Workbook 6: Creating Demand for your Software

Understanding the market reality 

From the very start, we need to understand the mathematical reality of the current mindset of the 240 faces you’ve identified in your Market Map.  

Research tell us that despite the fact you’re confident they have a defined need, the reality is they’ll all be at significantly different stages of the buying process. And you’ll need to tailor your marketing so you’re providing each stage with the right messages, in the right context, with the right calls to action across multiple of channels, to move them forwards through the sales process. Sadly, not all of them are sitting with their contract “signing pens” at the ready and many will need educating about the services you offer.  

The Five Prospect Stages 

The simple truth, built upon years of extensive research in this area, is that your prospects will fall into five different segments in terms of their current buying mindset.  

So, let’s break these five segments down piece by piece, and look at what sort of Marketing activities you should be considering for each. 

Segment 1: Actively Buying – Capture Demand (3%) 

This is the smallest segment and is roughly 3% (at most) of any given market, at any given moment and this represents the people who are in an active buying motion. They have a clear view of their challenge and how they’d like to solve it, or at least believe that challenge is worth solving. It’s worth remembering that this 3% remains fluid, with different organisations coming in and out at different times. 

But these businesses are actively in the market looking for a solution and are probably shortlisting the options available to them. At an early stage that could be shortlisting the categories of products or services that can solve their pain, or at a later stage it’s looking at specific service providers that they want to speak to. This 3% of the market is also the area where all your competitors are totally focused and something like 90% of their marketing spend is absorbed on this tiny segment.  

Your job here is to be in the best position possible to capture this demand highly effectively. When they come calling, you need to be accessible and available. We’ll talk more about this later in the chapter. 

Segment 2: Open to Buying – Nurture Demand (7%) 

7% of the market are ‘open to buying’ – they are waiting for somebody to over demonstrate and reconfirm the pain they’re suffering from.  

Your role as a marketer here, and the mode in which you should be working, is nurturing that demand. You can call it education, but in reality it’s confirming the problem that they already know they have and making sure you’re highly visible to them. This then allows you to start to introduce your product to the market.  

What the above two segments tells us is that any marketing that talks about your product, your service, or your category is really only immediately applicable to about 10% of your market at any one time; without doubt a sobering number. 

Segment 3: Not Thinking about it – Create Demand (30%) 

This segment (30%) is suffering from the pain, but it’s latent. They are not thinking about it or analysing what the core problem is, but they are still in some way suffering. They are living with the broken process, are suffering the symptoms but may not have them at the front of their mind, nor even know there’s a remedy.  

For this segment, and indeed the two below, your job is to create demand. These businesses need to have the symptoms exposed to them through useful, shareable, and therefore valuable thought content that makes them aware of the problem and explains that they are not alone. Again, we’ll cover off demand generation later on the chapter. 

Segment 4: Don’t think they are interested (30%) 

These companies don’t think they are interested in your product or service, nor believe your solution is relevant to them. 

Segment 5: Definitely not interested (30%) 

Exactly as it says on the tin – they are definitely not interested! 

What do these statistics mean for your Market Map facebook? 

Let’s look back now at your market map face book of 240 organisations that you’ve evidenced through peer interviews are suffering from the pains your solution solves. Using the matrix detailed above, we now know that 3% of them actively looking to buy and that 7% of them are open to buying. That means that there are 24 businesses out there whose demand you need to capture immediately, for fear of losing out to your competition.  

If all of these 24 businesses bought from you at an annual contract value of £25,000, you would achieve £600,000 worth of sales or 60% of your £1m ARR target. Suddenly all the work you’ve done focusing on visceral customer pain, creating a visualisation, and concentrating intently on your middle of the dartboard market map, gives you a distinct advantage for the next 12 months. These businesses are your low hanging fruit and indeed some of them are apples that are simply lying on the ground.  

Now you’re armed with this information, where should you start, especially if you feel you’re not marketing effectively today. 

