistakes SaaS companies make when crafting and executing demand generation strategies so you can successfully avoid them.

1. Neglecting demand generation altogether

One of the biggest mistakes SaaS companies make is placing too much emphasis on lead generation and not enough on demand generation. 

While lead generation is important for capturing prospects, demand generation is a broader strategy intent on building awareness and interest over time. 

Therefore, companies focusing solely on gathering leads without nurturing them through the entire funnel often struggle to convert those leads into customers later.

2. Not investing enough in lead nurturing

For SaaS businesses, customer retention is as critical as customer acquisition. 

However, many SaaS companies seem to forget that and focus heavily on generating new leads while failing to implement strategies to retain existing customers. 

And as the SaaS model thrives on subscription renewals, neglecting customer retention can lead to high churn rates, ultimately hindering growth. 

3. Failing to use data and analytics

Data and analytics are essential to refining demand generation strategies, yet many SaaS companies fail to fully leverage them. 

Not monitoring KPIs or neglecting to analyze campaign effectiveness can result in wasted marketing dollars and missed opportunities for optimization. 

All SaaS businesses should constantly track metrics like customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and MQLs to understand which tactics are working and where improvements must be made. 

4. Overcomplicating the buyer’s journey

Although you might be tempted to create an intricate buyer’s journey, doing so can make the overall experience overly complex and fragmented, confusing prospects and putting them off.

For instance, bombarding potential customers with too much information at once or creating unnecessary hurdles in the sign-up process can result in lost conversions. 

In this case, simpler is always better, as clear, frictionless, and easy-to-navigate pathways from awareness to conversion are key to successful demand generation. 

Examples of SaaS demand generation

Looking into other businesses’ yards to see how they’re handling demand generation can help you design your own strategy, especially when you’re looking up to companies that are absolutely rocking it.

Here are three examples of successful demand generation strategies you can use as inspiration when creating yours.

1. HockeyStack

First up is HockeyStack, a platform designed to help sales and marketing teams drive more revenue and secure a steady pipeline.

Given its specific offering and target audience, HoneyStack has an elaborate demand generation strategy that entails:

  • Regularly posting on LinkedIn to drive prospect engagement and brand loyalty - Its posts include feature and upgrade announcements, success stories, tips and tricks for raising brand awareness and increasing conversions, etc. 

  • Creating a repository of industry benchmarks, data insights, trends, etc. - HockeyStack Labs provides leads with a massive library of relevant trends, studies, reports, and more, all of which provide significant value. This helps raise brand awareness and build trust with leads.
  • Investing in gamified content - HockeyStack’s Flow is marketed as “Netflix for B2B”, and it essentially comprises games, podcasts, and series dealing with important B2B marketing topics. This enables leads to mix learning with entertainment, allowing HockeyStack to drive loyalty and trust.

2. Arcade

Arcade is an interactive demo platform.

Given this industry's competitive market, investing in demand generation was a must for Arcade to cut through the noise.

This is why the company focused on:

  • Publishing educational blogs - Arcade invests heavily in publishing SEO-optimized content, which helps raise brand awareness, improve SERP rankings and domain rating, and establish it as an industry leader.

  • Sharing social proof—As an interactive demo platform, Arcade leverages its customers’ success stories and best-in-class demos to showcase its product. This strategy helps drive trust, as leads are likelier to believe other customers than traditional marketing approaches.
  • Building a rich knowledge base - This helps make the entire onboarding and product adoption process much easier, improving overall customer satisfaction and boosting retention rates.

3. Arc

Arc is a FinTech company that helps modern startups better manage their idle cash.

As such, it has a highly specific target market, so it had to pay close attention to designing an adequate demand generation approach.

To create demand and capture it efficiently, Arc leveraged:

  • Email outreach - To raise brand awareness and nurture trust, Arc used drip campaigns targeting ICPs.
  • Multichannel campaigns - Arc made sure to stay top-of-mind by using social media, content, in-person and online events, SEO, and more.
  • First-class customer support - To boost retention rates.

All those efforts combined resulted in Arc gaining significant traction online, but its team was unable to:

  1. Handle attribution, as they had no way of knowing which of their strategies were working and to what extent.
  2. Capture the demand they generated, as they couldn’t identify leads who ended up on their website.

To overcome these challenges, Arc implemented Warmly, which enabled it to:

  • Detect visitors with the highest levels of buying intent.
  • Track visitors who’ve come through specific email campaigns, enabling them to understand which are performing well.
  • Engage visitors through AI Chat and qualify them.

As a result, Arc experienced 200% ROI in just 6 months.


Wrapping up

Building an efficient SaaS demand generation strategy requires time, effort, and lots of planning.

However, the tips, best practices, and efficient SaaS demand generation examples we provided here will surely help you quickly grasp the concept.

