How do you bring a steady stream of clients and customers into your business? 

The answer to that question is what so many voices in the online space purport to solve, and while many of the solutions on offer might contribute to a more steady stream of clients, they typically aren’t getting you all the way there. Why?

Well, if you’ve tried posting more on social media, running a launch or other type of promotion, consistently publishing long-form content (e.g. podcast, YouTube, blog), or any other strategy for bringing in more clients, and you still haven’t found that “steady stream,” it’s very likely not you. It’s your Demand Generation System. Or, rather, it’s the lack of a comprehensive Demand Generation System that’s making it seem like you must always need to do something more or different to what you’re already doing if you want to consistently bring clients in.

What is a Demand Generation System?

A Demand Generation System incorporates your marketing, lead generation, and sales systems into one cohesive ecosystem that all works together to bring a steady stream of clients or customers into your work.

There are four foundational components of any effective Demand Generation System, which every business needs regardless of business model. These are: 

  1. Grow: How you grow your audience.
  2. Nurture: How you nurture or “warm up” your audience.
  3. Identify: How you identify who in your audience is a Right Fit for a specific offer.
  4. Invite: How you invite those prospects into a specific offer.

Below, we’ll take a deeper look at each and what they mean for your business, but first…

Why Online Entrepreneurs Need a Demand Generation System

Of course, the simple reason why digital-first business owners need a Demand Generation System is that in order to remain in business, you need a steady inflow of clients. That’s precisely what an effective Demand Generation System creates.

However, the other primary reason why I recommend that all of my clients have a comprehensive Demand Generation System is that it takes all of the seemingly disparate strategies you’ve likely already been using, simplifies them, and makes them all work in harmony with one another toward a common goal (more clients, more consistently). Now, instead of posting on social media, trying to create a welcome sequence for your email list, guesting on podcasts, attending networking events, and sort of “spaghetti throwing” in the hopes that you’ll somehow find your next client, you know exactly what you need to be doing to attract new people into your audience, connect their desires with your work, and invite them to invest.

It’s not an accident that when defining what a Demand Generation System is, I use the word “ecosystem.” Ecosystems are systems in which each component of the system supports the others to promote mutual thriving and ongoing regeneration. You know how there’s been a ton of (very valid) hullabaloo about pollinators becoming endangered? The reason scientists and concerned citizens are freaking out is because pollinators are vital parts of our ecosystem. Without them, all sorts of negative things happen to society. (The U.S. Department of Agriculture says it quite frankly: “Without pollinators, we don’t eat.”)

While the efficacy of your or my Demand Generation System certainly isn’t as important as, ya know, humans being able to grow food, we can implement a lot of the same principles from nature into our businesses. In this case, when we treat your marketing, lead generation, and sales systems as part of one core ecosystem, we’re able to make our businesses more sustainable—and eventually regenerative!—because each piece of the system ‘feeds’ and supports the other pieces. Whereas when you see marketing as one independent “arm” of business, lead generation as another, and sales as yet another, you might end up creating success in one but not another, which can eventually lead to a decline in whatever one was originally successful due to attempts to make the others more successful.

As a practical example, let’s say you’re getting sales calls booked on a relatively steady basis, but many of the prospects who book a call end up not attending it (“ghosting” you). Without a comprehensive Demand Generation System, you might be tempted to see this as a problem exclusively within your sales system: “Maybe I need to start charging a fee and turn these into paid consultation calls instead.” However, while this might fix the issue of “prospects aren’t showing up for the call they booked,” it doesn’t fix the reason as to why you’re attracting unserious buyers in the first place. When you do have a comprehensive Demand Generation System in place, and you understand that where problems show up is not always where they began, you can search out the root of the issue rather than the symptom. For example, in this case, it’s likely that you have a problem either in marketing, lead generation, or even all the way back in the type of audience you’re speaking to to begin with.

