Fullfunnel.io

At Fullfunnel.io we are growing B2B companies with long and complex sales cycles since 2006.

We were and still are “in trenches”, know the lowdown of these businesses, and bring to the table our 30+ years of combined experience and knowledge.

I've been selling and marketing B2B tech and services since 2006. 

What makes Fullfunnel.io different?

1. Ins and outs of selling to enterprise

Coming from the mid-market and enterprise world, I know all the ins and outs of selling to these segments: the research and evaluation processes, decision-making procedures inside the buying committee and the approval workflows.

We’ve been there, done that, and know how to generate opportunities with these segments and influence the decision-making processes.

2. Niche experience

While we could help many B2B business, since 2007 we focus exclusively on two verticals: high-value B2B tech (enterprise SaaS, blockchain technology, hardware) and service-based companies (software development, consulting, cybersecurity, DevOps as a service, etc).

We were and still are “in the trenches”, know the lowdown of these businesses, so you’ll get access to 30+ years of our combined experience and knowledge.

3. Knowledge transfer and in-house operations

We believe that the real growth can only be driven in-house. You need to have people who are in the trenches every day, talking to customers, experiencing the sales hurdles, refining the messages and positioning.

We join your team as external marketing advisors, provide consistent support and training including step-by-step playbooks, templates, marketing and sales dashboards, tech stack and process maps.

As a result, you get an evergreen in-house growth engine.

Co-founder

Trenches - B2B marketing community

Trenches — a community created by B2B marketers for B2B marketers who are in the trenches every day getting their hands dirty in growing B2B companies with high ACV and long sales cycles.

We talk about ABM (account-based marketing), marketing-sourced pipeline, demand generation, lead nurturing, GTM strategy, buyer’s journey, and all other hot topics that are ignored in the sales communities.

Community is FOREVER FREE.

Co-Founder

6-Week ABM Playbook

An actionable account-based marketing playbook and training to consistently land sales opportunities with your dream clients in 6 weeks or faster. 

Cut through the noise and get busy decision makers to respond to your campaigns without spammy outreach, wasting money on enterprise tech stack or expensive ip-based advertising, and significant shifts in the company’s organization.

The account-based marketing strategy and campaigns we are sharing in this playbook can be executed by a team of 2 people (1 marketer + 1 sales) on a Ramen budget.

Author

Scale XL

Helping B2B entrepreneurs install a reliable process to predictably fill their pipeline with high-value clients. 

Scale XL process addresses the 4 critical challenges of client relationship building:

1. TARGETING: identify, target and engage with more of YOUR business’ ideal potential clients, not someone else’s. 
2. ATTRACTING: define, create and communicate compelling messages that cut through the noise and clearly establish your business as a natural answer to your ideal potential client’s problems.
3. QUALIFYING: qualifying which prospects are ideal for YOUR business and which of them are ready, and then applying different processes to sales-ready leads and those that need nurturing.
4. ROI: fix low return and underwhelming results of B2B marketing 

Scale XL relies on a process to build relationships with more key decision makers in your market by targeting, attracting and nurturing your ideal clients, not someone else’s.

And if your business is anything like 100+ niche B2B software and service companies I’ve helped before, it’s likely that my methodology could help you do just that.

To find out if this process can work for your business, feel free to get in touch here, or visit our website at scalexl.com.

Founder

Lean Startup Circle Brussels

We're a group of entrepreneurs taking lean startup and customer development techniques to practice in our startups. We're ready to talk implementation and share data from our experiments.

http://www.meetup.com/lean-brussels/

Every meetup addresses a different (lean) startup topic (minimum viable products, go to market, sales for startups, customer interviews...)

Most startups fail not because they fail to execute and build their product, but because they fail to build a viable business around it. Lean startup helps us validate our business model as fast as possible. Lean startup is a collection of techniques built around maximizing validated customer learning thought fast Build/Measure/Learn iteration loops.

