You subscribed to my newsletter. But I didn’t publish any edition since April 2023.
So I figured I should let you know what this will become, in case you want to receive the next ones or simply unsubscribe.
Since last time, lots happened.
Long story short:
I became a full-time freelancer and pivoted twice
I went to Thailand one month, and lived in Kyoto (Japan) for 5 months
I’m getting more demand than ever - that’s why I now have the time to restart this newsletter
What do I do now?
I help Sales-led B2B SaaS on their Website Messaging.
Why?
How often do you see a software’s website with:
A hard-to-believe promise about ROI, revenue, growth, pipeline, productivity…
A generic messaging that seems to be only for C-levels
Unclear explanations on what the tool actually does
?
Well, these messaging mistakes cost a lot of money to SaaS companies.
Because their website’s visitors don’t resonate with it:
They don’t get what the SaaS does and how it solves their problem.
Rather than helping their sales team, the website confuses prospects. And all marketing investments get wasted, as they redirect toward a useless website.
Actually, I faced this problem as a freelancer.
I was struggling to sell, my messaging was not clear, I had 0 traction.
So I worked on it, and designed my process. It got me 3 big clients within 2 weeks.
What’s next?
Now, I’m working on a small website to explain what I do, as I started on LinkedIn.
I intend to use this newsletter to share free tips on this topic:
Website Messaging for Sales-led B2B SaaS
I don’t know yet about the frequency or format. Probably a weekly short one, like <2mn to read, about this specific topic and nothing else.
If that interests you, great!
If not, feel free to unsubscribe. I don’t want to pollute your inbox.
Either way, I’m always open for a chat if you want to network/have a question about my services ;)
This is already the 4th issue of Growth Systems, and you are 42 reading it. I’m pretty happy to have not missed one so far. Let’s keep going!
Thanks for reading Growth Systems! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Today, we’ll talk about the very niche I’m specializing in: Demand Generation.
To those of you who work in B2B companies, that should interest and help you a lot.
Let’s dive in!
Summary
Demand Generation
Inbound and Outbound
How is Demand Gen the future of marketing?
How can you do it for your B2B company?
1/ What is Demand Generation?
There are two definitions for Demand Generation.
The first says that demand generation is about creating demand for something that people may not even know they need or want yet. Demand Generation comes from generating demand that previously didn’t exist.
The second definition says that demand generation is about focusing on increasing both the quantity and the quality of incoming prospects’ demands. Maybe the demand already exists, or maybe it doesn’t.
The second definition includes the first one, and it’s the one I use.
If that wasn’t clear, don’t worry, we’ll get back to it later.
2/ What are inbound and outbound marketing?
Traditionally, marketing operations are divided into two categories.
🧲 Inbound: when you attract clients through content. Ex: Writing articles, publishing on social media, organizing webinars…
🔊 Outbound: when you push your message to reach clients. Ex: Online advertising, TV, radio, billboards, cold calling…
These definitions are useful to put operations in categories but don’t really help to create strategies. Instead, it’s separating operations into silos, whereas these types of operations are often mixed.
For example, SEO and SEA, or Social media and Ads.
3/ How is Demand Gen the future of B2B marketing?
How do CEOs and CMOs choose their main marketing operation? The answer: speed.
Business leaders will always prioritize short-term results over uncertain long-term strategies.
In terms of speed, the fastest way to get results is always to do Sales operations (cold calling, cold emailing, prospection through social media messaging…).
To do so, marketing is way too often relegated to lead generation for the sales team.
That’s why in B2B marketing:
SEA is more used than SEO
Ebooks are always gated (requiring an email to be downloaded)
Forms are either super-long to get high-quality leads or super-short to get leads in quantity
etc. etc.
Inbound is reduced to producing content for SEO, or gated ebooks to gather emails.
Outbound is reduced to cold emails and messaging, or promoting the gated content.
Here comes the Demand Generation.
By definition, incoming demand is qualified: the prospect is interested.
Using inbound, outbound, ABM* or PLG*, the goal is clear: getting these high-quality leads in quantity.
*we’ll see those in a future issue
How is that the future? Well, it:
Shows clear results fast
Scales by itself over time
Allows a perfect budget management
Sounds too good to be true? Agree.
The downsides are that it requires a solid strategy, a marketing team trusted, some preparations, and consistency.
4/ So how can you do it for your B2B company?