Said simply: treat marketing, lead generation, and sales as separate arms of your business and you’ll often solve ‘problems’ that are actually surface manifestations of a deeper, more core problem. Solve that problem, and it’ll just lead to another one, and another one, and another one. Whereas when you can correctly diagnose what’s going wrong within the system as a whole, that’s when you can not only solve the problem, but create increasing amounts of sustainability within your business as a whole. You also end up being able to prevent a whole host of potential problems, but more on that another time.

The 4 Components of a Demand Generation System

Grow

The first foundational component of a Demand Generation System is “Grow.” This is where you’re growing your audience or attracting new people into your audience. 

Common growth strategies: ads, joint ventures or other forms of collaborations, networking and referral systems, etc.

If you aren’t utilizing a strategy for growth, then you’re going to eventually run out of leads/prospects. (In some business models—like a bookkeeper who retains clients for years with very little turnover—this might not be a problem! In most business models, this absolutely is a problem—and a common one, at that.)

Nurture

The second foundational component of a Demand Generation System is “Nurture.” This is where you’re nurturing the audience you already have, thus “warming them up” for a future purchase.

Common nurture strategies: consistently (whatever that means or looks like in your business) emailing your list, publishing blogs or other long form content (like this one!), posting on social media, etc.

Nurturing is what most online business owners are doing most consistently. That’s helpful, of course, but without the other components of a Demand Generation System, you aren’t positioning yourself as someone your audience wants to (or can!) buy from. Instead, you become someone who gives great value, but who is more of “a cool person to follow online” than an expert that people pay to help facilitate a transformation or result. 

The other common problem I’ve seen in business owners that I support through our various courses and programs is that they’re nurturing the wrong audience. They might be creating a weekly blog, let’s say, but that blog is not speaking directly to their Right Fit, ready-to-buy client. Which means that when they do try to invite their audience to work with them, they end up hearing “crickets” and dub their audience to be “freebie seekers.”

If this sounds familiar, all is not lost! In fact, experiential data (aka what I’ve seen in my own audience and with my clients’ audiences) shows that any nurturing is better than no nurturing. When business owners who have been creating nurturing content, though for the wrong audience, shift to creating nurturing content that speaks directly to their Right Fit, ready-to-buy client, they often see a pretty swift and dramatic uptick in clients. Specifically, those clients tend to be people who have been in their audience for a while, who always sort of liked what they were doing, but who only now feel like the business owner is talking directly to them about a solution that’s built for them.

Naturally, if you’re not nurturing, your audience goes “cold” and—especially in a digital-first business—you lose the relationship and therefore trust with them. 

Identify

The third foundational component of a Demand Generation System is “Identify.” Your goal with any strategy you implement here is to identify who in your audience is a Right Fit for the specific offer you are selling at that moment in time or through that avenue. 

Common identify strategies: launching, webinars, challenges, PDF lead magnets, free trainings, applications to work with you, discovery calls, even some paid workshops/offerings, etc.

Note that this “identification” needs to go both ways. You’re identifying who is a Right Fit client (for a specific offer!) by taking note of and strategically interacting with whoever is opting in or signing up for something. At the same time, your prospective clients or customers are identifying whether they, themselves are a Right Fit client for a specific offer, too. Thus, anything that you’re doing to identify Right Fit clients needs to be tailored specifically to the Right Fit client you want to attract. You “set the tone” by choosing who that is and building exclusively for them, and then your prospects self-filter by opting in (or not), interacting (or not), and taking the next step into your paid work (or not).

Invite

The fourth and final foundational component of a Demand Generation System is “Invite.” This is where you’re inviting prospects who are a Right Fit for a specific offer into that offer.

Common invite strategies: flash sales, pitching on discovery calls, promotional email sequences, etc.

You’re only going to get clients by actively inviting Right Fit prospects into your work. That may look different depending on your business model—e.g. a course business might actively invite prospects into their offers through automated email funnels, while a 1:1 coach might actively invite prospects into their offers through pitching on sales calls. Regardless, “inviting” has to happen in order to consistently bring in paying clients. 

