This week, I dig in to the primordial soup that leads emerge from – demand!
Leads have been the currency of B2B sales and marketing for decades.
We need more leads, we need the Glengarry leads, the leads are weak, the inboud and outbound leads, the qualified leads, the form fill leads…
The leads.
Leads are wonderful.
They are wonderful because we can see them, measure them, put them in our systems, act on them, pass them around, track them, and almost touch them. They are what our marketing automation technology defined as the fuel for B2B business.
And of course, they represent people who might want to give us some money.
But….
Like a pearl forming in an oyster shell, a planet forming from cosmic dust, or life emerging from the primordial soup – a lead only forms when the conditions are right, when stuff just aligns.
And the spark that turns a grain of sand, cosmic dust, or soup into the life-blood of a B2B business, a lead, is demand.
Yet, we often run our B2B businesses from the sales target down.
We’ve decided that we need a sales revenue of X, we sell the product for an average deal size of Y, and as we close 1 in 5 of the deals we get involved with…..
….we need Z leads.
Simples. Marketing, go do that.
And away we go, our route to Chocolate Island is plotted.
Yet, each of those leads needs to be formed from this more ephemeral fabric of the sales and marketing universe: Demand.
Something we rarely measure and discuss compared to leads. How much demand does it take to make Z leads?
What is the market size and general demand for a solution to the problem you solve (or the category you are in).
Is there an addressable slice of that demand that will keep your business in branded polo shirts? (Or whatever you like to spend excess marketing budget on).
How do you fit in this market? What is the demand to get this solution from you? Are you a leader? Do you have a unique proposition that would be hard for a competitor to replicate?
Do you have a tribe? Is there a demand to get the solution from you specifically because they trust YOU and want to buy from you.
(The thing we call brand).
Without demand, lead generation is akin to alchemy (it’s not possible).
If you want to see demand in action, hop into your time machine and watch the dot com boom when orders for web technologies were flowing out of fax machines into a sales force who believed they had the Midas touch as leads formed seemingly out of thin air
Like oysters, planets and…. ummm… the things that crawl out of primordial swamps; leads are important and lovely.
But without demand, they don’t form, and the world is a bleaker place.
Fancy more of this?
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I’m a 3xCMO, now a marketing strategy advisor and podcast host at Rockstar CMO. Although, I’m not a rock star, but a marketing leader, strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, and creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with. But most of all, I am an enthusiastic tea drinker.
You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or now Threads! – or listen to my weekly podcast at Rockstarcmo.com
The half-baked thoughts shared on this blog may not reflect those of my employer or clients, and if the topic of this article is interesting or you just want to say hello please get in touch.