B2B Demand Generation: 3 Strategies & 9 Things To Avoid

Taylor Wells (00:08.021)
Hey everyone, thanks for joining me. We'll get started here just in a minute as more people are still joining live.

Taylor Wells (00:42.197)
Thanks everyone for joining. We'll get started here in just a minute as a couple more folks are still joining.

Taylor Wells (01:51.445)
Alrighty folks, thanks everyone again for joining us live. Just a little housekeeping, if you are on a mobile device, it may not work as well to view the presentation or interact. I'm actually testing out Riverside for the first time for a live event. It has some pretty cool features where you can call in later and we can talk one -on -one live, a bunch of other stuff too. So yeah, if you're on a mobile device, I'd recommend jumping onto a desktop. You'll probably have a better experience.

and be able to interact and participate more in the event. So let's jump right in. Thanks everyone once again for everyone for joining us live. We have a packed agenda today. I'm going to be going through a bunch of stuff around demand generation for B2B startups. And so let's jump right in. So first of all, agenda item, a lot of this stuff was on the registration page, which is high level. We're going to be going through a counterintuitive framework for go to market.

nine non -obvious mistakes to avoid when going to market. So kind of the first part of the presentation will be around really go to market. So some fundamentals, like if you're trying to generate demand, trying to generate new opportunities, trying to generate sales, ultimately, if you don't have some of the fundamentals right when it comes to go to market, it won't work. So we'll be kind of going through a little bit of that. Then we'll jump into a couple of my favorite tactics for kind of three cost effective strategies to get more sales opportunities, whether you're a startup or even if you're a larger B2B organization.

We'll be going to some AI stuff. I've been playing around with a lot of different AI tools, integrating them into the work I do. And then also talk about how to compete against AI content. And then last but not least, we'll have a Q &A session where you can call in live. There's a little button at the very bottom where it says call in and you can jump on live and ask me any questions or we can chat through specific things you're dealing with. And then last but not least, I have a bonus at the end for the folks that stick through the entire presentation. I'll have something for you.

for a reward for investing in your education and taking the time to go through all this information. Also, if you have questions throughout this presentation, feel free to put it in the chat. And I love to answer your questions as they come up throughout the presentation. But then we'll also have that special call in time where you can call in live and talk to me one on one about anything we've talked about today or any other demand gen marketing questions you have.

Taylor Wells (04:07.381)
A couple other things when it comes to context, who is this for? So B2B SaaS or service organizations, B2C and whatnot, or can have some different, some of the stuff may be applicable to B2C organization or B2G. But generally speaking, my experience has been in B2B SaaS or service organizations and ACVs, average contract values or average sale price between 5K annually and 100K.

You go under 5K, your your ACVs may be a little just different. So under 5K is like a PLG motion or just, you know, high velocity. This is more tailored toward like SMB mid market enterprise. And then above 100K is really the enterprise as true like Fortune 500. And that those sales motions to man genesis is a little bit different. So this is a sweet spot for this. I'm sure you'll still learn something even if you're not.

in this ACV average contract value. But if you are, and if you don't know what average contract value is or what yours is in your condition, that's okay too. I'm sure you'll still learn a lot. Anish asked a question, does this apply to Indian SaaS? I think a lot of this stuff still applies. Once again, my experience, my background is in US markets, some European markets, but mostly US markets. I'm sure a lot of this stuff still applies. I'm not an expert on the Indian market.

But I imagine a lot of these practices, people are people no matter where they go, the internet works and marketing works a lot in the same situations. That being said, it may not all apply, but I guarantee you probably some of it will still be helpful. Last but not least, startups are early stage companies, under 10 million in annual ARR, annual reoccurring revenue. But once again, can be applicable to everyone, but once again, this is kind of the sweet spot. The folks that I've worked with over the years, my career, and then what I've seen has worked. If you're a larger organization, you may...

integrate other aspects to the strategies I'm going to be talking about. But also if you're a $20 billion company and you're on this call today, awesome. I'm so glad you're here. But a lot of these things may be not as new to you and or not as relevant. So really small organizations and beyond. A lot of context to what is demand generation. So a lot of folks ask this question. So I just want to kind of get it out there. Question.

Taylor Wells (06:31.861)
answer here is that demand generation is the focus. I literally just type this into Google. So demand generation is the focus of targeted marketing programs to drive awareness and interests and the company's products or services. That's a pretty boring definition, but basically IE how to generate opportunities and pipeline. So demand generation is as closely tied to sales. I think of any marketing practice where you're like, Hey, our direct goal is how do we generate pipeline and, and or revenue marketing has a lot of other

you know, attributions and, and things that it helps with, but demand generations focused on that. There's two types of demand generation. there's kind of two different lanes. There's domain capture. These are folks that are actively searching for a solution. We're not going to be talking about those folks today. Like if somebody goes to Google to like, Hey, how do I solve this problem? Or, if they go on, you know, review sites to try to find a solution to a problem, there's lots of strategies for that.

as we'll look at some stats in a second, most folks are not in that situation. Most folks are, not looking for a solution, you know, for a problem. Most of your TAM, most of your target demographic is not, that's where demand generation comes in. Demand generation is, these folks are not actively searching for anything. So the goal is how do we build trust with them? And really it's about good branding and how do we build a brand? and that's required to create demand. and, so yeah, that's what we're talking a lot about today, demand generation.

A little bit about me real quick. I've already talked about it. I've worked in B2B startups and sales teams and I've generated over a hundred million in pipeline for the companies I've worked with and I've made every mistake along the way. I currently now work as a fractional head of demand, head of marketing for early stage companies. And I also have a media company, GTM News. So if you see GTM News, that's my media company, podcast, events, newsletter, all that fun stuff.

which is a lot of where you are. All the folks are enjoying today or listen or will listen to the recording or will hear through DTM News. And I love this little and the it's sponsored by no one cares. I put that in a little levity because, you know, no one really cares about my background. They care about how I can provide value today. And that's my goal is how do I provide as much value to you in the next 50 minutes here or so. So let's jump right in. Couple stats. This is actually a report that just came out from BenchSite.