Considerations When Building a Demand Generation System in Your Online Business

The Success of Your Demand Generation System Depends on Having AOM Alignment

If you’ve seen our Sustainable Success System, you know that marketing, lead generation, and sales—those elements which are used across each of the four components of a Demand Generation System!—make up the bottom half of the system. They are preceded by Audience, Offer, and Messaging—which, together, create what’s known as AOM Alignment

AOM Alignment is how you reliably facilitate results for or with your clients. When you reliably facilitate results for or with your clients, not only can you feel proud of the work you’re doing and in-integrity as you’re following through on what you say you will, your clients are reliably getting results. What comes from clients who are reliably getting results? Rave reviews, referrals, and repeat sign ups—all powerful business outcomes which contribute to an increase in customer lifetime value and a decrease in the resources it takes to bring in new clients. AKA: reliably facilitating client results directly increases your Sustainable Success. 

Your Demand Generation System works best when it’s built on top of and in conjunction with effective AOM Alignment. Without AOM Alignment, you might be growing your audience and steadily bringing new people into your work, but the system effectively stops at the point that someone becomes a client because those clients aren’t reliably getting results. The Sustainable Success System is a circle because you’re meant to build AOM Alignment, build your Demand Generation System, and then your Demand Generation System feeds your AOM Alignment, and your AOM Alignment feeds your Demand Generation System, and on and on it goes. Back to the ecosystem analogy, you can think about the reliable client results (from AOM Alignment) as the “flowers” and the steady stream of Right Fit, ready-to-buy clients (from Demand Generation System) as the “pollinators.” If you don’t have flowers to pollinate, it’s much more difficult to attract pollinators. Have the rave reviews, referrals, and repeat sign ups, and it becomes infinitely easier to attract new clients into your work, too. (Does this analogy work? Idk, I’m still workshopping it.)

Practically, we’ve seen this with some of the “big names” in the online space who have been called out in recent years: they’re great at getting new clients, but when it comes to actually delivering on their marketing promises, they fall short. To be clear: we all fall short to various degrees on reliably delivering client results. No myth of perfection here! The difference is that some of us actively work to consistently increase client success rates, while others continue over-relying on various Demand Generation Strategies to keep their business running without ever fully addressing the client delivery issues.

Demand Generation Systems Need to be Tailored to Your Business Model

There are a lot of different types of business models for online service providers, coaches, course creators, and the like which exist on what I call the Business Model Spectrum. These models range from being High Volume + Low Touch to being Low Volume + High Touch. Of course, there are also “hybrid” business models that pull from both ends of the spectrum.

What’s required of a Demand Generation System for a High Volume + Low Touch business model like a course model is naturally going to be wildly different than what’s required of a Demand Generation System for a Low Volume + High Touch business model, such as a done for you service model. Building a Demand Generation System without first knowing your business model is a bit of a recipe for exhaustion and the complete opposite of sustainability, because you’ll be making decisions on client-attraction strategies to implement in your business without first understanding what your business truly needs in order to be successful over the long term.

You Can’t Build an Entire Demand Generation System Overnight (or even quickly, to be frank)

If you want your Demand Generation System to consistently generate demand for each of your offers, then you need to take the time to implement each of the four foundational components well. That takes time and a lot of testing. If you’re a solopreneur or have a small team, it’s going to take even more time. Even if you are in a place to hire aspects of the building/implementing process out, you still can’t really skip the testing and iterating phases. All of which is to say: it takes time. (Let it. And maybe even see if you can enjoy the journey of it. I don’t know about you, but treating everything as an experiment is actually kinda fun for me.)