And to ensure that you’ll be able to actually capture the demand you’ve successfully created, don’t forget to implement Warmly as part of your strategy.

The platform will enable you to identify website visitors and engage them while they’re still hot, boosting the likelihood of conversion.

Try it yourself - sign up for Warmly’s free plan and start capturing qualified leads within minutes.

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How to Build a Demand Generation Strategy [2024]

How to Build a Demand Generation Strategy [2024]

Time to read

Alan Zhao

An efficient and resilient demand generation strategy is crucial for cutting through the noise of today’s competitive market.

However, building one that works for your unique goals and needs isn’t that easy—which is what brought you here in the first place.

In this detailed guide, we’ll explain how to build a successful demand generation marketing strategy that will help you raise brand awareness, attract prospects, and drive them further down the sales funnel.

Let’s dive straight in!

What is demand generation?

It’s always best to begin by breaking down the basics, so here’s a quick reminder of what demand generation entails.

Demand gen is a specific marketing strategy that focuses on creating demand and interest in a product or service and nurturing them throughout the buyer's journey. 

To achieve this, demand generation aims to build long-term relationships by:

  1. Educating potential customers on topics closely related to their interests and needs on the one hand and your product as the ideal solution on the other.
  2. Addressing their pain points and showing that their well-being matters to you by distributing valuable content and resources focused on helping them solve these issues.
  3. Guiding them through the sales funnel with a combination of nurturing efforts.

This unique approach sheds light on the key differences between demand generation and traditional marketing, which lie in their main objectives and methodologies.

When it comes to traditional marketing, it typically focuses on broad campaigns aimed at raising general customer awareness and driving short-term sales. 

In contrast, demand generation is more holistic, integrating various tactics such as content marketing, lead nurturing, and personalized outreach to create and maintain constant interest and engagement throughout the buyer’s journey.

Consequently, demand generation plays a crucial role in the sales funnel, as it helps prospects progress from mere brand awareness to becoming actionable leads. 

Namely, due to its focus on building trust and continuously engaging with prospects to move them closer to a purchasing decision, demand generation both:

  1. Boosts overall efficiency of your sales and marketing teams.
  2. Increases the quality of leads that move down the funnel, as they’ll already have an established relationship with your brand when they get to your sales team.

This means that demand generation essentially enables a seamless transition from sparking initial interest to closing sales deals, making it a key factor in driving long-term business growth.

Which brings us to the next question.

Why is having a demand generation strategy important?

Today’s digital landscape requires businesses to put in the extra effort to stay competitive, and that’s where demand generation strategies step in.

By focusing on targeted engagement throughout the buyer’s journey, demand generation improves the quality of leads entering the sales funnel and boosts conversion rates.

The reason is simple: high-quality leads nurtured through tailored content and personalized interactions are much more likely to convert into paying customers.

Running a demand generation campaign has another important benefit in improving your overall business success and performance - it helps align marketing and sales teams, driving close collaboration between the two departments.

Namely, to do demand generation right, marketing and sales need to work on reaching the same goals—attracting, identifying, and nurturing potential leads with the greatest potential to convert. 

As a result of this alignment, leads that move down the funnel will be qualified, warmed-up, and ready for sales, significantly reducing friction in the sales process and directly leading to more conversions. 

Finally, demand generation has a number of long-term benefits that go well beyond immediate sales. 

If you continuously nurture leads, increase brand awareness, and build trust, you’ll be able to create a robust pipeline of potential customers who are familiar with the brand and trust it, making them more likely to convert.

Moreover, this approach drives customer loyalty, meaning that you’ll also improve retention rates over time.

And all these combined lead to one massive benefit - consistent revenue growth.

That alone is reason enough to include demand generation in your general sales and marketing efforts immediately, if not now.

However, to create an efficient demand generation strategy, you must first know who you’re targeting.

How to identify your target audience?

There are a few key methods you can use to pinpoint who your ideal customers are, including:

  • Surveys - These enable you to gather direct feedback from your current and potential customers, gaining firsthand insight into their preferences, challenges, and needs. 
  • Analytics - You can use various tools to collect relevant data and extract data-driven insights, which can help you understand customer behavior, demographics, and purchasing patterns. 
  • Website traffic tracking - Tools like Warmly enable you to track who visits your website and how they interact with it. This way, you’ll be able to identify the characteristics of your most engaged users.
  • Competitor analysis - Studying your direct competitors' customer base can reveal who they are targeting and how they engage with their audience. This analysis can help you identify gaps in the market or opportunities to make your offering stand out from the crowd.

Finally, once you’ve gathered all these insights, you can use them to create detailed profiles of your ideal customers—i.e., buyer personas—that offer a clear picture of who you should target.

After you’ve identified your target audience, you should focus your efforts on segmenting it, that is, dividing it into smaller, more specific groups based on factors like demographics, behavior, or purchase history.

