Do you like the movie trailer that shows you all the good parts that happen in the movie? And then when you go to see the full length movie, there is nothing more. No thrill of discovery that you get from finding out how all the pieces fit together. There is just nothing more to the story. It becomes just a repeat of the trailer in long form. But now it becomes a bit of a bore, because you already know the story and you have seen all the exciting parts.

Contrast that experience with the movie trailer that carefully selects its sneak peaks to get your attention. It could be a still scene with a remarkable image. It could be the emotion conveyed from the facial expressions. It can be carefully curated music to communicate the right feeling about it all. But the snippets do not tell the story. They capture your attention and arouse an interest in what is behind it all.

Your demand generation strategy must follow the same approach. First things first. You need to focus on capturing attention. And capturing attention is all about planting the seed, that idea which will cause your prospective buyer to think in a certain way, and in a certain direction. Which then leads them to postulate some kind of question of themselves. Only then will they have to take the next step of engagement in order to answer it. And this is what you want.

Have you every had any say to you – “I am glad you ask that”? That is what I am talking about.

If you expect to capture attention, you need to concentrate on planting seeds that can be nurtured to grow. And as nature has shown, not all seeds can be planted in all growing conditions. The growing conditions that work for some seeds just do not work for others. It’s all about the mix of soil type, sunlight and water that dictate what can grow where. So don’t bother trying to plant the whole tree. It may not take at all. Rather, it is all about finding the right seed that will grow in your environment.

In generating demand for your product offering, it is all about planting the right ideas for your prospective buyers, and seeking the ideal place of fertility in their mind. This is where you undoubtedly have to invest continual efforts to discover which ideas can germinate most effectively. Knowing the buyer persona is just a starting point; as any buyer persona that you create will be a mix of facts and assumptions.

So in order to effectively capture that precious and fleeting attention that you need to engage further, it comes down to engineering a process that can effectively derive the right seeds to plant. In the movie industry, smart companies such as Legendary Entertainment Applied Analytics are using data analytics to put the right trailer together. In agriculture, Monsanto is turning seed planting into an engineered process. And whatever market that you serve, an engineered demand generation process will keep things from getting derailed.

Whenever you embark on something new, there comes with it a huge source of excitement. And this excitement creates the fresh energy that drives things forward. But I am not just talking about the power to get things done, I am talking about the power to see more of what can be done.

A great example is when you move into a new home. It is a really personal thing. Something that consumes your thoughts and is hard to stop thinking about. You see an infinite amount of possibilities – some short term – some long term. Your whole mindset is running on some kind of creative adrenalin, and you are gushing with more ideas than you can latch onto or remember.

But at some point, that fresh energy is no longer fresh. It’s likely that there has been a good level of effort applied and there have been positive changes that have been realized. But with that comes the risk associated with the lack of fresh energy. And that is when the staleness process begins.

And it is this staleness, this fading effect, that you have to watch out for when you are driving your business forward. This whole fading effect is a double-ended force. As you fade away from the changes in your marketplace, your market fades away from your business. No matter how exciting something is at the start, the excitement fades. Customers get bored and tune out if you over-engage by doing the same things, i.e. same old, same old – and they certainly tune out if you are not engaging in some manner. And as you go along your merry away being happy with the status quo, marketplace activity, whether it be customer or competitor behavior, has a way of sneaking by without you noticing.

While you may not have the resources to act on all the ideas that you may have, it is still pretty important to keep the ideas flowing. And when you are in business, the growth and profitability will depend on it. If you are not going forwards, you are moving backwards. If the new ideas are not flowing for you and everything looks the same, opportunity will pass you by.

So what to do?

It is paramount to continually seek engagement with your marketplace. This is the source of all freshness. New perspectives can come through different sources and different channels. It can come from the fresh look that new entrants to your business bring naturally. It can come from new customers or departed customers. Or it can come from your suppliers.

