As companies in the B2B industry are looking to achieve more and more lofty YoY growth goals, marketing managers are being held increasingly accountable for demo set rates and cost-per acquisition as a measurable KPI in their job performance. As a direct result of this noticeable shift, it is now becoming the role of the marketer to ensure that all inbound leads generated are highly qualified, in order to have a better impact on the sales team’s demo set and win rates. This is most easily done by leveraging gated content pieces in a way that makes them intriguing enough for your audience to provide their information in exchange for the download, while linking directly to the benefit that your company’s product or service provides.
Offering gated content is considered the most scalable lead gen method, as it allows marketers to constantly refresh their offer to their audience without exhausting the marketing channels that could be classified as “low hanging fruits,” like email campaigns or retargeting ads, which will quickly result in an astronomical CPL (cost per lead).
The challenge today’s marketers are facing is finding the right type of content that will lend value to their audience, while also priming them for a demo set conversation. In this guide, we share 5 simple yet effective steps that will allow you to generate a high demo set rate, hit your cost per acquisition goal, and eventually provide you with scalable growth.
Take lengths to ensure that the asset you choose to promote can be directly linked to your audience’s unique struggles and aspirations so that your sales team can introduce your product or service as a solution and push them into a demo. If you choose the right topic for your audience, then the content in your ads, landing page, and white paper will help frame your sales team’s conversation and significantly increase the interest of the lead in learning more about your offer. A great way to start is by creating a believable persona of your end user that will assist you in determining a plausible reason for them to download your white paper or case study. From here, you can work towards the end result in a much more strategic way. And the best method we’ve found for marketers to gain insight into the end user? By interviewing the people in their company that interact with the users the most - the sales team!
Take, for example, a company that sells an office snack delivery subscription. Its user story would be about a frazzled office manager that has employees leaving sticky notes all over her desk saying “pretzels are out!” and “coffee running low!” and she is losing valuable time trying to keep track of all these requests and manage the inventory in the snack cupboard. A great piece of content to connect with this user might be something titled “3 Surprisingly Easy Ways to Keep Your Office Kitchen Stocked (hint: none of them involve sticky notes).”
Your user’s unique pain is the easiest way for your sales team to convert a reader into a demo. What problems do your users need you to solve for them? What could compel them to book a demo for your product or service? From the qualifying content you have produced in the first step, try to map 3 - 5 relevant pain points that can be linked directly to your asset. Starting an interaction where the SDR can immediately empathize with whatever pain could have caused the user to download the asset will create the easiest transition from a dial out into a genuine conversation.
From our previous example, our office manager’s pain points could be:
This should be the easiest step of the process if you truly understand your service or product. This step will allow your sales team to develop scripts that begin with a discussion around the user’s pain points and then quickly transition into your product or service as a solution that has solved the same pain for thousands of other users. How will your product or service directly solve the pain points you already mapped? Your sales team speaks to hundreds of users every day that all have very similar problems, and you know that your product/service can solve them in a meaningful way. You just need to ensure that the transition is smooth.
For our frazzled office manager, the solution is a snack delivery service that can be customized for her company’s unique size and snack needs, that allows hungry employees to request items in a digital portal where she can sign in and place her orders directly. This is the solution she didn’t know she needed but can’t wait to try!
This is the most important step to complete before launching your gated asset campaign, but it’s the step that is most often overlooked. You’ve put all of the effort into developing the asset and mapping the pain points and solution, so you need to be fully confident that your SDRs will be able to accomplish the task of converting all the qualified leads that you generate into demos. Set aside time before launch to train your sales team and develop easy dialogue scripts so that they can become experts in mapping the marketing messages. The key here is to deepen their familiarity with the asset, not just your product or service.
Once your campaign is launched and your qualified inbound leads start flowing in and booking demos, you will need to closely track per-asset performance and optimize your media buy and campaign budget according to demo set rates per ad, landing page, written asset, and audience. In order to successfully execute this step you will need to determine attribution for your winning leads that can be tracked starting with the ad that was first clicked all the way into the lead being marked “closed/won” in your CRM.
Generating large quantities of qualified inbound leads is the first step towards pushing your company into hypergrowth. However, if you don’t have a proven process in place for pushing those leads into demos, the growth process will be significantly stunted. Start implementing these 5 tactics today and watch the effect they have on your demo set rates and KPI achievement.
Genly is currently partnering with hypergrowth companies to feed their sales teams with 30 - 150 qualified inbound sales leads daily, and have a proprietary AI bot designed to integrate with your CRM and optimize your content strategy based on the ads, forms, and audiences that are leading to the highest demo set and win rates. Contact us at info@genly.com to learn more.
Your final challenge in this new era of demand generation is to provide a solution that offers predictable scalability and control over the volume of inbound leads based on your growth goals while adapting and adjusting your messaging enough to keep your CPL constant.