Truth Hurts

Sadly, when it comes to B2B marketing, the whole notion of “demand generation” doesn’t work anymore. Even with the perfect marketing campaign, you’re not going to get a company to buy a product they hadn’t considered in the first place.

If you are selling telecom equipment, working for a CRM vendor, or selling complex call center solutions that increases productivity and customer experience 10 fold, your customer will have to go through a lengthy process before they are ready for the tools you are offering.

Before any buying decisions are made, your customer will have to acknowledge that they have a problem, think about a solution, and commit to make hefty capital and operating expenditures to change the way they work.

No matter how awesome your booth, how creative your amazing corporate video, or how well crafted your PR is, they won’t bite. No one will buy your product just because you are a cool marketer.

Here at Pravda Media Group, we have the same challenge. We build sales and marketing machines for B2B companies, a combination of content, distribution, engagement and lead generation processes, coupled with supporting technologies and real-time performance measurement. In order to succeed, we help our clients synchronize different channels, introduce new technologies and platforms into their marketing and sales operations, and implement processes for sales and marketing cooperation. These things cannot happen without a full commitment from the client side, just like any other complex sales process.

So how do we, and our clients, cope with this sales complexity?

Well, it all starts by acknowledging that we do not generate demand. At best, we harvest it.

The truth is, as a vendor selling complex products and services, your goal should be that when a potential client or buyer decides that they’re ready to make a fundamental change in their business, they think of you.

This is a completely different approach from the traditional marketing concept of “demand generation,” the idea that you can actually get clients to buy your product.

Face it.
You can’t.

In other words: Don’t try to generate demand, cultivate it.

How? That will be covered in our next post, “Everything you wanted to know about continuous engagement but were afraid to ask”.