When co-founders Josh Verrill and Heather Stokes set out to start 4AM Demand, their goal was simple. Create a company that would prop demand-generators up. Get them off their heels, get their backs off the wall, and propel them to the forefront of revenue growth.
Demand-gen has always sort of been at the front though, haven’t they? Particularly in B2B SaaS and even more so now as product-led growth becomes more mainstream. But do you know what you still need even if your product sells itself? Prospects to be aware, educate, find you and sign-up.
In other words, demand-gen.
And so, demand-gen enablement was born. We sat back and thought about the billions (yes, with a “b”) of dollars being spent to enable sales teams and wondered, who is out there enabling demand-gen teams?
Companies spent >$2B enabling their sales teams in 2021 and rightfully so. You want the team responsible for delivering revenue to have everything they need to be successful. But, in a world where demand-gen teams are responsible for delivering high-intent, engaged prospects to sales to close – to the tune of 60-80% of the revenue number – and in a PLG model where that number is actually 100%, I think you see where we’re going with this. We need to be enabling the other revenue team (marketing), at a similar clip.
Enter, Demand-Gen Enablement
You may be thinking, there are thousands of martech vendors out there selling thousands of tools to help marketers. You’re right. And, there are some incredible and critical technologies in that space that marketers would be lost without (looking at you marketing automation). But, we see a gap.
Let’s consider the perception of life as a demand-generator.
- Get the financial plan, revenue targets, and your budget number from finance.
- Go off and execute a bunch of programs to capture and deliver high-quality leads to sales.
- Answer a bunch of questions about ROI, program performance, pipeline, revenue, etc.
There’s a major step missing in the above.
Once you have your revenue targets and budget number, a lot has to happen before you can just go off and execute programs. At least, a lot should happen if you’re doing it right.
- Align with sales on how you’ll work together to achieve the revenue targets
- Translate that revenue target into a lead target
- Jointly commit to SLA’s with sales on how to process and work those leads
- Optimize the processes, workflows and automation required to move leads through the joint funnel
- Put together the optimal program mix
- Allocate your budget across quarters and programs
- Make sure you understand your company go-to-market strategy, target persona, and content available to use
- Choose the right vendors to work with for your GTM and budget
- Have the right data and reports readily available to track progress and answer the barrage of questions that will come on ROI
- Run scenarios on the impact to lead totals and revenue if budget changes mid-year
There’s more. But, you probably get the idea. And, these things happen over and over throughout the year, it’s not a one-time exercise.
The demand-generators in the room are probably nodding their heads in violent agreement and thinking about the hundreds of spreadsheets with hundreds of tabs and countless presentations they use to justify their spend or defend themselves when sales claims they don’t have enough leads.
We've Been There. And, We Built a Better Way.
At 4AM we finally said enough. We built a demand-generation enablement platform to help you not only ditch the spreadsheets but give you guidance on how to ensure you’re doing all of the above based on the best available data.
We built the platform based on the 3 key fundamentals demand-generators have to get right:
Sales & Marketing Alignment
It will never be perfect. But if you can align the teams around joint definitions, processes and goals and then support those things with simple tech, you’re well on your way.
Radically simple tech, enabling jointly defined processes and goals drives radically simple alignment.
The platform sets the foundation for this in a straightforward and simple way. Plus, it integrates with your CRM and marketing automation tools to ensure data flows and processes are set up in line with your jointly defined goals. And, because it was built by demand-generators, it takes you through the key things you need to get right based on decades of experience doing this at companies of all sizes.
Demand-Gen Strategy & Planning
Spoiler alert: it will always be about the leads. No matter what shiny new marketing buzzword comes along, it will always be about delivering leads that turn into revenue.
The platform gets all of your go-to-market information in one place, then lets you easily do your revenue and lead planning, build your reverse waterfall, understand your funnel conversion rates and create your budget by channel, program and quarter. It even gives you a place to do scenario planning just in case your budget does change mid-year and you’re forced to refactor.
Ultimately, using the software not only saves you hours in your spreadsheets but it builds in the methodology to give you the confidence that what you are executing on has the best chance of actually delivering revenue.
Then, over time and as it collects data, planning your budget is simple because you can easily see what worked and what didn’t in previous quarters.
Telling the ROI Story
Being a demand-generator means you have to constantly communicate results and progress. And, we understand that there is no shortage of tools out there to help you do this. Our platform is integrated with both CRM and marketing automation platforms and because we’re able to see your revenue plan, lead plan and budget, we’re able to tell a more complete story.
The right metrics, without sending you into a sea of data that any marketer could over-analyze, and hooked into the tools you use so you don’t have to chase and rationalize the data yourself.
Now, you can quickly and easily communicate, as often as is required.
4AM is setting out to enable demand-generators in a way they have never been enabled. We have your back so you can keep yours off the wall.
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