Taylor Wells (08:48.117)
I forgot to cite it here. And in public SaaS companies, basically the public SaaS companies, right? So publicly traded SaaS companies, usually large companies, they looked at the, there was a 60 % increase in spend on marketing and sales from 2021 to 2023. So you've probably been hearing a lot about, you know, growth at all costs is over and, and,

You know, people are pulling back on spending, which is true. A lot of organizations are, but actually to acquire new customers, people are spending more now more than ever. And at least now more than compared to 2021. And so we're seeing this increase in spend to acquire the same amount of customers. This is net new era. This is new customers are spending more, 60 % more. It was crazy. I was like, wait a second. I thought all the sad public SaaS companies are pulling back on marketing spend. They are in other areas.

but not to acquire that next new customer, which is a lot of demand generation is all about, right? How do we get that next new customer? And it's so hard, right? That's why I've spent my career trying to figure it out. And I'm going to be sharing a lot of my best practices today. Another status against us is 85 % of the buyer's journey happens before sales. So once again, if you're in that 5K to 100K ACVs and beyond, folks are researching the product beforehand. They're asking their peers, they're listening to podcasts, they're...

You know, we're going on social media. They're Googling it. They're asking chat GPT. Funny little anecdote. One of my clients on the demo request form on their website, they somebody first time I've ever seen this, you know, we have we have the field. How did you hear about us? Somebody put in chat GPT. Somebody had literally went on chat to be T to look for a solution and check to be T was the way they found my client. First time I saw that I was like, I took a screenshot of it because it was kind of a surreal moment for me.

See, a lot of folks are finding all sorts of different ways to learn about products and sales. And once they get to the sales cycle, they're usually way more educated than they ever have been. And that's because of information being so readily available and advertising, et cetera. Another thing is 95 % of your target market is not looking for a solution right now. So back to that demand gen, demand capture. What I was talking about is most folks are not looking.

Taylor Wells (11:06.261)
for your product, right? Most folks are not in market. So if you have a target market of, I'll do some quick math here, of 5 ,000 accounts, right, that you're going after, that means only 250, right? Did I get that right? 250 accounts are actually in market searching right now for you. Everyone else isn't searching. They don't even know they have a problem. Number one, they're not even problem aware. Number two, they haven't built a trust with you for sure, probably, to be able to even reach out to you or even use you as a solution.

So that's where demand generation comes in. That's where building that relationship and ultimately creating that demand. Last but not least, 5 ,000 ads is what people see on a regular basis. Forbes reported crazy amount of ads we see, right? We're inundated with ads and with AI, and this is my last little thing, AI globalization, more competitors than ever. We're going to trust the internet less. We're going to be more inundated with misinformation, et cetera. And...

It's only going to get harder to trust things, right? And cybersecurity, all my clients work in the cybersecurity space. And it's like, we already have so little trust in the internet. And then competitors. I wrote a report the other day. I tried to find the stat, or I would have put it here. 14 SaaS providers, SaaS companies, on average have 14 competitors. 14 competitors.

So there's 14 other folks trying to get your target demographic 14 folks that are trying to go after your potential customers way more competition than ever. Well, what's cool about globalization is it's opened up the market, right? Especially for service providers in 2020. I was working for a service provider and we were a local company. We went national, right? Because of everyone was on zoom. So it's like, hey, let's all serve. You know, we can service people in much. We serve people now more than ever. And that's happening. I think globally, like it doesn't really matter where you live. You can service people everywhere.

That's awesome for opportunity, but it also means your competitive landscape has expanded as well too. So globalization has a two -edged sword, or on one hand it's awesome because you can service everyone in the world. On the other hand, now you're competing with people all around the world and you have to be that much more competitive. And then there's so many more, from a SaaS standpoint and a service standpoint, so much more competition. So I don't put these stats out here to cause too much fear, but enough to know that this problem is a really hard problem. And if you're struggling, it's a hard problem to solve.

Taylor Wells (13:26.293)
So this is where ultimately demand generation, all things I'm gonna talk about today is like, how do we combat against these things? And really, I wanna talk about a framework, which is called, and I have this quote at the bottom here, people in this counterintuitive framework that I've really, I'm gonna write a book on this someday, I'm really passionate about it. It's been an amazing shift in how I think about growing a company and also how I think about ultimately,

providing value and getting new customers. People buy not based on the value that they think they'll get, but based on the value they've already received. So it's that trust, that relationship, that deposits you've made with somebody. So I've coined this term called the selfless advantage. And this is a go -to -market term. So it applies to marketing, it applies to demand generation, but it also applies to sales, customer success, your entire go -to -market, how you present yourself to the world.

And really it's, I have some means throughout here to bring some levity and some laughter. I love this from Dodgeball. That's a bold strategy cotton. Let's see if it plays off for him. But really the idea is combating two different things. So number one is marketing and sales departments are the most inward focused departments. Marketing and sales is all focused on how do you get more customers? And it hurts the team. I really think like, you know, it,

you know, mental health and addiction and a lot of things are prevalent in marketing and sales because I think we're so inward focus. All we care about is getting that next to client. All we care about is getting more revenue. It's we don't, we never see the success of the customer. We never focused on providing value or how do we help people write things that are life giving for me personally, anecdotally. and so then it also hurts the growth. So the inward focus of, of marketing actually hurts and sales hurts growth.

And so what I propose is a giving without expectation, giving until it almost hurts, right? You're like, you've had to invest. You're giving like even right now I'm spending an hour with you all. I'm hopefully giving it till it hurts, right? I'm having, I spent hours creating this presentation, marketing it, right? Obviously I'm able to get in front of you all and I'm not taking that for granted and the value of that. But in general, it's like, how do I give so much that it hurts? And it builds that long -term customer loyalty and trust. Provide.

