Lead Gen → Demand Gen

Introduction: From Lead Gen to Demand Gen

For years, I ran a well-oiled lead generation machine. We had a repeatable system: generate net-new content downloads from our ICP for around $10 each, route them to a dedicated MDR team, and book meetings at volume.

On paper, it looked like it was working. But when we zoomed out, the cracks appeared.

Only 0.2% of those gated content leads converted into closed-won revenue. In contrast, our inbound demo requests were converting at over 4%.

That stat changed everything.

It wasn’t that lead gen wasn’t functioning, it was. But it was deeply inefficient. When you added up the cost of content, paid distribution, and the MDR resource required to chase every lead, the funnel didn’t scale. It wasn’t sustainable.

That’s when I realised: we didn’t just need more leads. We needed a better system, one built for how buyers actually buy today.

Not captured. Not coerced. But genuinely curious and coming to us. That insight was the beginning of our shift to demand gen.

Not because lead gen was broken, but because demand gen was the only scalable path forward.

Buyers today are more independent. More cynical. They don’t want to be “captured.” They want to explore on their own terms, without being forced into sales conversations they didn’t ask for. In fact, buyers now spend 70% of their time researching before speaking to sales.

And as marketers, our job has changed. 

We’re not here to push people through a funnel. We’re here to create demand in the places they actually spend time. To build trust before intent. To show up consistently, even when they’re not ready to buy.

We moved away from chasing low-intent content leads and focused instead on generating declared intent inbound, people who actually wanted to talk to us.

We didn’t abandon MQLs entirely. We redefined them. Instead of counting every content download or webinar sign-up, we shifted our focus to high-intent hand-raisers, buyers actively seeking a solution, not just consuming gated assets.

That mindset shift changed everything. We ungated our best content, prioritised buyer experience, and built a true demand generation engine that aligned with how people actually want to buy.

Today, that engine fuels the majority of our pipeline across multiple markets, and delivers MQLs that our sales team is excited to follow up on.

This course is the blueprint for how we made that shift.

You’ll learn:

• Why only 5% of your market is buying today - and what to do about the other 95%
• How to get buy-in from leadership, sales, and finance (especially when the old model still has fans)
• How to report like a revenue team - not just a marketing team

Whether you’re at the beginning of your journey or already building momentum, this course is here to give you the clarity, language, and confidence to lead the change.

Let’s get into it.

Lesson 1: The 95 - 5 Philosophy

Goal: Understand the mindset shift from generating leads to generating demand and brand awareness among the 95% of buyers who are not yet in-market.

Why this lesson matters

In traditional B2B marketing, success was measured by how many leads you captured. But that model assumes every buyer is ready to talk to sales - which simply isn’t true.

In fact, according to research shared by LinkedIn and widely adopted by modern B2B teams like Cognism, only around 5% of your total addressable market is actively in-market at any given time. That means 95% of your potential buyers aren’t ready to buy today—but will be in the future.

This lesson introduces the 95–5 mindset shift: marketing isn’t just about capturing short-term intent. It’s about creating long-term demand, so that when buyers are ready, they think of you first.

This philosophy is at the heart of Cognism’s pivot from lead generation to demand generation. And it’s where every demand gen transformation should begin.

Why demand gen?

To understand why you should make the shift from lead gen to demand gen, I think it first makes sense to understand why I realised demand gen was the right move.

Like a lot of B2B marketers, I was brought up on the MQL model. Gate the content. Run the paid ads. Capture as many leads as possible. Hand them off to sales and some convert. And for a while, it worked - sort of.

But as Cognism started to scale, I could see the cracks forming.

We were generating a huge volume of leads, but very few were converting. Sales were frustrated. Which caused friction between the teams.

Because we were always targeted on revenue, we could see the inefficiency in the system: To hit those goals, we had to drive massive lead volumes. And that meant relying on an increasingly expensive MDR team to work low-intent leads from gated content.

Worse, our best content wasn’t actually being consumed. It was stuck behind forms that buyers didn’t want to fill out.

At the same time, I was watching how I bought things as a consumer. I wasn’t filling out forms. 
I was listening to podcasts, joining Slack communities, watching videos, and chatting with peers. That’s when it really clicked for me: the way B2B buyers behave has changed - but our marketing hadn’t caught up.

