We’ve shared our 5 BEs Demand Generation Framework with you in over 140 episodes of The B2B Playbook. That’s our ‘free, easy’ way for marketers to get started learning about what a Demand Generation program should really look like.
But working out exactly how to implement a Demand Generation engine in your business is going to take time and considerable effort – often outside of your regular working hours.
Even if you set out with the best intentions, Demand Generation programs are often interrupted by day-to-day requests and activities and get pushed down the priority list. But the truth is – until you have a Demand Generation program running for your business, your marketing will forever be reactive. You will never get off that hamster wheel. And you’ll never consistently contribute to pipeline.
That’s why Kevin and I created our Demand Generation Course – The B2B Incubator. In this program, we give you the strategy, templates and tools to build your own Demand Generation engine in 12 weeks. The feedback has been amazing, and we’re so proud of the results our marketers are driving from the program (but more on that later).
Today we’re going to share more about our Demand Gen Course, The B2B Incubator to help you decide if it’s right for you or not.
Tune in and learn:
+ The end-to-end process for building a demand generation engine
+ Why B2B Marketing Managers, CMOs, Consultants and Demand Generation specialists love our program
+ Why you should document your demand generation engine in-house
If you're keen to learn more about demand generation and want the strategy, templates and tools to do it - watch this episode to see if our course is right for you.
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00:00 Unlock Your Demand Gen Engine in Just 12 Weeks
03:00 The 5 B's Framework: Your Secret Weapon for B2B Success
06:00 Why Most B2B Marketers Struggle (And How to Fix It)
10:00 Inside the B2B Incubator: Your Roadmap to Revenue Growth
14:00 From Reactive to Proactive: Transforming Your Marketing Approach
18:00 The 3-Part Strategy to Dominate Your Market
22:00 Crafting Content That Converts: Our Proven Formula
26:00 Measuring Success: The Metrics That Really Matter
30:00 Scaling Your Demand Gen Engine: Paid Media and ABM Tactics
34:00 Real Results: What Marketers Say About the B2B Incubator
37:00 Why In-House Demand Gen Trumps Outsourcing
40:00 Your Next Steps: How to Join the B2B Incubator
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👥 Are you a B2B marketer in a small team??
💰 Need to bring in more revenue for your company (so sales and your boss love you??)
Get the:
🔹 strategy
🔹 templates
🔹 tools
So you have everything you need to drive more revenue for your brand.
See why other B2B marketers like you love The B2B Incubator
Check out: https://theb2bplaybook.com/demand-generation-course
S06 E143 - The B2B Playbook
#b2b #b2bmarketing #demandgeneration #demandgen
#b2bsaas #revenuemarketing #MarketingStrategy #leadgeneration #b2bcontentmarketing #salesandmarketing
(soft music) If you need to start generating revenue from your marketing, check out our demand generation course, the B2B incubator. It is built for in-house B2B marketers who need to build their demand gen engine for the first time, or to supercharge their existing one. In the course over 12 weeks, we give you everything that you need to create a demand generation program that drives revenue. Now that includes the strategy, the templates and the tools. We also keep you accountable with live Q&A sessions to make sure you keep on track and have every question answered. The program is designed for in-house marketing teams with limited time and budget. We've had B2B marketing managers, CMOs, marketers in demand gen roles, content leads, growth marketers, marketing consultants and more all go through this program and then all now executing the demand generation strategy that they created in this program. Some are now even contributing as much as 80% of the pipeline to their business after applying the principles from the program. So if you're stuck on the activity hamster wheel and you're ready to be a more effective marketer that contributes to the business, next time you take that first sip of coffee in the morning, head to the B2B incubator.com. Apply now, there's only 10 spots available per cohort. The B2B incubator.com applications are now open for our next cohort. Check it out. Okay, back to the show. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the B2B Playbook Podcast. Each week we discuss strategies and tactics to help B2B businesses grow online. - We're your host, Kevin and George, a couple of digital marketing professionals. We've waited through the noise and made the mistakes so you don't have to. - The B2B world has changed and you need to put your customers at the heart of your marketing. - We'll cover how you can use our framework, the five Bs, to create a brand that customers are ready to buy from, love and advocate for. - We'll get insights from successful people in the industry and cover the latest trends to keep you on the cutting edge of the B2B world. - If you're interested in B2B marketing strategies and tactics that work, then this podcast is for you. - Subscribe to get the latest from the B2B Playbook first. - Remember, successful B2B marketing starts with the buyer. (upbeat music) - Welcome back to the B2B Playbook. Today, we're discussing how you can build your demand generation engine in 12 weeks. We are into season six of the show. We spent seasons one to five giving away our five Bs framework for demand generation, releasing it step by step. Please go back and listen to this. Kevin, please tell our listeners, if they're new to the show, what our five Bs framework for demand generation is, give us an overview of the first five Bs. - Listen, the five Bs is our framework for B2B marketing and demand generation, as George said. They cover B ready, be helpful, be seen, be better, and be the best. That framework starts with deeply understanding your dream customers, then developing relationships of trust with them, particularly