Demand Based Marketing

🧠 Free Recall ❓ Quiz 🔍 Cues 🔮 Simulation 🥷 ShadowBox 📐 Encode Cards

Everything that’s wrong about marketing comes from the supply-side. Demand-driven startups and growth organizations focus on the demand-side. It’s the Copernican revolution; here we overthrow the religious supply-side zealots.
I realized something this week that made me rethink what I know about marketing.
Which is: The “marketing funnel” is a supply-side concept.
Here is an example of a marketing funnel:

The marketing funnel assesses the evolving relationship between a prospective customer and your company. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is supply-side: It focuses on things that matter to your business, rather than things that matter to your customer.
Worse, the result of thinking in terms of funnels like this is that it encourages metrics and goals based on this funnel.
In B2B, this leads to the worst kind of persona-based marketing and sales. The kind I rail about every other week (here, here, here…)
What’s the demand-side “funnel”?
It’s the customer’s journey from “needing to change” to “no longer needing to change”. This journey happens independent of your product; your product may fit into this journey, but it is a mere supporting character and never at center stage.
My favorite visualization comes from Joe Norman’s Applied Complexity Science newsletter, and in its original context it has nothing to do with marketing or sales:

Your prospect doesn’t need to change; then one day something happens and they might need to change; their world temporarily goes out of whack and they need to solve a problem and find a new normal. Maybe you’re part of that new normal.
What does this mean for your marketing?
It means you sell when their world is changing. And you build awareness when their world isn’t.
Which segregates your marketing into two different pieces that should NOT be mixed:
The awareness layer: Marketing that’s based SOLELY on who people are, focused ENTIRELY on what matters to them and NEVER on your product
The conversion layer: Marketing/selling that happens based on what happens in their worlds, focused ENTIRELY on helping them successfully navigate from “normal” to “new normal” and ONLY IN THAT CONTEXT on your product
Rob

https://howtogrow.substack.com/p/whoa-the-marketing-funnel-is-supply

Real buyers have stuff to do; find the signals of what I’m trying to accomplish
In short, design your outreach around the things I’m trying to accomplish and I might actually respond. Stop thinking in personas; think in the combination of persona + situation.
You can find programmatic signals that give you hints of what I’m trying to accomplish, based on things like:
The time of year (e.g., quarterly OKR planning; summer hiring; Black Friday)
My company’s public signals (e.g., hiring/hired a new role; raised a funding round; posted an announcement on social media; attending an event; posted a new advertisement)
My competitors’ signals (e.g., customer announcements, any of the above signals)
My industry’s signals (e.g., new regulations or changes)
Don’t just use these signals to say, “Hey congrats on the new fundraise! Use my product.” Use these signals to assess how likely I am to be accomplishing what you can help me accomplish.
Draft your outreach to help me accomplish what I probably need help with
You’ve found a signal that I’m doing something big and need help. You can help.
Now, draft a message that will catch my attention and actually help me.
Here’s how I frame my email cold outreach.
Subject line:
Something to catch their attention
Content: Either the signal I saw, what I believe they’re trying to accomplish, or their desired end-state.
Body:
Signal + What they’re probably trying to accomplish right now + (optional) what we do + offer to help\

Find signals that help you know what your buyer needs to accomplish.
Write briefly to catch their attention; tie it to what they’re going through right now.
Help them; you’ve seen many more companies go through this than they have.