Taylor Wells (15:49.845)
Free, impactful resources, content, services to build trust with your ideal customers, pre -customer. So it's all about pre -customer, right? A lot of times we think about giving value as like post -customer, like how do you, you know, time to value and how do you get people the aha moment? I think to go to market, if you could, the folks that are gonna win the most is how do you do a pre -customer? So a lot of my demand generation strategies are all about how do we provide that impact pre -customer? How do we ultimately help folks?

before they become a customer. You can do that through content. You can do that through resources, community, sales, consultative selling. You can do that through mini services. We'll talk about much of that stuff today. But in general, the selfless advantage, how do you give without expectation? Right? Because I think that's the key there without expectation. A lot of times, reciprocity is a very popular idea, right? Using reciprocity to invest and then eventually somebody is going to reciprocate, right? If you go into that mindset, you're only going to give to a certain point.

Your competitors are probably already doing that, right? They're already giving out free content. They're already doing stuff like that. So how do you get go beyond just giving based upon expectation? How do you give selflessly? And I think that's a powerful like, you know, anecdote to a lot of things in life and a lot of problems in life. But then also it can provide so much meaning for you to I think I've found I've enjoyed my profession so much more with this mindset. But then also it's really powerful because it actually drives.

way better business outcomes. You'll get way more leads, way more customers with this mindset because you build that trust and you build that that loyalty and people get to know you and they trust you even more. So the selfless advantage. Look for the book being released in 2030. By the time I get it done. But this concept kind of lives through a lot of my strategies as we go through everything. Cool. So let's jump into nine non obvious mistakes to avoid when going to market. Once again, folks, if you have questions,

If you have issues, please put it in the chat. We'll have a Q &A time at the end as well that you can come on live and ask me questions. But if you have questions throughout, I can answer them as well. Feel free to put those in the chat. So nine non -obvious mistakes to avoid when going to market. Number one, niche down and saying no. This is actually just a general concept I think is really important when going to market is, number one, usually, especially small companies, we have this.

Taylor Wells (18:13.685)
You know, we don't want to say no to revenue, right? So we end up doing servicing clients. We shouldn't service. We end up going into industries that are not aligned. I think what's really amazing. So part one of this is niche down. So find a really targeted audience. And this is where ABM account based marketing has been popularized, where you're going after specific accounts, right? Think about it as accounts, not, you know, hey, I serve small businesses. Small businesses is like in the United States in particular.

is millions and millions of companies. And maybe you can eventually work your way that, you know, work your way up in that direction of like servicing all those companies. But when you go to market, your competitors are probably saying that, right? They serve small businesses. But what if you just served, you know, dental offices in the northeast, right? And you were the best service provider or the best software provider for that region, right? And you build relationships in that community and you got really hyper targeted on those accounts, right? Maybe that's a bad example, but.

In general, how do you serve? And I'm even thinking about for my own career, my own path, like how do I niche down even more? How do I target just a specific? How can I be the only one in that market? I think about that from a standpoint, whether you're a software provider or a service provider, and that's where vertical SaaS, vertical services have become so popular, right? And you look at like the success, if you go look at publicly traded SaaS companies,

Vertical SAS, generally speaking, there's a couple outliers, right? But vertical SAS is, from like a profitability standpoint, go to market standpoint, really, really effective because, once again, you're eliminating your competition because you're really focused on this one industry and become really the best too. Like if you're a service provider, if you're servicing all these different types of industries, all these different sizes of companies, all these different geographic regions, you're ultimately...

you're ultimately and you're ultimately focused on too many audiences. You're not you're going to diluted your service and dilute. But if you're focused on one industry focused ultimately on those industries. So part one of this is and Pauline, sorry if I'm confusing you. Part one of this is niche down on your industry, right? The other part of it is if you can't niche down, just say no more when it comes to either getting spread too thin from a go to market standpoint. I probably should have broken these out into two separate ones.

Taylor Wells (20:33.749)
but ultimately the idea here is like niche down, say no more, get more focused. Like if there's a word here for both of these concepts is focus. The more you can focus on a specific target demographic, the more your, your content is going to be better. Your marketing is going to be better. Your message is going to be better. Everything's gonna be better. your service, your product will probably be better too. Right. And your entire company will be better if you focus more in those industries.

and if you can't, if you're, let's say you're, you're a horizontal organization, right? Hey, we service all sorts of industries, et cetera. And there's no way to get that alignment in your organization to go vertical. Then just focus more on maybe specific campaigns, right? And just, and, and get really good at a couple of things. That's also another thing to hear in general, whether it's your target audience, whether it's your marketing campaigns, whether it's your demand gen, we try to do too much and hope that answers your.

question Pauline is, is we ultimately try to do too much. We get spread way too thin. Everything gets diluted. And ultimately it's you get it just, it's so many problems happen, right? Your product gets worse. Your service gets worse. Your marketing gets diluted. So if you can niche down your target audience, that's awesome. That's step number one. If you can't do that, just really focus your marketing efforts. Get really good at a couple different programs. Simplify things, simplify your go to market.

Because I guarantee you there's like literally a thousand and one things you can do for marketing sales, go to market, right? Demand gen. There's so many things you can do. So it's like, how do you get really good at a couple things? Because if you try to do everything, you're not going to be good at it, right? And really focus. A good book on this is Focus by Al Rees. It was published like 25 years ago. Really interesting book on marketing and focus and how...

Organizations that focus really from a product standpoint, but also go to market demand gen standpoint are way more effective Okay telling not showing so Hey, this is something that's interesting or showing not telling is another way flipped around but ultimately here it's the idea here is Instead of Don't tell somebody what you do show them what you do So this might be a meta meta a very meta example here. I

Taylor Wells (22:54.133)
It's ultimately focused on show them how your product works, don't tell them. And right now, I'm doing a webinar, right? And I'm doing a workshop with you all. Well, this is something I help my clients with, right? So it's very meta. I can show you how I think about doing a webinar or a workshop or providing value, et cetera. Even that selfless advantage example, right? I'm showing you why that's important and I'm hopefully living that out if I really believe it, if I'm doing my job right.

