Most demand gen teams are very good at the last mile. Click-through rates, cost per lead, conversion off the landing page, dialed in, tracked, reported on weekly. Meanwhile, the deal is being won or lost six months earlier by people who are not in your CRM.
Devon Shaw, VP of Marketing at LinkedIn, put a number on it that I cannot stop thinking about: the average B2B deal cycle is 211 days. Twenty-two people influence it. Half inside the buying company, half outside. If you are building your demand gen strategy around capturing in-market demand, you are working with 5% of the available opportunity on any given day.
That is a structural problem, not a tactics problem.
The 95% who are not in market right now are still out there. They are reading content, forming opinions about vendors, getting influenced by peers, and building mental shortlists. When they enter the market seven months from now, the vendors they already trust are on the list. The ones they have never heard of are not. And no amount of retargeting budget fixes the problem of never having been on the list.
The demand gen playbook that actually works right now runs in two tracks simultaneously. Track one is what most teams are already running: bottom-funnel, in-market, intent-based. Track two is the one most teams are underinvesting in: building familiarity, trust, and mental availability with the 95% who will need you later.
Thought leadership ads from real people at the company, not the brand logo, reaching the ICP before they are in a buying cycle. These are outperforming single image ads at a 2.2x click-through rate, not because they are louder but because they feel like content, not advertising.
Video at the top and middle of funnel, not just the bottom. Shaw's data shows video performs throughout the full funnel. Most demand gen teams only use it at the top.
Company-level measurement instead of individual-level. If you are tracking individual clicks, you are missing the buying committee. Company intelligence tools show you what is happening at the account level, which is where B2B deals actually get made.
The pipeline you are building in Q4 was shaped by what you were doing in Q1. If you were only running bottom-funnel in Q1, there is not much to harvest in Q4. That is not a sales problem. That is a demand gen problem.
Worth a conversation if you are rethinking how you are allocating across the funnel.