B2B demand generation in 2026: Why lead gen isn’t enough

(0:00) James: The pipeline's kind of gone cold, there's not much in there, they've got the pressure on them to hit a certain target. They hit a ceiling and they just can't really grow beyond it. We all know referrals are great, but they're so unpredictable, they're so unreliable. The best time to put demand generation in place is 12 months ago, isn't it? But if you, obviously people can't do that, so the next best time is now. CEOs still want attribution — they want to know, did that marketing intervention have an impact on this particular opportunity coming into the pipeline. So it's become really hard for marketing leaders to demonstrate that end to end. So today we're gonna talk about lead generation and demand generation, and we're gonna try and explain the differences between the two. I think there's still quite a lot of confusion, not just with CEOs and CROs but also marketeers as well.

(0:48) Craig: So if we start with lead generation, I think there's two types of lead generation. There's short-term and there's long-term. So in terms of short-term — and I know you'll have views on this as well, James — but short term very much is that kind of, we're at the end of the quarter, we've got a big hole in the pipeline, we need to generate leads, it's panic stations, it's a little bit of desperation, it's spraying prey, it's sending out emails to thousands of people and just hoping that something is gonna come in. But it is understandable that people kind of jumped to that point, isn't it, you know, ultimately.

(1:22) James: It, I can see why a leader may reach a point where the pipeline's kind of gone cold, there's not much in there, they've got the pressure on them to hit a certain target, and for someone that isn't fully aware of how things work in terms of how marketing works, for example, it's easy to think, well, just go and generate more leads. That's like asking a salesperson to just close more deals — it doesn't address the root cause of the problem, which is that there isn't enough demand there in the first place, which I think, obviously, is where demand generation comes in. And no one really wants to be in that situation, but often people find themselves there if they haven't got a demand generation program running.

(2:06) Craig: People that are in that position kind of go round these cycles, don't they? They'll try one thing — they've had an email from a company that promises them 10 leads on LinkedIn through automation — and then they'll hire an SDR and the SDR won't work, and they'll go do all sorts of different things, and they'll cycle through it. And what always ends up happening is that "shit doesn't work, marketing doesn't work" — but it's because there isn't that underlying demand generation there to feed any lead generation effort.

(2:37) James: So I think that's short-term lead generation. Longer-term lead generation isn't entirely different in terms of approach, but it's less pressured, it's a kind of more sustained effort over time. Again, you've probably got a team of SDRs, you're probably doing outbound through email, LinkedIn DMs, but it's all very outbound focused — everything is focused on trying to convert people who are actually in the buying process at any one time. So you're not doing anything other than looking for people that are in a buying cycle. And as we know, only 5% of your market are ever actually in-market at any given time. So it's like fishing in a pond where 95% of the fish aren't gonna bite.

(3:24) Craig: So just as a bit of context, as we go through this podcast, we're gonna refer to the 95/5 rule on a fairly frequent basis. So the 95/5 rule is basically based on your full addressable market, your total addressable market. Only 5% of any market typically is active, so they're actively looking for a solution to a problem. The vast majority, the 95%, are inactive, and they may be looking for information or education on some of their internal problems, but they're not at the point where they're ready to actually look for partners, vendors, suppliers to actually help them solve that problem.

(4:06) James: Now, basically what you're saying is, for a long-term approach, if you're hitting everybody consistently over that time, then obviously you're gonna land on that 5% more often because you're just consistently hitting everybody. The problem with that — particularly for B2B, and even more so for those that are in a more niche kind of complex sales environment — is that you don't have enough in terms of volume in order to make that work. Like if you're targeting 500 companies, for example, because you're in a really niche sector, and you're hammering them month in, month out on the hopes that you're hitting the 5% of those that are in the market, you're alienating the 95% every single time you do that. So you're just pissing people off that are in that cycle, you're gonna get unsubscribed, you're gonna lose that data, or you're gonna even worse cause a bad reputation for yourself in the market.

(5:00) Craig: So that can work as a play if you've got high volume, but particularly in B2B, and for those that are in a complex sell environment, often there isn't even enough volume there to make that kind of play work either. So demand generation is what successful companies do consistently over time, and they ultimately become the go-to in their niche, and that means that whenever there's a new opportunity, they're always part of that day-one consideration set. They're always the one, or 2, or 3, top companies that everyone in the market knows as the go-to for a particular solution.