*The Lean Startup is a trademark and service mark owned by Eric Ries.*

Co-Founder and Organizer

Growth Hacking Belgium

Your new business went online yesterday and you've got a marketing budget of zero. How are you supposed to create a movement around your product? How can you get to your first thousand - or million - customers? Starting from zero, it feels impossible. Enter the growth hacker. You may not have heard of growth hacking yet, but you've certainly used the billion dollar brands built by it: Hotmail, AirBnB, Facebook, Dropbox, amongst many others. This group is for people who want to adopt the growth hacker mindset. It is all about sharing hands-on tactics that bring you results.

Grant Snap

Grant Snap is an online service that helps you get your innovation funded by providing guidance in preparing winning R&D grant proposals.

€375 billion gets granted annually in the EU. Get your share.

Sirris

I help software companies in different phases of product development and innovation:
•	For entrepreneurs: to turn their ideas into viable product concepts by applying customer development and lean startup™ methodologies
•	For companies building product for early adopters: introduce flexibility needed to quickly respond to new opportunities and changing customer requests 
•	For companies shifting their focus from customer to market: to master product management
•	For companies established in a market: to deal with increasing product complexity and how to differentiate through innovation

Account Manager Software Industry

Development activities (middleware components of a distributed data storage system, test management system, framework and tools used for automation of system tests) 

Participating in introduction of agile methodologies in two R&amp;D teams and setting up test automation infrastructure

Senior Software Engineer

Sony

Participating in the transition of an R&amp;D team into a product development organization 

Development activities (several packages of DVB MHP standard for digital television, an integrated environment used for development, execution and automatic reporting of functional tests for digital television)

Setting up a test department (conceiving a test strategy and infrastructure, test specifications/reviews, recruiting, supervising and training of testing personnel)

Full-funnel ABM for B2B brands with 5+ figure deals | Co-Founder @ FullFunnel.io

You need more pipeline that turns into revenue. But:
- Most marketing leads never convert to deals
- ⁠Outbound is in continuous decline 
- All the investments in trendy programs, agencies or tech didn’t move the needle. 

It’s time to try implementing full-funnel sales and marketing programs. 

Why? 

So you can:
- Accelerate this quarter’s revenue while building the future pipeline
- ⁠Convert 5-15% accounts to pipeline
- ⁠Bring marketing and sales teams together to drive the KPI that matters the most: sales velocity. 

We helped dozens of B2B tech companies implement full-funnel marketing and sales programs with 10%+ account-to-pipeline ratio. 

We will take your team by the hand and together, implement a scoped pilot program with clear milestones to prove the key KPIs, before investing in operationalization and scaling. 

To learn more or ask me anything, connect with me here or visit our website at fullfunnel.io



VP of Sales: We need to improve lead quality and pipeline coverage (but we can't give you a dedicated sales rep for ABM). Here is what happens to the ABM program:

1. 𝐀𝐁𝐌 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐃𝐄𝐃𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐑𝐄𝐏𝐒

- Broad list-building without considering target use-cases, brand awareness or intent
- AI-based "research" pulling generic public information anybody can find
- No account prioritization framework to focus efforts on high-potential accounts
- Marketing creates awareness through non-personalized activities
- Sales sends automated emails with basic personalization (title/industry/AI)
- MQL handover (content dowload and other signals treated as buying intent)
- Resource dilution across too many accounts with minimal personalization

𝐸𝑥𝑎𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑒:

2 recent ABM audits we did last month tell you a painful story:

Outbound attempts to 4,412 accounts
- 1.77% meeting booking rate
- 70.51% no-response rate

Programmatic ads: 250k+ impressions, 588 clicks, 28 MQLs, 0 accounts entering opportunity pipeline

2. 𝐀𝐁𝐌 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐃𝐄𝐃𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐑𝐄𝐏𝐒

- Strategic list-building focused on clusters of accounts with high likelihood to become sales opportunities
- Multi-factor account prioritization based on revenue potential, vendor awareness, relationship strength, and product-need evidence
- In-depth desk and 1:1 research mapping product value to key initiatives and buyer JTBDs
- Detailed buying committee mapping identifying Champions, Decision-makers, Power Users, and Influencers
- Engagement playbooks aligned with intent level and vendor awareness
- Thoughtful commenting and content distribution with multi-threading
- Personalized messages based on captured signals and account research
- Joint program planning with marketing and weekly activation planning

𝐸𝑥𝑎𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑒:

The results gap is staggering (based on recent pilot program results):

- 40% increase in enterprise meeting conversion rates
- 25% reduction in sales cycle length
- 7-15 strategic conversations scheduled in first 90 days

Takeaways? 