So I made the call to test a different approach. I had been following the work of Chris Walker at Refine Labs, who was very vocal about the importance of shifting to a Demand Generation approach. The more I heard what he had to say, the more curious I was to test it for myself.

We ungated our highest-value content. We stopped measuring success by traditional MQLs and tracked it through to pipeline. We launched a media-led strategy - newsletters, videos, podcasts - to build consistent awareness and trust.

And we realigned our team around one shared goal: make sales easier by generating real demand.

It wasn’t a quick switch. It took internal education, trust, and experiments to prove the model. But here’s what we saw:

• When we turned off inefficient lead gen campaigns in one region, redirected the budget to ungated content and high-value assets, demo requests went up - not down.
• Sales started to comment on lead quality improving.
• Our content was finally being consumed again, meaning it could actually have some impact, helping us to build credibility and trust with our audience.

The tipping point for me was realising this wasn’t just about leads - it was about future growth. Lead gen might get you short-term numbers, but demand gen builds the brand, the pipeline, and the trust that fuel long-term revenue.

That’s why we made the switch. And that’s why I’m sharing everything we learned in this course - so you can make the shift too, and bring your team along for the journey.

The 95–5 Rule

When I first heard Chris Walker talk about the idea that only a small percentage of your market is actively buying at any given time, it was a real mindset reset.

And then, LinkedIn backed it up with research, confirming that as little as 5% of your total addressable market is typically in an active buying cycle. That means the other 95% of your ICP aren’t ready to buy today, but they might be, eventually.

The challenge? To be the brand they think of when they are.

The opportunity? To win mindshare now, before intent is declared, before your competitors even know they’re in-market.

That was when we decided to invest in creating demand with the 95%.

That meant building a content engine that educates, adds value, and keeps us front of mind, so when those buyers eventually move in-market, they already trust us.

But here’s the key: you can’t rely on the same content you used for lead gen.

The eBooks, gated PDFs, and surface-level blog posts that were built to capture contact info?
They don’t work when your goal is to build trust, not just traffic.

We had to reimagine our entire content approach, shifting from transactional assets to ongoing media: podcasts, video series, newsletters, and playbooks designed to teach, entertain, and connect.

The Dark Funnel

Here’s the hard truth: most of your buyers’ journey is invisible to you.

They're not clicking tracked links or filling out forms. They're sharing links in Slack. They're asking peers for recommendations. They're watching clips on LinkedIn, lurking in comment threads, or DMing a podcast episode to a teammate.

This is what we call the dark funnel - and it’s where most B2B buying decisions start today.
You won't be able to track it with traditional attribution tools, and that used to frustrate me.

Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not working. If you’re showing up in those conversations with helpful, relevant, memorable content, you’re shaping the buying decision long before sales gets a look in.

So we stopped obsessing over what we could track, and started focusing on what we could influence. More importantly, we focused on what actually matters. Pipeline, revenue, and efficiency.

Even if you can’t perfectly track every buyer touchpoint, if your pipeline is growing, your revenue is increasing, and your conversion rates are improving, the model is working.

We learned to let go of the need for perfect attribution, and instead built a strategy that consistently delivered real, measurable business outcomes.

Ungated Content

One of the biggest tactical shifts we made at Cognism was un-gating our best content.

Why? Because we knew the 95% weren’t ready to talk to sales yet - but they still had questions. And we wanted to be the ones answering them.

By removing gates from our blogs, playbooks, and videos, we made it ridiculously easy for potential buyers to engage. They could consume on their terms, share it freely, and come back when they were ready. And guess what? They did.

When someone fills out a demo request after spending weeks reading your content and watching your videos? That’s a high-intent, sales-ready lead - and it’s happening without friction.

Gating used to be how we controlled access. Now, ungating is how we earn attention.

Adopt a media mindset

This is probably the most important long-term shift: stop thinking like a traditional B2B marketer. Start thinking like a media company.

I realised that to consistently engage the 95%, we needed to show up regularly, with content they actually want to consume. That meant building a media engine - not just a campaign calendar.