Step 1: Have an optimized demand capture tool (aka a website or social media profile).
It must be easy for interested prospects to contact you.
Step 2: Become a media.
Think of your social media as your own media. Start an organic content strategy, with these goals:
Be remembered (post often where your target clients are, and post stuff worth subscribing to).
Be trusted (post about your very expertise, to help your target clients, while showing some of your results).
That’s it.
These two steps are the very basic of Demand Generation.
You’ll actually have a lot more to do:
Define your target audience and buyer personas.
Create valuable content and offers.
Promote your content through various channels.
Capture leads and follow up with them.
Measure and optimize your strategy.
And each of these steps hides some various more complex ones.
For example:
Promote your content: Choose the right channel, improve your content, rank in SEO, update content, use paid ads to show your content to the right audience, use retargeting to be visible by your ICP, steal someone’s audience…
Capture leads and follow up with them: Improve your conversion rate, build your owned media, nurture your leads, automate your follow up, leverage leads to find decision-makers…
I’m not going into the details today, as I wanted to use this newsletter as an introduction to this topic.
Truth is, I’m working on an online course about it. It’s designed to help scale marketing services, whether you’re a founder, CEO, CMO, project manager, or even a freelancer.
Interested? Reply to this email and I’ll send you the course for free.
Yes, for free. It’s my way of thanking you for your support!
You must be subscribed (if you know someone who could be interested, transfer him/her this email right now).
These are the projects I work on:
an online course to get started in Demand Generation
a podcast about Demand Generation with marketing experts
a consulting offer to help marketing services to scale
Let me know if you’re interested in any of those!
What did you think of today’s issue? I tried to make it shorter, but I struggle to explain complex topics. Tell me your opinion: I need your feedback!
See you in two weeks,
Gaspard
Thanks for reading Growth Systems! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
It’s a clothing brand that has a sustainable and eco-friendly approach to fashion: they take pre-orders and then produce the clothes. That’s the only way* you can buy their products.
*(actually, there’s an other way, we’ll talk about it later).
Having to pre-order your clothes and wait sometimes months before receiving it is the opposite of fast fashion. Asphalte is disrupting this industry and is helping it to change.
They started as a brand for men only, but they recently started to also sell clothing for women. Their style is pretty classic and simple. Take a look 👇
Nothing too fancy, but it’s still an elegant collection. And there is a reason why: the founder’s vision.
"Our job is not to make fashion, it is to make clothes that last", says William Hauvette.
Asphalte clothing is made to last over the ages, both in terms of style and quality. This also justifies the order delay, as customers have to wait weeks or months to receive their purchase, but the brand justifies it as “good clothes can’t be made overnight.”
Before we dive more into their strategy, look at these great photos taken from their website (some of you know I worked as a photographer, so I do recognize nice photos when I see some ahah).
Highs and lows of their model
Pre-orders are difficult to do.
You have to sell a product consumers can’t touch, have to wait for (and they are not used to doing so), and have no guarantee it’ll please them. And it’s more expensive.
So brands that succeed in doing their first pre-order drop usually put their revenue straight into buying stocks of products, to reduce their costs by buying in large quantities and to become able to sell fast at any time.
And yet, William Hauvette, Asphalte’s founder, not only managed to do one pre-order drop but based his entire model on it. Stunning.
He was already a founder and CEO of a clothing brand, Six-Sept (Six-Seven), before launching Asphalte. He used this experience to organize the launch of Asphalte: by building a MVB (Minimum Viable Brand), and a mailing list.
Once the mailing list got to 10,000 emails, he launched the first pre-order.
That allowed him to sell:
300 t-shirts on the first day,
2500 sweaters in a month,
to over 2000 clients.
These are really impressive stats for a non-existent brand.
There are many pros to the pre-order model.
You can predict the demand Pre-ordering allows Asphalte to accurately predict demand for their product before it even hits the market. This allow them avoid over/underproduction and ultimately save costs.
You can Increased cash flow By taking pre-orders, Asphalte can increase its cash flow before the product is even released, which can be used right away to fuel growth.
You get early feedback and learnings Pre-orders can also provide early feedback on products, to see which ones sell more and why.
It creates a sense of exclusivity Limiting the availability of the product to pre-orders only, can create a sense of exclusivity and hype around the product, which can lead to increased demand.
But these pros come with lots of difficulties to face.