A Demand Generation System is Best Built and Implemented in Stages

As you get started implementing a Demand Generation System, I’d recommend looking at what you currently have and/or are already doing and build on top of and/or simply from that. Typically when working with business owners on their Demand Generation System, I advise them to work in this order:

First: clean up your nurturing content by ensuring that it’s speaking to the Right Fit person. We start here for several reasons. One of the biggest is that I’ve found for many of my clients that it’s easiest—in terms of least resistance—to make relatively minor adjustments within something that you’re already doing rather than starting something brand new. Especially something that you’ve never done or maybe even attempted before, from scratch. But also, because a lot of nurturing content isn’t something that lives “forever”—e.g. most social media content has a lifespan of less than a day—it’s actually a great place to experiment and get in the practice of speaking directly to your Right Fit, ready-to-buy client. (Unlike, say, a free lead magnet that you pour hours into building only to find that it attracts an entirely wrong fit client, or no one at all.)

Plus, as mentioned previously, it’s often by shifting who you’re talking to in the content you’re already creating, wherever you’ve already been creating it, that you bring in a quick influx of new clients. This is because these people have already been in your world, likely for a while, they like you and the general gist of what you’re doing, but they haven’t yet felt like you’re speaking directly to them or their present situation—until now. When you make that shift, they step into your work with relatively little hesitancy since you’ve already established trust and a sense of reciprocity with them. While this initial influx of new clients is great and gives you a sense of momentum, it doesn’t create that steady inflow of clients that you desire. That’s why we start with this, but we don’t stop here. 

Second: clean up your sales process (invite). Similarly, we do this step next because most of the business owners I work with are already doing some form of inviting clients into their work. They’re already doing sales calls, or they already have sales page/s and/or email sequence/s, etc. Instead of adding something new into their business that’s going to take a good amount of testing and time, let’s just strengthen what you’re already doing—and build the momentum and reap the immediate rewards from that. 

With these first two steps, my clients have typically brought in some new revenue, which now enables them to dedicate a bit more time and energy—with less pressure!—to the next stages of the process. The stages where they’re being invited to do or build something new (and do all the testing and iterating that comes with that!).

Third: build and implement an MVP (minimum viable product) “identify” strategy. How business owners do this within their own business is different based on their business model, their current capacity, their desires, etc. For some, this looks like running a live launch with a 3-day challenge, for others, this looks like giving a training to a community they’re already in, and using that to then move people into their “world” (and subsequently into the “invite” stage of their Demand Generation System!). The initial runthrough of this strategy gives them valuable intel and data, which they can then use to iterate and update their strategy as necessary (and then try it again!).

What I’ve seen a lot of business owners do is try to create a hugely systematized and even automated thing right from the start, but this is not what we want to do. In the initial implementation stages, everything is a bit of an experiment. You’re trying things, you’re seeing both how they work in terms of results but also how they feel for you to do, and you’re learning and then iterating and going again. It’s only once you’re confident in your ability to speak to your Right Fit, ready-to-buy client and you’re seeing those clients steadily moving through your “identify” strategy and into your paid work that you can begin looking at further systematization and automation. You also want to wait to begin growing your audience until this point, as well. (Otherwise you might grow your audience, but it’ll be full of wrong fit people!)

Like I said: this is best implemented in stages. A Demand Generation System is not really something you can just put into place today and have running smoothly and without hiccups tomorrow. (But then again, is anything in life or business that way?)

There’s Going to Be a(n Uncomfortable) Growth Edge 

Because you’re going to build and implement your Demand Generation System in stages, and doing so effectively is going to take time, there’s naturally going to be a very real period of your business where you’re building for tomorrow while still being responsible for making results happen today. This is an admittedly uncomfortable part of the process, but it’s necessary if you want to go further than you’ve gone before. 

Practically, this may mean that you’re needing to rely on client attraction strategies in the present that aren’t sustainable for the long-term of your business in order to get clients now while setting up more sustainable and long-term strategies that’ll work later. A client of mine called this the “boots on the ground” strategy. It’s the sort of “hustle-y” stuff that has very likely kept your business going up until this point, and you’re probably going to need to—to an extent!—keep doing it for a little while longer. What might help you to keep going, however, is the reminder that you’re only continuing to do this while building yourself a way out of the “boots on the ground” approach. You’re simultaneously building, testing, iterating a Demand Generation System that’ll make it so that you can bring a steady stream of clients into your work without the “hustle” that’s previously been required in your business.

