#marketing – Practical Strategies for B2B Technology Companies

Why Everything About Demand Generation Is Being Rewritten

In this third installment, let’s review how the game has fundamentally changed and how we as demand gen practitioners need to potentially veer from what has worked in the past. That’s because the way people buy has changed fundamentally and forever – so our programs and processes must adapt.

Here are the shifts reshaping everything we thought we knew about demand generation.

Buyers Now Own the Process

All the data that used to require a conversation is now online. Buyers complete up to 85% of their decision process before ever engaging with sales. By the time they fill out a form, they’ve already made a short list.

“We used to generate demand. Now we need to make sure we’re discoverable when the buyer interest develops.”

Trust Has Moved to the Network

Prospects now rely on peers, communities, and review sites more than company messaging.
A customer’s voice carries 10x the credibility of the brand itself. This shift has turned advocacy and social proof into the new marketing currency.

“Your customers are your marketing department — whether you plan for it or not.”

Product-Led Growth Has Changed the Sales Cycle

Buyers expect to see and interact with the product, not just hear about it. Trials, freemium models, and self-serve experiences are now core parts of the funnel. If you don’t have some process by which customers can easily ‘experience’ your product, possibly it’s just too hard to use.

“A free trial or product experience used to be a sales event. Now it’s an expected prospect experience before engaging with sales.”

Remote Work Has Changed Reachability

The era of predictable access — phone calls, events, in-person meetings — is over.
Buyers are dispersed, mobile, and selective about what they engage with. So it takes much more effort now to connect live with prospects – and even more effort to make that connection a positive experience.

“When you can’t reach buyers, you have to attract them.”

Digital Filtering Has Rewired Attention

People have systems to filter out ads and email as well as have trained themselves to ignore irrelevant outreach. Spam filters, ad blockers, and notification fatigue make the traditional outbound machine less effective every year. Look to create value-driven, human content that breaks through.

“Attention is no longer bought. It’s earned.”

AI Has Changed Search

Any savvy buyer will use some version of AI to assist their discovery process. Showing up on non-branded keywords has been dropping in value and will continue to do so going forward. How AI presents your product and company will be key to making the short list. How do we do this? It’s evolving quickly now and we are all trying to figure this out.

“Sponsored results have a hard time competing with AI summaries.”

What the Future Looks Like

The answer for every company and product will be different – that is for sure. However, the next evolution of demand generation will look less like a funnel and more like an ecosystem. Companies are beginning to:

Ungate their content to maximize reach and trust
Invest in customer proof via review sites and community engagement
Enhance PLG trials so buyers experience value faster
Create authentic, educational content that earns credibility
Capture intent, not force it — focusing on “request a demo” moments rather than MQL volume

“The goal isn’t to chase buyers. It’s to be the company they find when they’re ready.”

The Takeaway

After 25 years, I’ve come to see demand generation differently.
It’s not a pipeline factory — it’s an ecosystem of trust, proof, and discoverability.

“The most effective marketing today doesn’t push. It proves.”

That’s not the end of demand generation. It’s the beginning of its next chapter.

Why Some Startups Don’t Reach Their Potential

As the second installment of this three article series, I look at common reasons that contributed to less-than-successful financial outcomes for the startups I joined.

As a recap, over the past 25 years, I have had the good fortune to be a part of demand generation teams across 20 technology companies. Recently, I created a summary data set containing each company and key characteristics like product-market fit, messaging focus, marketing-sales alignment, funnel instrumentation, PLG offerings and, most importantly, the financial outcomes achieved while I was there. What becomes evident are several common trends showing what worked, what didn’t, and what separated the companies that achieved strong results — IPOs or high-value acquisitions — from those that fell short.

Lets dig in.

Product–Market Fit Wasn’t Ready

This can take several different shapes. In the most obvious cases, customers tried our product and then decided not to buy it – it just did not create more value than time and cost of acquisition. In other cases, each sale is unique across buying persona and purchase process. It is hard to scale success when every sale is a one-off. While companies can limp along and linger – it is really hard to have a breakout success without a clear product-market fit.

Go-to-Market Process Wasn’t Repeatable or Scalable

I have been a part of companies where early wins came from hustle — founder energy, referrals, or one-off deals. But when the team tried to scale, there wasn’t yet a reliable playbook for targeting, qualification, and conversion. Marketing spend without process maturity leads to inefficiency, not growth.

“Scaling before repeatability just lights cash on fire.”

Better Mousetrap Versus Good-Enough

In some cases, the company had a product clearly better than the alternatives with certain features, product completeness or more. However, if those other products were simpler to deploy and manage (on-prem v SaaS) or good enough in meeting the underlying need (Beta v VHS), the early stage opportunities died on the vine. No amount of demand gen spending can meet an underwhelming response of the customer. The value prop used in the early stage of the sales process must be reinforced all the way through the sales process to achieve reliable and consistent growth.