We launched:

• Podcasts split by persona that pulled back the curtain on what was working (and what wasn’t)
• Video series that taught, entertained, and built trust
• Newsletters that didn’t just link dump new content, but actually delivered value
• Live events, again split by persona that allowed our audience to get a more human look inside our org.

This kind of content builds brand affinity, audience loyalty, and long-term demand. When those 95% shift into the buying window, your brand is already the familiar, trusted name. You’re not competing - you’re closing.

Course homework

To apply what you’ve learned, choose at least one of the following exercises:

1. Audit your gated content

• List your top five content assets.
• Are they gated? Why?
• What might happen if you ungated them?
• Compare performance: gated vs ungated (CTR, time on page, pipeline generated).
  

2. Map your dark funnel influence

• Identify the private or untracked channels where your audience hangs out (Slack groups, WhatsApp, podcasts, LinkedIn comments, YouTube).
• What content formats would naturally appear in those places?
• Where are you currently missing?

3. Draft a 95–5 content strategy for your ICP

• Who is your ICP, and what do they care about before they’re in-market?
  
  
  • Create a basic content plan that answers:
  • What can we teach them?
  • What can we give away freely?
  • What content would earn their attention each week?
    

Lesson 2: Building internal buy-in

Goal: Mobilise your organisation - stakeholders, budget, and sales - to support the shift.

Why this lesson matters

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that pivoting to demand gen isn’t just a marketing decision - it’s a company-wide shift.

And if you don’t bring the rest of the business with you, especially sales, leadership, and finance, it will stall before it starts.

When I first introduced the idea of moving away from lead gen at Cognism, I got pushback. Of course I did - MQLs were a known quantity. They were predictable, easy to track, and had years of historical data behind them. What I was suggesting? It felt risky. Unmeasurable. Fluffy, even.

But here’s the thing: you can’t change the system if you don’t change the scorecard.

This lesson is all about showing you how to do that. I’ll walk you through the mistakes I made, the conversations I had to repeat (more than once), and how we eventually got the full business behind a demand gen strategy.

Because demand gen isn’t just a channel - it’s a different way of thinking. And to make it stick, you’ll need buy-in at every level.

Let’s dive into how you make that happen.

Performance speaks louder than opinions

One of the turning points in securing buy-in was when I made a simple but powerful change: we split our funnel reporting.

Instead of lumping all leads into a single dashboard, we created two clear streams:

• Traditional lead gen: gated content downloads, webinar signups, and nurture form fills.
• Demand gen: inbound demo requests, direct hand-raisers, and high-intent product engagement.

This split gave us the clarity we needed to measure performance side by side, conversion rates, velocity, ROI. And the results spoke for themselves:

• MQL to SQO: under 2%
• Inbound demo to SQO: close to 20%

That’s when I went back and looked at our historical data to understand what had actually been driving revenue. What I found was clear: over 85% of our closed-won revenue had come from inbound demand, not traditional content leads.

Only around 15% came from our lead gen efforts, despite the volume we were driving. And while the machine looked efficient on the surface (low CPLs, strong MDR booking rates), the actual conversion to revenue was just 0.2%.

It wasn’t scalable.

That analysis was a turning point. It gave me the evidence I needed to prove that while lead gen could generate activity, it didn’t translate to meaningful business outcomes.

So we shifted our focus. Away from chasing content downloads, and toward generating high-intent inbound. People who were actively declaring their interest in what we sell. Because that’s what consistently converted. And that’s what aligned with how modern buyers actually buy.

When you walk into leadership meetings with that kind of stat, it becomes hard to argue that lead gen is still the best use of your marketing budget.

Efficiency isn’t optional

One of the biggest wake-up calls for us was just how inefficient our lead gen model had become. Our old MQL-to-SQO conversion rate sat at around 2%. That means for every 100 leads we passed to sales, only two became serious opportunities. It was a volume game, and a frustrating one, especially for sales.

In contrast, when we started generating inbound demand through our new approach, ungated content, consistent media, and high-intent hand-raisers, our conversion rates jumped to nearly 20%. That’s a 10x improvement in efficiency.