online, then using the different channels available to you online to amplify and focus in on those dream customers once again. And be better, we then looked at how to optimize your B2B marketing process that you've built to date. And finally, in be the best, we looked at some advanced tactics and strategies that you can employ in your day to day B2B marketing, as well as how to reuse this framework again and again, to keep delivering value. - Beautiful, thank you, Kevin. That is the framework that Kevin and I have used for ourselves, for clients, many times, to really start to drive pipeline from marketing side of the business. For a lot of you who are listening, very often you're reactive to what the business wants from you, or you're spending a lot of your day-to-day supporting sales, our 5B's framework is a system for you to finally sit down and look at how are we going to finally build a demand generation engine and engine that both generates demand, creates demand, and preference for your brand, and then also captures it when those people are in market. So you become the logical choice when they're finally in market, and there's a set system for doing it, that's what our 5B's framework is all about. But today, we're actually going to finish up our mini series on demand generation care, which is what we've covered in the last 12, 13 episodes, more of a mega series, isn't it? And the question that we're answering is, how can I actually start to build my demand generation engine in a limited time? The time period that we give you guys is 12 weeks. The context around this is, as we've mentioned, we've really shared our demand generation framework, the 5B's framework, step-by-step, over the course of the B2B Playbook podcast. I think it took us 120, 100 episodes, Kevin, for us to share it step-by-step. We actually, before we started the podcast, we laid out all the different steps in our demand-gen engine, what you have to do, and we estimated it would take us about 100 episodes. We were wrong, took us about 120. But what people were asking us after getting so much success through listening through the podcast was, "Hey, do you have a method where I can do this faster?" And Kevin and I have been working one-to-one with companies for a long time, helping them implement this demand engine in their own business, and we decided to make it more accessible, which is why we built this program, the B2B incubator. So today we're gonna give you some insight as to why we built that program, exactly what's involved, who it's for, and just give you a taste of what it's like to be part of that program. And then the next steps, if you are a good fit for it. Before we dive into that, Kev, just a little bit more context as to where we're at in the podcast, we said that we're deep into season six, we said that we just covered off a demand generation mini-series, just a little bit more about what we covered there. Listeners, we went through things like what is demand generation, we looked at who is it suited to, we looked at how to make a business case for it, we looked at what kind of budget do you need to do it, how to measure it, how do you balance it with all the other marketing activities and tasks that you need to do. In the last couple of weeks, we also went through things like what tech stack you need to help you. And then of course, the last two weeks, we looked at how do you work closely with sales to really maximize the impact of your demand generation. So please go back and listen to these if you haven't already. And now, Kev, we're gonna tell our listeners about our program, the B2B incubator, which takes our listeners by the hand and guides them step by step. I would even say forces them step by step to build this demand generation engine. - That's certainly an important point, George. A lot of our listeners have expressed as we started doing podcasts and we got more and more into it. When we got that feedback a lot of the time, it was that this knowledge is all well and good, the framework is perfect, but it's very hard to roll out when you're in a small marketing team within a B2B business and there's a million and one things to do, whether that's the sales team asking you to put together sales and environment material or the CEO driving in a different direction or maybe even the tech team asking you to help with product launches. So a million and one things to do, how do you go about putting in place demand generation when you have the time to do it before it's too late? And that's exactly why we put together the B2B incubator. So it's a 12-week program for your CMOs, B2B marketing managers and demand generation marketers, whoever you might be, as long as you're working in a B2B company and you're doing marketing as a function in some capacity, particularly if you're on a small marketing team in that business, then this course will help you put together your demand generation engine for the first time or plug in the gaps in your existing one. It's a great framework to also review your existing demand generation framework and see where else can we improve that process. - That's right, Kevin. And I'll just add to that and say that a lot of that listeners might think that demand generation and building a demand engine is out of reach because they're so busy with the day-to-day activities. But what you'll actually find is you can rework a lot of your day-to-day activities and use them to drive and fuel your demand generation engine. So we just need to look at how we're doing these activities through a new lens and then everything becomes so much more purposeful. You get so much more of those out of those activities and it doesn't feel like you just stuck in the hamster wheel. It actually feels like you are driving towards an end goal, a common purpose with tasks and goals to guide you along the way. And so I just wanna say that to those marketers who are out there thinking, I'm just never gonna have time to do this. Remember, you can just rework a lot of what you are currently doing, but do it in a much more strategic