YOU CAN'T AFFORD NOT PROVIDING A DEDICATED REP TO THE ABM TEAM

Enterprise opportunities require 250+ touchpoints before engagement. General SDRs focusing on volume cannot provide this.

Account research is time-intensive but critical.

Sales velocity depends on multi-threading. 

Without someone mapping and engaging the entire buying committee, enterprise deals stall indefinitely.

Time investment delivers exponential returns. Just 50% of one SDR's time dedicated to an ABM program can prevent annual revenue leakage.

Resource allocation becomes strategic. Currently, 37% of SDR capacity is wasted on unqualified accounts that never convert.

The alternative? 

Watching how your #ABM program becomes another marketing experiment destined to join the graveyard of failed initiatives that never generated revenue.

Vladimir Blagojević

Full-Funnel ABM and Demand Gen For B2B Companies w/ High ACV | Co-Founder @ FullFunnel.io

📊 Hard v.s. soft metrics in B2B Marketing:
 
HARD METRICS
 
- Marketing-sourced Revenue = revenue generated from opportunities created by marketing activities.
 
- ACV: the average yearly value of contracts generated through marketing efforts.
 
- Sales-cycle Length = the amount of time it takes to close a marketing-sourced deal.
 
Marketing-sourced (e.g. inbound) opportunities tend to have a shorter sale-cycle than e.g. outbound opportunities, as the buyers have already been educated about your solution, and gone through the initial research and comparison.
 
- Win-rate: This is the percentage of marketing-sourced deals that result in a successful sale. Marketing-sourced opportunities should have a higher win-rate, as buyers have already "qualified themselves" and you're likely in their short list of vendors.
 
...
 
But does this mean that we should ask, "What's the ROI of this?", for every piece of content or any marketing activity?
 
No, because lots of activities such as brand awareness act as multipliers for ROI of direct response actions. 

That's why we also need "SOFT METRICS":
 
1. Foundational activities (e.g. customer research, buyer journey, IC, strategic narrative...) have no immediate impact on revenue, but impact the ROI over the long terms.
 
Example:
- Message-buyer fit. E.g. use customer research & messaging validation tests with ICP buyers (e.g. with Wynter)
- Does you content resonate and make impact on your target buyers? Repeat engagement from target buyers + buyers mentioning your content in private messages or sales calls.
- How close are our inbound opportunities to our ICP? Do we see a positive evolution?
 
2. Early signals measuring new programs's impact with hard revenue metrics from the start is like evaluating a sapling by the fruit it bears. It takes time for the sapling to develop into a fruit-bearing tree.
 
When starting a new program, look at the qualitative, early signals first. E.g. engagement and conversations with the right people at the right companies.
 
3. Not each program or activity can be evaluated with the same metrics. Take for example, programs aimed to build brand awareness and trust.
 
Because, after all, buyers buy from people and brands they know, like and trust. And trust is built over time and accross many touchpoints in the buying journey.
 
Example:
- ICP account website visits that last longer than 5 minutes.
- What's your brand awareness with target accounts? How engaged are target buyers with our website and demand gen programs? Are we losing deals because we're an unknown brand?
 
---
 
By now, we all know that measuring marketing by MQLs and leads drives wrong behaviors. Vanity KPIs can easily be gamed.
 
But only measuring revenue can make it difficult to evaluate new programs, and activities that are important, but don't have a direct revenue impact.
 
And sometimes, it's just clear when something's working.

What does it take to generate demand and win an enterprise customer?

𝟏. 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐭𝐨𝐮𝐜𝐡𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬?

Most people know it takes a LOT of touch points. 

But nobody guesses anywhere close to the actual number.

According to studies by HockeyStack, it takes: 
- 141 touchpoints from first impression to an SQL 
- 417 touchpoints from an SQL to a closed-won deal ($100K+)

Plus all the touchpoints that no attribution software can track. 

