I heard this saying recently and it really grabbed me: “You can’t ride two horses with one arse”.
Crude but memorable. And insightful in our distracted and multi-tasking-obsessed world.
It’s also surprisingly relevant to B2B marketing and growth. Many business leaders struggle to focus. It’s hard enough to stay on top of day-to-day operations and demands from various stakeholders. Then there are the exciting and shiny new objects (hello, AI!) that create a whole new level of distraction from what ought to be the main game – growing your business.
But if you want to build a serious demand gen engine, it requires consistent attention, resources and effort.
Marketing and sales leaders are already starved for attention. Driving strategy, meeting budgets, managing people, appeasing customers and answering to a range of internal stakeholders is very time-consuming.
Work is done in short bursts of frenetic activity, often in pursuit of short-term goals. Random acts of marketing are the order of the day, and marketing teams chop and change in response to the latest internal demands or perceived opportunity.
Trying to build a consistent and effective demand engine while you’re barely making it through the day is that whole other horse you just can’t straddle, let alone ride.
Demand generation involves a lot of work and effort. Think about it. You need to:
Identify your ideal prospects (ICP)
Produce content ad publish consistently
Nurture prospects with ‘always on’ email sequences
Monitor signals
Qualify buyers
That’s a lot of work and it takes a lot of time – week in and week out. This is an engine that can never be switched off if it is to work as intended. And as we’ve argued elsewhere, it’s the very fact that it remains on all the time that provides the benefits of compounding which makes it work so much harder for you over time.
Many B2B companies understand they can’t ride two horses at the same time. And they also realise they can’t afford not to have a demand gen engine.
They don’t lack capability. They lack capacity.
So the simple solution is to outsource an activity. Demand gen is an ideal program to outsource, as it is a tangible and measurable activity that can be created, managed and reported on while sales and marketing leaders take the reins of day-to-day operations and people management.
As you ride the trails on your regular horse, you can be comforted to have your demand gen horse galloping alongside where you can see it, but in the capable hands of experienced riders (not cowboys!).
At the risk of grinding this analogy into the ground, The Demand Stream is ready to saddle up and mount your demand gen horse. We can feed it, prepare it, nurture it and ride it to where you need it to be.
Giddy up!