way. So in the course of the program, we give you the strategy, the templates and the tools that you really need to pull together this demand generation engine. Do it in the 12-week period. And Kevin and I are there to hold you accountable over each step of the way. So a lot of the materials, they're all pre-delivered via video. You go through, you consume the materials, it's roughly an hour a week. We then have activities for you to do off the back of those. We have templates and tools to support you in doing those activities. You will then come to live Q&A sessions where you will be able to ask myself or Kevin questions around applying this to your business specifically. We can get to the tactical weeds of it. You can email questions that you might have around it as well. We'll come prepared with answers. We'd record those live Q&As. We send them to you as well so they're there for you to keep. And we're so proud of this framework and we've had so many marketers had fantastic outcomes from it that we actually book a one-to-one session with every marketer who goes through the program three months beyond its conclusion. And the reason that we do that is we want to make sure that you get every single piece out of it that you need to, that you have no question left to be answered, that there's no stone left unturned. And that's why we book in those three month check-ins with every single person who goes through the program. All right, Kev, let's go into what kind of outcomes that you can hope to achieve with this program with the B2B incubator. - Some of the teams that have gone through and individuals that have gone through the incubator have gone from largely supporting sales and basically being very reactive and just putting together whatever the business needs with no real strong strategy behind them to actually now crediting the engine that they built in our program as to what is contributing up to 80% of the pipeline. That's pipeline into revenue for a particular business. So 80% of the business is now instead of coming through sales or other channels that they're not controlling or activities they're not really measuring back to. It's now coming from the demand engine that they were able to build and the incubator. And you also importantly get a documented demand generation engine out of it. As you start to scale your business internally it gets harder and harder to share what your demand generation strategy is, what that framework looks like individually within your business. And if you've gone through the incubator program then you get this whole demand engine documented. So it's easy to share whether that's with external parties who are helping you complete certain parts of that engine process or internally as new people come in and they need to be brought up to speed on what you're doing on the demand engine side as well. Sorry to interrupt guys, but if you need to start generating revenue from your marketing check out our demand generation course, the B2B incubator. It is built for in-house B2B marketers who need to build their demand gen engine for the first time or to supercharge their existing one. In the course over 12 weeks we give you everything that you need to create a demand generation program that drives revenue. Now that includes the strategy, the templates and the tools. We also keep you accountable with live Q&A sessions to make sure you keep on track and have every question answered. The program is designed for in-house marketing teams with limited time and budget. We've had B2B marketing managers, CMOs, marketers in demand gen roles, content leads, growth marketers, marketing consultants and more all go through this program and then all now executing the demand generation strategy that they created in this program. Some are now even contributing as much as 80% of the pipeline to their business after applying the principles from the program. So if you're stuck on the activity hamster wheel and you're ready to be a more effective marketer that contributes to the business, next time you take that first sip of coffee in the morning, head to the B2B incubator.com. Apply now, there's only 10 spots available per cohort. The B2B incubator.com applications are now open for our next cohort, check it out. Okay, back to the show. - It's also an amazing way, Kevin, for our listeners to upskill their team, upskill themselves to feel more confident in what you're doing. If you have a team of marketers, it also enables you to all sing from the same choir sheet. Now, I don't know what it was like for you, Kevin, but for me, when I first really got B2B marketing, so much of my knowledge came from Googling or from learning from others and everything was so tactically driven that I just got tunnel vision for what I was doing and I never saw how this played into a bigger overarching picture of what we're actually even trying to achieve with B2B marketing and how does that play into what the wider business needs from us? And so by participating in this program, you're able to give everyone in your team those fundamental principles, that fundamental understanding of B2B marketing, what it's driving towards and how to execute it, which means when they go and do their tasks, their siloed tasks, they're gonna be so much more effective in how they do it because they're gonna have that bigger picture in mind. And so that's why, yes, we've built this for small teams, but sometimes we have quite large teams of marketers come to us and run through this program in a one-to-one version as well. So everyone can be singing from the same choir sheet. Demand generation is in many ways, Kevin, a fancy term for very good, sustainable B2B marketing, and every single marketer needs to know it. But unfortunately, the way that we learn things and the information that's out there doesn't teach it to you this way. It's much more reactive, it's much more tactic-driven, and this is our solution for that. Kevin just diving deeper into the kinds of problems that marketers have typically when they come to this program. And again, we've