This kind of audience segmentation is crucial as it enables you to create highly targeted campaigns built to resonate with each segment’s unique needs, which will, in turn, improve both engagement and conversion rates.

What are the key components of a demand generation strategy?

When it comes to building a successful demand generation strategy, it’s important to know that it always consists of several key components, each playing a role in driving awareness, engagement, and conversions. 

Among these components, content marketing, SEO, social media, and paid ads stand out as fundamental pillars.

Let’s get a closer look at each.

Content marketing 

Content marketing is at the heart of demand generation, as it provides valuable, relevant, and consistent content that attracts and nurtures prospects throughout the buyer’s journey. 

You can use various kinds of content to establish your brand as a source of truth and guide potential customers toward choosing your product in the end, including:

  • Blogs
  • Whitepapers
  • Case studies 
  • Webinars
  • Quizzes 
  • Videos, etc.

The types of content you’ll include in your strategy depend only on your goals, vision, product, and resources you’re willing to invest, as they can all drive interest and build trust.

SEO

SEO ensures that your content and website are discoverable by optimizing them for search engines. 

By using relevant keywords, improving site structure, and earning backlinks, SEO increases the visibility of your content in search results, driving organic traffic to your website. 

This organic reach is crucial for attracting high-quality leads actively searching for solutions like yours.

Social media 

Social media networks help amplify your content's reach and drive direct engagement with your audience. 

Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook allow you to share content, interact with prospects, and build relationships in real-time. 

Moreover, social media offers valuable insights into audience behavior and preferences, helping you tailor your demand generation efforts more effectively.

Paid ads 

Paid ads complement your organic efforts by providing targeted exposure to specific audiences.

Using marketing channels like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and social media advertising helps you reach prospects who might not have discovered your brand organically. 

These ads can be fine-tuned to target specific demographics, behaviors, or interests, ensuring your message reaches the right people at the right time.

Creating an integrated approach

Finally, once you’ve got these components figured out, it’s crucial to integrate them to maximize the effect of your demand generation strategy, as each plays a distinct role in it:

  1. Content marketing raises brand awareness and builds trust.
  2. SEO ensures that potential leads will find your content.
  3. Social media enables you to nurture relationships through direct contact.
  4. Paid ads fill in the gaps left by your organic efforts, ensuring your brand will be displayed to relevant audiences.

Therefore, when content marketing, SEO, social media, and paid ads work together, they create a robust, unified approach that:

  • Attracts potential customers.
  • Nurtures them throughout the entire sales funnel, ensuring that your brand stays top-of-mind all the time and increasing the likelihood of conversion.

How to create a content strategy for demand generation?

Since content is pretty much the cornerstone of each demand generation strategy, we’ll explain how exactly to leverage content to get the results you want.

Creating a content strategy for demand generation involves creating and distributing content that attracts potential customers and nurtures them through the buyer’s journey, making them more likely to purchase your product. 

To achieve this, it’s essential to focus on three things:

  1. Choosing the right type of content to create demand
  2. SEO
  3. Align content with different stages of the buyer’s journey

Types of content that drive demand

Various types of content can be used to fuel demand generation efforts, each serving a unique purpose, such as:

  1. Blogs - Blogs are ideal for attracting organic traffic and addressing common questions or challenges your audience faces. As such, they help build brand awareness and establish your brand as a thought leader. 
  2. Whitepapers - They offer in-depth insights into specific topics, making them valuable for prospects in the consideration stage who need detailed information to make the right decision.
  3. Webinars - Webinars provide an interactive platform for engaging with prospects, offering real-time value, and showcasing your expertise. They are particularly effective in the decision stage when prospects are evaluating their options and looking for deeper engagement and connection.

These are just a few examples of efficient content, as other types, such as testimonials, videos, and infographics, can all do the trick equally as well.

The role of SEO in creating content 

SEO plays a crucial role in ensuring that your content reaches the right audience. 

Namely, SEO helps boost content visibility in search engines by:

  1. Optimizing it with keywords relevant to your audience and related to your product.
  2. Improving on-page elements like meta descriptions and headers to make sure that your content meets all the search engine guidelines. 
  3. Ensuring that it is readable. 

This increased visibility drives organic traffic to your content, making it easier for potential customers to discover your brand and engage with it in a meaningful way.

Mapping content to different stages of the buyer’s journey

To maximize the impact of your content strategy, it’s important to align your content with the different stages of the buyer’s journey. 

  1. During the awareness stage, content should focus on educating prospects about their problems and potential solutions. Blog posts, infographics, and social media content are effective here. 
  2. In the consideration stage, where prospects are evaluating different options, more in-depth content like whitepapers, case studies, and comparison guides can help them assess your offerings. 
  3. Finally, in the decision stage, content such as webinars, product demos, and testimonials can provide the final push needed to convert prospects into customers.