Category and Value Proposition Weren’t Clear

When prospects can’t easily categorize your product, or, worse yet, don’t understand it easily, the buying journey becomes slow and expensive. This takes more time and effort to drive awareness, engagement and eventually create pipeline. In demand gen, we live under the brand value created by product marketing. If the messaging is not crisp and sharp, this dulls the returns of every program.

“If your category isn’t clear, your campaigns have to work twice as hard.”

The Takeaway:
Some of the most valuable lessons come from the companies that didn’t win big. They remind us that product capabilities, messaging clarity, and scalability are preconditions for marketing success.

“Demand generation is an amplifier. It strengthens what’s already working.”

In my next post, I’ll explore how much the game itself has changed — and why the old rules of demand generation may no longer apply.

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?

Solving Data Gaps: The Importance of Sales Collaboration

Challenge: What do you do when your analytics don’t give you a clear answer?

Marketing data is powerful. We now have a wide range of sources to understand prospect behavior—website analytics, form submissions, event traffic, third-party enrichment, and more. Even better, we can integrate these data points through attribution platforms to create compelling narratives about the buyer’s journey.

These insights help answer key questions:

Which programs drive the highest-quality leads that result in closed-won deals?
How can we accelerate deal velocity or improve close rates?
Which channels or tactics generate engagement that never translates into pipeline?

Ultimately, the goal is to build a predictive marketing engine—one that allows us to understand how today’s efforts will impact tomorrow’s pipeline and revenue.

But sometimes, the data falls short.

Case in Point

Years ago, we had a product with several distinct value propositions—each strong enough to justify a purchase. We ran targeted campaigns around each component and guided prospects through customized nurture tracks designed to drive opportunity creation.

In one segment, we saw strong lead volume and even new opportunities. But oddly, these deals consistently failed to close—unlike opportunities from other product components, which converted successfully. We experimented with nurture sequences and tested new offers, but the issue persisted.

So, I did something simple: I sat down with the AEs who had worked those opportunities.

After some digging (and pushing past polite responses), two insights emerged:

Sales enablement gaps – Reps didn’t feel confident selling this particular component, so they often avoided highlighting it in conversations.
Product-market fit issues – The component lacked key features found in competing solutions. As a result, prospects disengaged early in the sales cycle.

These are problems no dashboard could ever reveal.

The Takeaway

This was a classic “duh” moment. Despite all the data at our fingertips, the oldest attribution method in the book still reigns supreme: talking to your sales team.

Sales reps are your most reliable sensor network. They’re on the front lines, having real conversations with real buyers. Their feedback is often the missing puzzle piece when data alone doesn’t add up.

As demand gen leaders, our job is to equip sellers with the programs and insights they need to succeed. And that starts with genuine, ongoing collaboration.

Lesson: Don’t overlook your most valuable attribution tool—consistent, open dialogue between marketing and sales.

B2B SaaS Marketing in a Time of COVID

Challenge: With our new ‘COVID normal,’ how do we deliver against our increasing pipeline requirements?

[First, let me say that my heart goes out to all those impacted by the COVID pandemic. It impacts everyone in different ways – and to some whose lives have been tragically disrupted.]

OK – the pandemic has been with us for seven plus months. We have executed our initial fire-drill response programs to show our customers and prospects that ‘we are in this with you.’ We have adjusted our team operations to work remotely and be sensitive to the varying needs of our team members. We now have back to back Zoom calls that suck up all the time ‘gained’ from no commute. And we have even figured out how to manage our hair with little or no external help. Yes – we are now operating at our ‘new normal.’

But more importantly, we changed our marketing go-to-market. Let’s summarize these top level changes:

Shifted from in-person events to online events
Re-allocated funds to digital marketing
Optimized our landing pages for conversion
Improved our nurture programs

OK – now what? Quarterly revenue targets are increasing for sales and therefore so are our targets for marketing sourced pipeline. Unfortunately, reaching buyers on the phone is more difficult than ever because no one is in the office, which also makes mailing packages and ABM programs more difficult. So where do we turn next? How do we convert more MQL into Opportunities?

Before making recommendations, let’s first recognize that our prospects are facing the same issues we’re facing, namely:

A tsunami of Zoom calls
Stress about COVID
Stress with increased family responsibilities
Feeling isolated

My recommendation – let’s make their life easier. I know this might be radical, but what if we:

Provide truly helpful content that helps them do their jobs
Educate them about things they don’t know that will actually help them
Make it easy for them to learn about how our products and services work
Simplify the process to successfully trial our product

Now more than ever our prospects need us to make their lives easier and we can do so by making the process of engaging with us simpler and more satisfying. Let’s give them what they crave most: a bit of time back in their day with informative and easy to consume content. And most importantly, a great experience to trial our product and see for themselves how their life improves with our company’s product.

Lesson: Focusing on our customer’s needs is more important now than ever in every step of the buyer’s journey.