got this up on our whiteboard for anyone who's listening, go and check out our YouTube. We always have things in our whiteboard to visually demonstrate what we're doing and hopefully make things care a little more entertaining. Really, small marketing teams, B2B marketers, a lot of them are coming to us because they're struggling to consistently generate opportunities for sales. That is a really common situation that we see. Very often, that marketer has been designated as the make it pretty department for sales. We constantly doing decks and making things look pretty for them. Or you are largely supporting whatever activities that sales have going on. But marketing's role is so much more important to that. I think marketing's role is fundamental to the business growing. And so that's what we give you in this program is we show you how do you start to use marketing to impact the bottom line of the business. A lot of people come to our program, Kevin, and they're actually funding it quite hard to get buy-in from leadership on marketing programs too. And it's funny, the number of marketers who come to us, Kevin, and they say, oh, I have tried to really define who our dream customers are with sales. Or I've tried to ask leadership about what type of business they want to win moving forward and they just won't engage with me. But all of a sudden, you pay a little bit for a program and there's a set start point and end point and you start getting collaboration with those other departments and you start getting answers to the questions that you have. And so that's a bit of a funny one that comes from that. We know that a lot of the marketers who come to their program are just drowned in busy work that doesn't really move the needle. And we know that pretty often at your acquisition costs are probably starting to rise. You've tapped out the lower funnel or you haven't quite been able to make that work. And so now you need to look at creating a system that's going to consistently generate demand, look to the other 97% of the market who's not ready to buy right now and make sure that you are top of mind and that you've led them to the logical conclusion that you are the perfect business for them when they're ready to buy. As we said earlier, a lot of the activities that you do in this program can double with what you're doing currently. The time commitment is about an hour a week to consume. There's more time on top of that to try and work through these activities but you probably need to do these activities anyway. So we know that this program can't take up your time 24/7. We know that demand generation might not be all you can do in your role and we've designed the program accordingly. It's designed to be a pilot program. It's a pilot program, meaning you're not dedicating all your time and resources to this, you're just dedicating a fraction of them. You can approve out that it works after you implement our system. And then once you've proved out it works, you're then going to roll that out to other segments of the business, to new product launches, whatever is next for you and your team. - Fundamentally, I think all those problems or all those things that you're dealing with when you come to the program or people who come to the program is that there's a fundamental misalignment or misunderstanding of what marketing's job is. And for us, we think the market is job, particularly in a B2B business, is not just to get more leads. It's actually to get more revenue and there's been a detachment of that responsibility from marketing to revenue. And I think that's fundamentally where a lot of the misalignment, whether it's from sales, from the leadership team, where that stems from, that disconnect. So what is wrong with looking at just leads, that demand generation model versus the leads model is very much hired here in what George is sharing on the screen now. When you're looking at leads only, the focus is often on quantity. It just shifts naturally towards quantity. It's a lot easier to talk about how many leads are you driving. And it's a lot harder to talk about the quality of those leads. And it's a quality of those leads drop, then it's a nightmare for sales. So then that disconnect naturally happens with the sales team. Unfortunately, it also means that it's very rare for marketers to find a profitable way to acquire more customers by hunting more leads in quantity instead of quality. So we've seen too many marketing managers just fall victim to this. Over time, the acquisition costs go up, the lead numbers that they require from sales go up and up because the quality is dropping, so they need more and more leads to actually meet the revenue targets. And so more and more marketers are put under ridiculous expectations and just unrealistic expectations about how many leads that actually need to drive. Instead, what we'd like you to pivot towards is to focus on building a relationship with your dream customers, even before they're ready to buy from you. There's tons of studies, tons of literature and statistics that we've gone through in the podcast that proved that point. But basically, if you're building that relationship before customers or your dream customers are ready to buy from you, you will create a much more efficient pipeline of customers ready to buy at much lower costs and much more sustainable model of acquisition versus if you're looking at lead generation. So that is what demand generation is all about. Less leads, more revenue, and that's exactly what the incubator is set up to help you start your journey towards. - And into exactly how we do that, Kev, just running through what the session plan looks like over those next 12 weeks. I think it's important for people to realize that demand generation doesn't have to be this wishy, washy thing that we always get, we always see described or hardly described on LinkedIn, Kevin. People talk about demand generation, but no one talks about the steps that you need to do to actually execute it. And we really have always felt that's been our point of difference