I was on a Google Meet a few weeks ago and told my team, "I'm going to give you the Coles Notes of the..." I continued talking but saw an awkward look on the video faces of my American coworkers. I paused. Realizing I recognized the look I was getting (I had seen it in a previous conversation when I mentioned Polkaroo and the time I told someone at my local Denver Wholefoods that I liked their toque), I asked, "Are Coles Notes not a thing in the States?". I'm fully aware of "Cliff's Notes," but upon a quick Google search, I learned that while both terms are synonymous in Canada, Coles Notes was the original Cliff's Notes and not a colloquial saying in the USA.

Fun fact: Coles Notes sold the U.S. rights to Cliff's Notes in the late 1950s. 

So dear friends, we can add our beloved Cliff's Notes/Coles Notes to the tribute of great Canadian inventions along with insulin, basketball, the telephone, the walkie talkie, and poutine.

Without further adieu (and with great Canadian pride), I am going to give you the Coles Notes of how to build the best five-minute demand generation strategy that actually grows your marketing-influenced revenue.

Intro to SaaS Metrics 101

Before we get into the meat of my Coles Notes, let's start with defining a few key terms for subscription and SaaS business models.

1. Average Contract Value (ACV): this is the total amount of revenue in a contract for a year time period. 

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): the amount of money spent to acquire a new customer; it is calculated by dividing the costs of your marketing and sales spend by the number of customers you acquired.

3. Lifetime Value (LTV): this is a forecast value of the amount of revenue a customer will generate over their lifetime.

If you're a SaaS business, you will be aiming to keep your CAC under your ACV to maximize your LTV/CAC ratio, which measures the value of a customer over their lifetime compared to the cost of acquiring them. An ideal LTV:CAC ratio is 3:1. If your CAC is higher than ACV, you will likely spend too much money to acquire a new customer and want to look at how you can reduce this spend.

Good news, a solid demand generation plan can help!

If you are successful in your marketing strategy, you can lower your CAC. 

A solid B2B marketing and demand approach can help make your sellers more efficient and effective, which means you can sell more with the same number of sales reps or sell the same amount with fewer sales reps.

How? Improving brand awareness in the market and generating more high-intent inbound interest will augment sellers' outbound efforts and bring in more marketing qualified leads that close at a higher and faster rate.

The Best Five Minute B2B Demand Generation Strategy

Now that we got a few fundamentals out of the way, let's get into your B2B demand strategy planning. The following table is, low and behold, my B2B Demand Gen strategy cheat sheet to help you craft the right approach to drive revenue growth for your business – and put it together in five minutes.

Average ACV/Deal Size <$20K

Higher velocity sales = more inbound at low cost. Resources are wasted when you go outbound for small fish (you need to cast a wide net for shrimp). 

Organic SEO, content marketing, Google Ads (BoFu/demo conversion) are most important. Focus on low-cost ways to build a community around your target audience. Spend needs to be efficient due to lower ACV.

Metrics: North Star Metric is Lead Quality

Where do the best sources of leads come from and how do we get more of them? (Can be defined at keyword level, content/page level, may not be digital channels → are events the best lead source?)

Tactical Considerations:

• Consider fit for product-led growth (PLG) strategy 

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Homegrown videos for social, repurpose audio for podcasts and transcribe for thought leadership content.

Average ACV/Deal Size $20K - $100K

Efficient and effective spend to maximize ROI. 

Website is optimized for conversions, well-defined content strategy that spans customer journey and addresses persona questions at each stage.  Dedicated resources to rev the Content Engine, drive MoFu & BoFu traffic via paid search, drive ToFu traffic and MoFu content via targeted social ads.

Metrics: ROI and ROAS

Where are you seeing the biggest bang for buck? Performance marketing and paid tactics will give quick wins but will have longer-term diminishing returns. Invest in strong organic, it will take longer and be harder to measure but grow in value over time.

