Capturing Demand
A few people out there want to buy from you right now. Do you know who they are?
Your CMO should be able to walk into your next board meeting and answer three questions without looking at a dashboard and without looking at their notes:
How many high-intent inbound leads/hand-raisers did we create last month?
What did we do (and spend) to get them?
What are we going to try next to improve those numbers?
Why are those questions so important?
Well, unless you’re an extremely early-stage company in a category that’s literally being created right now, a CMO’s first job is to capture existing demand. As in, find the people who are actively trying to buy the thing you sell and make sure you’re on their radar.
And the easiest way to track how good you are at that is by measuring your count of high-intent inbound leads.
Yes, a good marketing leader should be doing much more than this, but this demand capture thing is a foundational layer of the growth machine you want to build. There’s people out there who have already decided (and secured the budget!) to buy what you sell in the very near-term.
So, do you have a mechanism for finding and converting at least some of them? And are you improving how that mechanism works over time by making little adjustments to it?
Are you paying attention to the overall quality of how demand capture works at your company?
Good marketing is about much more than just creating hand-raisers.
But great marketing leaders make sure this part of their lead creation and conversion process becomes and stays absolutely airtight.
A few of my best posts below on the topic below.
I love the hand-raiser metric. Not only does it tell you whether you're capturing existing demand for the category, but it's also one of the best proxy metrics to measure how well your brand marketing is working.
The better your brand marketing and WoM within your target ICP/personas is working, the more this number will rise seemingly organically (and outside the field of vision of your attribution software).