Author: Kate Kirkham

Winning new clients in the third-party software support space isn’t exactly a walk in the park these days.

Every conversation we’ve had with CMOs, CROs, Heads of Sales, and CEOs echoes the same themes:

• The market is growing, but pipelines feel unpredictable.
• Budgets are tight, while acquisition costs keep climbing.
• Prospects love the idea of cost savings, but cutting through vendor fear, uncertainty, and doubt is still a full-time job.

If it feels harder than it used to be, that’s because it is.

Here’s what the market really looks like in 2025:

1. Big vendors keep raising the bar (and the bills).
   SAP hiked on-premises support fees by 5% in 2024, up from 3.3% in 2023 (Forrester, 2023; CIO, 2023).
   Oracle customers typically hand over 22% of the discounted license fee annually just for support (Oracle Licensing Experts, 2024; Tekstream, 2024).
   And since Broadcom acquired VMware, customers have reported rising support costs and less flexibility (The Register, 2024).

Your prospects know these costs are spiralling. That’s the opportunity. But knowing doesn’t always mean they’re ready to make the leap.

2. The competition is intensifying.
   The global third-party maintenance market is projected to grow from $2.6B in 2025 to $4.9B by 2032 (Intel Market Research, 2024).
   Even data centre TPM is on the rise: $2.5B in 2023, heading to $4.7B by 2030 at a 14.5% CAGR (PreRackIT, 2024).

That means more providers, more noise, and a lot of “we’ll save you money” messages that all sound the same.

3. Pipeline unpredictability is real.
   Enterprise deals still take 6-18 months, with multiple stakeholders, compliance checks, and vendor pushback.
   Relying on referrals or renewal cycles alone leaves growth to chance.

If you’re running sales or marketing in this space, these will feel familiar:

• Messaging sameness: Too many providers lead with “we save you 50%.” True, but it’s also the bare minimum. Decision makers want to hear about risk reduction, compliance, and global capability.
• Content fatigue: Buyers are drowning in whitepapers and generic outreach. Standing out requires relevance and authority, not another “copy-and-paste campaign.”
• Sales/Marketing friction: Marketing insists leads are there. Sales insists they’re not. Meanwhile, real opportunities slip through the cracks.
• Long cycles, cold leads: With 12+ month buying processes, neglecting nurture means great opportunities simply fade away.
• Fuzzy ROI: Too often, marketing activity isn’t tied back to pipeline and revenue.

Here’s how the leaders are pulling ahead:

• Hyper-targeted positioning. Speak directly to verticals like pharma, financial services, or the public sector. Highlight compliance, uptime, and reduced risk, not just price cuts.
• Value-led drip campaigns. A single cold email won’t cut it. A thoughtful sequence that educates (like why Oracle’s 22% support fee isn’t mandatory) builds credibility.
• Proof points that matter. Decision makers want numbers, case studies, and outcomes they can take to the board.
• The right partnerships. Rather than relying on internal trial and error, the savviest providers team up with specialists who already understand the enterprise IT landscape.

This is where GoDemand comes in.

• Flexible, low risk: Unlike full-time hires, (with NIC, benefits, and the headache of parting ways if it doesn’t work out).
• Cost-effective: No overheads, no supervision needed. Just seasoned specialists who know IT and third-party support lead gen inside out.
• A lighter load for your sales team: We handle the heavy lifting of sourcing, nurturing and booking highly qualified meetings, so your team can focus on what they do best, closing deals.
• Direct revenue impact: For clients like Spinnaker Support, we’ve strengthened pipelines, eased the sales burden, and contributed directly to revenue growth.

Yes, SAP, Oracle, and VMware can keep hiking fees and call it strategy.

For third-party support providers, real growth won’t come from raising prices, it’ll come from raising your game with smarter messaging, sharper targeting, and a growth partner who knows your world – enter GoDemand.

And if you’re ready to leave the generic campaigns behind and build a pipeline that converts, that’s where we come in.

