The Most Straightforward Way to Think About Demand-Gen— The Big Bang Methodology©
Grew your business from 0 to 1 and got stuck at 1? Here are three steps to fix it.
A short story about a business that bled to death
This story comes back like a boomerang every time I start working with a new client:
- They quickly grew from 0 to $1M+ ARR
- Riding this wave of success they went into another round of funding
- Their big plan to scale was to find a “scalable marketing channel” where they would pump all the raised capital.
- They started hiring like crazy.
- The bigger team started to apply the same techniques to more channels.
- Turned out that instead of scaling, they ended up burning even more budget.
- Investors started to pressure them to lower costs so the lay-offs began.
- Their business is on the verge of bleeding to death.
This story inspired me to create The Big Bang Methodology© — a set of frameworks and methods to help startups avoid these painful mistakes and scale their businesses with a smart and predictable plan.
If you don’t want this story to be about you keep reading to find out what you can do to avoid it.
Switch from demand capturing to demand generation before it’s too late
Your CACs soared, your conversion rates plummeted and your growth slowed down? It’s a classic symptom of a tapped-out market.
If your business went from zero to one but has hit a plateau, consistently missing growth targets, it’s time to rethink your approach. Depending on seasonal campaigns and aggressive discounts has become the norm, but it’s not breaking the stagnation, leaving you scratching your head when explaining to investors.
You’ve been honing in on a ‘ready-to-buy’ audience, but here’s the catch — they make up only 5% of your potential market, and the majority lies dormant.
They are waiting for the right nudge to turn them from passive onlookers into eager customers. Neglecting this 95% means missing out on substantial sales opportunities.
Ignoring this reality will lead your business straight to insolvency. I’ve been there, and trust me, it’s a very real scenario, more common than you might think.
Don’t wait until your business bleeds to death. Act now. The key is in finding balance — incorporating demand-generation strategies alongside your demand-capturing ones. This shift can be the lifeline your business needs to thrive, not just survive.
Make the switch in 3 steps
I’ve invented The Big Bang Methodology© to unlock massive growth potential for businesses like yours. It’s a transformative approach that starts at the demand origin (the Big Bang) and aligns your marketing strategy with narratives guiding audiences through different demand levels until they purchase your product.
Picture this: a carefully mapped-out approach that awakens a dormant audience and empowers you to wield control over your narrative with customers.
This innovative approach means blending the art of connecting with people like an experienced psychologist, convincing them like a good salesperson, and grabbing attention and interest like a skilled journalist.
The result? Predictable and scalable growth you’ve always wanted.
In this article, I will guide you through the 3 steps to unlock your growth potential:
- Map your customer's purchase path — It starts with understanding when your audience becomes eligible for your product but they haven’t experienced any symptoms yet. Think about it like this: you’re eligible for plumbing services when you have pipes in your home, regardless of whether there’s an issue with the pipes. This exercise helps you create a path from that initial moment to the purchase of your product
- Create The Perfect Pitch — The purchase path exercise uncovers different paths and personas leading to unveiling endless sales opportunities. That’s where you craft compelling narratives that resonate with different audiences, incorporating psychological insights and effective salesmanship. I call it “The Perfect Pitch”.
- Create assets and connect channels — strategically deploy content across various channels to amplify your message, ensuring it reaches and engages in the right narrative.
Step 1: Purchase path mapping — uncover high-value marketing & sales opportunities
It all starts with demand eligibility — the criteria that describe your broadest target audience. This is the origin of the future demand for your product (hence the Big Bang).
Understanding the journey from demand eligibility to your product purchase is transformative.
To find that origin you need to do a simple exercise I call “The Empathy Probing Method”. I consistently use it in my work with my clients and that’s when the most “AHA! Moments” happen.
Take a moment to examine the visual representation below — a mental odyssey that your audience undertakes on their way to discovering your product.
This technique allows you to unravel the mysteries of demand generation without having to do extensive customer research. You already know enough about your audience to get started.
It all starts with one simple question:
“What are the reasons people buy a product like mine?”
Asking yourself this question will uncover so many different narratives that originate from different criteria but all eventually lead to purchasing a product like yours. These narratives define your personas.
That’s right, your personas are not useless demographics you target. They are narratives — real stories of real people wanting to solve real problems.
Your job is to reverse-engineer the steps your personas take from when they purchase a product like yours until you get to the origin of their demand.
