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#135: Steal our Demand Generation Framework – The 5 BEs

2 weeks ago

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Demand Generation requires consistent execution of a well informed strategy. Today we’re going to give you our Demand Gen strategy (The 5 BEs Framework) that’s helped marketers drive up to 80% of pipeline for their business.

This is part of our Demand Gen mini-series. You can access previous whiteboarding sessions here:

As per usual, you can read, watch or listen below to work through our 5 BEs Framework for Demand Generation.

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Table of Contents

Our Demand Generation Framework – The 5 BEs

Our 5 BEs Framework for Demand Generation not only powers our business, but 1000s of others who have either been through our Demand Generation course, or are keen listeners of the podcast.

It’s represented below in this flywheel.

There are 5 steps in our 5 BEs Framework for Demand Generation.

They are:

Be Ready – Deeply Understand Your Customers
BE Helpful – Develop Relationships with your ICP with Helpful Content
BE Seen – Accelerate Demand with Paid Media and ABM
BE Better – Optimize your Workflow
BE The Best – Advanced Demand Gen Tactics

So why is it represented as a flywheel?

It’s because the process is cyclical. You should run through this process again and again for your business. Each time you do it, you will get closer to your Dream Customers. You will understand deeper how to earn their trust and make them want to buy from you. You’ll know exactly where they hang out online and offline.

We run through this process every 3-6 months for our own business.

BE Ready – Deeply Understand Your Customers

The 5 BEs Framework starts by defining who your best customers are, and deeply understanding them. The reason why you have to start here is because every business is limited by time, budget and resources.

It takes these resources to win over our target future customers. Dreamdata’s research shows that the the average B2B customer journey has 62.4 touches across 3.6 channels and involves 6.3 contacts over 192 days. If we try to target too many at once (with different messages), we will never get enough touchpoints with our target customers to win their trust. If we don’t win their trust, we won’t win their business.

That’s why you need to start with 80/20 analysis of who your Ideal Customers are (ICP), so you can focus your attention and limited resources on a segment of the market.

Then your next step should be to conduct interviews with your best customers to understand:

What the buying committee looks like
What great pains do you help solve for the customer
Why are you such a great fit for them
What does their buying journey look like
Where do they hang out online and offline
What sources of information do they trust

This gives you the information you need to reposition your brand to make it a complete ‘no brainer’ in the mind of the Dream Customer. It also gives you a roadmap of where you need to be to reach your Dream Customers, and what content you need to get in front of them to build their trust and lead them to the logical conclusion that you’re the perfect company to solve their problem.

The comprehensive list of steps in stage 1: BE Ready are:

Conduct 80/20 analysis
Interview Dream Customers
Document Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP)
Update your Positioning and Messaging
Map the Buying Journey
Create your Dream 100 sources of influence

We cover much of this in season 1 of The B2B Playbook podcast, so make sure you check it out!

We also give you everything you need to do this for your business in our 12 week Demand Gen program, The B2B Incubator. See here for details.

BE Helpful – Develop Relationships with Helpful Content

After completing stage 1 of the framework ‘BE Ready’, you should have a deep understanding of your target companies. This includes what you need to say to them to build trust, and lead them along the buying journey.

Our favourite framework for creating this content that builds trust is The 5 Stages of Awareness framework.

The 5 Stages of Awareness framework leads your Dream Customers from being ‘unaware’ that they even have a problem that you can help with – to being led to the logical conclusion that you’re the perfect option for them.

This content will cover all stages of the buying journey. You can read more about each of the 5 stages of awareness here.

The complete list of steps in ‘BE Helpful’ is:

Understand how to help your ICP
Create helpful content that educates and entertains
Map your content to the 5 Stages of Awareness framework
Use Subject Matter Experts to create pillar content with on a regular schedule
Repurpose this content to multiple channels for ease of consumption for your ICP
Distribute your helpful content wherever it is your ICP is present
Scale your content production
Improve with quantitative and qualitative data

So many businesses don’t execute the ‘Be Helpful’ stage properly because they miss one of these key steps. Perhaps the worst is when marketers don’t get Subject Matter Experts to help them create content. That means you end up churning out commodity content from a freelancer that often hurts your reputation as a brand, because it isn’t valued by your target audience.

