Lead Generation Programs – Practical Strategies for B2B Technology Companies

Building Trust: Rethinking Gated Content Strategies

Before I begin, let me start by saying do as I say, not as I do. This post is, in many ways, aspirational and something I am trying to bring to my own practice.

For more than a decade, gated content has been a central component of B2B demand generation. We built prospect databases, tracked downloads, and passed MQLs to SDRs and sales teams on a weekly cycle. It worked—for us. But here’s the reality: our prospective customers never thanked us for the follow-up calls and nurture sequences tied to that whitepaper download. Instead, they felt trapped. Buyers today are fatigued, flooded with options, and increasingly resistant to being treated like entries in a spreadsheet.

The shift we’re facing is bigger than campaign mechanics—it’s about trust. Prospects don’t want to be harvested; they want to be understood. Authentic relationships, not lead traps, are becoming the real differentiator. Content should work as a trust-building asset, not a transaction. That means rethinking how we approach community, conversation, and transparency. Instead of forms, personalization can come from relevance, empathy, and credibility. Think open libraries, ungated research, and community-led events that create value without demanding an email address first.

Are you part of a marketing group currently measured by flow of MQLs and Opps? For the past 20 years, this has been the case for me.

So where to start? Ungating all content overnight isn’t realistic—or even smart. I believe this is a longer-term evolution that requires balance. A practical first step is to selectively remove forms for high-value pieces: a webinar, a guide, or a playbook. Double down on quality so that what you publish truly resonates. Then, shift some of the dollars once tied up in form-fill campaigns toward community-building: podcasts, YouTube channels, niche events, or targeted amplification that actually meets buyers where they are. Keep the gates where intent is clear—demos, contact requests, or bottom-of-funnel brand searches.

The tradeoffs are real. You’ll likely see fewer raw leads and slower list growth in the short term. But the upside is far more powerful: deeper trust, stronger engagement, and a pipeline driven by buyers who want to hear from you, not avoid you. It also means rethinking metrics—moving from counting MQLs to measuring engagement, influence, and revenue contribution. These are the numbers that reflect how buyers actually buy today.

Looking forward, the winners in B2B marketing won’t be the brands that cling to gated PDFs. They’ll be the ones that invest in authentic, long-term relationships—brands that buyers see as trusted advisors instead of gatekeepers. Authenticity becomes the moat, and trust becomes the growth engine.

Gated content isn’t dead today, but its dominance is fading. The challenge for marketers is to experiment with ungating, to start small, and to learn what it unlocks. So here’s the question: what’s one piece of content you’d ungate today to begin building more trust with your audience?

Three Factors that Jeopardize Outbound Program Results

Challenge: Identifying Personas Within Buying Centers is Difficult

I had a brainstorm last week that I believe will lead to more productive outbound programs by identifying a problem inherent in many Account Based Marketing (ABM) programs. In sum, we need to improve how we develop our target buyers at the early stage of program launch. Since this is a new insight for me, this post focuses more on diagnosing he problem rather than recommending solutions. Have you found a better way? Love to hear your thoughts.

We must address several layers of issues to accurately target prospects in a scalable way providing the foundation for outbound/ABM programs. These layers act like concentric circles to get to the ideal program target list. Here are a set of three ‘formulas’ or reasons that describe the top three challenges:

Because:

ABM ≠ Buying Center

AND

Buying Center ≠ Persona

AND

Contacts ≠ Updated

Therefore

ABM ≠ $ROI Potential$

Let me explain.

First, we all love Account Based Marketing and understand that greater customization and effort focused on a limited set of accounts who represent your ideal customer will deliver higher conversion rates. However, when targeting enterprise accounts, there are different buying centers. More specifically, your offering may address the needs of and be purchased by multiple departments, so targeting a ‘company’ does not sufficiently address the buying center because there are actually multiple buying centers. For example, if you sell to developers, your target account many have many different groups of developers who will make different purchase decisions. And this raises further questions. Do these different departments (buying centers) have the same needs, pain points and interests? Do your value proposition, primary contacts and other key elements change across every buying center? If so, then many ABM programs may be missing the mark by not tailoring to a specific buying center within a target account. Factor #1: ABM ≠ Buying Center.

As we dig further into our outbound programs, the buyers are often not in the same department. The personas leading the purchase may be part of one department but in most cases there are personas from different departments involved in the buying decision. To accurately target an ‘Buying Center’, your programs need to consider all of the different contacts associated with the buying center (the collective group of people responsible for making the purchase decision). In many outbound/ABM programs, contacts are selected because they fit key personas but their position in the organization may not be identified in terms of how they fit within the buying center. Factor #2: Buying Center ≠ Persona.

Finally, the targets of our programs often shift jobs — up to 20% of contact details may change every year. While many organizations have deployed CRM account alignment solutions (DiscoverOrg, DataFox, D&B, …), few automatically update contact information. As contact take on new roles/responsibilities and as contacts change jobs, is your database staying current? Likely not. (Personal note — I would love to a cloud solution that automatically updated contact details as they change) Factor #3: frequently Contacts ≠ Updated.

While ABM provides a mechanism for better account and contact selection for outbound programs, there remains a huge gap between this method and how internal enterprise B2B purchase decisions are made. Therefore, your ABM may be delivering less revenue than it could if the programs were more carefully targeted. Clearly there are major gaps in our ability to map organizational buying decisions to a level where our systems can help us execute these programs at scale. That’s the bad news — but realizing this gap is the first step to designing better processes.