Capturing the demand of the 10% 

Capturing demand is the easiest place to start because these are all things within your control. You must make sure you’re: 

• Appearing in the right categories 
• Aware of the relevant key words and phrases for your paid search  
• Creating content that contains the right phraseology to achieve great results with your earned search 

These activities over time will gain you visibility on page 1 of Google and will ensure those actively searching for a solution like yours can find you. There’s nothing more frustrating than entering a tender process late whilst having the most ideal solution for your customer, but not being shortlisted because the buying company weren’t aware of your existence.  

You may well need an agency’s help with this (I’d start by contacting Gripped), but budget must be assigned to Pay Per Click and creating inbound content that’s seeded with these key word phrases. It’ll take several months for your content to increase your earned rankings, but the Pay Per Click can be activated immediately. 

Buyer Intent Software 

One other suggestion would be to research and potentially make an investment into one of the buyer intent software packages such as 6 Sense, the market leader, (www.6sense.com) or even Sales Navigator within LinkedIn. 6 Sense describe a ‘Dark Funnel’ which is a ghostly data realm packed with buyer intent information and includes content from industry publications, blogs, social networks, influence outlets, product review sites like G2 and TrustRadius and much more. These signals, transmitted from B2B buyers who conduct research across thousands of websites and digital resources, are brimming with incredibly useful and actionable intent data.  

The true power of the Dark Funnel lies in combining those countless, disparate intent signals spread across the internet into a cohesive picture which can empower you to navigate prospects with absolute confidence. A software package such as this would provide fantastic lead indicators about which businesses are actively searching for a solution such as yours. 

The critical importance of your website 

Let’s assume your ‘Ready to Buy’ customers have now found you on Google and they click through to your website. How happy are you with the messages they’ll now see there? 

We’ve discussed many times in this book the importance of this and how too many websites don’t accurately explain what you do as a business. Let’s unpack this again and add more. 

It doesn’t matter whether you are a transactional type of solution charging £200 per month for your service or you’re an Enterprise solution with an annual contract value of £1m a year. The rules are just the same. Buyers expect, at a bare minimum, certain things from your website.  

If you boil it down to the basics, your messaging must immediately answer the following questions. 

• Is this thing for me? 
• What benefit do I get?  
• Does it meet the use case that I have in mind? 
• Is it going to fix my problem? 
• How much does it cost? 

• Do other people like me use it and have they got benefit from it?  
• How do I go about implementing and quickly getting best value from it?  
• How do I buy it or get started? 

These questions are the acid test for any marketer and it’s worth spending time looking at your own site and being honest with yourself about your messaging. Within a few minutes, does your existing messaging adequately answer the questions above? 

The importance of the headline message 

What does the headline message (marketers call this the H1) on your website say? There’s a formula for success with this headline that doesn’t guarantee success, but certainly stacks the odds in your favour.  

Your H1 must say 3 things: 

1. The Category you’re in – in other words ‘what you are’ 
2. The Audience you serve – who is it that gets most benefit 
3. The Macro benefit of working with you 

If you can get all of these three points covered off in one sentence on your website, you’ve immediately increased your chances of success.  

A great example here would be Gripped’s own website. Their H1 is ‘You’re a B2B Founder who is serious about growth. We are too.” And underneath their strapline is “Gripped helps founders, sales leaders and marketing teams to earn the trust of prospects and customers.’ Bingo. Says it all.  

Remember customers need to land on your homepage and immediately understand ‘Is this for me, what is it, and what benefit do I get from it.’ So you need to spend time with your team, your marketing department and/or an agency to get your H1 right. 

The Gartner research 

As further evidence about the importance of your website, consider this. In September 2020, Gartner released a Future of Sales research paper highlighting the exponential rise in digital interactions between buyers and suppliers that will break the traditional sales model. They predicted that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels, because 33% of all buyers now desire a “seller free” sales experience. This preference climbs to 44% for the millennials they interviewed.  

They believe a digital first buying posture will become the norm and their customers would increasingly learn and buy digitally rather than talking to a sales rep, who will become only one of many possible sales channels. Their research found that buyers typically spend only 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers when they are considering a purchase. 

Gartner’s findings offer relevance to this book. What it teaches us is that irrespective of the annual contract value, most software buyers expect to do at least 80% of their learning about a particular solution on your organisation’s website. Yet again we must look at our existing site and consider whether our customers are able to educate themselves effectively. 

