What marketing tools are you using to drive growth? A net or a fishing line?

Do you use a fishing net or a fishing line?

Lusi: I had the pleasure of interviewing Siqi Lin today, the founder of DemandSense. She specializes in growth marketing. She started her career as a partnership manager at Plug and Play, a VC and corporate innovation platform. Later, she led growth marketing and demand gen for the past five years at various start-ups.

Lusi: What are you doing now to help companies drive growth?

Siqi: DemandSense is a marketing agency focused on early-stage startups in the AI space. We help them define their go-to-market strategy, demand generation, content creation, and implementation.

Lusi: What are the main levers of growth that startups should focus on? I know you're hosting an entire conference on growth shortly.

Siqi: First of all, you need to have a really good go-to-market strategy as the blueprint to drive growth. What is the lay of the land? What is the big picture? What is the segment that you should go after? It's not just about working hard; it's about working smart, in the right direction. Once this strategy is in place, it cascades into demand generation activities, branding efforts, and establishing a brand's authority and category leadership.

Branding goes hand in hand with growth. A strong brand presence ensures that when you reach out to potential customers, they recognize and respect your brand as legitimate.

Another channel is to create interactive and in-person communication, usually through user conferences or events.

Finally, you may have heard of the term product-led growth, if your product is really strong and it can go viral, then existing customers become your marketing engine.

Lusi: Both of us have experience with primarily B2B, how would you say this is different from B2C growth?

Siqi: On a high level, in B2B, you’re triggering a buying behavior that represents an organization's interest. Usually that involves strategies that involve longer decisions and more rational thinking. For B2C, usually, it's an individual's behavior, it can be something more personal and could include impulsive buying. You need to have a strong hook and get the user to hit the buy button right away. Sometimes that's a little bit less rational, and you need to just trigger that personal motivation. Understanding your customers, especially in B2B, involves longer sales cycles and multiple stakeholders.

Lusi: Yes, longer sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, and having a more rational value proposition. Let's dive into demand generation. What is classic demand generation?

Siqi: Classic demand generation involves creating a theme and related activities to generate qualified leads and sign up new customers. It's about bringing leads to the top of the funnel and nurturing them through the buying cycle.

Lusi: Since we’re talking about longer sales cycles, organizational buy-in, etc. a key word I want to draw is nurture. It's not a one-and-done, but it's a process of nurturing. Can you expound on the concept of Account Based Marketing (ABM) and why it’s very important?

Siqi: ABM means marketing to specific accounts. You select a set of target accounts, often collaborating with the sales team. It involves personalized messaging and content to engage with those accounts and nurture them.

Lusi: Given B2B sales requires you to understand what the customer cares about, and how you can tailor to that, would you say ABM is better than classic demand generation? For example, you can research what Bank of America cares about. Or what Kaiser Hospitals care about.

Siqi: They're both very important to fill up your funnel and power growth. The focus might depend on your product and ticket size. ABM is great for high-ticket solutions targeting specific accounts, while classic demand gen is vital for startups targeting a broader market. It’s like fishing.

General demand generation is like catching fish with a net, while ABM is like going fishing with a line, so they like having different tools to get there.

Lusi: When should startups consider implementing ABM?

Siqi: It depends on your product and market. If you have a heavy-hitter solution targeting a limited market, consider ABM from day one. For mid-market or SMBs, where you have 1000s of potential targets, start with classic demand gen. Consider ABM once you hit a certain customer milestone.

Lusi: Having an account-based strategy takes more resources. What tools are needed for effective ABM?

Siqi: As a start-up, it’s impossible to capture all your dream brands immediately, so one of the magic of ABM is that let's capture the great accounts out there that show strong intent to buy your solution or buy solution of your category now and that you have a higher chance to close them in the next year. Some example tools include 6sense or Terminus.

Lusi: How do you measure the success of an ABM strategy, especially for larger accounts with longer sales cycles?

Siqi: Metrics like click-through rates, stakeholder engagement, meeting book rates, pipeline efficiency, and revenue are essential. Meeting book rate is a key indicator of ABM's success. However, it takes time to measure revenue effects.

Lusi: How do you avoid stepping on sales' toes when implementing ABM? Since with ABM, you’re likely going after multiple people at the same account. Do you stop once sales are talking to people at said account?

Siqi: Communication is key. Keep the sales team informed about marketing activities. Emphasize that marketing is there to complement sales, not compete. Educate sales about the value marketing brings to the table. Ultimately marketing takes the lead from sales if they feel that we should stop reaching out to an account, but it’s also important to get more awareness and update the messaging based on existing conversations.

Siqi: to wrap up, while demand generation and ABM are distinct, they are complementary and essential to fueling the growth engine.

Startups should calibrate their focus based on product type and market size, always keeping a data-driven and collaborative strategy at the forefront.

About:

Lusi is a partner of The Thirteens, a start-up consultancy of fractional executives covering multiple functions and industries, supercharging your start-up to the next level.

Siqi Lin is the founder of DemandSense and also the GROW community, catch her at an upcoming meet-up or her growth conference on 11/18/23 at Stanford