If we, as a marketing department, take our ABM efforts to the next level with tailored targeting processes, we will be more closely aligned with the actual purchase process. For now this starts with a careful examination of the purchase process, personas, target accounts and more, in order to develop a strategy with available tools. As we identify target accounts, we must identify all of the personas across the organization associated with the buying decision to increase success rates. We will need to lean harder on our tech stack providers to give us greater insights into these areas for better and easier segmentation at scale. In the end, this will be an optimization of outbound programs to have more precision and greater results.

Lesson: If we take the time to identify and target all of the contacts associated with organization buying centers, our outbound campaigns will be more productive and drive greater revenue.

Account Based Marketing Migration Plan

Here are the presentation slides from a DemandBase seminar I gave in January of 2016 describing a planned migration to ABM. I believe the structure and approach has stood the test of time and is still relevant today. Does this look like your ABM approach?

Account Based Marketing Migration Plan

Freemium and Frictionless

Challenge: While companies are chasing freemium and frictionless sales motions, they are missing the main point.

It’s clear that the freemium sales model, where prospects can download products for free, has taken off. Successful companies like Dropbox are clear winners, but will this work for enterprise B2B marketers? Well Box, Zendesk, Atlassian, Splunk and others prove that it certainly can. It’s obviously a marketing model that works. Prospects try a free version and upgrade to a more robust, paid version easily and seamlessly. This breathes life into ‘see-try-buy’ or frictionless sales models. So is that all we need? Freemium sales model is our salvation?

The challenge is that you can’t automate or accelerate a bad experience. What is important to deliver is a positive and engaging customer experience, and it must be enticing very quickly. Your prospect must be able to easily understand how to use your product and find it engaging right away. If they need training or other have requirements to meet, you may be setting yourself up for disaster. Your prospects will freely download your application only to be confused and wander off – not upgrading to the paid version. In this outcome, you have just proven why yours is not the right solution. Even if you convert a small portion of users, you’re building up a base of prospects who now ‘know’ that your solution is not the right one.

So you need to consider a few things as you pursue a freemium strategy. First, do you have a process where your prospects will be highly successful in their free trial of your product? If the product is not immediately intuitive and usable, can you provide supporting materials to make their usage successful? Then, do you have a process either inside the product or as a separate communication path to help them explore your product and ensure a successful outcome? Finally, what is your process to monitor usage and outcomes from your trial/free users? How will you know if the process is working? To quote Stephen Covey, “Start with the end in mind,” or in this case, start with a plan to measure success. This may be tracking trial usage, getting usage surveys, measuring conversion rates and more.

Strangely enough, your path down a freemium model may start with improving or adding components to the product itself. A more fool-proof usage process will drive greater success. Constant learning and adjustment will yield great results and hopefully drive that hockey-stick growth curve we all seek.

Lesson: Charity starts at home. Give a hard look at your product before chasing a freemium model.

Money for Nothing and Leads for Free

Challenge: Turn your customers into your best lead generators.

Salespeople have very short memories. Certainly the old adage, “what have you done for me lately” springs to mind. Unfortunately, lead generation programs often have diminishing marginal returns – meaning that as you look to drive more leads, often the conversion rate to sales will drop. So just driving more leads will not necessarily drive profitable growth. So what is a marketer to do?

No one can better advocate for you than your customers. Leveraging your customers to speak to your prospects is an ideal way to drive new leads. Current customers understand the challenges prospective customers face and exactly how your solution can address their needs. The materials coming from your company are ‘discounted’ in terms of their value. Prospects come to your website for data sheets, demonstrations, solutions and even customer case studies and videos. However, even case studies sometimes feel ‘produced’ by your organization. Prospective customers are looking for ‘the real story’ about your organization, and they’d rather get it from other customers. But how can you systematically gather the details about your current customers in terms of their deployment, usage and benefits? You need information like industry, geography, use case, competitive comparisons, deployment, integration, value realized and other key dimensions related to your outbound and inbound marketing.

Gathering data is the first step, and encouraging specific groups of customers to take certain actions on your behalf is the second step. Both are challenging tasks, especially the latter because these customers are busy and have many other things to do BEFORE helping you! The solution – make it fun and competitive. There is a new social media tool that encourages your customers to become advocates – it is called Influitive (www.influitive.com). This tool uses gamification to make it fun AND easy to be an advocate for your company. The concept of gamification (gam(e) +‎ -ification) is hot (http://gamification.org/) in B2B marketing. With Influitive, you create challenges for your customers and reward them with points as they meet those challenges. For instance, you might reward them for Liking you on Facebook, re-tweeting one of your posts, commenting on a blog post, serving as a customer reference, taking a customer reference sales call, or any number of other actions. Your customers can use these points for value added items like training, time with executive staff, access to a product roadmap presentation, company apparel or any number of other items. You’re limited only by your creativity!

The result? You’re able to create your own competitive environment for customer advocates to earn points by advocating for your company and its solutions. You turn your best and most loyal customers into an extension of your marketing team. They can take natural steps and actions that fit within their interest and ability. This product is currently in beta – so stay tuned to see more developments.

Lesson: Leverage your most valuable asset – your customers – to drive new prospects!