The 3 Demand Pillars

Most B2B buyers don’t wake up ready to purchase your product. In fact, research shows that:

• 90% are out of market
• 7% are latent (aware of the problem but not prioritizing it)
• 3% are in-market (actively looking for a solution)

That’s why demand generation, activation, and capture are the three pillars every go-to-market strategy needs. Miss one, and you’ll struggle to build an allbound machine. Nail all three, and you’ll meet your buyers wherever they are in the journey.

In this article, we’ll break down each pillar, define them at an atomic level, and show you what the solutions are for each.

Definitions

To understand these three pillars, you first need to understand these definitions:

• ICP (Who): Your ideal customer profile i.e. the business and customer avatars you're targeting
• Need (Why): Your ICP is aware of the problem and it's big enough to be on their radar.
• Priority (When): The problem is now a high-priority (urgent enough or big enough) that your ICP is actively searching for a solution to fix it.

1. Demand Generation

90% of buyers are out of market, which means:

• They’re your ICP
• They don’t feel a need yet

Solution

• Scroll-stopping organic content e.g. LinkedIn posts & videos because that’s where your B2B ICP spend their time every single day.

2. Demand Activation

7% of buyers are latent, which means:

• They’re your ICP
• They have a need
• It’s not a priority yet (they’re not actively searching)

Solution

• Cold and warm outbound campaigns (LinkedIn + email) because you need to reach out to your ICP directly to activate them (they’re not actively searching, remember!).

3. Demand Capture

3% of buyers are in-market, which means:

• They’re your ICP
• They have a need
• It’s a priority (they’re actively searching for a solution)

Solution

• A highly optimized website because when your ICP are actively searching, and you’ve done generation & activation correctly, they’ll search for you directly. At this stage, it’s about serving the right content and removing all objections so they can make a confident buying decision.

The Demand Matrix

Here's the overall demand matrix:

Key Takeaways

• 90% of buyers aren’t in-market, so you need to generate demand via organic content.
• 7% are latent, so you need to activate demand via cold and warm outbound.
• 3% are actively searching, so you need to capture demand with a killer website.
• If your demand is off, then at least one of these pillars is out of whack.