Perhaps the term “generation” is not the most appropriate, because companies don’t buy what they desire, but rather what they need. Consumers are different; they buy for many reasons, not always associated with a necessity. The annual release of hundreds of cell phones is a clear example of this point. In mass consumer sales, advertising, trends, and social media might generate that “desire” to own things, and that would indeed be considered generating demand.
In the B2B context, it’s more appropriate to analyze where our products and services are needed and what else we can sell to our existing customer base. But that’s just a semantic digression; let’s get back on track.
Demand generation can be divided into two major groups: Existing customer base and prospects, those with whom we haven’t had any activity yet or with whom we have no direct contact. There are different demand generation activities in each group, and some general activities could apply to both the existing base and potential customers.
For existing customers, the expectation is to sell more or offer new products and services, and also to block our competition, whereas with potential customers, we’ll settle for a valid contact to introduce our company and offerings.
Demand generation tasks can be focused from the offer to the market or from the market to the market… it sounds confusing, but it’s actually straightforward.
A company can assess how to grow in a market by analyzing the possibilities of its product and/or service offering, i.e., from the offer to the market. But it should also assess its market within the market conditions, i.e., analyzing its industry, strategies, positioning strengths, and bargaining strengths within that market, in order to identify specific improvement points where our products and services can contribute.
Within the existing base, we can analyze the territory through Territory Planning, where we essentially match our offerings with customers and analyze the overlaps to discover what else we can offer to each customer.
For those customers that are strategically or financially more important within the territory, we’ll conduct a more specific analysis with Account Planning. In this process, we study the customer in all their activities, starting with the challenges their Industry presents and continuing with their commercial strategy, market, the various ratios their industry has with our product and service line, and several additional aspects, in order to have a clearer idea of where our Customer’s industry is heading and where our Customer is heading within their market. This way, we can anticipate the needs that our Customer will have sooner or later.
The result of Territory Planning is concrete actions that a sales team must undertake within the territory to ensure that all current Customer needs are met and position themselves for future needs with a certain degree of probability.
On the other hand, the result of Account Planning will be specific actions that the sales team attending to the specific Customer must undertake to maximize sales, ensure loyalty, and protect against competition in that Customer.
There are many other demand generation actions within our existing base, such as participating in industry events, forums, communities, hosting specific events for each Customer, etc.
But each of these actions must align with our sales strategy and a certain forecast of success, as some of these tasks are resource-intensive, and we seek to maximize the investment we dedicate to exploiting our territories.
Well, this concludes part 1; in the next notes, we’ll talk about our vision of demand generation in new prospects.
It’s worth noting that this document was written without the assistance of open AI, chat-GPT, Grammarly, Socratic, SGE, or any other Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool.
By the way, what is your Sales Team doing with AI?
If you want to learn more about Demand Generation or other topics related to Consultative Sales, don’t hesitate to contact us; we’ll be happy to assist you.