Will you see results from this work on your long-term strategy tomorrow? No (see my note above lol). But will your Demand Generation System be operational a few months or even a year from now? Probably (you’ve gotta stay committed and focused, which, as someone who can get bored when things aren’t happening “fast enough,” can feel like wrangling chickens sometimes!).

Will consistently attracting in Right Fit, ready-to-buy clients continue to get simpler and more efficient from there, though? Abso-freaking-lutely. So is it worth it to take the long-game approach? Well, you get to decide that one. (I sure think so, though.)

“How do I know if my Demand Generation System is working?”

The most obvious answer to how you know if your Demand Generation System is working is that you’re bringing in a steady stream of Right Fit clients. However, the more nuanced answer—and I’d say the real way to tell—is by looking at the data. “What data?” Whatever data you determine is important, based on the Demand Generation System you’ve built for your specific business model. 

When I guide clients to build each aspect of their Demand Generation System, we also look at what KPIs (key performance indicators) to watch within each strategy they’re implementing. It might be easier if I could say a blanket, “Here are the 5 KPIs to track.” But the reality is that the KPIs that matter in your business might be different than those in mine, because we have a different business model and a different Demand Generation System. As an example, one KPI that I watch in my business is cost per lead (CPL). If you’re running a largely referral-based business, e.g. for done-for-you 1:1 services, you’re not going to log into the Meta Business Suite and look at your CPL each week like I do. However, a KPI that you might watch is your referral conversion rate—or, how many referrals end up signing up as clients—which would tell you whether or not you’ve adequately communicated your work to your referral partners, to the point that they are primarily referring Right Fit prospects to you. 

You can’t know what data matters until you know what Demand Generation System you’re building (and you’re building it in alignment with the specific needs of your business model). So, sure, look at how many Instagram followers you lost with that recent post. But don’t use that data to make decisions until you’re clear on whether it actually matters in the overall system you’re building. (e.g. It could be a good thing that you’re losing followers, because now you’re actually speaking to a Right Fit, ready-to-buy client rather than just anyone who’ll give you a ‘like.’)

Your Next Steps

Creating a Demand Generation System is a step-by-step process, absolutely, but it can also be a straightforward and even fun one—if you know what you need to focus on and do at each and every stage. Want me to guide you through creating the first iteration of your Demand Generation System—while equipping you with the business acumen to refine and expand it as needed on your own, in the future?

Join me inside our 9-month live cohort of our comprehensive business training program, EXPAND, where designing, implementing, and iterating on your Demand Generation System is a core part of what we’ll do!

EXPAND: the live cohort gets started in February 2025, though applications are currently open (and there is an early bird discount and bonus available right now, too!). If you’re ready to embrace your role as CEO while systematically setting your business up for long-lasting Sustainable Success, then apply to join us today.

Want more posts like these? I send them out most weeks to my email list; get on the list in the form below.

(Attribution note: I first learned about Demand Generation from the team at Visionary CEO Academy via their Academy several years ago. In my work with clients and in my own business, I have since extrapolated and built on top of what I first learnt from them.)

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Carly Jo Bell of WholeCo Media - Headshot@2x

hey!

I’m Carly Jo Bell.

(Though you can just call me Carly.)

Carly Jo Bell is a business strategist and mentor, and fonder of Whole Co media. Through her courses and programs, podcast, and one on one coaching, Carly helps pulled-in-every-direction entrepreneurs create a business that brings in as much joy as it does revenue — by cultivating deep self trust, and solid foundations as the first step.

For more from Carly, and to learn about her signature “looking external for inspiration, and internal for answers” approach, join the conversation by signing up for her weekly email series, Carly's Couch.

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