Companies also fail to measure the leading and lagging indicators of success for this demand generation program. We detail here the demand generation metrics you should measure so you can see if what you’re doing is working – before it results in pipeline.

(P.S. we also show you how to do each of these steps in our 12 week Demand Gen program, The B2B Incubator)

BE Seen – Accelerate Demand with Paid Media & ABM

If you’ve done the hard work in ‘BE Ready’ and ‘BE Helpful’, you make your life so much easier in stage three – ‘BE Seen’.

BE Seen is all about distributing your content so it gets in front of your Dream Customers. You should know where they are, and you should know what to say to them if you did stages 1 and 2 properly.

So how do you distribute your content to your Dream Customers? You can do this 3 ways:

1:Many (e.g. paid ads, organic social, YouTube, forums, newsletters)
1:Few (e.g. webinars, industry events)
1:1 (e.g. email, call, text)

Marketing is best equipped to handle 1:Many and 1:Few interactions. Sales is normally best equipped to handle 1:1.

The complete list of steps in stage 3 are:

Use paid media to target buying committee of key accounts
Push educational content mapped to 5 Stages of Awareness
Push product education content highlighting key benefits and features
Focus on target accounts with low budget, high touch Account Based Marketing (ABM) pilot program

Marketers can also accelerate demand for accounts expressing intent, that haven’t explicitly raised their hand and said that they want to work with you. A great way to do this is with a pilot Account Based Marketing program. This is where you select a handful of accounts based on your ICP, and orchestrate actions between sales and marketing to turn them into paying customers. It’s much higher touch, so generally you want the ACV to be high enough for it to be worth it.

Kevin and I ran a mini-ABM series on The B2B Playbook. Catch our introductory episode here.

BE Better – Optimise Your Workflow

Stages 1-3 (i.e. BE Ready, BE Helpful, BE Seen) are the fundamentals that every business needs to have in place. When done correctly, they’ll have the biggest impact on your business overall.

Once you’ve done them the first time, you can move onto stage 4 of the framework – BE Better. This is all about optimizing processes and optimizations to find incremental improvements in what you’re doing.

There is no strict order in how you approach the steps in ‘BE Better’. As a starting point, pick the one most suited to your business and go-to-market strategy.

Below are the activities you can choose from in ‘BE Better’.

CRO and A/B testing
Leveraging partners and affiliates
Getting the most out of CRMs, CDPs and your Data
Email marketing
Expanding to new channels
Integrating A.I into your processes
Using the power of story telling to get closer to your customers
Outbound marketing
Social selling
Community
Customer Advisory Boards (CABs)
Advanced reporting
Event-led growth

My recommendation is to approach these one at a time. There is always a battle for resources and budget. Spreading yourself across too many tactics means you’re less likely to succeed.

BE The Best – Advanced Tactics for Demand Generation

The fifth and final stage of our 5 BEs Framework is ‘BE The Best’. It’s the more advanced tactics that are normally reserved for the ‘big players’ – but we show you how you can do it in a resource efficient way.

Again I recommend picking one of these and going deep into it, rather than shopping around between them.

Future proofing your B2B marketing
How to make people pay attention by thinking outside the box
Building an education ecosystem
Using neuroscience to get customers to say ‘yes’ more often
Scaling strategies for small teams
Crafting the perfect ‘offer’
Bottom of funnel content that converts

Select the one that’s most suited to your business, and that you have the resources to execute on.

Where To Get Started With The 5 BEs Framework?

We give you everything you need to implement The 5 BEs Framework for Demand Generation in your business.

We give it to you as part of our 12 week Demand Gen program called The B2B Incubator. Read why marketers like you are calling it a “masters degree in Demand Gen”, and see how it’s helped marketing teams drive up to 80% of pipeline for their business.

Learn more about the Demand Gen B2B Incubator program here.