Most demand generation strategies are built on a model that doesn't work.

The marketing funnel feels useful because it's simple. Awareness leads to consideration, which leads to conversion. It gives teams something to plan around, something to measure, something to point to when someone asks what marketing is actually doing.

The problem is it doesn't describe how people make decisions. It describes how businesses wish people made decisions.

Real buying behaviour doesn't move in a straight line. It starts with something unsettling — a missed target, a regulatory change, a conversation that won't quite leave someone alone — and then it meanders. People read. They ask questions. They revisit the same ideas from different angles, pause, come back weeks later, and often move backwards before they move forwards. Somewhere in that process, a view forms. By the time they pick up the phone to a vendor, much of the decision has already been made.

Picture a VP of Supply Chain who sees a new disclosure rule, bookmarks two analyst notes, debates with the procurement team and three weeks later forwards your content to her CFO. That's how intent takes shape — slowly, through accumulation.

That changes everything about what demand generation is actually supposed to do.

Most demand isn't waiting to be captured

Most demand gen strategies start from the assumption that demand already exists. The market is out there. Your job is to find it, chase it down and convert it before a competitor does.

Sometimes that's true. Mostly, it isn't.

At any given moment, only a small slice of your market is actively looking for a solution. Everyone else is somewhere earlier, and "earlier" covers a lot of ground. Some people feel a problem but haven't named it yet. Some know something isn't working but can't picture what better would look like. Some have heard of solutions but don't feel any urgency to move.

From their perspective, they're not "in market." They're still figuring things out.

This is where a lot of marketing goes wrong. It tries to accelerate a decision that hasn't properly formed yet. It optimises for capturing intent instead of doing the harder, slower work of helping create it.

Of course, this isn't to say you should forget about the 10% who are ready to act.

In reality, a strong organisation has both systems in play:

• Demand capture: Use paid advertising and SEO to reach those in market.
• Demand generation: Give ideal buyers the insights they need to generate demand.

In complex markets, the problem is understanding

This matters even more when the problem itself is a moving target.

In sustainability, supply chains, and most of B2B technology, buyers are operating in environments that are genuinely shifting. Regulation is tightening. Scrutiny is increasing. What used to be fine no longer is. The stakes for getting it wrong are more visible than they were a few years ago.

But pressure isn't the same as clarity.

Buyers in these spaces don't just need a solution. They need to understand what's actually changing, why it matters to them specifically, and what their real options are. They need language for the problem. They need a sense of how people in similar situations are thinking about it. They need some way of judging what good looks like, before they can even evaluate whether you're it.

Without that foundation, there's nothing to convert. There's only hesitation.

Where marketing does its real work

If you take that seriously, the job of marketing looks quite different.

It's not about moving people through stages or nudging them toward a predefined action. It's about helping them make sense of something they don't fully understand yet. And that happens slowly, through accumulation.

An explanation that clarifies what's going on. An example that shows how someone else handled it. A reframe that makes the problem feel more tractable. These things don't produce instant results, but they're not supposed to. They're building something: a mental model, a vocabulary, a growing sense that action is not only necessary but possible.

The moment most demand gen strategies are chasing — the moment someone is genuinely ready to buy — is the output of that process. You can't skip the process and expect to reliably reach the moment.

Content isn't a channel — it's the mechanism

Content marketing is so frequently misunderstood for exactly this reason.

It gets slotted in alongside paid campaigns and sales enablement as another distribution tactic, another way to fill the top of the funnel. Which is a bit like saying a conversation is just a way of moving air around.

If marketing's actual job is to shape how people understand a problem, content is how that shaping happens. It's how ideas get introduced, tested, repeated and refined. It's how a company makes its view of the world available to other people and, over time, makes that view feel familiar, credible, worth listening to.

In practice, that looks like recurring explainers teams can forward internally, founder POV memos that reframe industry shifts or case narratives that show how peers navigated the trade‑offs. When it's working, it doesn't feel like a campaign. It feels like a consistent, ongoing explanation of something worth paying attention to.

Systems, not calendars

An engine is genuinely useful here, but only if you understand what an engine actually is.

It's not a content calendar. It's not a campaign schedule. It's a system with a core set of ideas at its centre — about the problem, the market, the trade-offs, what good looks like — expressed in different ways, for different moments, over time.

