The Importance of Trust in Demand Generation

By James Oberhausen, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, BlueWhale Research

In today’s B2B landscape, marketers are under immense pressure to drive demand at their organization, but often struggle with a lack of transparency, poor campaign performance, and not enough information from the partners they rely on. They find themselves feeling around in the dark of a complex ecosystem where everyone claims to have the highest performing programs, but it can be difficult to discern what makes one partner different than the next. Amidst all that noise, one thing remains clear: trust is the foundation for successful demand generation.

At BlueWhale Research, we understand the importance of trust in building long-term relationships with our clients. We’ve been at the forefront of full-funnel demand generation since 2013, and our commitment to integrity, collaboration, and positive outcomes for B2B revenue teams sets us apart.

Here’s how we build trust with our clients:

We embody transparency.

We believe in being upfront and open about what our products can do, our capabilities, and how campaigns are performing. That means sometimes turning down business when the campaign targeting or expectations aren’t realistic or achievable. We’d rather tell a client why we can’t do something, and offer an alternative, then just say yes and risk letting them down later on.

Once our programs are live, we provide our clients with full visibility into our processes and key statistics that we monitor so they can be confident that they are getting what they paid for. In fact, as part of our services, we like to pull back the curtain to report on “production metrics” that give our clients a better idea of how a campaign is performing, which pieces of content are working best, what target personas or segments are outperforming others, and how are we using this behind-the-scenes data to proactively and continuously improve the performance of the program.

We keep our word.

We always strive to exceed our client’s expectations by delivering high ROI programs, with each expected delivery arriving on time and exactly to specification. If we somehow fail, that’s a big deal. So, we invented an internal KPI called “promises.” That is, for any campaign we run, if we don’t deliver an output as expected and on time, we consider that a “broken promise.”

That metric is considered so important at BlueWhale that we report on it in every weekly management meeting and during quarterly reports to all staff. Due to our unrelenting attention to this aspect of our business, we go many months between any unmet promises to our clients. When basic accountability and reliability are 100% handled, we can all focus on the things that matter most like program ROI.

We show, don’t tell, quality.

Everyone talks about quality, but BlueWhale was founded on the belief that we could be the highest quality provider in our space. We never set out to be the biggest company in our cohort, just the best in the eyes of our customers. All of our programs have a 100% data accuracy guarantee and a lead return rate of less than 1%, compared to the industry averages that can be as high as 15-20%. Many things contribute to our best-in-class quality including a fantastic quality control team, robust process, and a homegrown campaign management platform that provides effective data harmonization, verification, and delivery, all insulated by rigorous data protection and compliance.

Furthermore, as we continue to prioritize and measure ourselves against outcomes for our clients we recognize that account quality is just as important as the more often considered lead quality. By using sophisticated data analysis, informed by AI, against a variety of demographic, firmographic, and diversified intent data sources, we can determine the accounts that are more likely to be in the market for various products and services. Those accounts are where we then focus our resources and attention during demand generation or awareness campaigns. That results in higher conversion rates and efficiency for us, and substantially higher SQLs, pipeline, and return for our clients.

We provide valuable and unique insights.

We also build trust by demonstrating how well we know the market. BlueWhale is interacting with thousands of B2B buyers every day, and we gather all kinds of unique information that we can pass along to our clients. We create reporting and content that is informative and actionable and that helps our clients do their jobs. We also offer custom research tailored to our clients’ target audiences so they can gain deeper insights into their buyers’ motivators and challenges at a fraction of the price of a traditional research or survey engagement.

Since we’ve been serving our clients for more than 12 years, we do know a thing or two about how to create sales and marketing alignment. It’s imperative that we transfer our knowledge and expertise about how to generate, route, nurture, and convert leads into opportunities. That’s why we offer free consultations on sales development best practices and other mission critical sales and marketing functions.

When our clients choose us, we take it upon ourselves to help them be more successful across the board, not solely as it directly relates to our campaigns. Our dedicated team of experts is committed to providing our clients with the information and support they need to be set up for success.

We build collaborative partnerships.

Our vision statement drives home the importance of partnership. It states that marketing relationships should be more than just buyers and sellers engaged in transactions. We believe in building a world of insightful partnerships that enable marketing and sales to actually work together to close more deals than they ever thought possible.

When we partner with a client, they can be confident that they are working with a trusted partner who is deeply committed to their success. We foster a sense of collaboration to develop and execute demand generation programs that deliver real results, based on the priorities and KPIs that matter most to each client.

In co-designing our programs, we can supercharge their effectiveness by combining our client’s expertise of their products and ideal customers, and our expertise of how to engage with and capture that market. When our clients buy into this concept and are willing to be transparent themselves about the results they are seeing, it enables us to do an even better job for them, leaning into the things we can do that will drive achievement of our campaign’s critical success factors.