𝟐. 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐨𝐮𝐜𝐡𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐥

Needing more touchpoints doesn't mean we should: 
- Make email nurtures screaming “Book a demo now” longer
- Have more cold InMails asking for "15 minutes next Wednesday"
- Add a few more dozen “Hey, just checking in” follow-up emails

Those aren’t real touchpoints. That’s just noise.

Instead, what actually matters?

- Educational content created by experts (not a product pitch disguised as educational)
- Meaningful retargeting (e.g. case studies, solutions, and thought leadership that resonate)
- In-person events where buyers get to learn from their peers
- Giving voice to execs with opinion and internal experts
- Real relationships 

𝟑. 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞?

Here's a real example: 

🗓 Mar '23: prospect hears about us through a network recommendation
🗓 Quietly follows us on LinkedIn
🗓 Jul '23: Quietly reads 3 case studies (no form fills)
🗓 Sep-Nov '23: As their team starts planning for next year, they engaged more. Signed up for a newsletter, attended a webinar.
🗓 Mar '24: They initiate contact after budget alignment
🗓 May '24: Deal is closed

After a full year of educational engagement, content consumption, and trust-building, they reach out to us, because they were finally ready to prioritize account-based marketing.

--- 

Generating demand for your product takes many touchpoints over a long time. 

Yet the most B2B companies are still stuck in a transactional mindset, trying to use direct response marketing and led gen to generate enterprise deals.

What we need is a full-funnel model aligned with the way the buyers that are actually buying today: 

- Aligning content & actions with 3 levels of demand (demand for content, demand for a solution and demand for a vendor)
- Putting the buying committee at the center 
- Proper distribution with all four layers (organic, paid, one-to-one and amplified through partners and influencers)
- Demand capture that captures relevant signals, leverages both inbound and allbound capture and aligns the call-to-action with the level of the buyer intenr 

If you want to dive deeper, we just published another guide about demand generation for long sales cycles. 

Check it out here: 
https://lnkd.in/dyD_JSZW

Brand is a SALES issue.

And no, it's not just marketing job to fix it.

𝐖𝐇𝐘 𝐃𝐎 𝐒𝐀𝐋𝐄𝐒 𝐓𝐄𝐀𝐌𝐒 𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐄

The #1 complaint I hear from sales teams?

“Our target accounts don’t know who we are.”

Why do they care? 

1) Buyers ignore their outreach

With low brand awareness: 
- Buyers perceive them as, “yet another rep from yet another vendor”
- Their outreach disappears in the noise—especially in an age of AI-generated SDR emails and LinkedIn messages

Even perfect personalization won’t matter if your message isn’t read.

2) They loose on brand. 

Buyers (especially corporate ones) won't risk their social capital on an unknown brand.

As the old saying goes, “No one got fired for hiring IBM.”

In fact, 86% of enterprise buyers choose vendors they discovered before their buying process even started. 

Translation: a strong brand wins deals.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐎𝐋𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐒𝐀𝐋𝐄𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐀𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐄𝐒𝐒

Sales often blame marketing for lack of brand awareness. Instead, sales MUST create awareness themselves:

1. Find the right buyers in the buying committee (champions, economic buyers, technical buyers and power users). 

It makes sense to connect to insiders and connectors. 

2. Start value-added comments in the places where buyers hang out and learn (LinkedIn / niche Discord or Slack communities).

3. Use engagement to start conversations. 

4. Ask profiling questions to understand where the buyers are in the buying process, and to validate their challenges and product need.

5. Keep buyers engaged by tagging or sharing with them relevant news or content.

Lack expertise? 

Use account love letters and content curation.

6. Invite to events to strengthen relationships and use it as an opportunity for more in-depth account research. Connect pre and post event. 

7. Connect them with their peers (your SMEs, solution architects, or your reference customers) to help with specific problems and with change management.

8. Invite them for content collaborations with your marketing team: interviews, quotes, etc. 

It can be as easy as sourcing a LinkedIn post from chats.

9. Work with marketing to create tailored nurturing for highly engaged accounts showing buying signals.

---

Account awareness ≠ In-mail -> Email -> Phone cadence. 