By asking the right questions at each juncture of the purchase path, you unlock the magic of understanding how your potential buyers make decisions. Understanding this will help you control the narrative.
Post-exercise, you’ll gain profound insights:
- Understand the journey your audience takes from unawareness to interest in your product.
- Discern the emotions and influences guiding their journey.
- Uncover the decision-making factors shaping their path.
- Identify distinct buyer personas as their paths diverge towards your product.
Armed with this knowledge, we transition to the next step, where we harness this information to craft your narratives.
Step 2: The Perfect Pitch — create narratives that resonate, generate demand and sell
Now that you understand what are the most common narratives leading people to buy products like yours, you can figure out ways to control them.
Remember that part in “The Wolf of Wall Street” where Leo Di Caprio wrote a sales script? He showed his team how to sell stocks to strangers in just one call using that script.
The Perfect Pitch is kind of like that. It’s a script that guides your marketing and sales to smoothly sell your product steering the narrative in your favour and turning complete strangers into “shut-up-and-take-my-money” supporters.
The objective is to craft a narrative that is not only helpful and persuasive but also resonates with the dreams, fears, desires, and hopes of your audience. It’s about strategically exploiting narratives that tap into these emotional facets and align them with your product.
It might sound abstract but it’s really not.
This is precisely the daily modus operandi of a sales agent — an expert in capitalizing on opportunities rooted in emotions and meticulously observed behavioural patterns.
The beauty of this approach lies in its ability to transform marketing from a broad communication tool to a finely tuned dialogue addressing the core emotional drivers that influence your audience’s decision-making.
Step 3: Assets and Channels — Intentional distribution of demand-generating content assets
It’s time to construct a scalable marketing machine that does the selling for you. All the work you’ve done in the previous steps will take shape here.
This is where you turn The Perfect Pitch into content assets and distribute them strategically to reach the right audience at the right time.
In the Big Bang Methodology©, you seamlessly integrate three types of assets that work in harmony, propelling your audience up the demand ladder — from complete unawareness to product awareness — in a matter of moments, not years.
Let me introduce you to your set of assets.
Attraction Assets
These are the messages with scroll-stopping power — ads, social posts, subject lines, headlines, etc. The shift in approach here is ‘intentional’. Instead of focusing on an audience, your outreach is now narrative-focused.
You deliberately join the conversation where your audience is currently concerned. This approach resonates with those in your chosen narrative while avoiding annoyance for those it doesn’t apply to. Attraction assets are crafted to mentally awaken demand.
Let me give you an example. Imagine you’re selling bananas. Your goal is to sell a banana to a person who’s working out but has never eaten one before. Which ad do you think would resonate better with that person?
After your audience gets presented with this undeniable message we take them to the gateway asset fitting their narrative and guiding them towards the next demand level.
Gateway Assets
These assets transition your audience from one demand stage to another. These could be landing pages, emails, outreach scripts, blog posts, etc. After grabbing attention, the primary goal is to be exceptionally helpful.
Being exceptionally helpful means getting your potential buyers at least one step closer to solving their problem or fulfilling their desire.
Gateway assets provide a continuation of the message that drew your audience in. They show proof of your expertise on the topic and finally, they intentionally propel your audience’s stage of awareness upward, providing actionable steps to maintain the momentum.
A perfect collection of gateway assets is connected and educates your users in the shortest time possible until they hit the criteria that make them care about buying your product.
Using the banana example mentioned earlier, when your potential banana buyers visit your gateway asset, they’ll find easy tips on how to build muscle with bananas. Share facts about the traits bananas should have for the best and fastest results. Highlight that your special bananas possess these traits.
Product Bridges
These assets aim to lower the risk and effort of trying your product — free trials, downloadable resources, low-priced offers, etc. A product bridge is a taste of your offering, a manifestation of your helpfulness.
At this point, users recognize their symptoms, understand their problems, and view you as a valuable solution to all their pains. The product bridge offers them a chance to experience your solution with no strings attached, converting them into steady buyers.
Want to start doing things differently?
I talk to founders daily and I keep on hearing that they “want to start doing things differently”. The Big Bang Methodology© is the perfect roadmap to start doing things differently and break free from growth stagnation in 3 simple steps.
Wanna learn more about The Big Bang Methodology©?
Here are your options:
- Join the waitlist to get your hands on a one-of-a-kind demand gen playbook here.
- Follow me on LinkedIn
Important Note: The Big Bang Methodology© is designed to bring customers into your product; it doesn’t address or solve issues at the product or service level.