📞 Call us:
+44 1935 315826 (Office)
+44 7448 743251 (Mobile)

📧 Email us: soraiya.n@go-demand.com

👉 Contact us today to discuss your EMEA lead generation goals and how we can support your expansion.

Soraiya Noorani 

Business Development Manager

As Benjamin Spock said, “It’s not the words you use, it’s the music you play,” and Miles Davis once famously said, “It’s not the notes you play but the notes you don’t play.” For me, it’s what happens between the words and the notes that defines the shape of responses—whether this is within or between ‘participants’.

In a crowded field of lead generation agencies, it’s easy to assume everyone’s offering more of the same: bulk emails, templated outreach, and the occasional spray-and-pray campaign. At Go Demand, we take a fundamentally different approach—one rooted in psychology, not just platforms.

Our team is trained in the Cognitive Interview, a proven method from forensic psychology, and we combine it with Semantic Priming, a concept from cognitive science (language acquisition and development), to create lead generation that feels less like outreach and more like connection.

If you're in IT or consulting services and tired of seeing lacklustre pipelines and disconnected conversations, this is for you.

The Cognitive Interview (CI) was originally developed by psychologists Ronald Fisher and Edward Geiselman to help eyewitnesses recall more accurate details during criminal investigations. Today, that same approach is being adapted in business contexts to improve the quality of information gathered in conversation—and we're leading the way in applying it to B2B lead generation.

Rather than relying on rigid scripts or one-size-fits-all messaging, our SDRs are trained in conversational psychology to build rapport, trigger memory, and elicit valuable insights that other teams often miss.

We tailor our conversations using classic investigative techniques that include the 5 W’s—Who, What, When, Where, Why—along with open-ended, non-leading questions. These simple prompts are deceptively powerful in helping the other person construct a more complete and reflective narrative. When used correctly, they reduce ambiguity and unlock rich, often unexpected insights.

Detectives have long known that short, open-ended questions followed by well-timed pauses or silence encourage people to expand naturally, revealing more than they would if pushed. We use the same principle in our discovery-style conversations—allowing room for prospects to think, recall, and share deeper context.

Additionally, we account for the cognitive phenomena around false memory, as uncovered by Elizabeth Loftus in her landmark False Memory Experiment. Loftus demonstrated that people can confidently recall events that never happened, especially when influenced by subtle suggestion. This is a cautionary flag for anyone in information gathering. It’s why we avoid suggestive phrasing and instead focus on facilitating authentic recall, not implanted narratives.

Our SDRs are trained to understand false memory syndrome—where entire, fabricated experiences can feel vividly real. In lead generation, this informs our restraint: we don’t push prospects into agreement or implant urgency. Instead, we design prompts that let their existing needs and challenges emerge organically.

Semantic Priming is a cognitive science principle where exposure to one concept subconsciously influences the response to another.

In simple terms, if the word “FRUIT” is presented to you, you’ll more quickly recognize and categorize related words like Bananas, Oranges, Apples, and Grapes. But if you’re first primed with an unrelated word like “AIRCRAFT,” this recognition slows down due to a mismatch. This interference is also observed in the famous Stroop Test.

In our world, if you encounter the word “infrastructure,” you’re more likely to immediately associate it with terms like “cloud,” “security,” or “scalability.”

Practically, this allows us to craft messaging that resonates with your prospects—priming them to engage before they even consciously realize why it feels relevant.

A 2012 study published in Psychological Science found that semantically primed subjects responded 30–40% faster to related stimuli. In lead generation, this equates to faster, more natural engagement—and more relevance in that critical first impression.

We build campaigns that linguistically and emotionally align with the decision-maker’s domain, whether it’s:

• “Cloud transformation” for enterprise infrastructure leads
• “AI governance” for C-level tech leaders
• “Process automation” for ops-focused consultants

This isn’t manipulation—it’s intelligent message design grounded in behavioural science.