https://howtogrow.substack.com/p/demand-side-cold-outreach

Outbound works… but is annoying
Judging from my LinkedIn and email inbox, outbound prospecting still follows a 3-step process:
Find a list of people who are your “ideal customer profile”
Write generic messaging based on the same “cold email templates” article everyone else uses
Spam the pants off (1) with (2)
This works - you can get a 1-2% meeting rate with a decent list and bland messaging.
But this generic approach annoys a lot of recipients. And who’s to say you couldn’t get a 10%+ meeting rate with a better approach?
So while the 10-year-old model for go-to-market works better than doing nothing, there are massive opportunities for improvement.
How people buy
The entire problem with go-to-market, especially outbound sales, is that the “ideal customer profile” focuses on WHO THE TARGET CUSTOMER IS, NOT WHAT HAPPENS IN THEIR WORLD.
If I’m your target customer, you’ll focus on my demographics - my job title, my company size, my industry.
But these demographics don’t cause me to buy things.
I don’t wake up one morning and say, “Gosh, I am a 29-year-old first-time founder and so that means today’s the day I buy a CRM.”
Something happens in my world that causes me to say, “Dammit, today’s the day I need a CRM.”
364 days of 365, if you reach out to me and say, “Hey Rob, do you need a CRM?” I’m not going to reply.
I don’t care if it’s positive-ROI. I don’t care if someone else is using it. I don’t care if you have positive reviews, are the leader in your category, or just raised a big funding round. I couldn’t care less about how pretty your website is. I don’t want to talk about my business growth plans with you, I don’t want to share my pain points, I don’t want your Calendly link “just in case”. And I’ll just get angrier as you send me 6 additional emails over the next 3 weeks.
I have shit to do, and 364 days out of 365, you’re getting in my way.
But.
If you can catch me on that ONE day when I actually need you, I’m not just going to reply - I’ll be HAPPY to hear from you. I’ll be open to buying. You can teach me about CRMs in a way that causes me to understand why yours is meaningfully different, why it’s right for me. And I’ll probably buy very quickly.
The question becomes: How do you catch me on that ONE day?
Triggers & signals
Remember, something happens in my world that causes me to say, “Today’s the day…”
Your job is to figure out what that is.
I was talking with a friend about his business. In our conversation, we realized that every customer who bought his software had hired for a particular position a few months before buying.
Interesting.
It seemed like something about hiring that role caused them to be open to considering my friend’s software.
We dug in further, and came up with a few hypotheses:
They hire for this role because their software has quality issues
They expect the person in this role to solve the quality issues
After 2-4 months, they realize that “solving the quality issues” is a lot more complicated than they initially thought, and are open to new ideas
The last point is what I call the trigger - the thing that causes your “ideal customer profile” to be open to meeting with you and even buying from you.
If you can build your go-to-market around triggers, you’ll have clearer messaging, higher win rates, faster sales cycles, and fewer “screw off” replies to your cold emails.
Importantly - in the words of my idols April Dunford and Bob Moesta - you’ll be helping your customers buy, rather than selling. The difference is meaningful.
How do you do design your GTM around triggers?
You look for signals that your ideal customer has experienced - or will experience - the trigger. So, in my friend’s case, some obvious signals they could find include:
A company searches “quality engineer job description” in Google
A company posts a job for a quality engineer
A company hires a quality engineer
A company searches something in Google that indicates that they’ve realized “solving their quality issues” is more complicated than they expected
All these signal that a company is headed towards - or in the middle of - that 1 day of 365 where they’d be open to a sales conversation with my friend.
Build GTM around triggers & signals
Tomorrow’s GTM will be designed around triggers & signals.
Companies will succeed by “owning” triggers: When someone experiences that trigger, they usually purchase your software.
And this requires a different approach to GTM. Because instead of having a bunch of people who do “cold emails”, you’ll want multi-skilled teams who tackle signals in different ways.
Here’s how my friend’s company might tackle the trigger of “hiring a quality engineer”:
A company searches “quality engineer job description” in Google -> SEO
A company posts a job for a quality engineer -> Outbound (top-down)
A company hires a quality engineer -> Outbound (top-down AND bottom-up)
A company searches something in Google that indicates that they’ve realized “solving their quality issues” is more complicated than they expected -> SEO, Outbound
They’d build meaningful content that customers hiring for a quality engineer would appreciate. And their outreach messaging and sales demo would be designed in the context of the customer experiencing this trigger.
An outbound message designed for a trigger is infinitely better than one designed around a static customer profile. “Hey I saw you’re hiring for your first quality engineer, I assume you have big automation plans and would love to share some pitfalls,” beats “Are you having quality issues?” every day of the year.
What do you think?

Unstarred

Dunk (exclude from study)

Demand Based Marketing

Review Questions

Todos

Sensemaker