A well executed demand generation strategy is critical to growing any SaaS.
But here's the reality.
Most marketing teams are not doing activities that actually create demand. Their doing activities that create leads and MQLs.
Yay! We generated 200 MQLs this month *high fives*. But every marketing audit I perform these MQLs close at less than 1%.
That means your marketing team is celebrating 198 MQLs that didn't close to revenue and this doesn't even include all the time wasted by SDRs calling into leads that are not ready to buy.
This has been the standard play since 2007.
But now buyers have more control over the buying process. They don't want to download whitepapers so they can be dropped into your marketing automation campaign and scored up for sellers to spam them into 15 touch automated cadences.
You're not doing demand gen you're doing lead gen.
You're trying to generate as many leads as possible so you can pass them over to sales, and this play no longer works.
And you wonder why Sales doesn't want to work the leads you're passing over to them.
Your marketing strategy needs a lot more empathy.
It needs be centered around buyer-centric behaviors.
It needs to augment your sales team.
And it actually needs to start creating product demand.
It's time demand gen stops focusing on leads and starts focusing on the marketing activities that actually create that demand.
The landscape has changed - stop going back to the same old playbook. It doesn't work anymore.