(5:40) James: If you break demand generation down, we see it that there's 3 levels to it. So you've got broad market demand generation, you've got account-based demand generation, and then you've got demand capture. So we'll take each one of those in turn and explain the dynamics of each.

(5:56) Craig: So put simply, broad market demand generation is where you are creating content and distributing that content across multiple channels, trying to engage your audience, and build awareness, familiarity and trust over time. So that's targeting your full addressable market — that may be a lot of companies that you've never heard of before, but they still fit your ICP, but they don't sit within your CRM. This is really defining a particular niche, a particular ICP, a persona, and you're pushing out content through various different channels, trying to engage them, get them to know, like and trust you. It's very much an always-on approach. It's not about one piece of content, it's about continuously engaging with your market.

(6:42) James: And then there's account-based demand generation, so this works for more complex B2B sales, where you've got a much smaller number of high-value, more complex deals that are few and far between, in comparison to maybe a SaaS market where it's at the other end of the spectrum, where you've got a large number of companies. With account-based demand generation, you are targeting a much smaller, very defined set of target accounts, and you're taking the same approach that you take with broad market demand generation. You're still pushing out content, distributing it across multiple channels with the aim of building familiarity and trust over time.

(7:27) Craig: And why it's so important that you take a demand generation approach with complex B2B is because trust is such a critical part of the whole process. In any complex, high-value deal, the risk on the buyer's part is so big, that typically, if trust hasn't been built over time, it's very hard to take a lead generation approach, because you'll be coming in probably very late into the opportunity, and therefore there'll be others in the same opportunity that have taken the time with an effective demand generation program to build that trust — or maybe they have personal relationships through referrals — therefore they're always gonna be in a stronger position than if you just take a very basic kind of lead generation approach.

(8:10) James: Yeah, and you can't build that trust in the sales cycle itself, can you? You just simply don't have enough time. There's some stats we often share around Google — I can't remember them exactly, but the number of touch points you need to have with a particular person to build trust is far greater than you could ever do, particularly for a complex sale, in a couple of discovery calls or something like that. And at the very best, if you don't have that level of trust, then you're at a disadvantage. At the worst case, you're not gonna be in the room at all, because most organizations aren't gonna invite you into those conversations if you haven't demonstrated at least some level of credibility and trust in the first place. So if you get to the sales process, or run a lead gen program and get a couple of opportunities and you're in a discovery call but you haven't done that, at the very best you're at a distinct disadvantage if the other people in the room have.

(9:07) Craig: When you take a demand generation approach, in real terms, it's gonna look something like this: over maybe a 12 to 18 month period, you might have engaged with a decision maker, or multiple decision makers, in a buying group, and they will have engaged with you through multiple forms of content — it could be they've discovered your podcast and they've watched several episodes over a period of time, you invite them to webinars and they may have registered but not turned up, but they may have caught the recording, they will have seen you on LinkedIn, they maybe have watched videos on YouTube. But if you're pushing out this expertise, this thought leadership, consistently, buyers will get to know you, they get to trust you. So that's really what it looks like in practice — you could look at a whole history of engagement over a long period of time, and there'll be so many different touch points that a buyer would have needed to go through, and potentially their colleagues in the organization will be sharing that content with them too. And we've looked at this many, many times, and we're gonna come to reporting later, cos this is the real challenge today — how you actually track, measure, and prove that that is all happening. But really, in practical terms, this is what's happening — it's, in many ways, invisible to you.

(10:29) James: I think there's lots of people that kind of run both sides of that equation, aren't there? We just talked about demand generation in terms of sharing your expertise, building credibility, building trust — traditional content marketing, I suppose, if you want to think of it that way — and we've shared the lead gen approach, and there's lots of people doing one or the other. And I think the real challenge is doing both, consistently, and it being data driven, cos I think ultimately that's what people need to do in order to be successful. And I think a key component to that is demand capture — which is probably not actually a term all that many people are familiar with, but effectively what it means is: if you're going into market generating that demand, publishing content, investing a lot of time, effort and money in doing so, but not then listening for people when they show that they're potentially interested in you — and therefore moving people from that demand generation side into a more lead generation effort when they show that intent — if you're just expecting them to come to you, that isn't, as we know, always the case. So demand capture is really intended to listen for when all your demand generation efforts are paying off and people are showing that they have intent in you. And there's multiple ways of doing that — traditionally that may have been a form on the website, or going to events and having a lead form there, things like that.