This brain-first approach isn’t just theoretical. Across multiple campaigns in IT and consulting services, we’ve seen:

• Up to 48% improvement in first message reply rates compared to traditional outreach
• 25–30% increase in qualified SQLs within the first 60 days
• Lower no-show rates on discovery calls due to better message-persona alignment
• Higher client satisfaction with lead relevance and speed to value

Here’s the kind of feedback we hear often:

“This didn’t sound like a cold pitch—it actually felt tailored to our business.”
“We’re used to deleting messages like this. Yours caught our attention.”

That’s not accidental. It’s cognitive science applied to B2B conversations.

Let’s be candid. Most agencies can:

• Buy a list
• Load up an automation platform
• Push out 500 messages a day

But few can say they:

• Train SDRs in forensic and cognitive interviewing techniques
• Craft messaging with embedded Semantic Priming for enhanced relevance
• Customise outreach based on decision-maker psychology—not just job titles
• Create feedback loops based on micro-conversion data—not just opens, clicks, or generic replies

And importantly, we don’t oversell AI as a replacement for human connection. Our stance? Technology supports conversations—it doesn’t replace them.

In a market flooded with noise, your brand can’t afford to sound like everyone else. You don’t need more leads - you need better ones. You need conversations that convert. Our neuroscience-informed approach ensures every outbound message has the best chance to do just that.

If you're in IT or consulting and want to see how a more human, data-driven methodology performs in the real world, let’s talk.

We’ll skip the clichés and jargon - and get straight to what matters.

📞 Call us:
+44 1935 315826 (Office)
+44 7448 743251 (Mobile)

📧 Email us: soraiya.n@go-demand.com

👉 Contact us today to discuss your EMEA lead generation goals and how we can support your expansion.

Soraiya Noorani 

Business Development Manager

Let’s be honest- if you're in marketing or sales leadership at a third-party support or managed services company, you probably know the grind. The market’s noisy, your prospects are busy, and getting in front of the right decision makers can feel like trying to get tech support from your toaster.

That’s where we come in (don’t worry, we’re nothing like the toaster).

We help third-party support providers stand out in a crowded market, connect with high-intent prospects, and build a steady pipeline of real opportunities. Our approach is all about targeted, value-driven outreach that gets you in front of people who actually want to hear what you have to say.

We’ve seen this work first hand. One of our longtime clients, Spinnaker Support, has been with us for three years. In that time, we've helped them consistently connect with qualified sales meetings, built strong pipeline, and drive growth across EMEA and North America.

Hear directly from Chris James and Niki Frank, Field Marketing Directors for EMEA and North America at Spinnaker Support, about how our partnership has helped drive their lead generation and growth efforts across global markets. (www.go-demand.com/case-study/godemand-and-spinnaker-support/)

Let’s address the elephant in the room: Could your team generate leads internally? Sure. But ask any CMO or Head of Sales and they'll likely tell you the same thing - building predictable, high-quality pipeline at scale is harder than it looks, especially in the third-party support space, where buying journeys are more like marathons than sprints. Prospects don’t just want support-they want relevance, timing, and trust.

That’s where we shine.

We use a strategic qualification methodology built around real market intelligence. Every lead we deliver is carefully assessed on:

• Budget and buying authority
• Licensing landscape (hello, expiring contracts)
• Support shelf life and urgency (because why pay for something you're not using?)
• Business pain points (Response times to tickets)
• Alignment with your ideal customer profile

We don’t just generate leads-we book highly qualified meetings directly into your sales team’s calendar. So your reps can focus on closing, not chasing.

We also take client confidentiality and GDPR compliance very seriously.  Just smart, ethical outreach that protects your brand and respects your prospects’ privacy. Every meeting we book has been through a structured discovery process - so by the time they meet your sales team, they’ve already begun to move through the early buying stages.

We focus on global enterprise and mid-market companies actively reviewing support options, often because of:

• Upcoming contract renewals
• Budget constraints pushing them to explore third-party alternatives
• Platform migrations (SAP, Oracle, VMware)
• A need for more personalised or cost-effective support models

If you’re ready to scale your pipeline with high-intent leads (the kind that actually show up to meetings and want to buy), let’s talk.