But don't tell somebody what you do, show them. So in the really great example of this is PLG, product -led growth. This is more for smaller deal sizes, high velocity, less on the SMB, mid -market, enterprise deals, but where you can do a free trial, a premium, right? If you can go sign up for a free service and do a free trial, or there's a freemium version where you can sign up a free version. That's a great example of showing somebody and not telling them. They can immediately get value from it.

they can immediately start playing around with it. They can see if it works for them. Another great, if you're in higher ACVs, interactive demos or having the ability for somebody to play around with your product on your website. Interactive demos have been really popular over the past couple of years for that exact reason. How can you show somebody, not tell them? Content can be another way of doing this, right? If you do create content around what you do, right? And actually show them how it works. Show them how your services work. Show them how your product works.

versus telling them how it works. And this is really powerful in the sense of building trust, right? They get behind the scenes and they get to understand how things work. Really powerful. I think this is only gonna become more important as we evolve and things continue to work through here. Next thing is not understanding business economics. So of all these little acronyms, NRR, Net Dollar Retention, GRR, Gross Revenue Retention, Net Revenue Retention, Gross Revenue Retention,

churn, payback periods, gross margins, run rates, profit and loss statements. Understand these things. If you don't, as a marketer, as a salesperson, as a leader, if you don't understand these things, going to market is gonna be really hard. Because first of all, you're not gonna get alignment with your executive team, your CEO, your board, whoever you're reporting to, your marketing manager, because if you don't understand the business economics, you're not gonna understand which levers to pull, you're not gonna understand the health of the company.

Taylor Wells (25:14.933)
And you have to, really when it comes to anything in business, the people that are the most successful is how can they tie their activities back to these things, right? Net dollar retention, churn, look at these things up. Unit economics is another way of this, looking at this. But these business economics, and I have a, if you go look up on YouTube, go to my YouTube channel, GTM News, Unit Economics, just search for Unit Economics and there's a...

Discussion I did with Sam Jacobs from Pavilion on unit economics and I learned a term from it was great Understanding kind of the business economics of the company and this is this great great Just best practice in general like when you're when you are trying to grow your career becoming a marketing leader or a sales leader or whatnot I understand the business economics because everything has to tie back to that ultimately if it doesn't then you Doesn't matter what you'll do you you won't get the buy -in things won't work and people will quit

because we're like, hey, I don't know how this actually, why does this matter for the business economics? Awesome. Not integrating the entire GTM team. So the goal here, so demand generation is just one part, right? It's like, how do we get opportunities in sales? But actually, how you get opportunities in sales, every department's involved in that. For example, your products involved in that, sales teams is involved in that, your website, like every department is involved in generating demand.

And so you getting alignment and bringing in the entire go -to -market team is really important. And you come in with a leadership standpoint of how do you create amazing pre -customer experiences, right? And that's another back to the selfless advantage mindset is how do you create amazing pre -customer experiences? And everyone's involved in that. And if you want to create great thought leadership, you're going to need product or you're going to need your executive team.

If you want to do partnerships, because as a demand gen strategy, well, guess what? If you have a partnership team, you're going to need partnerships with the sales teams to be involved with that. If you want to grow customer advocacy, right, and get more customers and more advocacy out there, you're going to need to get customer success. So it's all about bringing in the entire team and leveraging those things. A lot of times demand gen gets kind of pigeonholed into just like running ads or doing outbound and doing like and those things are great.

Taylor Wells (27:33.589)
But really demand gen kind of five buckets. I think about content, partnerships, paid media, customer advocacy, and outbound. So those are kind of the five programs you can kind of pull. And depending on your strategy, you may pull those other ones differently. So content, partnerships, paid media, customer advocacy, and outbound. And the entire organization's involved in all five of those areas. So making sure you bring in the rest of the team as needed.

and really leveraging all the expertise, because that's how you create amazing demand. Another mistake here is no follow -up content or product, no, content or product offers. So Gong did a great example of this. Gong does an awesome content loop. When you go opt -in for an e -book or when you go read an e -book, they have another e -book ready for you. Hey, check out this other one.

And I was like, after like, you know, six or seven clicks, I had like six eBooks and it's just like all these content offers and the, you know, continue to consume, providing more value and these content loops. So whenever you do more content and whenever you create content, right. content offer or any sort of content have another followup content offer. Right. And then when they've consumed enough content, you then throw in the product offers. So product offers, product offer is not scheduled demo or let's talk.

Those are like, you know, they are not an offer at all. There's not there's nothing of value in that. It's very self focused in the sense of like, hey, I want to sell you something. What an offer is, is something that they get in exchange for giving up time or jumping on meeting or whatever. So an offer, I'll give you an example. I was working for a service provider years ago and we were a Microsoft 365 service provider. So we helped people with Microsoft 365 and a bunch of other technology stuff.

But so we did a webinar around Microsoft 365, how to leverage Microsoft 365. And at the end of the webinar, we offered to become for free their Microsoft 365 certified partner was completely free. They didn't didn't cost them anything. And we were to help. We were able to help them with a couple Microsoft 365 things like help them add new accounts, delete accounts, set up security, some basic things. So our main service was like, hey, we did cybersecurity and cloud services, all these other things.

Taylor Wells (29:59.957)
but we distilled one small little offer to get people in the door and aligned with our content, right? So as they watched the Microsoft 365 webinar and they wanted to get more help with Microsoft 365, they then booked a meeting to get set up with us being able to support them with the Microsoft 365, a small version of our product in general. Right here is probably like, when it comes to demand generation, awesome opportunity where I see no one, first of all, content offers.

That's more common right gong has been a bunch of that But the product offers I do not see people doing this and I'm helping my clients test these out and it's actually working really well where You know take a small version. Maybe a small little service. You can give somebody for free, right? Just to get them in the door And once they've you know, once you've provided more value, they're like hey I want you to help solve the other 99 problems we have and that's exactly what happened with the company I worked with was

We had a great content offer, right? And then we had a great product offer, free offer that followed up. And then ultimately like, hey, I want you to help me with all my IT, right? And we were able to help them with all their IT. So gold opportunity here, I really think, especially for SaaS companies where, you know, bring them in on a small little service will help you migrate, will help you deploy, will help you do this small little thing for free. Get them in the door, build that relationship and continue that selfless advantage of giving, right? Pre -customer.