In the age of AI, brand and trust become even more important. 

To be considered, you must be known.

Sales must work on account awareness in parallel with marketing, to create future pipeline. 

The biggest opportunity opens when sales and marketing work together to create multiple touch points across the buying committee (and their buying journey).

Here is how marketing and sales jointly create sales pipeline leaks
(and how to fix them).

Reality: Most marketing and sales teams miss 85% of intent and engagement signals because of 𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡 𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠 .

Account blindness = lack of a comprehensive view of all collected insights & historical interactions at the account and buying group level with strategic accounts.

As a result, sales teams lose momentum while marketing maintains siloed demand gen that costs millions in lost pipeline.

Here is a 5-step process to fix it.

1. CREATE UNIFIED ACCOUNT ENRICHMENT AND RESEARCH

Define the information about target accounts you need to collect to:

- Qualify accounts
- Segment accounts by tiers and opportunity probability
- Create a personalized solution/offer

Next to standard firmographics & technographics, add 𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ 𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 you want both marketing and sales to collect and store in the CRM.

On the contact level, add all buying committee members and power users.

2. DEFINE IMPORTANT INTENT AND ENGAGEMENT SIGNALS

Include signals on both account and contact levels:

- High-intent website page visits
- Insights collected from buyers (answers to the account research questions)
- Engagement with content and ads
- Event sign-ups
- Content consumption in the content hubs
⠀
3. DEFINE IMPORTANT BUYING PROCESS TRIGGERS/SIGNALS

Analyze closed-won deals and define signals that triggered the buying process. E.g. 
- Hiring for specific positions
- Strategic initiative announcements in annual reports
- Former customer joins a target account
- Asking for a vendor recommendation in communities
- Opening new locations
⠀
4. DEFINE THE PROGRAM (AND TECH) OWNER

Usually, B2B companies buy a technology to capture these signals and expect marketing and sales tracking them asynchronously. This never works.

You need a program owner who creates a holistic process of capturing and cross-sharing signals and manages the tech stack.

(The only tech vendor I know that currently helps with all 4 steps is Demandbase with their new Agentbase solution. 

This is a great example of AI agents working on a unified data set that ensures accuracy and shared insights across marketing and sales.)

5. MAKE SENSE OF EVERY SIGNAL AND DEVELOP PLAYBOOKS ALIGNED WITH INTENT

Not all signals are equal and mean buying intent.

Understand where your buyer is in their journey and provide the next step aligned with their current needs, not your wishes.
---
TLDR;

A lot of teams are looking for new tactics, tools (or prompts) to fix their sales pipeline. Quite often they ignore the leaks: 

- No unified account enrichment and research
- Not tracking important intent and engagement signals
- No capturing of buying triggers
- Lack of playbooks aligned with the level of intent

Fix the friction in the buying process and the leaks in sales pipeline.

Here is how I see the necessary functions in the B2B  #demandgen team
(broken down by in-house, optional and outsourced functions).

𝐈𝐍𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐄 𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐀𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘 𝐅𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒

1. HEAD OF DEMAND GEN

- Demand gen strategy
- Program & team coordination (including agencies)
- Programs orchestration
- Demand calendar and capacity planning
- Budgeting
- Thought leadership

2. DEMAND GEN MARKETER

- Demand gen strategy
- Programs/playbooks execution
- Tech stack
- Reporting
- Collabs with media, thought leaders, partners and customers
- Thought leadership
- Customer research & interviews
- Demand capturing (intent data, content hubs, etc.)

3. SME (Subject-matter expert)

- Demand gen strategy input
- Content input
- Hosting a podcast
- Running webinars

4. CONTENT

I firmly believe you need to have in-house content creators as a PART OF THE TEAM (different for low-ticket B2B products).

- SME interviews
- Content for thought leadership
- Guides
- Case studies
- Buyer & sales enablement
- Newsletters

5. DESIGN

You can start outsourcing, but it's best if you can get this function in-house.
- Diagrams & graphs for proprietary data and workflows
- Slides / decks
- Infographics
- Banners
- Content repurposing (e.g. text -> diagram, text -> decks, etc.).