This data further backed up my case to shift towards a demand generation model. Because when sales starts to feel that difference in lead quality? That’s when the buy-in gets real. The conversation shifts from “why are we doing this?” to “how can we do more of it?”

If you’re facing scepticism internally, this is where I’d start. Don't try to win the argument - let the numbers do it for you.

Try this:

• Build two separate dashboards: one for content download ‘MQLs’, and one for inbound demos.
• Compare cost per opportunity, time to close, and average deal size.
• Present your findings in your next sales or board meeting. Frame it not as a marketing win, but as a business case for efficiency and growth.

Make marketing revenue-aligned

One of the most important shifts we made wasn’t just in strategy, it was in how we reported that strategy to the business.

We started by identifying which tactics actually converted to revenue. That meant digging into CRM data, comparing traditional content leads with declared-intent inbound, and focusing our investment on what drove real outcomes: pipeline, SQOs, and closed-won deals.

This wasn’t about abandoning lead metrics altogether, it was about surfacing what mattered most to sales and finance:

• For sales: better quality leads that convert faster.
• For finance: a more efficient funnel that doesn’t require headcount scaling to grow.

By consistently reporting on conversion efficiency, showing how one declared-intent inbound could outperform dozens of content leads, we made the case clear.

And to bring it to life, I regularly shared real account journeys. I’d highlight how a buyer discovered us, what content they engaged with, and how multiple unseen touches led to a deal. It helped stakeholders understand the hidden nature of modern buying and why our strategy matched how real people evaluate.

When you frame marketing as a growth lever that improves efficiency and drives better commercial outcomes, you don’t just get buy-in. You get advocacy.

Course homework:

To start driving internal alignment, choose at least one of the following exercises to complete.

1. Build a business case using content downloads vs inbound performance

Use your own data - or benchmark it against stats like ours at Cognism - to show the difference in conversion rates, pipeline influence, and revenue contribution between traditional MQLs and inbound demand. You should look at:

• MQL → SQO conversion %
• Inbound → SQO conversion %
• Cost per MQL vs Cost per inbound demo
• Average deal size and velocity comparison (if available)

2. Host a cross-functional strategy session

Bring together your paid, demand gen, and sales leaders for a working session on what’s currently working, where friction exists, and where a demand-led approach could make the biggest impact. Discuss:

• Where do sales see quality gaps in current leads?
• Which paid channels drive real pipeline?
• What content do buyers engage with most before they convert?
• How can we better align content, targeting, and sales follow-up?

3. Pitch your first media loop pilot

Demand gen needs repeatable, valuable content formats to sustain awareness and trust. That’s where media loops come in - regular newsletters, podcasts, YouTube series, or event series that serve your ICP week after week.

Choose one pilot idea and pitch it to a senior stakeholder:

• What’s the format?
• Who’s the audience?
• What will it teach or offer them?
• How will you measure success?
• What budget or resources do you need to test?

Guest lecture: Insights from €20M+ in Demand Gen Spend with YOYABA

At YOYABA, we’ve studied demand generation performance across 27 instances of B2B SaaS companies such as ​​Hubspot and Personio, with over €20M+ in ad spend. The results paint a clear picture: traditional lead generation is not just inefficient - in almost every case, it’s unsustainable. Let us break it down.

1. The reality of lead gen economics

On average, the conversion rate from gated content leads to closed-won ARR was just 0.4%. In every instance but one, the spend-to-ARR ratio was at least 3x higher than what a healthy business model could sustain.

The only exception? A traditional German manufacturing ICP with exceptionally strong product-market fit. Outside of that rare case, gated content campaigns consistently underdelivered. 

They generated form fills, yes - but they created minimal spillover in the form of followers, brand lift, or meaningful engagement. In most cases, their impact ended at the spreadsheet.

2. Why the biggest challenge arises after 2-4 months

Most CMOs can prove the funnel is broken. That part is obvious - finance and leadership rarely dispute it. Many even manage to win approval for demand generation tests, especially if they can tell a compelling story.

The real challenge comes 2–4 months into the shift. That’s when lead volumes drop, SDRs run dry, and demand gen hasn’t yet had enough time to show compounding results. Without preparation, this pressure breaks the change.

So what do you do? You prepare the organisation for the dip.

