The demand type of a product or service drives a number of fundamental marketing decisions – messaging, targeting, the offers you create, the tactics you use and more. Yet seemingly agreeable colleagues often disagree on which demand type matches their products or services. This disparity is dangerous to your ability to market effectively as a team.

I spent years as a ballet dancer, and with every year of training came more-challenging jumps, turns and leaps. But even world-class ballet dancers focus endless amounts of energy on the basics – studying intently the nuance of the simple plié, the subtlety of the first tendue. By pulling apart what is simple, we are better equipped to improve what is complex.

That same idea reminds us to step back from the complexities of our B2B marketing day jobs to make a simple decision: what type of demand we are trying to create.

The demand type of a product or service drives a number of fundamental marketing decisions – messaging, targeting, the offers you create, the tactics you use and more. Yet seemingly agreeable colleagues often disagree on which demand type matches their products or services. This disparity is dangerous to your ability to market effectively as a team.

SiriusDecisions has identified three demand type categories:

  • New concept: A disruptive product or service with no budgetary line item within its target audience. New concept marketing is typically based on defining a problem that is solved by your solution.
  • New paradigm: A product that promises to retool or optimize an existing process, automate a manual process or solve known issues more effectively than what is currently in place.
  • Established market: A product or service that is accepted by the majority of target organizations to be necessary and best-of-breed. The market for these products and services is generally served by a few powerful providers that battle for market share.

Check in with your colleagues to identify the type of demand you’re trying to create for the product that you’re marketing, ensure it hasn’t changed as the product has evolved, and make sure that demand type isn’t different based on region or geography (it’s indeed possible for the type of demand you’re trying to create to be different from one geo to another).

For those of us looking to bring our teams together toward the common goal of marketing and sales alignment, demand type is a fundamental place to start. Simply agreeing on the type of demand you’re trying to generate and what that means for your strategy, messaging and tactics can mean the difference between a futile demand creation effort and a successful strategic initiative. The takeaway? Take the time to get back to the basics.