It has long wait times Pre-ordering can sometimes mean a long wait time before the product is actually available, which can lead to frustration among customers.
It discourages buyers It’s a big barrier consumers have to overcome.
It can lead to over-hype the brand’s products If a product is over-hyped, customers over-expect their delivery, and the cloth can fail to meet customer expectations. It can simply lose the customer who won’t buy from Asphalte again, lead to negative publicity, or damage the brand's reputation.
It lacks flexibility Once a product is sold, you have to produce it, or it will severe your brand’s image. What happens today is that costs are rising, and it may become a hindrance if you sell a product at the price you thought was fair, but finally have to reduce your margins.
Also, pre-orders mean longer sales cycles, which means customers buy less often, which means lower customer lifetime values, which leads to slow growth.
That’s what we’ll analyze now.
Their growth and marketing strategy
Asphalte made pre-orders for their weapon but focused their strategy on one thing: their customers.
It comes from involving them from the very first part of creating clothes to having a seamless customer journey.
Growth always has the same core: customer engagement.
By involving customers early into the whole process, Asphalte rise their engagement and will to follow and be part of the outcome.
It improves retention (see where I’m going?).
The whole pre-order-only model restrains the company’s growth in time, as each purchase takes time and is more expensive than the market, blablabla.
So focusing on customer engagement, which means retention and referral, allows the brand to grow with fewer customers, but with a higher lifetime value.
This isn’t just about having a survey before each new clothing, it’s a global effort mixing:
Brand building
Customer nurturing (through emails + social media)
And constantly working on making the brand worth consumers’ attention.
But of course, it relies on customer satisfaction, so the quality of the products is compared to the customer’s expectation.
In short, Asphalte involves customers creating the products they want, engaging them through the process, selling but not over-sell the product’s quality, and delivering something that meets the customer’s (so controlled) expectation.
It’s important to say since its launch, the company raised funds to invest in development:
to ensure their supply chain was on point and could deliver more and more,
to fund the launch of women’s clothing,
and to grow quickly abroad, in Europe.
To develop revenue streams, they put their best-sellers available all year long (still in “pre-order”, but not a temporary one).
Also, the products that are the most sold at each drop are over-produced and then sold on their website directly, without having to pre-order it, but at a slightly higher price (which makes the pre-order even more appealing, hello FOMO).
Women clothing, opening in new countries, and selling more expensive products without pre-orders through their website, allowed Asphalte to grow in just a few years.
Today, they have less than 50 employees (without counting manufacturers) and do 23M€ ARR.
This is a perfect example of how focusing on retention, through customer engagement and brand building, can lead to fast, sustainable, and profitable growth.
Inspirations and hacks to steal
Before we talk about how all of this can help your business, just a short question:
What do you need at the moment for your business?
If there is any way I can help you, feel free to write me ;)
Back to our subject.
What we can learn from Asphalte is that being laser-focused on the right thing can lead to success.
The founder focused on:
Having a Minimum Viable Brand (a mission, the core messaging, values, a vision…)
Having engaged customers, by building the hype and momentum for each drop
Having an Owned Media (the email list)
Being profitable, with pre-orders
It all started with:
One target audience (men in their 30s, in France, with the budget to buy good quality clothes, and wanting to change their habits to eco-friendly ones)
One type of product (t-shirts and sweaters)
One offer (pre-order clothes)
One channel (website)
One media (mails)
That’s why, if you are focusing on your number of followers, likes, how many social media you’re on, how many products you sell, to how many types of audiences, stop.
Learn from the famous proverb: The Riches Are In the Niches.
Focus on what matters to your growth and revenue, and expand once it works.
A few examples:
Clean and organize your databases and email lists before spamming promotions
Get a good organic strategy working on social media before going into paid
Have a good conversion rate on your website before doing ads on Google
I did say there would be “a hack”, so here it is:
Ask your customers.
Asphalte’s surveys are their cheat code.
It allows them to build the product consumers want, in the quantity they need, at the price it will sell.
When is the last time you asked your customers, your clients, and your audience about what they like about your work? Or about what they would want you to improve?
It’s a gold mine of information too many people ignore.
That’s it.
This is the end of today’s issue. I hope you liked it.
I wasn’t organized at all, and I am finishing this the evening before the due date. You wouldn’t have known about it, but I felt like sharing you.