Tactical Considerations:

• 1:few ABM

• Co-branded (w/ partner or industry media publication) research study, key asset for paid and organic ToFu distribution

• Invite target audience to speak on a hosted podcast/webinar series

Average ACV/Deal Size $100K+

Sale is not transactional, marketing can’t be either. Create consistent, high-value content in order to create brand awareness and help your audience understand the value of what you do. Similar approach to smaller ACVs but consider higher-quality YouTube & LinkedIn advertising (if audience fit), 1:1 ABM (target prospects), 3rd-party validation (ie. software review sites, high-quality testimonial videos, high-value events) that require larger investments.

Metrics: Pipeline Velocity

Create more qualified opportunities, reduce sales cycle length, improve win rates via marketing that creates value for your audience and brings them to you. 

Tactical Considerations:

• Strategic ABM

• High-value (digital) events: Invite-only whiskey tasting & invite a customer to present and share a live success story.

Why ACV Matters to B2B Demand Generation Marketers

When thinking through your demand gen approach, you need to understand the complexity of your sales cycle. For smaller, more transactional deals with a lower average ACV, you don't need to do as much work educating the value of what you are selling compared to higher ticket products.

You need to focus on building a high-performing inbound engine with strong organic performance at the lower-end average ACV. With an under $20,000 ACV, you need to ensure that you are efficient with your spend to keep CAC under control. Think about developing a really effective demand flywheel, a model that builds momentum by focusing beyond customer acquisition to fuel customer loyalty and help work for you to bring in more new customers.

In the under $20K average deal size range, you need to ensure your SEO is buttoned up, your bottom of funnel conversion points (website product pages, PPC landing pages, any high buying intent page) are crack free. That means no leaks in your funnel. You won't have as much leeway to spend on advertising with lower ACVs, so make sure your organic content engine works well. When you invest in organic content marketing, it may take longer than paid to achieve results, but remember content is evergreen, grows in value over time, and has a high lifetime ROI. 

When you are measuring success at the lower-ACV end, focus on lead quality. Think beyond the lead to evaluate how your leads progress through to closed deals. Your lead quality is determined by the rate and speed that marketing qualified leads progress to won opportunities. Find out what lead sources drive the highest value leads and invest in doing more of that.

As your ACV gets higher, you can get a little more spendy with your marketing budget. But keep in mind, your spending needs to be focused on building value for your audience. The complexity of the sale increases as the ACV increases, which means marketing's job to convince buyers of the value is more important. This does not mean you produce content marketing about your product. You need to focus on your target personas, find out what they care about and how you can help them. Build your content strategy around that and focus on solid buyer enablement materials.

If you have a higher price point product, you will still want to build a high-performing inbound motion but with more money to work with, think about how you can get more creative with developing content that resonates with your buyers. As an example, you can create really stunning customer testimonial videos that speak from the voice of your customer about their real challenges and how your company helped them. Evaluate cutting the video up into a short YouTube 30-second pre-roll. Promote it on LinkedIn. Also, consider an invite-only virtual event (tequila or whiskey tasting?) and ask a customer to present their success story live at the event.

As you start to spend more, make sure you are looking at the return on your investments. Measure your marketing ROI and look at how impactful your demand work is in shortening long, complex sales cycles. If you are effectively creating demand, you should have more leads filling the pipeline that are better primed to seal the deal. 

No matter your average ACV, remember that building market demand is really about building trust with your audience. Get to know your customers, find out what makes them tick, find out why they love your products, and try to talk to the prospects that didn't buy too – find out why. If you don't have a good channel to reach your customers today, create one! Think about starting a webinar or podcast series and invite customers and target prospects to speak. Not only will you get high-quality content you can repurpose into different formats, you will also collect valuable market intelligence to deepen your knowledge of your audience.

Remember that even in B2B, it’s not companies that buy products, but people. Emotional connections matter in B2B buying decisions. If you can win the trust of your prospects and prove your company is an authoritative voice in the industry, you will succeed in drawing people in to want to buy from you, therefore, reducing the need for outbound sales.

So there you have it, the Coles Notes of building a demand strategy for your business.

What is your average deal size sweet spot as a marketer? Do you have demand generation tips to share?

Also, a big shout out to Chris Walker from Refine Labs and his State of Demand Gen podcast for providing many of the ideas I've summarized in this quick and dirty demand generation framework. If you haven't yet followed Chris on LinkedIn or listened to his podcast, go do yourself a favor and check it out!