𝐎𝐏𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋 𝐅𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍
(that makes a big difference)

6. SALES DEVELOPMENT

It's hard to involve sales, but I firmly believe that your BDRs should be a part of the program.

They can leverage thought leadership content to create awareness, initiate conversations, connect and engage with target buyers.

- Strategy input
- Content distribution
- Thought leadership
- Invites to the events

𝐎𝐔𝐓𝐒𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐂𝐄𝐃

7. ADS MANAGEMENT
Ads management and optimization might require a full-time position. If you don't have a budget for FTE, you can outsource it (there are great vendors like Justin Rowe and Jonathan Bland).

Make sure you have clear workflows and instructions for your partner to avoid working in silos.

- Ads optimization
- Program maintainance
- Reporting
- Demand capturing

8. SEO

Pretty much aligned with the previous point.

---

Pro-tips:

1. Functions ≠ team members. One person can cover 2–3 functions.

2. A critical aspect is cross-functional collaboration.

Quite often demand gen and other teams are siloed:
- Content - traffic
- Demand gen - MQLs
- Field marketing - MQLs
- Client success - NPS
- SDRs - # of lead gen touches & meetings booked
- AEs - pipeline won

They are often not aware of each other's activities and most don't care about revenue.

Then, it doesn't matter how good your team is. It will be always criticized for the lack of revenue contribution.

3. I mentioned multiple functions should be involved in thought leadership.

Here is why
- The bigger the buying center, the more people you need to influence
- Diversifying your content and engagement for different buyer roles & increasing # of meaningful touchpoints ⇒accelerating pipeline generation

Buying triggers: How to create targeted messaging (and programs) around specific trigger events?

Most buyers are NOT buying... until their priorities shift. 

Or they run into an obstacle to a high priority business objective. 
A problem they cannot ignore or postpone. 

A buying trigger.
(e.g. M&A, missed revenue targets, expansion to a new country, new CFO...) 

Here is the process we follow to create messaging, content and playbooks around specific buying triggers. 

1. Deal analysis

- Analyze recent net-new won deals
- Segment them based on the strategic use case and challenges driving their buying decisions

Select the segment where you are more likely to win.

Look at: ACV, sales cycle and win rates. 

2. Develop the segment ICP

Study the largest deals from that segment and identify patters in: 
 - The buying committee
 - Account qualification criteria
 - Firmographics and technographics

3. Define segment challenges

- Think about what triggers the buying process
- What your buyers should be educated about
- What change management is required

4. Develop content and messaging plan for the selected cluster.

- Align it with the identified strategic use-case, and related triggers and challenges. 

5. Develop a warm-up program

Create a mix of activities to connect and engage with the buying committee.

We always include activities from these 4 groups:

- Event
- Social and community
- Paid distribution
- Content collaborations

6. Develop an opportunity generation program

Program includes a mix of:

- Trigger-specific content hubs
- 1:1 strategy sessions
- Direct mail
- Personalized offers/business cases
- Proof Of Concept planning

7. Define criteria for accounts that are likely become sales opportunities

We prioritize:

- Revenue potential
- Relationship
- Brand awareness
- Strong challenge / product need evidence and buying signals

8. Define the sources of account selection & signals to capture 
(make sure to include signals for the buying trigger and the related strategic use-case and challenges)

9. Source and prioritize accounts

Meet weekly and identify new accounts that fit our ICP or match identified signals? Segment them into 3 lists depending on their buying stage

- Segment ICP: fits our ICP, no awareness, challenge is unknown
- Future pipeline: vendor aware, trigger/challenge is unknown
- Active Focus: vendor aware, trigger/challenge is known + demonstrating buying signals 

10. Map the activities and playbooks to lists and accounts

Meet weekly and review your lists: 
- Map awareness content and 1:many warm-up activities on Segment ICP (cold accounts)
- Map nurturing, 1:few activities to Future Pipeline accounts 
- For each Active Focus account, develop 1: messaging & content, and map the opportunity generation activities

---

ABM ≠ targeted lead generation. 

ABM is about: 
- Identifying relevant triggers
- Researching
- Engaging
- Personalizing our message and offer 

...to accounts that are likely to buy our product.