Over time, the system compounds. Your perspective becomes more recognisable. Familiarity builds into trust, not because of any single interaction, but because of repeated exposure to a consistent way of thinking.

That's the thing about trust. It's not a metric you can optimise in a quarter. It's a residue. So how exactly can you know it's working before pipeline shows up?

Look for leading indicators:

• Prospects repeating your language in sales calls
• Inbound mentions of your POV
• Repeat engagement from the right accounts
• Non‑marketing teams sharing your explainers internally
• Higher‑quality sales conversations (clearer problem framing, fewer "what do you do?" questions)

These are the signatures of understanding compounding.

What a system actually looks like

If you accept that demand is built through accumulated understanding, the question becomes: what are you actually building?

A useful way to think about it is four distinct jobs, each mapped to where a buyer actually is in their thinking.

Each motion serves a different moment. Each one does something the others can't. And they all need to run simultaneously, because your market contains people at every stage at any given time.

Take a company helping enterprises manage Scope 3 emissions. Some leaders don't yet understand why their supplier engagement programs keep stalling; they need their worldview reframed. Some sustainability teams understand the problem but lack the language to bring procurement along; they need clear explanations they can share internally. Some know exactly what they need but are weighing the risk of choosing the wrong solution; they need evidence, not more education.

A campaign aimed at the third group won't reach the first two. But a system running all four motions continuously reaches all of them. And over time, it moves people through.

That's what compounding looks like in practice. Not more content, but better coverage. The same ideas showing up in different forms, at different moments, for different versions of the same buyer.

A different question

Seen this way, the core question behind demand generation changes.

It's not just: how do we capture demand that already exists?

It's also about: how do we help demand take shape in the first place?

That's a harder question. Less immediate, harder to attribute, harder to justify in a quarterly review. But it's also the question that actually matches how decisions get made.

Demand generation is usually framed as a problem of efficiency — better conversion rates, smarter targeting, faster movement through the funnel.

In practice, it's a problem of understanding.

If your marketing isn't helping people make sense of what's changing in their world, it won't influence what they do next. And if it's not influencing what they do next, it isn't generating demand. It's just waiting for demand to show up on its own.

Most B2B marketing teams are producing constantly. And yet two foundational steps happen rarely if at all: understanding the market through real conversations, and testing whether the messages you're building actually resonate before you commit to them. Without those inputs, everything that follows is guesswork — expensive, time-consuming guesswork that looks like strategy.

The first blind spot: nobody's actually talking to customers

The reasons companies skip customer research are rarely about resources. They're about assumptions.

Leadership often believes it already understands the market. Executives who've been close to a product for years develop a kind of certainty about what customers need, what problems they're solving, what they're willing to pay for. Research starts to feel redundant. Why ask when you already know?

Marketing doesn't help itself here either. In many organisations it's treated as a promotional function: a team that turns strategy into campaigns and campaigns into leads. When marketing is framed that way, customer research falls outside its remit. That's a product problem, or a sales problem, or a leadership problem. Not a marketing problem.

So the research doesn't happen. And the work that follows is built on internal assumptions that nobody has tested.

The consequences tend to show up slowly, then suddenly. A product gets redesigned. A brand gets overhauled. Positioning shifts. All of it decided without speaking to the people it's meant to serve. The messaging that comes out the other side doesn't land because it was never grounded in how customers actually think about their problems. It uses the company's language, not the customer's. It describes features rather than the moment of frustration that made someone go looking for a solution in the first place.

The marketing starts to look like everyone else's. And when leadership notices it isn't working, the instinct is to look sideways: to competitors, to see what they're doing, to make sure the company is matching them activity for activity. That makes things worse. Now you have an echo chamber. The same messages, the same formats, the same corporate jargon, all circulating through a market that has learned to ignore it.

Sales suffers too, in ways that are harder to trace back to the original problem. Without customer insight feeding into how reps position the product, every conversation is partly a fishing expedition. Reps learn what works through trial and error, call by call. Demos miss the mark because nobody is quite sure what mark they're aiming for. The learning that does happen stays anecdotal, trapped in individual sales conversations rather than feeding back into the broader system.

By the time the problem becomes undeniable — customers leaving, revenue declining, internal confidence collapsing — the company is often willing to do the research it should have done at the start. Usually in the form of churn analysis. Which is, to put it plainly, research conducted after the damage is done.

The second blind spot: committing to messages before testing them

Even companies that do some form of customer research often skip the second step: testing whether the messages they've developed actually resonate before investing heavily in them.