Any teacher will tell you that to educate a pupil effectively, your story needs to have a start a middle and an end. ‘Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you’ve told them’, is another way of saying it. You need to capture your customer’s attention with a stimulating message upfront and make them keen to find out more. 

Make yourself easy to buy from 

One of the things most B2B software organisations underestimate is the fact that if you make yourself easy to buy from, it’s a clear point of differentiation from your competition. Because most other organisations are so difficult to buy from. This is such an easy win for you if you can get it right, so what do we mean about being ‘easy to buy from’? 

Think about all the micro decisions you might have to make when you’re considering a purchasing decision in your own life. You’re thinking about the price, whether it’s a great product and how long will it be before you’re seeing value from your investment. In the same way, you must anticipate all of the information your customer might need to move themselves through the buying cycle. And answer all their questions. What might those questions be?  

The answer is you already know them as they are the same questions (and maybe objections) each prospect has asked you in the past. Will this be easy to implement, or will it cause upheaval across my business? Why should I prioritise this project ahead of all the others? How much does it cost? Will my IT team need to be involved? How long will it take before I see the value pull through? 

Get in the habit of documenting these questions and publish them (and the answers!) on your website. If one person has this question, we can guarantee all your prospects will be wondering the same thing. You might think about creating an FAQ’s section and that’s a good idea, but you can go even further than that. 

Think about all the objections a customer has given a sales person historically. These objections need to be confronted and reassurance given, and these should be littered through the message set on your website. The more common the objection, the more it needs to be tackled head on, especially if they are objections that disrupt the sales process. Get the answers to the questions you know they are going to ask written within the narrative of your website, allowing your customers to self-qualify themselves into the sales funnel.   

The importance of advertising your pricing 

The next issue to address here is pricing. Many businesses seem fearful of advertising their pricing on their website because they are worried about putting their potential customers off.  

But they are forgetting that for most of us, way before we entertain the concept of buying anything, we need to understand the cost. It’s human instinct to understand cost implications, especially with a big purchase, for fear of embarrassment or a difficult conversation down the line, which could seriously upset the final sale. It’s why car dealers put the price tag in the front window of the car and estate agents clearly identify the asking price of a new home.  

Too many well-funded B2B SaaS businesses make their customers have a demo before they’ll even discuss pricing. This is a mistake. The customer needs to qualify themselves in before they want to see the product. It works in so many other aspects of life. Why should we in software think we’re different? Customers want to speak to a sales person when they are ready, not the other way around.  

So for us the debate about pricing is over. Get the price of your software up on your site so it’s clearly signposted and available. You could have 3 or even 4 different subsets from basic to enterprise, but allow your customers to qualify themselves in. We’ve dedicated a whole chapter to pricing later in this book so keep reading! 

Hopefully now you’ll have formulated some good plans about how to capture demand from the 10% who are either actively buying or looking to buy. Plenty of work will almost certainly need to be done on your core messaging and the quality of education you provide on your website. But what about the other 90% of your market – how are we going to get their attention? 

Generating the demand from the 90% 

Let’s go back to the statistics in the graphic above and understand the challenge we’re facing. The reality is that 90% of your target market are either not thinking about the problem you’re looking to solve, don’t think they’re interested in your solution, or are not thinking about making a purchase decision at all. Let that sink in for a moment. That’s a vast majority of your audience and we need them to notice us.  

What you need to be doing for this group is creating demand because at this stage they have little conscious awareness of their situation. One of two things needs to happen. At the very least you need to establish your credibility as a potential solution, and in the best case scenario you need to educate them on the pain that they’re not seeing.  

You should be using e-books and user guides to highlight the symptoms that they may not be aware of and help them gather all of those different symptoms into a self-diagnosis. You need to be educating them and creating insights, thought leadership, case studies and industry trends. In this way, you can move them into being open to solving that problem.  

We’ve always been fans of user guides or e-books that provide a step by step guide to solving a particular problem. It’s great to provide the number of steps so the reader knows the length of the guide you’re writing and can focus on each one.  

