Building A Demand-Focused Company (w/ Prashant Kaw, Helmur)

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Prashant Kaw shares three principles your company should embrace, in order to make the most of your demand gen efforts.

How They Move The Needle

There are three key parts to demand orchestration:

1. Designing your company for demand. 

The role of demand in 2023 has changed. Since demand is impacted by almost every function of the business, the demand owner must act cross-functionally, similar to how a product manager would, ensuring performance across the entire lifecycle. 

And the organization must consider itself a “demand-focused” organization. Lots of teams talk now about being “revenue-focused” or “growth-focused”, but Prashant points out that revenue and growth are lagging outcomes based on what happens further up-funnel. He says revenue-focused organizations tend to make decisions for short-term revenue growth this year, at the detriment of driving sustainable demand for years to come.

2. Defining metrics and measurements for demand.

High-growth companies feel that “predictable” growth means getting to 30-40% growth year over year growth. In reality, it’s probably better to aim for periods of rapid, hockey stick growth, then baking in periods of plateau. These plateau periods allow the company to deal with “debt” they’ve accumulated from that rapid growth. This is similar to how developers need time to deal with tech debt they’ve accumulated: where they did shortcuts to get the job done, but also built a to-do list of things that need to be addressed later. 

3. Having a flexible funnel
One way to think about the role of demand, is driving a steady pipleline of customers who are your best customer. Those who will retain the longest and pay the most. As demand teams learn more about who this audience is and refine their targeting, ICP, messaging, and creative, they also need the ability to adapt their goals along the way. They may start out aiming at a certain number of SQLs for example, but then realize that the best customers make up a much smaller target audience. Naturally, this means the SQL goal will diminish in hopes that revenue and retention go up. Your company needs to be flexible to adapt funnel goals based on these iterations.

Links

• Try Helmur
• Follow Prashant