If GTM=production line, revenue=output. 
To scale, fix the bottlenecks. Optimize 𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡 𝑣𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑦.

Imagine your B2B go-to-market system as a production line¹: 
- Input = target ICP accounts
- Output = revenue
- Throughput = sales velocity (revenue GTM generates in a quarter/year)

𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐖𝐄 𝐓𝐑𝐘 𝐓𝐎 𝐎𝐏𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐈𝐙𝐄 (𝐒𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐄 𝐑𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐔𝐄)

- Add more input (target more accounts)
- Optimize locally (more MQLs / leads / meetings / demos)

The result?
- Many leads don't convert to sales 
- Unpredictable pipeline 
- AEs — the most expensive resource — chase low-value accounts, struggle with low win rates 
- Missed revenue targets


𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐋 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐁𝐋𝐄𝐌

The chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

In any production system, there are always constraints — the true bottlenecks that limit the entire system's throughput.

They show up as a build up of materials in front of a production machine. 
(shown as the "red", bottlenecked accounts on the video below).

But symtoms can mask the root causes. 

Here are root bottlenecks we see frequently. 

1. PRIORITIZATION

Simply increasing volume only causes more accounts to get stuck ("engaged", but not moving to pipeline and deals). 

Instead, prioritize acconts that: 

- We can reasonably win & retain (best-fit)
- Have high revenue potential
- Are more likely to have an active need

2. AWARENESS

Symptoms of low brand awareness: 
- Low response rates
- High CAC
- Sales lose deals "on brand"

Most buyers shortlist vendors they discover (=awareness) BEFORE they start the buying process. 

3. DEMAND GEN

Beyond lack of awareness, demand gen often suffers from:

- Targeting, messaging, and content misaligned with prioritized accounts
- Transactional processes with too few touch points
- Sales not engaging and developing relationships with multiple buyers

4. DEMAND CAPTURE

Two frequent bottlenecks: 
- Friction (lack of product info, no trials/sandbox, delays in booking demos, handoffs...)
- Lack of allbound capture with active sales involvement

5. DEAL DEVELOPMENT

While the biggest problems at this stage are usually caused upstream, a common bottleneck is lack of proper buyer enablement. 

---
¹ The production line analogy doesn't hold 100%.

The biggest difference:
We’re not processing materials — we’re influencing accounts and buyers, with their own priorities, agendas, and many factors outside our control.

That’s why we should focus on what we can control:

- Prioritization
- Awareness creation
- Sales and marketing working hand-in-hand on the highest-value, best-fit accounts

And that’s why — alongside sales velocity — we should also track account velocity: How fast we move accounts from unaware → aware → consideration → deal.

Account velocity can reveal where the bottlenecks are — and where our systems needs to improve.

7 mistakes that kill pipeline in #demandgen. 



1. Lack of customer insights

Want to generate demand with your content?

Leverage a simple formula:

In-depth answers to your buyers’ most important questions + expertise + examples = awareness & demand.

2. E-comm approach

More articles -> more keywords + long tails -> more traffic -> more revenue may work in B2C but not in B2B.

Your buyers don’t need MORE content.

They need better content answering questions they have during the buying process.

3. Farming out content to budget vendors/AI

Here's how lots of B2B content creation happens:
- Find keywords with high traffic volume,
- Find popular articles on this topic
- Cherrypick/summarize these articles + add info about product features

(or just prompt AI without in-depth research and expert interviews)

B2B buyers smell superficial content from miles away, and simply ignore it.

And no salesperson will ever help you distribute it, if they feel this content presents them as amateurs.

4. Blindly copying market leaders

Many B2B companies copy market leaders in their industry, thinking, “if they do this, it should be the right approach.”

But:
- Do I know their goals and their GTM strategy?
- Do I have their skillset and their budget?
- Is this content actually generating the results (I want)?

Market leaders have a huge advantage of a known brand. They can afford experiments & losses - but can you?

5. Linear funnels

Demand generation is not linear.

A content download or a webinar signup = interest in the topic, not the product.

Sending these contacts to sales ≠ pipeline.

Align the next action with the level of buyer's intent.