Last Sunday I ran my very first (and last) half-marathon. That was difficult, I’m a little disappointed in my performance, but proud of myself for achieving it.
I won’t do it again.
Today, you’ll get the final answer to a question I received many times after I made some posts about growth frameworks.
This question is: “Should I focus on Acquisition or Retention first?”
Obviously, the best is to work on both.
But in a world where you really have to choose one, go for Retention.
We’ll see why, and in which cases you should focus on Acquisition instead.
Let’s dive in!
Before we start, I wanted to let you know I write this newsletter as a hobby. If you aren’t subscribed, you can do it here:
My everyday job is doing growth marketing consulting and operations for our clients at Spaag, a growth marketing cabinet based in Paris and Lille (France), and working for clients from all over the world.
And as a second job I do part-time, I help B2B business leaders construct their growth strategy and system. If you’re interested, write me an email or DM me on LinkedIn.
That’s all for me, let’s go back to Acquisition vs Retention.
Definitions
The framework we use the most in growth marketing is the (A)AARRR.
I’m thinking of writing a one-page glossary, to not repeat such definitions in each newsletter. Would it be a good idea?
Anyway, the AARRR framework is helpful to visualize the customer journey.
Your customer starts by discovering you (Awareness), then becomes a subscriber, a community member, whatever it is in your case but the thing is: he remembers you (Acquisition).
Then, he hires you or starts paying your offer (Activation).
You try to keep him as a client as long as possible (Retention), and after a while, he starts recommending you to others (Referrals).
All of that leads to an increase in your total income (Revenue).
So, focusing on Acquisition means focusing on increasing how many clients you got, whereas focusing on Retention means focusing on how long your clients stay.
Why focus on Retention first?
Acquiring a client always costs you something: time, money, or energy.
You can reduce this cost by different means (improving your performance marketing, having an ROI approach, doing inbound marketing…), but it will always cost you something, EXCEPT through Referrals (from your actual or previous clients, or just someone who knows you).
If two clients cost you the same amount to get, which one is worth more? Answer: the one who will pay you more.
So, as the amount you initially charge in B2B is often more or less the same per client, sometimes it’s more if the mission is bigger, you can’t control this parameter.
This means the client who will spend the most is the one who stays longer.
By working on Retention, you increase the overall lifetime value (LTV) of your clients.
Plus, a client who works with you for a longer time trusts you more, so you can do more upsells.
Also, it allows you to take more risks, so to potentially get better results to promote yourself.
Finally, it also helps you understand more and more your customer’s behavior, which means better targeting and technics to sell.
The very last factor that comes in: as I just said, a client who works with you for a longer period trusts you more. That means he has way more chances of recommending you!
So working on Retention improves Acquisition AND Referrals.
Wombo combo.
Final slash: Retention costs 5x less than Acquisition. (I lost the link to the scientific study, that’s why I don’t use this stat so much, but it’s true).
That’s why, in my humble opinion, if you had to choose between the two, I would go for Retention.
Now, let’s see in which cases I would not make this choice.
When should you choose Acquisition instead?
Sometimes, you can’t make clients stay longer.
Let’s say you work in the wedding industry. You don’t hope all your clients will get a divorce, right?
In this case, working on retention is kinda useless.
What you need, is to work on your acquisition. Creating a shortcut toward referrals is the best option, as it will lower your acquisition costs.
With the same example of weddings, you can work on improving word-of-mouth by offering free photos your clients will share.
Or a referral program, giving away promotion codes.
And sometimes, you can work on retention, but should not focus on it first.
Startups, for instance, need to grow fast.
They need data, and customer feedback as they burn cash to get more customers fast (profitability comes later).
In that case, you should focus on Acquisition.
It’ll help you lower your costs, and get more clients so more learnings, to achieve product(/offer)-market fit ASAP.
Retention is still important, but not a priority.
Conclusion
In most cases, Retention is the part you should focus on, to be more profitable and to build your growth for the long term.
But sometimes you can’t work on it, so Acquisition becomes your main focus.
According to your business model, and at which stage your business is, you should also focus on Acquisition until you attain a product-market fit, and the balance to break even (/be profitable).
But anyway, work on both your Acquisition and Retention.
And your overall framework.
After all, you want to build a growth system, right?
If you enjoyed this newsletter, like and share it. That would be amazing.
See you in two weeks, take care.
Gaspard
Thank you for reading Growth Systems and for your support!