is, well, we go, this is our five-piece framework. These are all the steps involved in it. And now we've really reduced that down into a very actionable 12-week program. So this program is gonna build those relationships with those dream customers. And then once you identify those who are more ready to buy, we're gonna look at how do we identify those people, accelerate that demand, and then turn them into paying customers. And we show you step-by-step how to do that. So the program is split to three main parts. The first part is all about getting your demand engine ready. The second part is actually building it. And the third part is about accelerating pouring gasoline on that demand engine to make it go faster and wider. Let's go into the first four weeks around getting your demand engine ready. This is all about really deeply understanding who your best customers are. And Kevin, I say best, because what we get you to do right from the beginning is we get you to define using 80/20 analysis, who are the best customers in your business that fit your business like a glove, that don't necessarily just drive the most revenue, but are the most profitable, and is the segment that you want to target next as a business to see your next level of growth. So we give you a template straight away to conduct that 80/20 analysis on your business, and we show you how to identify who those companies are. And the reason we get you to do that is now we know what our best customers look like. Let's pull out the thermographic, the demographic details around those companies and see what they all have in common. So then eventually, Kevin, we can start to create an ideal customer profile, an ideal fit of what our future best customers look like. And we want to really narrow this down because remember, every organization has limited time, budget and resources. If we try and cast the net too wide, if we try and target too many people, we aren't going to build relationships deep enough to then turn people into paying customers. We're going to use a spray and pray approach. You're going to do a light touch on a lot of people, but you're not actually going to win any people over and turn them into paying customers. So that's why we needed to decide who our best customers are so we can hone in on them so we can understand them as deeply as possible. And that's what we get you to do with our next step, which is all around conducting customer interviews. Now, we give you the questions that you should ask in those customer interviews if you're the person who's doing them. So you have all the information that you need to then go to market to win over that next set of customers. Based on that information, we then get you to really position your business so it's a complete no-brainer in the mind of your customer. We have a whole lot of templates to help you with that and also show you how to update your messaging to really reflect that. So when that dream customer comes to you, they can see they belong right there with you over a competitive because you understand them better than anyone else does. We also make sure that you identify what that buying committee looks like for your dream customers. So in B2B, it's not just one person who makes that decision. There's also a whole committee of people. That committee can be large and more complex if you're selling a product that is typically worth more or if it has longer sales cycles. And it's very important to understand each person in that committee, what's important to them, what their roles are, because then we have to be able to communicate with and effectively market to them as well. We also get you to map the buying journeys, really where to focus your resources. So what are the key touch points that your past customers had in going from finding out about your solution to becoming a paying customer? What did that whole journey look like? What information objections did they have along the way? We need to know all that information so we can map the buying journey. And then finally, we look at how do we influence the decision making of those future dream customers? So we need to know who do they trust? Where do they hang out online and offline? Who influences them and their decisions? Where do they get all that information from? So effectively, Kevin, we know where we need to be present as a company to win over the hearts and minds of these future dream customers. And we're doing all of that, Kevin, in just weeks one to four. Again, we give you the templates and tools to execute it. It might sound a little scary, but I promise you it's not. We take you by the hand and we show you exactly how to do it. After you got that solid base in place listeners in weeks five to 10 in the incubator, we then take you through how to build your helpful demand generation engine. And we actually get you to build it in those five weeks or four to five weeks. And this is all about building relationships at scale with very helpful content. So we talked about this thing before in a number of episode and whole season earlier in the podcast, but we distilled it down into a process that you can execute within four to five weeks. And we first turn our attention to implementing your system by creating expert and helpful content that your dream customers love. So all those insights that you took from that research to get to know your dream customers before, whether that's the customer interviews that you've done or talking to your internal teams and subject matter experts. Now we're pulling all those bits of information into use. You're getting expert information that's very helpful to your dream customers that they actually have told you that they want to know and you're putting that out there for them. So you start to build that relationship of trust because they're seeing helpful information come from you in the content that you're putting out there. And we also give you a repurposing framework to cut down the times you create that content by up to 50%. And sometimes even more as you get more and more sophisticated with that