But you have to pro-actively seek it out. You need to expect that the questions that you ask of yourself will remain the same – What business are you in? How are you positioned to fulfill your goals? – but the answers will change as your marketplace goes through its natural evolution. The processes that you incorporate to gather that vital information for satisfy the market’s needs as best you can, are vital to success of your business beyond the short term.

The key to it all is to have the mindset to seek out the new freshness that is out there. And putting that mindset to work in a set of marketing processes that are able to drive the continual change that every business needs, to adapt and grow. Getting fresh perspective triggers regular infusions of fresh energy into your business, and this is what keeps your “sales” full.

Sometimes things are just not working out. You have got a great offering. You have a great story to tell. And you are getting your message in front of your target audience. But there is that big missing link. You are not getting the customers you are expecting.

You know the feeling. The webinar is packed. The demo is packed. The trade show is packed. The right people are there. So many people are interested. But not a single qualified lead emerges. One of those true anomalies. You can’t help but think:

Have they come for the right reason?

Are they asking the right questions?

Will they come back?

Why do they not want to leave their contact info for more information?

How long did they stay before they left or tuned out?

Why were they not moved by your great revelations?

So what to do? Hire a detective. That is what sales people are for. They need to put their best sleuthing skills to work. The causes of anomalies are never quite apparent. They need to get closer to prospective customers to uncover that true intent.

No doubt, it is an ideal approach that can get things on the right path. But there are just a few problems that could get in the way.

1. Not all sales people are effective sleuths. Some are great closers. Some work hard at being ultra-responsive to whatever prospective customers request. But not all have skills to uncover the insights you need.

2. There is a resource mismatch. There are many more prospective customers than salespeople. And not all prospects are alike. Hence, you may not be able to find out what you need from the prospects that are truly able to become customers.

3. The qualification process may be wrong. There may be something missing from the criteria that is being used to choose where to mine for customer insights. So the insights could be wrong.

4. There is a shield against sales people. The earlier that a prospect is in the their buying cycle, the less interested they are to invest in face time or telephone time, or any human interaction time. So the harder it becomes to discern their true intent and motivation.

So adding detective resources has a limitations on the effectiveness that can be produced. Just like with real life detectives, some mysteries are solved and some are not.

On the other hand, the more clues that are present, the higher the likelihood that the mystery will be solved. Given enough clues, we can solve a lot of mysteries with a basic level of detective skills. In today’s smartphone and video-crazed world, there always seems to be someone that is able to capture those interesting moments that make it to the top news stories.

When it comes to your demand generation system, you will make much better gains if you invest in increasing the number of clues that are collected with every touch point with your prospective customer. With enough clues, there will be no mystery in the customer behaviors that are occurring as they interact with you.

Your demand generation system must have that feedback loop built in. It must provide a data set that enables you to steer your efforts both in the right direction, and in the right manner. If not, you increase the risk of wasting precious marketing and sales resources. In today’s overcrowded market, if you don’t extract an understanding of why you are getting the results that you are, you are doomed.

Measurement is important. No one will argue.

It is the only way to get quantitative data that is objective. Measurements can be compared from one snapshot of your status to the next. It gives you a baseline from which improvement and progress can be made.

But in order to make those improvements, you need to know what is behind the measurement.

Since the internet is such an important front-end to your whole customer acquisition process, no one can afford to be passé about how effectively it is working for their business. We all know that the top-of-the-funnel must work. And even in cases where your prospect does not enter from the top, they will look at the website during their buying process. You need a measurement.

This makes website graders great tools. They are able to give you a comprehensive set of measurements about all the parameters that culminate in a website score.

But how different are they from your bathroom scale?

There are all those weight-loss enthusiasts out there, who are finally ready to look at the scale to understand exactly how bad their situation is. Of course, the scale does not really tell them anything that they didn’t already know anyways. That they are just carrying around too much weight. But the scale does put a real measurement on it. And it establishes the baseline.