The pattern is familiar. A team runs a workshop, develops a narrative, aligns on three or four key messages, and then immediately starts building. Reports, long-form content, campaigns, sales decks. Weeks of work committed to a hypothesis that hasn't been validated.

Sometimes it works. Often it doesn't. The content goes out, gets modest engagement, doesn't make its way into sales conversations, and quietly collects dust. The team moves on to the next thing.

Message testing doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as running a short post on LinkedIn to see whether a particular framing gets attention, or testing different angles in paid ads before writing the long version, or putting two problem statements in front of a handful of prospects to see which one makes them lean forward. The goal isn't statistical significance; it's signal. A rough sense of whether this idea resonates with the people you're trying to reach before you spend weeks on it.

The reason teams don't do this is partly cultural. Marketing gets measured on outputs: content produced, campaigns launched, leads generated. Testing means spending time and sometimes money to learn something, which can look like waste if you're not measuring learning as an outcome. The incentive structure pushes teams toward producing, not discovering.

So they guess. They decide internally what the market needs to hear, build it, and ship it. Sometimes they're right. More often, they're building for a version of the customer that only exists inside the company's own thinking.

Why this keeps happening

The deeper issue isn't that companies are lazy or incompetent. It's that most companies are structurally set up to produce marketing, not to learn from the market.

The pressure is to move quickly, to generate activity, to show the board that something is happening. Research takes time. Testing introduces uncertainty. Both can surface findings that challenge decisions leadership has already made and doesn't want to revisit.

Something uncomfortable sits underneath this. Research introduces evidence, and evidence can challenge assumptions that powerful people have staked their credibility on. Many people, consciously or not, prefer a confident internal guess to an uncomfortable external truth. It's a well-documented phenomenon in psychology and neuroscience, driven by the brain's priority for safety, coherence, and emotional comfort over objective accuracy.

Then, there's a structural problem that rarely gets named directly: marketing is too often positioned as an executor rather than a strategic voice. When that's the case, even a marketing leader who knows exactly what's needed — customer research, message testing, time to learn — doesn't have the standing to make it happen. They can make the case. The CEO can simply disagree.

I've seen this play out with two different results. A CMO who took redundancy over doing things they didn't believe would grow the company, and a marketing director who kept quiet to keep their job safe. Both are understandable. Neither fixes the problem.

Either way, the outcome tends to be the same. Companies move fast, skip the steps that feel slow, and then spend the next eighteen months fixing decisions they didn't think carefully enough about the first time. The positions get rebuilt. The content gets rewritten. The customer relationships that eroded have to be recovered. All of it more expensive and more damaging than the research would ever have been.

What changes when companies actually do this

The upside of research and testing isn't just better marketing; it's a better understanding of the business itself.

When you talk to customers properly — not through a quick post-sale survey but in a real conversation about the situation they were in before they found you — you start to find the shared moments of frustration that drive buying decisions. The tipping point that makes someone go from "we should probably think about this" to "we need to fix this now." That is gold. It's the raw material of every piece of content, every sales conversation, every product decision that follows.

You also get language. The words customers use to describe their own problems are almost always more useful than the words a marketing team would choose. They're specific. They're free of jargon. They describe real situations. When you put those words back into your marketing, it creates a flicker of recognition in the reader: the sense that someone actually understands what they're dealing with. That's hard to manufacture and very hard to copy.

Message testing adds a different kind of leverage. It means that by the time you commit to a major piece of content or a campaign, you already have some evidence that the central idea resonates. You're not guessing in the dark. You're investing in something that's shown early signals of working, which changes the confidence of the whole team and the quality of the brief.

Together, these two things turn marketing into a learning system, not a content factory. A function that continuously improves its understanding of the market and feeds that understanding into positioning, messaging, product decisions and sales conversations. The work gets sharper over time. The right accounts start to show up already familiar with how you think. Sales conversations get easier because prospects arrive with clearer problem framing. Marketing stops being blamed for results it was never set up to achieve.

Where to start

None of this requires a major transformation programme. It requires three habits, applied consistently.

Start there. Not with a rebrand. Not with a new content strategy. With conversations.

Most B2B marketing problems aren't creative problems. They're understanding problems.

The companies that do this well don't look like they're doing anything unusual. They just seem to know their market better than everyone else. And they do.