repurposing. So that you might have one piece of pillar content that you can use again and again throughout the process of creating content. So you don't actually have to use as much resources as you think to create the amount of content that you need. And then you're going to start to see that volume of dream customers really start to come in and engage with your content and seeing your content even without spending money on ads. And it's exactly where we start. We recommend you start and we'll take you through in this framework once you've got that content ready to go. How do you push it out there? How do you start to distribute it? And again, the hint here is that you're going back to your understanding of your dream customers, where they're already residing online and making sure you're visible in those different channels and spaces online. And we also show you our three techniques to make sure that your content actually cuts through the noise because it's likely that other competitors, other people in the space that your dream customers are in are doing content as well. But how do you differentiate yourself? We share with you our techniques to do that. And we also go through the framework of the five stages of awareness, the five types of content that you really need to turn a potential dream customer into an actual buyer. And we help you lay that out again with all the templates, all the frameworks that you need to get this down, recorded, documented, what have you, and to start actually implementing it day to day. But it's not enough just to put that information out there and to have things going out there day to day. Obviously, you need to understand whether that's actually having the impact that you wanted to have. So we talk you through the metrics that you need to be measuring and how to measure them to gauge the success of your helpful content and to keep improving that health content so that you can continue to scale your content program and to also lean on things like partnerships so that you're not doing it alone. - Can we also give the people who join the program the metrics that they need to measure the success of this helpful content program of their demand generation engine, so many demand gen programs fail or get canceled because people don't know how to measure the leading indicators of success. Meaning what signs of life are there that we are really on the money and we just need to keep going versus, you know what, this isn't quite hitting the way we thought it would and let's try a different tact. And so it's very important to know what those leading indicators of success are and then also the lagging indicators too. How do we then also look backwards and have those metrics of success so we can show leadership, hey, this marketing approach is really driving pipeline and revenue and the lagging indicators to prove that. And so we go through all of that in the program as well. Crucially, Kevin, we get people to document how they create this demand engine too. So we actually get you in a big overarching document to show the process that you go through from identifying who those dream customers are to building this helpful demand engine, we force you to document those steps in creating that content, repurposing that content because then if you are able to do it, you're then able to insource it or outsource it to someone else. And the way that you progress in marketing is by being able to lift yourself out of the weeds so you can start to think and act more strategically. And this way, you're not just doing it alone, you don't have to be the person that is doing absolutely everything. But even if you are just to give you a taster as to what you can achieve using this demand gen system, the way that Kevin and I create content, we get together to record the B2B Playbook once a week, every week. After that, we get a 40 minute YouTube video, a 40 minute podcast, 12 LinkedIn posts. We get a newsletter, we get an article, a whole lot more as well on top of that. And it takes us about five hours a week. And it's only because we have a really efficient documented system to do this. Now, doing this every week is overkill for almost every single business, including ours, probably doing it once a month is really the sweet spot that most companies who go through this program end up doing, but it still creates way better content created by subject matter experts that really lands with your dream customers and is ushering them on the buying journey. So that's what you're gonna then cover in weeks five to 10. Weeks 11 to 12 is all about scaling your demand generation engine and using paid media and account based marketing to really try and win key accounts. So we should be generating demand from that market that we identified in steps one and two. This is then all about how do we accelerate that relationship building process, that demand generation using paid media. So we look at and show you how to do that in step three of the program. We also show you how to create product ads that really generate opportunities and revenue. We also then look at which accounts that fit our ICP are expressing intent but haven't actively requested a demo. How do we identify who they are and then orchestrate an account based marketing program to develop that relationship to accelerate their demand and try and activate them into a paying customer. So we show you how to launch your first pilot account based marketing program on a shoestring budget. You don't need any fancy ABM software. You can do it all within Google Sheets all you need is one marketing person and one sales person to help with some follow up. It's something which has gotten a lot of results for people who have gone through the program and something that they always tell me they really love as part of the program because it's just so damn actionable. Then, Kevin, we give people a path to independence beyond the 12 week program. We don't want you to live and die with this program. You get to keep this program because you're gonna use this system every single time you