• We already understand your space, so there's no need to explain what third-party support is for the hundredth time. We’ll hit the ground running, coffee in hand.
• Spinnaker Support is still reaping the rewards of our partnership years down the line. You could be next.
• So go on,drop us a message.
• If you’re ready to grow, without losing your sanity- we’re here to help.

📞 Call us:
+44 1935 315826 (Office)
+44 7448 743251 (Mobile)

📧 Email us: soraiya.n@go-demand.com

👉 Contact us today to discuss your EMEA lead generation goals and how we can support your expansion.

Soraiya Noorani 

Business Development Manager

For U.S.-based marketing directors and CMOs in the IT sector, expanding into the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) region often feels like launching into another universe. Despite global ambitions, many well-resourced U.S. tech firms hit a wall when trying to build meaningful traction in this complex and fragmented market.

At Go Demand, a UK-based lead generation agency, we work closely with U.S. brands to overcome these challenges. If you're tasked with generating pipeline from EMEA but are stuck with underperforming campaigns and lackluster ROI, you’re not alone. Here's what’s standing in your way- and how the right partner can make all the difference.

The biggest mistake U.S. companies make? Treating EMEA as a single entity.

EMEA spans more than 100 countries, dozens of languages, and a vast range of buyer behaviors. Marketing messages that work in San Francisco fall flat in Stockholm, and German IT buyers have very different expectations than their counterparts in the UAE.

Localised messaging is essential. McKinsey reports that companies that tailor campaigns to local markets see up to 40% higher engagement. Without culturally aware campaigns and in-language assets, you risk being perceived as “another American company that doesn’t get us.”

Tip: Work with regional experts who understand local buying cycles, cultural nuances, and regulatory barriers. Localisation isn’t just translation- it’s relevance.

In EMEA, 70% of B2B IT buyers prefer to work with local partners, according to Forrester. The ecosystem is deeply entrenched in regional distributors, system integrators, and value-added resellers.

U.S. marketing teams often underestimate the importance of building relationships with these local players, or they apply a U.S.-centric approach to media and outreach that simply doesn’t convert.

Most U.S. tech brands face an uphill battle with brand awareness and trust in EMEA. Unlike in the U.S., where your name may carry weight, many EMEA buyers are unfamiliar with your brand- and hesitant to engage.

Edelman research shows 68% of EMEA buyers rely heavily on local reputation and trusted relationships when making purchasing decisions. A flashy U.S. logo won’t win you deals; credibility, proof points, and thought leadership will.

Tip: Focus on building trust over time. This means creating localised case studies, securing testimonials from regional clients, and investing in analyst relations or earned media in each market.

The U.S. loves data. EMEA loves data privacy.

Regulations like GDPR (with potential fines of up to 4% of global revenue) make U.S.-style demand gen campaigns difficult—or even dangerous—if mishandled. What’s more, rules differ not just across the EU, but within each country.

Tip: Ensure your lead generation efforts are compliant with local data laws. Work with partners who understand the legal landscape and can protect your brand while delivering results.

Penetrating EMEA requires feet on the ground, but many U.S. firms try to stretch U.S. teams across continents. This often leads to inconsistent execution, lack of continuity, and marketing that feels generic or out of touch.

At the same time, marketing leaders face intense pressure to justify spend with ROI. With budget spread thin across regions, it’s tough to know what’s working—or where to double down.

Tip: Align marketing with sales readiness, pipeline acceleration, and closed-loop reporting. Partner with a lead generation firm that can localise your strategy, qualify leads accurately, and attribute revenue clearly.

While time zones are often a logistical nightmare for U.S. teams working across APAC or LATAM, EMEA presents a far more manageable landscape- especially when your lead generation partner is based in the UK.

But time zone coverage alone isn’t enough.