Frame it upfront: tell leadership the decline in leads is part of the journey, not a failure.

Offset pressure: consider reducing budgets slightly to soften the spike in cost-per-lead.

Support sales differently: equip SDRs with alternative motions - cold calling or signal-based outbound - that aren’t reliant on gated content. 

When you normalise the dip and have alternatives ready, the organisation can weather the transition instead of abandoning it too soon.

3. Looking for early signals

One of the most common mistakes we see is only measuring success once pipeline arrives. By then, it’s too late to course-correct. Instead, demand gen leaders should track early signals that show cross-channel progress:

• Rising brand search volume
• Mentions of your brand on third-party websites
• Growth in ICP followers across social
• Buyers referencing your content in sales calls
• Higher “go-to-Google” rates (people searching your name when they want more info)
• Outbound reps reporting that more prospects already know your brand

These signals might not close deals overnight, but they tell you whether the strategy is working beneath the surface. Over time, they compound into pipeline.

The takeaway

Our data confirms what many marketers feel in their gut: gated lead gen rarely delivers lasting revenue. Demand gen, on the other hand, works, but only if you prepare your company for the transition and measure success the right way.

It’s not enough to prove the old model is broken. You need to prepare for the short-term challenges of change, support sales with interim tactics, and track the early signs of long-term gain.

Lesson 3: Reporting to the Board

Why this lesson matters:

If you want to scale a demand generation strategy, you need more than just good execution. You need trust. And that means reporting in a way that resonates with the people holding the purse strings -  your board and leadership team.

Early on in our transition at Cognism, I realised we had to change the narrative. We couldn’t keep reporting on marketing-sourced leads and MQL volume when those metrics weren’t aligned to revenue. Worse - they were undermining our credibility.

Boards care about growth. They care about pipeline, efficiency, ROI, and predictability. And if your reporting doesn't speak their language, demand gen will always be seen as a risky bet instead of a strategic move.

In this lesson, I’ll show you how we evolved our reporting to:

• Prove that brand and content are revenue-generating assets, not just “nice to have”
• Use CRM data to demonstrate influence, efficiency gains, and marketing’s contribution to pipeline

The truth is, demand gen works. But if you don’t prove it clearly - and consistently - you’ll never get the buy-in, budget, or headcount you need to scale it.

Let’s fix that.

Revenue-driven metrics

One of the first - and most important - changes we made at Cognism was redefining how marketing success was measured.

For years, like many B2B companies, we were reporting on MQLs: marketing-qualified leads based on form fills, gated content downloads, webinar sign-ups, etc. But the problem was clear: these numbers looked impressive on paper but weren’t driving meaningful revenue.

Most of those leads were low intent. Sales didn’t want them so we made a deliberate shift. We stopped chasing volume, and started focusing on what actually matters to the business:

• Pipeline created – Not just the number of leads, but how many real opportunities marketing is influencing and generating.
• Revenue closed – How much of that pipeline converts into revenue? What’s marketing’s contribution to closed-won business?
• ACV (Average Contract Value) – Are we helping attract and convert the right types of customers?
• Win rate – Are the leads we generate helping sales close more, faster?
• Sales cycle length – Is marketing helping accelerate deals through the funnel?

When we started reporting on these metrics, something shifted. Suddenly, marketing wasn’t seen as a cost centre - it was seen as a growth engine. And importantly, we were speaking the same language as sales, finance, and the board.

We still track MQLs - but not in the traditional sense. We look at declared intent inbounds: people who request a demo or engage deeply with product-related content. These are leads that want to talk to sales, not ones we’ve forced into a funnel. In fact speaking to sales is exactly what they want to do, it is the expected next step in their journey.

If you’re still being judged solely on content downloads, my advice is this: challenge it with data. Track how those convert through to revenue. Then compare that with demo requests or inbound demand gen leads. Show the board and your leadership team the difference in efficiency, pipeline contribution, and close rates.

Regional alignment

As Cognism grew, so did the complexity of our go-to-market motion. We weren’t just running marketing campaigns in one market anymore - we were building pipeline across multiple geographies, each with its own market maturity, buyer behaviour, language, regulations, and cultural nuances.