Content's a great way to do it too, right? Providing thought leadership, those content offers, but then that product offers is gold as well too. Something I do not see people doing. I think it will be a huge opportunity. Really obvious for service -based businesses, right? Do a small version of whatever big service you're doing, but really good also for SaaS companies as well. Okay, another non -obvious mistake is patience or not being patient or spending enough money.

So what I've learned is you can either have speed or you can have efficiency. You can't have both. So you can either have speed with money, dump a ton of money into marketing and sales to get your customers. I mean, if you look at, I love looking at the publicly traded SaaS companies, how much they spend on marketing and sales and Salesforce, I'll give you an example here. Salesforce, the number one CRM in the world, right? They have more customers, more revenue than anyone else. Their market cap is,

Taylor Wells (32:17.653)
The revenue is like 30 billion dollars a year. They spend anywhere from like seven to ten billion dollars a year on marketing and sales. They're the number one provider. They're the brand awareness. They have tons of inbound. Everyone knows about them. And yet they still have to spend, you know, right now it's gone down. It used to be like 45 percent, you know, a couple of years ago. It's gone down a little bit, but they're still like 40 percent of the revenue on marketing and sales.

I guarantee you most people are listening right now, unless you're in a growth stage company and you've raised money. If you're bootstrapped or self -funded, you're not probably spending 40 % of your revenue on sales and marketing. But if this large company, that has all the brand awareness and establishment. So generally speaking, you have to be patient. If you wanna be efficient and you're constrained by budget, right? And your CEO, your founder doesn't want to spend a ton of money on marketing and sales. You have a limited budget, which is most of the companies I've worked in, right?

I get it. You have to be patient and you got to build your brand and you have to invest or you can spend a ton of money to get that speed. So you can't have both. I've never seen a situation where you can have both, sadly. So number seven is not integrating partners. These last three are kind of, you know, if you're small, really small, like under a million dollars in revenue, a lot of these things are especially partners. Partnerships are really hard to start. They can be really great, though, from a demand standpoint.

So find a couple of partners, right? Integrate those partners in general. Always think about how you can integrate a strategic partner, right? Whether, and strategic partners is a whole thing. I actually did, I've done a bunch of trainings on it. If you want to go check out my other videos on strategic partners, just go to YouTube and GTM News, look up strategic partners and you can see a bunch of different videos I've done on it and interviews I've done, et cetera. Strategic partners is its own thing and there's lots of value to it. There's ways to kind of start and get people in the door and build those relationships, but.

Once again, a common mistake I see is strategic partners are gonna be even more important as we go into the future, which we'll talk about a little bit later as well. Now integrating customers. So customer advocacy, how do you integrate customers into your programs, right? How do you get your customers to help you create content? How do you get customers to do testimonials, get customers to come to the conference with you, get customers to come do dinners with you after a conference, right? The more you can get customers, people...

Taylor Wells (34:36.341)
No one really cares about what we have to say. They care about what their peers have to say, what influencers have to say, what strategic partners have to say, other folks in the industry, because we have a bias, right? I'm being hyperbolic. People do care about what we have to say, but generally speaking, they trust their peers way more than they trust us. So how do you get your customers? Always figure out how to get your customers into whatever you're doing will make your marketing, your demand, way more successful. You're going to market in general. And then last but not least,

and having a sucky product. No matter how good your marketing is, it's obvious, right? No matter how good, maybe this one is obvious, but no matter how good your marketing, no matter how good your sales is, if people, if your product doesn't work, right, I've worked for companies where we hit all of our marketing goals. We, you know, we were successful in getting new customers, but we failed in the end because the product didn't work. So if you're like looking for a new job or if you're thinking about a career change, the number one thing,

I would focus on as a marketing and salesperson or anyone can go to market is does the product work and are people turning? Because if they are, then it doesn't matter what you do, that will just drain the life out of everything you do and ultimately you will not be successful in the end. Okay, let's get into some tactical stuff here. I'm gonna drink a quick drink of water and we'll get right into these three tactical things.

Taylor Wells (36:01.845)
All righty, let's talk about three cost effective strategies. It was hard for me to distill all the thousands of strategies out there, but three, okay, maybe four practical strategies for you to implement. First one is owned media. So this graph right here kind of shows you the different types of media. I'm sure a lot of you already seen this, but you can kind of put all marketing into these three buckets. There's earned media, earned media is word of mouth, it's social media, organic.

social media, it's SEO, it's PR, it's anything you have to earn, right? Where you're earning through content, through reputation, through word of mouth. So there's earned media. That's become increasingly harder, right? Every social media platform is so saturated. SEO is like super weird right now with Google and AI, generative AI.

Who knows how that's going to produce long term. Not to say our media isn't bad, right? It still has its place. Paid media is also, you know, you probably really come out of that. That's anything that's pay to play, right? That could be a conference. I think conferences are paid media. You're sponsoring the conference. You're going there and you're paying to get access to their audience, right? To pay to play situation. It could be sponsoring influencers. It could be paid advertising in the sense of like paid social, paid search, anything pay per click.

And anything that's pay to play where you're paying to get in front of people's audiences. And last one at least is owned media. So this is your website. This is your blog. This is an email newsletter. This is a virtual events sort of podcast. Podcast is sort of an owned media in my opinion. And so owned media is actually one of my favorite of these three buckets. If you can figure out owned media, all the other ones get way easier. Number one.

because you're building an audience. Owned media is all about audience building. So you're building people, and that's why I have GTM News, right? It's me building an audience of people that are gonna consume my content, and I'm building that relationship with them over a long period of time. And then when they come into market for my services, maybe they'll hire me or whatever, right? There's all these benefits to it. So owned media is my favorite. And here's kind of typical owned media in the B2B space, email newsletter.

Taylor Wells (38:22.549)
virtual event program, podcasts is sort of an own media. I think of it as depending on how your podcast is distributed, you're kind of at the mercy of all the podcasting companies, right? Apple podcasts, Spotify. So it's sort of an earned media approach, but it can be owned in the sense of like, if you had your podcast on your website and it can subscribe to get, it's kind of how I've done it with GTM News is where you can watch it on my website and then subscribe to get up.

updating additional updated episodes. And the blog would also be an owned asset in some ways. But problem with blog is it's usually distributed by earned media, right through Google. So you're at the mercy of them. So really, my favorite out of these four is virtual events. So my favorite is virtual events. And like this little meme here, I love events. And the reason why I love virtual events is they're a low dollar net outlay.