As an example, let’s go back to our L&D software solution from earlier in the book. The target persona you’ve been targeting is the HR Director and (you know from your testing research) they have an itch for their department to become more relevant across their business. They are proactively looking for ways they can enhance their perceived value. And let’s assume you’re targeting the automotive trade as your uncomfortably narrow vertical. You might want to produce an e-book with the title ‘7 ways that Learning & Development can help your organisation achieve its annual global objectives.’  

Number 1: increase margin through greater blue collar machine efficiencies.  

Number 2: increase productivity through reducing mistakes in the assembly line 

Number 3: capture the expertise and experience of your longest serving employees 

And so on. The time you’ve spent understanding your Buying Persona’s objectives for the year and the particular challenges they have, arms you with the ability to create laser sharp content that plays to their pain.. 

‘Dark Social’ 

When Richard was a customer of Gripped in a former life, he brought them in to generate demand amongst his target businesses who either hadn’t heard of his organisation or who were perhaps not yet ready to buy. They taught him so much about how to create great content and the rules of the game, and we thought these lessons would be valuable here. 

They taught him all about the concept of ‘Dark Social’ which is all the things that happen in a B2B buying process that as a sales person or a marketer you’re not in control of. It’s when you’ve written a highly useful and informative user guide or e-book and it’s shared around the business without your knowledge. At Vencha we’ve had our content shared amongst VCs in newsletters to their investee companies, for example. This is Dark Social, and you have no idea what happens to it. It could be shared in Slack for dozens of people to read, comment and feed back. This is where the green shoots of demand begin to flourish. 

Great content allows you to fuel Dark Social. It’s ideas, advice or research driven, and it allows you to provide your customers with information that allows them to relate to the problems you solve, not necessarily about the product they should buy. Great content is not an advert for your business, it’s an advert for the problems you solve.    

The art of writing great content is covered off in other books, so I will leave the experts to teach you more. But the simple rule is that that content must be useful and teaches your audience about something they didn’t already recognise. It should talk to the persona who is ambitious in their business, who has seen a symptom of an undiagnosed problem that no-one else has seen and who is determined to fix it. You need to arm them through your content with the ability to recognise those symptoms and think ‘this is talking exactly about the problems we have. I need to know more.’ 

Inbound Content 

Now we know the messaging rules around user guides and e-books, that it must be useful, shareable, and not an advert for your product, what other components of your Go To Market plan should we consider. 

Video explainers. We’re personally big advocates of 90 second videos on the website that explain the ‘why’. Perhaps it’s because we can’t learn what we need from the rest of the website content, but it’s always the thing we search for. It may well be because a picture paints a thousand words, or because we’re in a hurry! Or perhaps it’s both. But a well-crafted video animation that explains the pain and then quickly highlights the solution, always leaves us wanting to learn more. And we suspect your customers feel the same as part of their education journey.

Webinars. Despite the fact that webinars have been around for a long time, we’re still surprised that B2B software businesses don’t use them more often. It’s a critical part of a buyer’s educational journey, either attending live or watching the webinar back in their own time. And it’s especially relevant now so many people are working from home in our post pandemic age.  

 Please do not fall into the trap of making this an advertorial. It should again address the unrecognised pain symptoms that your 90% may not be aware of and ask a customer to do most of the talking. Craft a brilliant set of questions that cleverly draws out the information your audience needs to hear and outline their journey from unconsciousness to awakening. 

Connecting on LinkedIn. We worry that auto generated messages from LinkedIn have been done to death by marketers. Where once it was a useful cascade for sales people to follow up, we now find them impersonal and a nuisance. We’re not advocating not making a LinkedIn connection because I think it shows interest. But we’d far rather a seller has done more intelligent research on us than sending us a computer generated note.  

The best we’ve seen recently was a connection request with a personalised video explaining why they’d like to make contact and why a call might be useful. They’d done their research and knew a lot about us, and we immediately accepted. 

Exhibitions/Seminars. Here’s where we might break the mould and be a little more controversial. Between us, we can’t remember making a sale from more than two decades of attending exhibitions. We could be wrong and maybe our stand helped with brand awareness and it was a good place to meet and reinforce relationships with customers. We’ve just never seen a 10x ROI on an exhibition stand and on a limited budget, I’d put this further down your list of marketing spend. There’s one exception though which is detailed below. 