Which is why we begin to report by region.

• DACH, which stands for Deutschland (Germany), Austria, and CH (Confoederatio Helvetica, Switzerland)
• EMEA, which stands for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa
• NAM, which stands for North America, e.g. USA and Canada

Here’s why this matters:

• It lets us diagnose what’s working, where. If pipeline is strong in NAM but lagging in DACH, we know where to focus.
• It gives regional teams ownership and accountability. They can see how their campaigns are performing and course-correct quickly.
• It reflects real market conditions. For example, GDPR compliance in Germany is stricter than in the US - so engagement rates, channels, and conversion metrics will naturally vary.
• It allows us to allocate budget more effectively. Instead of splitting spend equally, we double down on regions that are showing high return or high potential.

Regional reporting has also improved cross-functional collaboration. Marketing, sales, and RevOps are now aligned not just globally - but locally. That’s been huge for increasing speed to insight and speed to action.

My advice? As soon as you start expanding into new territories - even if it’s just one or two - split your dashboards. It might feel like more work at first, but the clarity and decision-making power it gives your team is worth its weight in gold.

Shared accountability

Similarly to our reporting systems growing in complexity, so too did the level of shared accountability. Especially across regions, channels, and departments, we needed a model that could scale, create clarity, and bring teams together around a shared goal: generating pipeline and revenue.

That’s when we adopted the hub-and-spoke model.

At the centre of the hub were our paid and demand generation teams - responsible for strategy, execution, and performance at a global level. Around them sat the regional marketers and sales teams - the spokes - embedded in local markets, owning execution on the ground, and feeding insights back into the centre.

This structure worked because it made roles crystal clear:

• The hub focused on building scalable programs, owning performance infrastructure, and driving consistency in measurement.
• The spokes provided local context, activated programs regionally, and kept a pulse on what was resonating in their markets.

But structure alone isn’t enough - you need rhythm. So we put in place weekly and fortnightly cadences:

• Weekly syncs between demand gen and paid to check performance and reallocate budget based on what’s working
• Fortnightly meetings with regional marketers and sales to review pipeline progress, campaign feedback, and flag blockers
• Shared dashboards that made performance visible to everyone - not hidden in silos

Instead of finger-pointing when we missedX pipeline target, we had open conversations. Instead of misaligned goals, we had joint accountability. And instead of reporting for the sake of reporting, we created visibility that actually moved the business forward.

If you’re struggling with alignment, especially across multiple teams or markets, I’d highly recommend experimenting with this model. It’s helped us break down silos, speed up execution, and make sure that what marketing reports on matches what sales is experiencing day to day.

Testing frameworks

When you move from lead gen to demand gen, your biggest challenge isn’t creativity - it’s proving impact.

In the early days at Cognism, we realised we needed a more structured, data-driven way to test new ideas. Whether it was a new content format, a campaign angle, or a paid channel, every initiative had to ladder up to business impact - not just feel like a good idea in the moment.

So we adopted a clear testing framework for every campaign:

1. What’s the hypothesis?
   → Example: “If we launch a founder-led podcast for sales leaders, we’ll increase demo requests in our outbound persona.”
2. What’s the expected outcome?
   → Not just vanity metrics like views or likes - real signals like direct traffic, influenced pipeline, or demo conversions.
3. How does it connect to pipeline or revenue?
   → This is the most important question. If it doesn’t touch pipeline or support it indirectly, it probably isn’t a priority.
4. How will we measure it?
   → We set clear benchmarks up front - often tracked through dashboards visible across demand gen, sales, and leadership.

Crucially, we tied these experiments to broader OKRs, so every test wasn’t just an isolated win or loss, but part of a long-term growth objective. It changed how we reported to the board: suddenly, marketing became a predictable engine, not a creative black box.

It also helped our team fail fast, learn faster, and prioritise the channels and content types that delivered consistent results.

My advice: If you want long-term trust and budget, show the board not just that your ideas work - but that you have a system to scale them.

Early signals

In the lead gen world, you’re trained to look for hard conversions: a content download, or a contact form submission. But those metrics only tell part of the story, and usually far too late.