To effectively penetrate EMEA, you need a team with local presence and native language skills—something U.S.-based teams rarely have in-house. From German and French to Arabic and Dutch, engaging in your buyer’s native language builds instant credibility and improves response rates significantly.

That’s where Go Demand stands apart. Our UK HQ puts us in the ideal position to manage campaigns across Western, Central, and Eastern Europe- as well as the Middle East and Africa. And our network of in-region associates ensures your messaging is not just understood, but trusted.

Tip: Choose a partner with in-region resources who speak your buyers’ language - literally and culturally. It’s the difference between being heard and being ignored.

The Bottom Line: EMEA Isn’t Hard- When You Have the Right Partner

Many U.S. tech marketers go into EMEA assuming they can just scale what worked at home. But without a localised, channel-savvy, trust-building strategy, even the best U.S. brands struggle to get ROI.

That’s where Go Demand comes in. Based in the UK, we specialise in lead generation for U.S. IT firms expanding into EMEA. We help you build the pipeline you need- compliantly, credibly, and cost-effectively.

📩 Ready to Build a Real EMEA Pipeline?

Let’s talk about how Go Demand can help you generate high-quality leads across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa - with the right localisation, trusted partnerships, and a strategy built for ROI.

📞 Call us:
+44 1935 315826 (Office)
+44 7448 743251 (Mobile)

📧 Email us: soraiya.n@go-demand.com

👉 Contact us today to discuss your EMEA lead generation goals and how we can support your expansion.

Soraiya Noorani 

Business Development Manager

Lead Generation is the action or process of identifying, attracting and converting ‘suspects’ and ‘prospects’ into leads. Leads are potential customers who have expressed some interest in your products or company and have provided information that you can use to follow up with. Generating a steady flow of new leads to fill your pipeline is a crucial part of developing a profitable business. Yet despite this, only 1 in 10 marketers say that their lead generation efforts are highly efficient and effective. A survey by HubSpot in 2018 showed that 61% of marketers said that generating traffic and leads was their top challenge, with 85% of B2B marketers saying that lead generation was their most important marketing goal. But what about the 10%~ of start-ups that are experiencing large success and rapid growth? What are they doing to fill their pipeline with highly qualified prospects who are ready to purchase their products?

To attract the right kinds of leads, it’s essential that you do some buyer persona research on who exactly your ideal clients are, and from there begin to develop these personas. Use the knowledge you’ve gathered from your research to align your value proposition with your ideal client’s pain points (or Business Drivers, as we like to call them). We then need to understand the impact these pains are having on the business and what the implications are, from there you can create content around those pain points and implications and distribute it in various ways that will best serve your clients at each stage of the buying process. For example, buyers who are at the top the funnel may be more interested in informational pieces, like whitepapers or eBooks. Whereas someone who’s further down the funnel might be more interested in seeing a demo of your products and services or could even want to trial them for themselves. It doesn’t matter where in the funnel your prospects are, the key is to make your offerings so attractive that your potential clients can’t help but get in touch. Whether this is directly from your website, through social media, adverts, email-based campaigns or through direct contact via a team of ISRs. Always make yourself stand out.

An effective lead generation strategy will turn every piece of content into an opt-in offer. You don’t need to rely on the  Contact Us section of your website and sign-up forms at the end of all of your blog posts (although these are always very useful to have). The best thing to do is to have a multitude of these offers across your entire site. The more that your potential clients can relate to your offerings, the more sign-ups you are going to receive, and the more contacts you’ll have to fill your pipeline.  You may think that you’re over doing it when it comes to opt-in offers, but this simply isn’t true. Readers are known to have very short attentions spans, so if you’ve only got a few offers dotted around your page, they’ll be forgotten about once they’ve been scrolled past. The important thing to remember is that your opt-in forms are hassle free, the last thing anyone wants (including yourselves) are large sign-up forms getting in their way.   In our opinion the best practice is to minimise the number of required fields for your potential clients (or prospects) to fill out. Only ask for information that your sales team really needs, because if your form is too demanding, people won’t take the time to fill it out. In a survey carried out in 2018, 72% of marketers said that having a good content strategy was a major key to their success.   Providing  content  such as whitepapers and  eBooks  in return for a potential clients contact information ensures compliance with GDPR (which you really need to be in compliance with). Couple this with the fact that on average,  inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads, and you’re getting some real benefits.   With the right  content  strategy in place  with the correct use of content syndication you will be able to quickly grow your contact database and give yourself a running start when it comes to your lead generation process.