6. Press releases / announcements

Here is a harsh truth.

Nobody cares about:
- Trade shows you’ve attended
- The money you raised (other then SDRs who’ll use it as a trigger to spam you)
- Pictures from your corporate/team events
- Awards you won

It provides 0 value to your buyers and doesn’t generate demand for your product.

7. Attribution and lead generation obsession

The primary goal of the content is helping and educating the buyers, sowing the seeds of interest. Not selling.

But because we can’t attribute this, demand gen is turned into lead gen.

Webinars become sales pitches. Blog articles promote product features instead of answering the most challenging questions your buyers have.

Define leading indicators and get everybody aligned.

The most common question we get is how to measure brand awareness and efficiency of demand generation and thought leadership.

Here are the metrics I’m looking at:
- # of inbound opportunities
- Sources of opportunities (How did the prospect hear about us?)
- Direct brand traffic (& quality)
- # & quality of media invites
- # brand mentions as product/vendor recommendations

Fix these 7 bottlenecks, and you’ll start noticing increased revenue, shortened sales cycle, and higher ACV.

How to use AI in B2B marketing the right way. 

𝐈𝐍𝐏𝐔𝐓𝐒 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐓𝐄𝐑 

𝑊𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑎𝑦: "Act as a VP of Marketing at a SaaS company..."
(Translation: "hallucinate based on broad, random internet content you were trained on")

𝑅𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑦: 

1. High-resolution inputs 

- Select the target segment (based on revenue and deal analysis)
- Collect sales calls & customer interviews from that segment 
- Interview AEs/stakeholders who won the deals 
- Run additional deep research on those accounts 
- Run deep research on accounts + audience (account & industry websites, forums, LinkedIn, events, thought leaders...)

Use all of this as raw input.

2. AI as Synthesizer, not an Oracle

With good inputs, use AI to extract: 
- Qualification criteria
- Product-need signals 
- Buying triggers and signals 
- Buying center roles 
- Key use-cases and related challenges 
- Challenging the status quo
- Trends driving urgency 

3. Always request quotes 

Quotes prevent hallucination and preserve buyer language.

4. Demand signal

- Call out fluff
- Push for specifics, examples, context
- Pressure-test ideas 
- Interrogate assumptions & identify edge cases

5. Build in feedback loops

A process I follow: 
- Gather messy input (see 1 ↑)
- Feed in stages
- Prompt for synthesis (see 2 ↑)
- Demand signal (see 4 ↑)
- Refine and refeed

You’ll train a high-context assistant—not a generic bot.

--- 

𝐔𝐏𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐌 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆, 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐉𝐔𝐒𝐓 𝐄𝐗𝐄𝐂𝐔𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 

𝑊𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑎𝑦: "Write a cold email," "Generate LinkedIn hooks"
(Translation: I haven’t thought this through)

𝑅𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑦: 

6. What's the strategy?

Skipping this is like starting a journey without a destination (and choosing a car for a trans-Atlantic trip):

- Goal (e.g. net-new revenue from mid-market West Coast accounts)
- ICP, buying center
- Content and messaging themes aligned with ICP
- KPIs and metrics

7. Planning before execution 

Connect the dots between content, messaging and activities.

E.g. Align LinkedIn posts with webinar topics → Sales engagement before/after → Use the content to fuel outbound.

---

𝐎𝐔𝐓𝐏𝐔𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐒

𝑊𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑎𝑦: "Generate an article Top 5 AI trends in 2025"
(Translation: content graveyard filler)

𝑅𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑦:

8. Be specific

Start around a specific buyer challenge or a question.

Add context (what happens before and after).

9. Show what good looks like

Curate templates and real examples of well-performing content / messages. 

AI is a well-trained plagiarism machine. Control what it's copying.

10. Know what good looks like (and demand it)

(see 4 ↑)

---

Of course, no one knows the right way.
(although we can spot wrong ways from a mile away).

But one of the biggest dangers of AI?
Letting it replace our critical thinking.

That's why, instead of "How do I do this faster?"
I like asking: "How do I do this better?"

To do that, I arm myself with good input, critical thinking and a thoughtful process.

Taplio

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