At Cognism, we realised that to build a scalable demand engine, we needed to understand whether our content was actually resonating with the right audience before they declared intent.

That meant looking beyond forms and into earlier signals, like repeat engagement, traffic surges to key content, and shares among our ICP.

These weren’t KPIs in the traditional sense, but they told us if we were building the right foundations: improving audience retention, expanding our reach inside target accounts, and delivering consistent value.

By monitoring these indicators, we could see whether we were on track to increase declared intent inbound over time. And importantly, we could adapt quickly, doubling down on what was working and reworking what wasn’t, well before pipeline showed up.

Early signals don’t replace revenue metrics, but they help predict them.

• Surges in traffic to high-intent pages
  → We treated spikes in views to our product or pricing pages as buying signals, even before form submissions.
• Repeat engagement with high-value content
  → If someone watched multiple episodes of our podcast or consistently engaged with a newsletter, we flagged it.
• Multiple signals from the same account
  → One person viewing a blog post is interesting. Three people from the same company across different roles? That’s buying behaviour.
• Social interaction patterns
  → When ICPs were liking, sharing, or commenting on key posts, we viewed that as a signal of rising brand awareness in that segment.

These signals didn’t always show up in our attribution model, but they did show up in tools like Qualified and Dreamdata. Platforms like these gave us visibility into what was happening before an MQL was even created. Which accounts were returning to our site, what content they were engaging with, and where intent was starting to build.

That insight helped us spot warm markets, validate which topics were resonating with our ICP, and guide where we focused spend, before the pipeline landed. It allowed us to make faster, smarter decisions based on real buyer behaviour, not just what showed up in last-touch attribution.

We went from asking ‘What did marketing deliver last quarter?’ to asking ‘Where is demand starting to build - and how can we support it before the competition does?’

That change didn’t just improve alignment with sales, it gave our board a forward-looking view. Instead of just reporting on what had already happened, we could show them what was likely to happen and where we were doubling down in response.

Course homework:

To apply the concepts from this lesson, try one or more of the following:

1. Build an executive dashboard

Create a board-level dashboard that tracks the metrics that matter: pipeline generated, win rates, sales cycle time, and marketing-sourced revenue. Ensure it's broken down by region and channel, and easily accessible to exec sponsors for full transparency.

Plan a quarterly “Demand Gen Performance Review”

Set up a recurring cadence with your CMO, CFO, and VP Sales to walk through performance - what’s working, what’s being tested, and what’s coming next. Use this meeting to reset expectations, share early signals, and validate your next bets.

Define three DG experiments

Pick a demand gen initiative (e.g., a new media loop, a revised paid campaign, or a content partnership). Outline:

• The hypothesis
• Success metrics (e.g., intent signals, influenced pipeline, demo velocity)
• Timeline for review

Wrapping up module 1: Your step by step for switching from lead gen to demand gen

You’ve just completed the first stage of your shift from lead gen to demand gen. If you’re here, it means you’re serious about modernising your marketing - and leading a change that most teams are still only talking about.

So let’s pause and recap what we’ve covered, and more importantly, lay out the concrete steps you can take from here.

Your demand gen transformation checklist

If I were doing it all over again, here’s the sequence I’d follow:

1. Redefine success

• Stop reporting on content downloads that don’t convert.
• Align your goals to pipeline, revenue, ACV, win rate, and sales cycle.

2. Audit your content & conversion strategy

• Identify your top assets - ungate what’s valuable.
• Start showing up where buyers already are, not just where you can track them.

3. Prove the model with a pilot

• Choose one region or campaign.
• Redirect budget to demand gen tactics: high-value content, dark funnel engagement, paid amplification.
• Track demo requests,pipeline growth, and deal velocity.

4. Get sales involved early

• Run joint retros on lead quality.
• Share buyer signals (even soft ones) so sales can gain access to depper, more meaningful intelligence

5. Report with confidence

• Build an executive dashboard that reflects the metrics the board cares about.
• Use early indicators (page views, repeat engagement, account signals) to forecast - not just report.

6. Think like a media company

• Launch your first media loop: podcast, newsletter, YouTube series, whatever your ICP would subscribe to.
• Deliver value week after week, with consistency and creativity.