go to market, every single time that you take on a new segment or you launch a new product, you should be going through this process. Kevin, you and I run through this process every three to six months for our own business. And every time we do it, we understand our dream customers better. We know how to build relationships with better, with and better. We know how to accelerate that demand better and it helps us grow more and more as a business. And so, we show you how to do that at the end of the program as well. So, it's a very actionable program, Kevin. Of course, we issue people with certificate of demand generation if they do complete it, which is fantastic. And people have really, really liked that because it's important to show that you spent the time upskilling in this area and that can then help you for your next job or within your current job to show you commitment to really learning these principles of demand generation. Into what people say about the program, Kevin, we get a lot of amazing feedback from marketers who go through the program, everyone from CMOs to marketing managers to demand generation titles to marketing consultants. Pretty often, the more advanced people like the CMOs tell us that they thought that it was gonna be more of an entry level program. But it's actually really well suited to them as well because very often they do know a decent amount of the stuff that's in the program, but they haven't had the time to piece it all together into a cohesive strategy. And we've had CMOs who have called this program leading edge, that it's a completely new modern way to do B2B marketing that every single marketer should be doing it. And for a CMO that is a part of a small team or a CMO that's leading a larger team is a great program to both upskill themselves as a refresher on what those fundamental core things are that go into a demand-gen program and also to upskill their tech. We've also had marketing consultants go through it too. Initially, we didn't let marketing consultants in the program despite them asking us quite a lot for it because I don't know, Kevin, maybe we're being a little bit anti-competitive, but we thought we didn't want people to just take our framework and run with it and give it to other people. But you know what, Kev? We exist to make B2B marketers lives easier. That includes our consultants. And so we started letting them in the program too. And they found that again, it's been an amazing way to be able to consistently roll out end-to-end projects for clients, helping them create and launch their demand-gen engine, save them so much work in getting together the strategy, the templates and the tools to do it. And so it saved them a lot of time to do that for themselves. In terms of just a few highlights, Kev, of what people have said about the program, people have said that they love the structure and the templates we've had marketers write in and tell us that it's helping them contribute way more to pipeline. A director of growth marketing and demand generation, Dario, he told us that after following our demand-gen program last year, he thinks it's like a massive degree in demand-gen and that college wouldn't even cover one-third of the stuff that we have in our course. We've had head of marketing, Ryan McIntyre, say that it's an incredible course. It's stuffed with useful theory, but also the biggest benefit was the wealth of templates, frameworks and processes, so you can get up and running in a really short amount of time. For him, he said it helped them establish a complete end-to-end ABM program that's been delivering fantastic results. They also got buy-in from senior leadership for what they're doing, and they said they were really struggling to do that before the course. Alison Akavadi, she was a CMO from Rivet, and she used the framework to launch a video podcast. It features subject matter experts, and she said the results have been nothing short of amazing. If the customers are feeling seen and heard, they end up becoming recognized as industry leaders in what they're doing. It's been a huge launching-off point for a lot of wonderful things to follow from this program, and she's been a great advocate of ours, and we truly thank Alison for that. Our tears is she's a bit of a growth marketer. She said that it really allowed her to lead as a manager, so the framework has been able to help it point out. This is what we need to do, this is the strategy, this is the process, and this is how we can scale the process in the team, so that really gave her the confidence to be able to do that and to lead the team with a set strategy. And, Kev, there's a lot that people can run through if they head to the B2BplayBook.com/the-B2B-incubator, go through and check out the testimonials and what other marketers have said about the program, and hopefully you can see yourself in one of those marketers and really relate to them, and you will see that if it benefits them, there's a very good chance it's gonna benefit you too. - Well, listen, that's a little bit about the program and who it's for, who have been through it, and what kind of the benefits and problems that it hopefully solves. It's probably also worth putting it into a broader context of what an alternative would be to the program. So you could potentially outsource your demand generation to an agency, so that marketing function can certainly be outsourced to an extent to external parties, or you can even hire a new demand generation manager just to look after demand generation. But there's, we think, a few inherent problems with this. Fundamentally, we think demand generation is a function that really needs to live within an organization within that B2B marketing function of that business. We'll go through those two examples with the agency and hiring the margin manager for comparison. So if you outsource to an agency, I think the real issue there is that they aren't able to get a lot of that insight that you can internally, whether that's from your sales team, from your subject, matter experts, and from your dream