Introducing Demand-Genius: A Platform for Content-Led Growth

‍What’s changed?

For years now, SaaS GTM has revolved around labour intensive outbound tactics, propped up by favourable market conditions and a "grow at all costs" mindset. Lower level decision makers were empowered to tool their own teams to the hilt with SaaS, and could be “sold” via a more tactical engagement run by less experienced reps.

We’ve invested heavily in SalesTech to offset the diminishing returns we’ve seen on this strategy. We got better and better at personalising outbound at scale, understanding 2nd and 3rd party intent signals, coaching reps with AI to deliver better sales calls.

Essentially, we’re treading water, finding ways to stay afloat as outbound tactics become over saturated and under effective (yes, I made that word up. I thought it sounded good).

That’s not to say these solutions don’t work. I love several and in most cases they are great technologies that will improve efficiency and effectiveness hugely. But they can also distract from the underlying problem - modern buyers don’t want to talk to you nearly as much as you want them to.

The stats bear that out pretty conclusively. Gartner predict that by 2025, 80% of sales interactions will be digital, stemming from the 75% of buyers that now prefer to avoid direct interactions with sales representatives.

Where does this leave us?

Is outbound dead? My view - definitely not. But it must change, and work hand-in-hand with more sophisticated content, partnership and referral strategies.

It’s maybe ironic given that my own career started off by standing out through sheer volume. I wasn’t the smartest or the charming-est (made that one up too), but wherever I went I saw to it that I sent more emails, made more dials, than anyone else. That inarguable measurement of effort - the daily “touchpoint count”; that is, the sum of all emails, calls, LinkedIn messages, folded up pieces of paper popped hopefully in the backpacks of unsuspecting people on the train in - triggered a competitiveness that my therapist would have a field day with.

But times have changed, and I think the modern SDR is unlikely to achieve the same results without more nuanced tactics. That phrase says it all - “touchpoint”.

Your buyers are not a touchpoint in your sales process. You are a touchpoint in their buyer journey.

That’s the important mindset shift that needs to take place. In most cases your buyers don’t want to engage with your reps every step of the way. And they definitely don’t want to do so in a way that falls neatly in line with your 6 stage sales process.

We can keep trying to force them to, but look at the results:

• 94% of buyers don’t trust sales teams (G2). Without change, this is only likely to get worse given that millennial buyers are 2.2x more likely to report high skepticism of sales rep claims (Gartner: Future of Sales).
• Our reps’ experience reflects this. Per the same report, 65% of reps report finding their prospects’ trust harder than ever to earn.
• It’s hardly surprising, then, that 75% are finding it harder than ever to get prospects’ attention.

In short, the market has spoken. It’s time to ease off.

By the way - this is great news! Take the sometimes myopic view of the quota carrying AE out of the equation and what are the absolute best SaaS businesses built off? Customer Success. Not the team (although in some cases it is 100% the team), but the principle. First class onboarding. Cross-organisational adoption. Value. Better, more thoughtful buying decisions mean true commitment to adopting your product, which means higher ACV, more strategic partnerships and customers for life. The best technologies will win in this environment and they’ll do so sustainably.

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A better way

So you’re saying we should just sit here and wait, snoozing our way to another bad quarter in the name of a good buyer experience? Absolutely not. What do the best reps do? They understand, educate, and influence buyers.

This will always be the job of the go-to-market function (and we should absolutely view ourselves as a single GTM function, not Sales, Marketing, CS, and so on). Demand-Genius is built on the belief that customers don’t necessarily have to talk to a rep every step of the way for us to understand, educate and influence.

Take the B2C world; do the apps on your phone understand you? Do they educate you? They definitely influence you.

Sales reps and outbound tactics have their place but it should be to support customers through the trickier, more technical and tactical elements of purchasing software. Not to guide every step in the journey from problem → solution.

In today’s world, your buyers are spread out. They’re harder to reach. They aren’t all searching from the same office IP address so you can’t always work out when a new decision maker has joined the party by following the metadata. They are digitally native, accustomed to getting information at their fingertips from a digital world designed to make everything easy.

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No surprise they don’t always appreciate B2B sales, the only remaining place where we deliberately impose unnecessary friction to get our customers to speak to us.

Don't Trade Your Trust

If we’re looking for better ways to influence prospects via content, it’s probably worth looking at businesses for whom that job is absolutely foundational. As news publishers adapted to a digital world, they needed new ways to get to know their customers, to influence them to subscribe or to buy the products they advertise.

They went on a similar journey to SaaS. At first, privacy was the victim. They bought 3rd party datasets and used them to target advertising. Increasingly, they understood that this was hurting trust and credibility with their audiences. They were trading their most fundamental asset for a revenue stream that could prop them up in the short term. I think SaaS will come to a similar inflection point when it comes to how we identify intent and capture personal details to support our outbound models.

I’ll come back to the publishing example in much more detail in the coming months, as I try to keep myself occupied while smarter brains than me deal with the pesky details of building out a bloody awesome platform for content-led growth.

What does Demand-Genius actually do...?

Demand-Genius lets you leverage the outstanding content and thought leadership you produce to identify exactly who’s on your site. Not through 3rd party datasets and probabilistic IP lookups - through a fair, transparent value exchange with the customer.

Leverage your content properly, authenticating users in exchange for the valuable insight you provide and from that moment on, every interaction (online and offline) will benefit.

This lays the foundation for everything Demand-Genius lets you do, and plans to let you do in the future (we’re just getting started).

• Content Experience Optimization. Move beyond repetitive lead forms; tailor your gating strategy and messaging for each individual prospect based on their unique buyer journey, on and offline.
• (Proper) Content Insights. Content supports GTM throughout the customer lifecycle, not just top-of-funnel. We let you see how your content is influencing specific down-funnel conversion points (e.g. demo → proposal, proposal → closed) and KPIs like sales velocity, ACV, Close Rate and Closed Revenue.
• Deal Insights. It’s not just about digitising sales, it’s about online and offline channels working together to drive sales efficiency and a better buyer experience. We equip you with insight into each prospect’s digital buyer journey, so your sales reps and leaders can better influence and forecast deals.

In short, we want your prospects to have a better buyer experience, where thoughtful content optimized to their specific stage in the buyer journey helps them to arrive at decisions.

We want you to have a more efficient GTM motion.

We want your sales and marketing to work in tandem to move deals efficiently and predictably through the funnel, so you close more deals and forecast more accurately.

If you’re in growth at all costs mode, maybe you can just throw more and more money at outbound strategies. Number of reps and number of deals are undoubtedly correlated, if not proportionally. But if you need to do more with less across your entire GTM motion, we’re building Demand-Genius for you.

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*The Future of Sales in 2025: A Gartner Trend Insight Report

*Gartner: Customer Acquisition and Retention eBook.

*Godard Abel, CEO & CO-Founder of G2, in SaaStr: The SaaS Trust Crisis with Godard Abel.

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