A CTA (or Call To Action) is meant to send potential clients to a dedicated landing page where they will receive a specific offer for a specific product or service. Even though strategic landing pages are used by 68% of B2B businesses to acquire leads, there are still many who simply don’t use them. This can make quite a big impact on their conversion rates when you take into account that when businesses follow-up with an online lead within 5 minutes, that leads is nine times more likely to convert into a customer. Be sure not to use a CTA to drive people towards your homepage, because most of the time the offer you are talking about in your CTA, won’t be at the very top of your homepage where people are going to end up. If you have the option, trying using videos on your landing pages, as research has shown that this will increase your conversions by an average of 86%. The more landing pages you have, the more leads you will generate, according to this HubSpot survey, companies with more than 30 strategic landing pages on their website, generated seven times more leads than companies with between one and five. Remember, if you have the opportunity to use a CTA, make sure to send prospects to a page that will convert them into a lead.

Now we arrive at the wonders of social media. Whilst many marketers think of social media as a tool to fill the top of your sales funnel, it can still be a helpful and low-cost method of lead generation, as we mentioned in a previous article. You’ll want to start off by sharing links on various social media channels to your high performing landing pages. Make sure you make it clear that these links will be sending people to a landing page though, that way people will end up where they expect to be.   Social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn have loads of great features that can help you with  social selling. The key here is learning how to utilise  the concept of social selling, it’s more than just sharing content on websites like  Facebook,  LinkedIn and Twitter and hoping the leads just pour in, it’s about building a relationship with your potential clients and engaging with them on a more personal level.

Now this article wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention outbound telemarketing, which, in my opinion is the most effective and important method of generating high-qualify, qualified leads. As I mentioned earlier, 85% of B2B marketers said that lead generation is their most important marketing goal, true lead generation cannot be achieved without a team of top quality ISR/SDR/BDMs to contact your prospects and qualify them for your sales teams.    Now I’m not talking about Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), these will be generated (hopefully) by the various inbound methods that I talked about earlier, no, I’m talking about Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and Sales Ready Leads (SRLs), 46% of marketers with well-planned lead generation strategies have teams of dedicated ISR/SDR/BDMs that will follow up on more than 75% of their Marketing Qualified Leads and convert these into Sales Qualified and Sales Ready Leads to hand over to their sales team.  69% of marketers say that converting their MQLs into SQLs and SRLs is their top priority. This process is more commonly called “nurturing” and I cannot stress the importance of it enough, but maybe this will help, businesses who nurture their leads make (on average) 50% more sales at a cost 33% less, than non-nurture prospects.

In the modern lead generation world, there is no place for simply “winging it”. If you want to stand out amongst the competition you must keep tabs on vital metrics that are relevant to your goals. For virtually every business, the most important key performance indicators (KPIs), are lead generation metrics, as these provide you with an insight into the customer journey. There are many lead generation KPIs that you need to be aware of, including; Click-Through Rates, Conversion Rates, Time to Conversion, Return on Investment and many more. We will be covering these in our next article, be sure to request a copy once it goes live. In conclusion, whether your lead generation strategies use all of these methods, or a specific mixture, one thing is key. Everything that you do needs to be targeted, a ‘multitouch’ approach, if you will, all of the touchpoints that your prospect has with your company need to be consistent and relevant to them. The more you revisit and test your inbound and outbound lead generation process, the more you’ll improve the quality of your leads and as we all know, the higher the quality of your leads, the higher the chance is of turning that prospect, into a client.