Right. You're not just not a lot of money to execute them versus like an in -person event or really any of the other strategies. Right. Takes time. Takes energy from that standpoint. But not like a net dollar doesn't cost a lot of money to execute it. An obvious opt in. So all you that sign up for my webinar, you opted in with no regrets probably. Right. And you used a real email address. And if you're signing up for an e -book or whatever, there's no it's not obvious opt in.

It's kind of like bait and switch when you sign up for an ebook, you need to put your email address in or other ways of generating leads, other ways of generating opt -ins, which is what that is. So I like it because it's an obvious opt -in. Like, hey, I want reminders, you're going to follow up with recording, whatever. So it's an obvious opt -in. I also like it because it builds a relationship at scale. So in this event, I've talked to Pauline, I've talked to Anish.

Hopefully other people are going to come on live to ask me questions later. It's a two way communication, right? I'm building relationships with you all, which is a really powerful way to build trust is building that relationship where I'm getting to know you, you're going to know me. And it's a two way relationship building at scale though. I can do it with hundreds of people, thousands of people at once. Really powerful. They spend a lot of time with you. You're all are spending an hour of your time today, which is, I take it, don't take it for granted. That's a lot of time, right? As somebody reads your ebook or watches your

Taylor Wells (40:41.845)
blog or any other form of like owned asset on your website. They don't spend that much time with you. For sure. They don't spend that much time. They glance over it. It's been two minutes on it. Whatever. Even a newsletter, right? They'll only read it for a few minutes and they're done. There's also a video component. You're hearing, you know, you're seeing me live on video. You're hearing my voice. I'm able to crack jokes. There's so much more. There's that video aspect, which I should have put on here. That's so important is that is that video connection that we're making.

and then, you also able to bring customers in. So this event is just me doing a workshop, but you're able to bring customers in some of the best, you know, webinars, just a little side note here or virtual events is combined social proof and thought leadership. So I've done this for my clients and this myself, but you bring a customer on to do a webinar and there's a thought leadership topic, right? So it's all about content. It's all about thought leadership and,

Ultimately, you're talking, you're providing value to your audience. And inevitably, that customer is going to bring up your product. And they're like, hey, I'm not trying to rep. You know, I'm not trying to go make a joke, right? I'm not trying to rep, you know, the company. But this is how we solve this problem here. This is how this this platform helps us do this. It's gold. It's awesome because you get social proof, right? You get somebody advocating your product, that customer advocacy. But then you also get thought leadership. It's a sweet combination.

events are a great way to do that. Whereas a case study kind of canned, it's not very natural, right? testimonials, same thing, you know, so they're awkward a lot of times, whereas an event it's really natural, right? They're, they're sharing thought leadership. they're building, you know, they're providing value to the audience and their position, your product, pretty awesome combination. You can bring strategic partners on even bring prospects on to, to, to, on your event, right? That's a common, podcast play where if you have a podcast, you can bring people on, interview them at your prospects.

It's awesome for events too, where bring your prospects on and interview them. Have your prospects and your customers on as well. And a strategic partner. And you have a sweet trio of content. And ultimately, you're kind of pulling all these different levers, right? And having all these awesome outcomes from this one single event. That's why I love it so much. I think events are so powerful because it does all these different things. You get opt -ins, you build relationships, you get customer advocacy, you strategic partners, right? If you're like wondering, how do I do...

Taylor Wells (43:01.301)
strategic partners, how do I build strategic partners, do an event and invite them to come on, right? It's a great way to do co -marketing. I'm trying to do prospecting, I'm trying to get ahold of my prospects. Well, invite them to come share, right? That's a way for you to get to know your prospects. Last but not least, it's a great long form contest. The reason why I'm actually on Riverside right now is I'm testing it out because Riverside's the best recording platform I've found. No one does a better recording. It's actually, it's originally a podcast platform, but it's the best recording platform. And so,

for me to repurpose this recording into social media clips, et cetera, I wanna get the highest quality recording and hence why I'm using Riverside. So yeah, long form content to repurpose, really powerful. So how to do it, couple of hot tips here and looking at the clock here, we still got a lot more to go through. I wanna be able to answer your questions as well at the end.

so I'm going to kind of go through this pretty quickly here. You, number one, you want to build a recurring program. Don't just do one -off webinars, build a recurring program. People are expecting to get more content from you. Sometimes it's month six that you crack the virtual event program, right? And you find a topic that's just gold. And in fact, almost guarantee you it'll be month six because that's been my, my, experience with all the programs I've run internally, externally, as it takes a while to figure out what works, what doesn't work, what your audience wants to, watch and learn about.

And then you want to do a variety of programs to a net recurring program, do a workshop, do a panel event, do all sorts of different formats because your audience is going to get bored of just hearing you or your CEO talk. The number one problem I see with virtual events in general is number one is they have just their CEO or their CTA or whoever just keeps doing these webinars and people get tired of that. People, you know, they hear the same thing over and over again and they don't want, they want fresh new content, fresh new ideas. Make it all about thought leadership. So thought leadership mean like content, value added content.

You can always add product demo webinars on top of that. So you could have your monthly webinar program or every two months webinar program and then add in a product webinar, you know, where it's a product demo webinar on top of that. But keep those separate just because you want to build that audience, right? You want to build that where people are coming back, they're learning, they're experiencing, you're building that relationship, you're building that trust. Once again, bring customers, bring strategic partners, influencers, right?