customers. Traditionally, an agency just won't be able to have that level of access that you would in-house to be able to get the relevant insights from your dream customers, or even to talk to your dream customers directly. And so it's important to actually be doing a lot of this within your business, within your B2B marketing function, because you're the people who have the keys to that information, who have the access, and are able to get everyone on board and discussing this real issue. So you can really distill down what are those pain points and solutions that you can present to your dream customer. In the example of the demand generation manager where you're hiring someone in just to do that function, often that hire might not have the relevant experience or this level of knowledge that we've collated from various experienced people in the industry, from our own experience, and from working with businesses just like yours, time and again, there's still down the frameworks that really work for people. So in taking the course, you're able to have a bit of a shortcut in that process of learning from the different experiences from people who have been through the course, we have contributed to the course, and obviously from ourselves in putting the course together. And plus, if you're hiring a brand new role for just that knowledge just to train up a team, potentially it's going to be more cost-inhibitive over the long-term, medium to long-term, as you start to run the program, as you start to need different resources to sustain that demand generation program. Potentially, there's gonna be shifts in person now over time and things like that. So it's very hard to retain the information that you're building around your demand generation engine, and to also make that cost effective in the long run as the team scales and changes over time. So again, another benefit of having the incubator, because we get you to document all the information down so that the knowledge specific to a business stays with that business over time as well. - Just coming back to Kevin the alternative of outsourcing to an agency, I just would like to ask listeners and viewers to stop and pause and reflect on how long it actually took them to really understand the business that they are working in. Who are your customers? What motivates them to buy? What pieces of content you need to usher them through that buying journey? What's important internally to the business as well? It probably took you a really long time to get all that done. Or you haven't got that information down and that's why you're going through a program like this. - Then imagine how much an external agency would need to charge you to do that work properly for your business. And so unless you come across an agency that is basically dedicated to give you one of their employees full time, I think very carefully about whether or not it's the right time for you to partner with them to build your demand generation engine. Agencies are fantastic for amplifying, for scaling, something that already works. But to get these fundamentals down, they are very often not the right option for your business. You need to just cop it. You need to do this work internally. You need to document everything around it. And then you can start to lean on external and internal resources like agencies, freelancers, whatever it might be to scale this process. All right, Kev, in terms of what's next for those who are listening or viewing, if you want to find out more about the B2B incubator, if you want to apply to join our next cohort, check out the B2B incubator, give it a Google, go to the B2Bplaybook.com/the-B2B-Incubator, or you can also Google demand generation course. Our page is starting to rank nicely for that too. Thank you to Sam Dunning for his help there. He's good at SEO old Sam. Make sure also if you're leaning into demand generation, you want to learn more about it, check out our demand gen mega series. There's 13 or 14 step-by-step episodes to answer every question that you might have on the topic. We also share a lot about our framework in summary episodes. And if you have a lot of patience, go back and listen to episode one through to 120 of the B2Bplaybook. And you can get a lot of the framework and a lot of the principles in the framework from there to for free. All right, make sure you go and check out the B2B incubator. We hope to see some more of you listeners and viewers there. It's been fantastic working with so many of you. And we really, really love having people who come and listen to the playbook join the program. I think they tend to be the best participants we have because they understand the framework. They're really committed and they get so much out of it. Make sure you check out the B2B incubator and learn more or apply if you are ready. All right, listeners, you can find those links in the show notes as well as obviously going to the B2B incubator sites. We're so great for that every week. More and more marketers like yourselves are tuning in every Monday, whether that's on YouTube or on podcast, wherever you get your podcast from. And if we can ask one thing, it will be, if you could please pass the show onto someone that you think would get value from it. And also to check us out on YouTube, you've haven't already. Both those things are amazing help to us. And we really, really appreciate it. Thank you, listeners. Thank you, George. As always, take care, everyone, and catch you all next week. Thank you, listeners. Thank you, viewers. Thank you, Kevin. Take care and catch you next week. A quick note before you go, listeners, you can find more great content and get in touch with us at theb2bplaybook.com. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and our newsletter while you're there to get the latest news tips and resources from our playbook. We'll be back the same day and same time with another episode next week. Thanks for tuning in to the B2B Playbook. Remember, successful B2B marketing starts with a buyer. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