How to leverage data and analytics in demand generation?

First off, why is data important?

Given today’s fast-paced market, it’s essential to optimize your campaigns on the go, and having quality data helps you understand what needs improvement and what works well.

This is why investing in tools that can help track essential demand generation metrics is never a bad idea.

For instance, tools like Warmly can help you identify anonymous website visitors and track how they interact with your website content in real-time.

As a result, you’ll be able to:

  • Determine whether the companies and individuals visiting your website actually fit your ICP. If they don’t, it means that the other segments of your demand generation efforts are failing to target the right audience or that your buyer persona needs to be updated.
  • Understand how engaging your website content is by gaining insight into drop-off points, high-converting areas, etc., allowing you to review and improve underperforming parts.

In addition to using Warmly and similar tools, you can test the effectiveness of various parts of your demand generation strategy by applying A/B testing.

By testing different variations of your campaigns - such as email subject lines, landing page designs, or call-to-action buttons - you can determine which elements resonate best with your audience and make necessary improvements. 

How to implement marketing automation in demand generation?

Thanks to its ability to streamline processes and boost efficiencies across levels, automation has become virtually omnipresent in all business areas, including sales and marketing.

This is why implementing marketing automation in demand generation is always a good idea, as it can significantly enhance the overall success of your campaigns due to several key benefits:

  1. Streamlining repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and lead nurturing. As a result, your team can focus on strategic initiatives while ensuring that every lead receives timely and personalized communication.
  2. Enabling more efficient segmentation, which allows you to deliver highly targeted messages that resonate with different buyer personas. 
  3. Allowing for more precise lead scoring and qualification, as many of these tools can be configured to automatically recognize criteria you specified as relevant and qualify leads accordingly.

The best way to understand the value of marketing automation is through a practical example, so let’s look at Behavioral Signals - a textbook example of successfully deployed marketing automation.

Namely, Behavioral Signals had a carefully designed demand generation strategy that included targeted email campaigns and content, all of which resulted in a high website traffic volume.

However, without knowing who their visitors are and without a way to engage them, Behavioral Signals couldn’t respond to the thousands of leads that landed on their website each month.

This is when its team decided to implement Warmly to automate a part of its demand generation efforts, and this is how they did it:

  1. Warmly’s website visitor identification feature would reveal who’s visiting their website.
  2. The platform’s enrichment option provided detailed B2B and intent data on each identified visitor, allowing the team to easily identify the hottest leads among them.

3. Automated Slack notifications would alert sales reps when a high-value or high-intent lead landed on the website, enabling them to immediately engage them.

4. Warmly’s Orchestrator was used to engage visitors who’ve taken certain high-intent actions (visited the pricing page or frequently returned to features overview, etc.) by adding them to automated LinkedIn and email sequences tailored to each individual lead.

Moreover, Behavioral Signals’ reps made sure to use the insights and intent data Warmly provided for each identified visitor when designing their approach, making sure that it was perfectly tailored to every lead they contacted.

As a result, Behavioral Signals sourced $7M in the enterprise pipeline within several months of using Warmly.

How to measure the success of your demand generation strategy?

So, you’ve created a killer demand generation strategy and applied it, but your work doesn’t end there.

You have to keep a close eye on how your strategy is performing to understand whether it’s effective so you’ll know which steps to take next.

To do so, you need to track certain KPIs and metrics, including:

  1. Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), which measure the number of leads that meet specific criteria indicating they are ready for sales engagement. 
  2. Conversion rates are another critical metric, reflecting the percentage of leads that progress from one stage of the sales funnel to the next. 
  3. Cost per lead and overall ROI help assess the financial efficiency of your campaigns, indicating how much you’re spending to acquire leads and the overall profitability of your demand generation strategy. 

However, gathering data is only the first step, as the real value comes from actually using these insights to refine your demand generation strategy. 

Regularly reviewing your KPIs and analyzing trends enables you to identify what’s working and what isn’t. 

For example, if you notice a drop in conversion rates, you can investigate potential causes, such as ineffective lead nurturing tactics or content that doesn’t align well with your audience, and adjust your approach accordingly. 

Wrapping up

Hopefully, you’ll feel much more confident about building your own demand generation strategy by now.

It takes time to get everything right, but the end results are definitely worth it.

And if you’d like to see results faster, Warmly can help.

With it, you’ll be able to make the most of all the website traffic you generate as a result of other demand generation tactics, as you’ll:

  • Know who’s visiting your website.
  • Identify the hottest leads right now.
  • Automatically engage them.
  • Reach out precisely when they’re most likely to convert.

Intrigued to see if Warmly can help with all this?

Sign up for its free plan and find out firsthand.


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