Taylor Wells (45:19.637)
A couple of a bunch of hacks here. Really about promoting the heck out of it. Put it on LinkedIn, create a LinkedIn event, have people register on LinkedIn and invite your audiences. You can invite up to a thousand people from your network from LinkedIn to your event and then you can pull those people out. So I did here half my audience is from LinkedIn. Half of them are from my newsletter and then I promoted it a bunch of different places. But you can run ads on cost effective platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

You can invite folks, invite guests or your audience through outbound. I've done that where you just invite people through your webinars. Great outbound play. Post on social media, get your speakers to promote it. Post in different communities where appropriate, right? I've done that. Really effective too. Last but not least, repurpose it. Repurpose it into social clips, repurpose it into blog article, eBooks or guides. Even put it on your podcast, right? Take your event and put it on your podcast. Right way there.

Okay, number two here is guest speaking or writing. Another funny meme for you all there. Guest speaking's awesome. So there's tons of free speaking opportunities. I'm always looking for speaking opportunities on other podcasts, webinars, conferences. You should have a speaker bank internally where you have a bunch of speakers that are gonna come speak on your event. You should also do the same thing externally. Go find all the speaker banks out there to go speak. Some of them require sponsorships, some of them don't.

But great, great opportunity to go provide content for free, right? Provide that thought leadership, provide that content value added content. If you're not a public speaker, go write, go do guest writing for somebody's blog, go do create a guide for strategic partner or an association. People love free content. You can go right for you can go right for HubSpot like HubSpot, you can go apply to become a writer and create content and they'll link back to you great way to get free publicity and tap into other people's audiences, right?

And once again, not a huge amount of work if you're already creating content, just create that content and for new audiences, tweak it a bit. I found this to be really effective. Number three is maximize conferences in person. So I still think in person, you know, especially with AI and the way the internet's going, in person is still super powerful, especially if the ACV is high enough. If you have a high deal, you know, deal value, if you're like, if you're in like the 25 to 50 to a hundred thousand dollar,

Taylor Wells (47:43.285)
annual contract value in person makes sense to go in person and make those build those relationships. One of my clients said this the other day and I thought I wrote it down so so powerful. He says we can measure our success by how many meals we have with somebody. I'm gonna take like 15 seconds for that to all sit in. We can measure our success by how many meals we have with somebody. That's gonna be a good life maxim, if you would, of like how many meals you have with people.

and building those relationships and there's somebody so powerful about having a meal. So a couple of tips for events, creative follow ups from events, right? Do really creative follow ups. Like if you met somebody, follow up an email, be like, hey, I remember you mentioned this and provide some sort of value in that creative follow up. Host dinners at conferences. And last but not least, create a sense of urgency to build relationships with people at conferences. Don't just like sit at your booth, sit down and wait for people to come to you, go to them.

Create that sense of urgency. Last but not least, the bonus is community -led growth. This is Chang from the show Community. Great show if no one's seen that. But I thought that's such a funny meme. He's a hilarious character. Community -led growth. Catherine Bruce from Pavilion actually had a great way of encapsulizing this. So there's thousands of micro communities, right? Associations were kind of the original micro communities. Now there's people who've started their own communities. There's Facebook groups was also kind of the start of it too on the digital side.

Now there's like school, there's Google, there's LinkedIn groups, there's Slack groups, there's thousands of communities out there. Three things you could do, go become a member, sponsor a community, or build your own, which is much harder, the third one. At least become a member and start contributing as a member. That's how I've built my own company of getting clients is contributing as a member. But communities, as everything gets more competitive, right? People and more as things...

become people want more context, right, to how to solve their problems. So they're going to look to like, who are the people that do exactly what I do? So for example, you know, it's not just a B2B go to market group. It's a B2B ag tech group, you know, you know, or it's a B2B cybersecurity group, right, for marketers. And so thinking about that really niche groups and ultimately join those groups, super powerful way to build those relationships.

Taylor Wells (50:07.157)
So those are my four tactics. I'm gonna talk through here for a few minutes and then we're gonna go into some time for you to jump on live if you have questions and wrap up a couple things here in the next 10 minutes. So how to compete against AI content. There's kind of two different ways I think about it. Number one, this is a great way to kind of get alignment internally or just for your own career is relationships. So how to compete against AI content is relationships. AI can't have relationships yet. Probably will never be able to have a relationship.

And also, AI is gonna make, in my opinion, gonna make the internet way less trustworthy. So relationships are gonna be that much more important than ever. So one -on -one relationships, right? Building one -on -one relationships in your community, building one -on -one relationships in general, right? How do you build those one -on -one relationships? A really powerful strategic partner is another way, right? It's a way of generating, getting through relationships, leveraging their relationship, getting in front of their audience or vice versa.

customer advocacy, and then community -led growth. I think these four strategies are relationship -based, right? They're all about how do you leverage relationships? How do you get in front of people relationships? And I think really important as we move into the future, and I've always been important, but the internet has made it very cheap to get in front of people. And so relationships have become much harder, just from a cost standpoint. They were more expensive, right, to build relationships. It takes time, it takes travel, it takes whatever.

takes investment to build relationships, number one. So I think down the road, it's like, it's gonna be that, it's gonna be, if you have relationships, this is gonna be, you're gonna be a competitive differentiator, because you have that relationship, and chances are your competitors don't have, right? Because you only can have so many relationships, your audience, your studio partners, et cetera. So build those relationships now, I think they'll pay off greatly. And then the other one is impact. So I've talked about this a lot too, pre -customer impact, right?

I think the folks that provide the most impact pre -customer will win. So pre -customer value, think about GTM as a vehicle to provide value, not just to get new customers, even sales, right? How can sales provide value through consultative selling? How can you, when I was an account executive, I actually learned that, especially in a competitive market, which I was in, how I could differentiate us is through the sales process. I immediately provide, I treated them as a customer.

Taylor Wells (52:31.029)
the minute I got on a demo with them and I acted as they were a customer. Like how would I treat them? Not as a prospect, but as a customer. A mind shift change when it comes to thinking about prospects. And when, once again, if you haven't think you've invested enough, give a little bit more. And that's also another good maxim too is like with how expensive it is to acquire customers, et cetera, you probably have to do more than you think you do.

