Elements of a Modern Demand Generation Plan, Part 1: Buyer-Targeting Context

There is no shortage of tips and tricks for demand generation and marketing automation. They are useful, but only if you already have a working programme. Most B2B marketers face a bigger gap: they are not sure how to build a modern demand generation programme end to end, or where to start.

The starting point is the plan, and the plan has two halves. Part one, below, is buyer-targeting context: understanding the environment in which you target a specific buyer and the results you need. Part two turns that context into engagement, acquisition and nurturing models.

1. Qualitative and quantitative objectives

"Generate more leads" is not an objective. A plan needs two kinds of target. The qualitative objective is a definition of the mature, fully vetted lead that marketing hands to sales, often called a sales opportunity. Marketing and sales must write that definition together and both sign up to it.

The quantitative objective is the number of those opportunities you need each month to hit the closed-won target, given your win rate. If sales needs 20 new deals a quarter and wins one opportunity in four, marketing's job is roughly 80 qualified opportunities a quarter, or about 27 a month. Everything else in the plan is built backwards from that number.

2. A buying-process profile

Demand generation does not happen in a vacuum, and marketers control less of the buyer's journey than ever. So you need a profile of how your target buyer actually buys: which stages they pass through, who is involved at each stage, and what information they consume on the way to a decision.

Traditional personas are often product-centric: they describe how someone uses your product. For demand generation, flip the perspective. Start with the buyer's problem and their search for a solution, and work out where that search eventually meets what you sell.

3. Baseline conversion estimates

With objectives and a buying-process profile in hand, you can estimate conversion rates for each step and channel. A going concern should start with its own history. A new venture leans on industry benchmarks from analysts and peers. Either way, treat the baseline as an estimate. Much of the value of a demand generation programme comes from comparing baseline with actual results and improving each step.

4. Reverse funnel maths

Now combine the inputs and work backwards. From opportunities per month, calculate the sales-ready leads you need, then the marketing-qualified leads, then the respondents (people who identify themselves), and finally the number of prospects you must reach through inbound and outbound channels.

The numbers in the table are illustrative, but the shape is typical. The ends of the funnel are very large or very small, which is why one change in a middle conversion rate can matter more than doubling the media budget.

Funnel maths is odds maths: what bookmakers and casino affiliates know

Reverse funnel maths is a chain of probabilities, and nobody handles probability chains more ruthlessly than the gambling industry. A casino affiliate site works backwards in exactly this way: visitors to a review page, the share who click through to an operator, the share who register, the share who make a first deposit, and the expected net gaming revenue from each depositor. That chain decides whether the affiliate should accept a fixed CPA per first-time depositor or a revenue share, which we explain in iGaming affiliate economics: CPA versus revenue share.

A bookmaker thinks the same way about odds: every price implies a probability, and the margin is built into the gap between the implied and the true probability. B2B marketers who start treating each funnel stage as an estimated probability, rather than a fixed fact, plan better and forecast more honestly. We take that idea further in the probability mindset in lead scoring.

From context to programme

Once the context is clear you know who you are targeting, what counts as a qualified lead, what conversion steps lie between first touch and opportunity, and how large each stage must be. Those are the inputs for the programme itself, covered in part two: program translation.