A strong demand engineering program creates awareness and interest to generate qualified pipeline for sales teams.
Demand engineering is an essential part of a healthy business to business (B2B) sales and marketing strategy.
Demand engineering is the use of buyer data, SaaS platforms, and outbound sales methodology to connect sales teams with in-market prospects when they are most likely to enter the interest phase of the customer lifecycle.
Creating demand is often a complex and resource-intensive process, as it frequently requires changing or establishing new behaviors.
Scaling demand in SMB markets is particularly difficult due to low margins, lack of formal marketing channels, and the costs of high-touch models that can involve additional personnel, such as last-mile sales agents and business influencers.
Growth stage companies often struggle to make the leap and scale demand—and continue satisfying that demand in a sustainable and cost-effective manner—after successfully piloting new products and services.
Experience shows that these companies need to invest in awareness and consideration campaigns to make value propositions understood, easy, desirable, rewarding, and, ultimately, to generate sales pipeline.
When scaling your business, the main goal is getting more customers, producers, or partners for a company’s main revenue source.
Scale can be achieved by targeting new geographies or developing new distribution networks or pricing policies.
Demand Engineering is most relevant for SMB-focused product and service providers who:
- Offer a market-based solution, with the aim of generating revenue from selling products and/or services to SMB accounts;
- Are preparing for or have already entered the “Expand” phase;
- Have validated their Persona Based Messaging as relevant to the SMB accounts they aim to serve, thus enabling mutual value creation for the enterprise and SMBs; and
- Are looking for effective and efficient marketing strategies to scale deep.
At the heart of Demand Engineering is Persona Based Messaging.
Demand Engineering strategies can only be successful if the value proposition is proven to be understood, relevant and attractive to the target persona.
While the pilot phase focuses on testing and iterating the value proposition to ensure a high level of certainty for qualified leads it leaves room for experimentation.
A business’s value proposition is not static, but rather evolves and iterates as the business begins to grow based on new information and data from customers, sales, and markets. They require continuous improvement and adaptation to new markets and new circumstances.
Automation helps push demand while data reinforces and strengthens a business's value proposition.
Automating repetitive tasks that are key to building simple and profitable customer journeys and allocate more time to revenue-generating activities.
Businesses can manage a larger volume of leads in their sales funnel. Then create a standardized sales workflow that can be refined to even greater efficiency over time.
Building a data loop is crucial to Demand Engineering, 1st party and 3rd party data provide valuable insights for strategic decisions.
Data loops allow you to pinpoint verticals that drive the most revenue and duplicate sales efforts across those markets.
Demand Engineering Strategies
1: Leverage Trusted Networks
Establishing trust in the sales process is one of the most important challenges.
Trust indicates confidence that the proposition will deliver the promised value. It is important in all markets, but it is of special importance in SMB markets, where customers require the highest value for money and where they are unlikely to invest in a new solution just to “try it out and see what happens”
How to establish trust? You could invest in a sales agent to go door-to-door to explain your solution, show a demo, spend quality time, and develop personal relationships with your potential clients. However, while this method is often necessary to activate demand in underserved markets, it quickly becomes too expensive during growth.
A more cost-effective strategy is to leverage existing networks of trust, such as social networks, groups or events.
In addition to accelerating trust building, this strategy also lowers the cost of creating product or service awareness by leveraging existing, well-known networks, rather than building new ones.
However, sales leaders should be mindful of the fit between a value proposition and a trusted network, as well as the customer’s journey, when initiating such partnerships to establish and scale demand.
Keeping the focus on the end user rather than industry experts can help find a better fit for a company’s target group.
2: Offer Workshops
Scaling demand for SMB accounts is often difficult because of the heavy cost of making the first sale. This is due to the previously described trust issue – making the first sale is difficult not because the SMB is not willing to pay at all but because they want to ensure maximum value for the money spent.
Instead of asking for meetings, that require a high level of trust, many growth-stage companies offer workshops to let the product/service “speak” for itself, convincing the client that it is worth the investment.
As a product or service provider, you should answer the following questions:
- What questions do your clients ask most about your product or services?
- What are they most worried about?
- What would it take for you to be 100% sure that these worries will not materialize, and that your client will succeed?
- What would it take for your clients to see 100% of the value you bring them, and be convinced that it is risk-free?
3: Incentivize Referrals
Loyal customers are a built-in referral network to spread awareness on the benefits of your product, to drive retention, and to leverage existing networks of trust.
Acquiring new SMB consumers is expensive given the high upfront costs associated with building awareness of your offering, whether through social media and marketing or in person through outside sales representatives. Similarly, the costs of recruiting new sales agents can be high, especially for businesses that are not yet well-established in a community, and therefore need locally embedded partners to assist with sales efforts.
Aside from simply attracting attention to your product, there is also a need to establish trust, which is easier to do by using referrals because you can leverage existing trust within communities.
Furthermore, the introduction of referral incentives, such as digital money, free merchandise, or vouchers, can increase the retention of your current customers. These same referral incentives can also be effective in leveraging sales agent retention. Agents and customers are incentivized not only to increase their performance and purchasing power, but also to spur that of new customers.
Demand Engineering In Practice
By putting pieces of demand engineering strategies together, marketing and sales leaders can finetune their current state of play to drive maximum conversions and ROI in the most effective, tactical, and efficient ways possible.
Some key takeaways are:
Creating Persona Based Messaging to accelerate the lead conversion process.
Automating sales initiatives to allow sales representatives to focus on revenue-generating activities.
Leveraging data to help better understand your ICP and create data loop to duplicate your highest-performing verticals.
Need help getting started with Demand Engineering?
Demand Engineering focuses on lead quality over quantity. Bad leads are a waste of precious time and resources that can be better utilized elsewhere, so understanding which high-quality leads to prioritize and those with the greatest propensity to convert is key.
Demand Engineering aspires to be ‘zero-waste’ marketing. It’s a model that targets only the companies and contacts that are likely to buy your product and that sales have pre-committed to try to close.
If you want to see Demand Engineering in action then book a demo today.
Our experts will run you through how Demand Engineering works and how you can use it to generate more sales pipeline.