Speaking opportunities. If you can get one of these at an Exhibition then we believe  the balance changes, especially if you can deliver the session with a client on the next podium. If you have established your credentials effectively enough, through excellent content, website messaging and thought leadership, you may well be asked to speak at industry events.  

Again, talk about the problems and the symptoms of the broken process and do not be a walking, talking advertising board. You’ll be amazed how many people then come to your stand to find out more, particularly if you focus on talking about your prospect’s lives and their personal pains. 

 Referrals. This is the lost art of sales. Back in the day, when our livelihoods depended on making sales, we used to hate cold calling, so became proficient at asking for referrals. We found that customers were very happy to introduce us to peers and colleagues in other businesses who they felt may have similar issues. Or they might even invite us to their next industry seminar to talk about the problems we’d solved. You must do more of this. 

Direct vs Indirect   

This is a key consideration to be examined at the birth of any Go to Market strategy. Is the main thrust of your sales strategy going to be direct, via an internal sales team or will you be looking to grow using value added resellers or channel partners.   

Each business will be different of course and it’s difficult to give generic direction here, but each has its merits and sometimes a blend of direct and channel can work well.  

Channel partnerships 

We’ll take a more detailed look at Customer Acquisition Costs in a later chapter, but there’s little doubt that if your software can be sold effectively through other sales teams than your own, that’s a significant advantage.  

You’ll need to find a reseller partner that’s a perfect fit for your solution and where they are already selling adjacent services to your own. Where it makes an upsell so obvious and easy for the reseller’s sales team, that they are happy to introduce your solution. This works particularly well where you have a reseller partner who has a large number of customers but little fresh technology to sell them. Remember they have targets too and your solution could easily become popular when they are performing their client reviews.  

MessageLabs, who sold for $700m, had a particularly effective reseller channel for example. But what makes their story particularly fascinating was the dynamic flow between Channel and Direct as the business matured. Early on when they needed market access and coverage, the channel represented more than 70% of the bookings number. But by the time they sold to Symantec when they were a highly recognized brand globally and category leader, they were 70% direct. Channel Go to Market is a specialist field and needs thought and attention in design and execution 

It also reinforces the importance of the simplicity of your messaging. The channel sales team need to understand the value you bring very quickly, and they’ll need the white labelled sales collateral to do so. 

The disadvantages of relying completely on channel resellers is the loss of pipeline control and the sense of being too remote to affect outcomes. The reseller team will also need a lot of support with regular meetings to discuss progress, objection handling and simply to make sure they are still promoting your software.  

Channel partnerships may be most effective when they are part of a Go to Market strategy, rather than the entirety but may well be especially useful in the early days of your growth. Again, getting external counsel on the suitability of channel versus direct will be useful. Learn from your competitors experience, ask the Board, or bring in external expertise than can help guide you here. 

Direct Sales 

Building an effective internal sales team does not come without its challenges and is a very significant financial investment to make.  

It is such an important issue that’s it’s worth a workbook all of its own. When and who to hire is a multi-million pound question to answer, so let’s look at that next. 

Workbook Actions 

• Understand your Prospect metrics from the outset. More than 90% of your target market will either not currently be interested, don’t think they are interested or are feeling the pain but not yet considering finding a solution. 
• It’s critical your website is capable of quickly capturing the demand of those prospects actively in the buying motion – this may be as many as 10% of your Market Map.  
• Make sure your website answers as many of their objections and questions as possible. Ensure this is littered across the pages. 
• Always, always make yourself easy to buy from. Don’t worry about publishing your pricing as it allows prospects to qualify themselves in from an early stage. 
• Think deeply about your inbound content and remember to always focus on the customer pain and solution rather than selling your product or service. There are a good number of Inbound strategies you can follow, so analyse which you feel will be most effective.  

You’ve now sharpened your message set and have built a Market Map. Your thoughts are now turning to who should hire to sell your software and in what order. That’s the subject of the next workbook.