And then there is that burst of energy, enthusiasm, and willpower to do something. Eat less. Eat properly. Exercise. It is no secret that fitness centres are packed in January every year with a surge of new enthusiasts.

So what happens after that?

For most of the crash-course enthusiasts, what happens it that they attain some positive results in the short term. Then slowly things go back to the way they used to be. And all of the weight comes back. That is a net gain of zero. Doing a lot of things for a short time did not work.

This bears a remarkable similarity to all those businesses out there who want to improve their demand generation capabilities. They want that website to drive more leads. It’s all about putting food on the table today. Seeds can only be planted if they can grow fast enough. And this sense-of-urgency translates into an impatience level.

Quick results. Quick wins. Instant gratification is what it is all about.

It means applying lots of actions after little thinking. But quick results may have that undesirable side-effect. Unsustainability. Have you ever seen blogs that have been started, and there are no posts, or one post, or a few great posts and then a full stop. And what perception does that impart on your website visitors. You guessed it. It’s a negative one. Which means you are worse off than before you started.

So when you look behind that website grader, or whatever assessment tool you choose, you need to come away with a plan that fits your situation. You need to accept what new activities can be transformed into habits that your company can keep doing. Make things workable one step at a time, and this will lead to those enviable sustained process that will deliver predictable results and flow to your marketing and sales.

Emulating someone else’s proven system provides no assurance that it will work for you.

One of the greatest patent battles in history was over who invented the regenerative circuit, i.e. the positive feedback loop. This is a battle that dragged through the courts for 12 years and ended in 1934. The legal victor was Lee de Forest. Yet his adversary, Edwin Howard Armstrong was still accepted by most in the engineering community as the true inventor. In simple terms the battle was won, not by who filed first, nor by who actually got something to work first, nor by who could properly explain how the circuit worked, but rather, by who had a dated drawing and some lab notes. So much for the old patent laws.

One of the things that is most striking is the nature of the two individuals themselves. Certainly both men were driven inventors in their own right. But they couldn’t be more opposite in how they operated. Lee de Forest was a voracious reader and consumed all of the technical content that was published; and in fact, he was a Yale PhD. From this vantage point, he sought to emulate and build on the concepts of others. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the approach. It’s just that building on the proven systems of others, or the thinking of others, just did not result in a breakthrough. It may be true that he hooked up a vacuum tube in some manner that resembled a regenerative circuit. But he just did not understand how it worked, and it certainly did not result in amplification; (which was the whole point of the circuit).

Edwin Howard Armstrong on the other hand, did not put a lot of faith in the knowledge published by others, nor in mathematical explanations of how things worked. It may have served as a starting point, as it did for de Forest, but Armstrong’s focus on proving things for himself through his own experiments, was unstoppable. Through his understanding of electronics, he was all about theorizing, experimenting, analyzing, and seeking to understand. Even in the courts, there was no doubt that he truly and intimately understood everything about the regenerative circuit.

The same distinction of efforts must be made when you are formulating your demand generation methods. You can’t just do what worked for others. It may not work for you. Especially in a marketing world that is constantly changing, what worked yesterday, may not work today. In fact, you must be even more conscientious that what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

Your return on investment will not be the greatest by soaking up all those case studies, and studying excessively as to what and how others are driving their marketing. But rather, you must be driven to experiment in order to derive, discover and understand both what combination, and what sequence of activities, will yield predictable results. You need to elevate yourself to the point where you have developed a “sense” of the dynamics. And metaphorically speaking, an understanding of how your regeneration circuit works.

This means that you can’t design your demand generation system based on someone else’s proven system, unless it is your own proof. For the emulation approach to work, your situation would need to be exactly like the organization that derived the proven system. It happens all the time with CEOs and executives when they succeed marvelously in one company. And when they apply the same model to their new company, they at times fail dramatically. At the end of the day, you can’t get around it. Developing “your” marketing messages and deriving “your” demand generation system is a key investment to your overall success.