Right. It's gonna take more impressions, more cost per lead, more of everything than you think it does. Any stat you've read is probably out of date when it comes to like cost per lead or, you know, how many impressions you need. Cause things are changing so quickly. Number one, but then number two, it's also, you're not applicable to you, especially if you're a startup. A lot of those best practices are not startups, right? And maybe Facebook or Google or, you know, or a large organizations, right? So the context, right?

is missing in a lot of that. So probably you have to give more. You have to do more. You have to ultimately to get people over over that threshold. Awesome. Let's talk about some AI tools on the flip side. We talked about all the bad stuff about AI and how like how to compete against it and stay relevant. But here's some things that I found helpful. Here's five tools that I use regularly that are all AI tools or use a lot of AI in them. Number one is Opus. I use it to take long form video and turn it into short form video.

I use Cloud for, it's kind of similar to ChatjpT, but I feel it's a little bit better. Just all things, generative AI. Summarize, really cool tool. You'll take the audio or video, basically the transcript. It takes a transcript and you can turn it into blogs and other written form. Copy .ai, a great copywriting tool, generative copywriting tool. And then Clay, which is just kind of this own kind of unique research data.

A lot of people use it for outbound. I use it for research and summarizing and creating, you know, all sorts of follow ups and stuff like that. But a lot of cool AI tools out there. I will say that what I've noticed is right now, I mean, it's May of 2024. Who knows what will happen in a month or two? Is that AI tools are best for repurposing original content. I don't think they're actually that good for creating original content. So.

Taylor Wells (54:54.325)
Contents like, you know, the number one game, number one thing that marketing is, right? Or demand generation is, so like, it won't, it can't create a virtual event for you, but can help you repurpose a virtual event. It won't create a blog article for you, but it can help you turn a virtual event into a blog article or a podcast into a blog article. So I think it does a lot of those things really, it's doing those things really well and it's worth the investment. And eventually maybe down the road, it will, it can actually create original content really well.

so right now, I'm not an expert on AI content. So as a caveat, I'm sure people have figured out how to create original content really well with it. But what I found is, in general, when it comes to content as a side note is how do you take the brilliance, your genius, your team's genius, your team's brilliance, extract that knowledge through virtual events or podcasts or guest speaking or, or whatever, and then repurpose that.

into blogs, etc. And so I think that's the most powerful way of A .I. is like, how do you extract ultimately all of your your your brilliance? Right. You can do that through interviews. You can do that through guest speaking. You can do that through whatnot and then use all these types of tools to repurpose it for all sorts of means. That's a cool thing about it. You can do virtual men and you can create social posts. You can create a podcast. You can create blog articles and A .I. super, super helpful with that. OK, we've got a couple of minutes left here.

Questions anyone want to jump on and be brave and jump on and ask me a question live. You can just click that little button at the bottom. No pressure if you don't feel comfortable with doing it. You can always follow up with me later. But yeah you can click that little button that says call in now. It will ask you to for permissions to use your audio and video and you can jump on right now to ask me a question and I'll give it a couple seconds get people opportunity to do it. This is a new feature I'm testing so.

I'd love it if you did it just for that. And if not, though, totally understand. And you can also ping me through the chat if you have a question there or follow me afterwards with the questions. I'll give people another 20 seconds or so and I'll make it really awkward, make it awkward sounds. I wonder if I can put some music on to make it even more awkward. But yeah, I'll give it another.

Taylor Wells (57:15.477)
in a few seconds here if anybody wants to jump on, do the security permissions and awesome. Pauline has a question. I'll answer that here. Do you consider PR as a part of demand gen for awareness? Totally. Yeah, I think going back to the, going back to the own, the different owned media, earned media, it definitely is, I think it's part of demand gen. I think all these five bucks, all these three buckets,

are totally demand gen appropriate. I do think PR, yeah, depends on your size of organization and where you're at and your budgets and are you doing those other things I mentioned really well? Because if you're not, I don't know if PR is the route I would take. It depends on your size of organization. There's so many variables. I hate saying it depends, but yeah, depend, PR is totally a demand gen. In fact, anything in these three buckets is a demand gen in my opinion. And then some, and there's other things that are outside of this, right?

Partnerships isn't in here. Outbound isn't in here. And so yeah, anything word of mouth, PR, SEO, social media, all that I think falls into the earned media category and totally a PR play. Good question, Pauline.

Taylor Wells (58:33.973)
Cool, awesome, I'm glad it was helpful. And awesome, well folks, I'm gonna go back to the end of my slide here. And cool, and special offer for you all, I wanted to give you this opportunity. I'm giving away for the folks that stayed to the end here, thanks for spending the last hour. I want to give you a free 75 minute one -on -one session to work on any of the above with me. I do it for two reasons. Number one, it's a great opportunity to build relationships with folks, right?

So from my end, it's a great opportunity to build relationships. I also learn a ton when I do these consulting sessions. But it's only for you folks that have been on the call. Free 75 minutes if you want to go into any of this stuff, right? Or other things. You're like, hey, I'm wondering about Outbound or Pauline if you want to talk more about PR or SEO. Happy to talk more about that and how it's integrated into your rest of your strategy or your demand gen in general, right? Like I talked about a couple things here. Demand gen though, there's lots of different things you can do.

And depending on your organization, it might make sense to do other things and happy to talk through there. So reach out to me. There's two different ways you reach out to me on LinkedIn. Taylor Wells, I'm one of the first ones that pop up, connect with me there. Like, hey, this message me like, hey, Taylor, I'd love to take you up on that opportunity for the 75 minutes. You can also go to potential opportunity .com and book a time with me there and we can we can make it a 75 minute session. So yeah, I'd love to spend time with you all. If you have any additional questions, I'm happy to once again give you that free.

75 minute session just as a thank you for spending this hour with me. And yeah, thanks everyone. We're at the top of the hour. Thanks everyone for joining. Hope it was helpful. And once again, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Taylor Wells, stay connected with me there. Follow me on potential opportunity as well if you want to book a time. Or you also get my follow ups on the GTM news. So any events I do in the future, my podcast, my newsletter, look out for the recording for this event and also any other content I create.

or produce, you'll be on the list. So thanks everyone for joining. Have a great day. Take care. Best of luck generating more opportunities.