(12:05) Craig: I think we've seen recently those more traditional methods decline in their effectiveness. Particularly the kind of traditional inbound approach with the gated guide — less so on the webinar side — but the piece of content that you publish and share in return for data, we've seen that method decline. So these days, from a demand capture perspective, we're focusing a lot more on intent and signals as a method to pick up when people are interested in that content that you share in your demand generation program, and, just as importantly, when that does happen, pushing them into a lead generation strategy or approach. Effectively what we're doing there is nurturing the 95 until they're ready. When they are ready, the demand capture process picks them up, and when the demand capture process picks them up, they can move into the lead generation process.

(13:01) James: So it's about treating people appropriately, depending on what stage they are in that 95-5 kind of split.

(13:10) Craig: Yeah, the beauty of demand capture is that you are only focusing on, ideally, high-intent buyers, so you're using signals to find those high-intent buyers, and if you're consistent with the demand generation and demand capture program over time, the results start to really compound. Because demand capture is far more effective if the people that are in the market that you've identified through signals already know you, because you've engaged with them for 12 to 18 months, if not longer — the chances of you converting them are a lot higher than if you just take a very traditional lead generation approach. So that's really the key with demand capture, and obviously, if you're doing demand generation over a very long period of time — many of our clients have done it consistently over many years — demand capture actually becomes less important, because when you become that go-to company, people just naturally come to you anyway. So demand capture, whilst it's always advised that you keep running it in parallel, does become less important, because ideally, every time someone in your space comes to market, they will already know you and they'll reach out to you anyway. We've got to be clear that is nirvana, isn't it?

(14:23) James: You know, people don't start running a demand generation program one month and by month 6 they're the most well-known supplier in their market and people start flooding into them, and they don't need to do demand capture. We're talking years, aren't we — and in some cases decades — of this kind of demand generation work, to really cement yourself as that fully known, go-to organization in the space. You can't expect people to come to you — you need to have some level, some will — but equally, you need to encourage that to happen, let's say.

(14:58) Craig: Yeah, and this is where you've got — whether it's your founders or your subject matter experts — speaking at events, they're being asked to go on podcasts, they are seen as the thought leaders, the experts in the industry. Now, that happens without you paying for it — you're approached by influencers, content creators, other organizations, and you're the kind of keynote speaker at the event. So it does take a long time to get to that point.

(15:30) James: I think the other important aspect with demand capture that's key to talk about is, as we always talk with CEOs — they understand demand generation is the best approach if done consistently, and it's an always-on approach, but where they struggle is the challenge they have in their own mind: well, that sounds great, but we haven't got 12 to 18 months or years to build our pipeline, we need impact today, we need results now. And that's where demand capture can still play a part. The beauty of it is you're not spraying and praying like lead generation, you're not trying to hit the entire market with a generic message — you're only going after those that are showing high intent through signals.

(16:14) Craig: Yeah, as long as you also, at that same moment, start your demand generation program. Because what we'll often see — and it more applies to lead generation than demand capture in the traditional sense — we'll often see people reach that point of panic, that point of need, and, understandably, as we talked about at the start, they'll then jump to lead generation, run a 3-month campaign, get jack shit from it, and then, maybe get a couple of referrals in, the pressure goes away, and then 6 months later they're back in that same position. Now it's such a constant kind of vicious circle, if you don't put demand generation in place. The best time to put demand generation in place is 12 months ago, isn't it — but obviously people can't do that, so the next best time is now. And if you constantly just jump to the quick, short-term solution, you'll be in a constant cycle of maybe wasting money on expensive campaigns on LinkedIn, etc., without ever having built the foundation for which demand generation really works, which is of course that kind of outreach—

(17:25) James: Sorry, it's cutting across you — it's like taking a leap of faith. In 12 to 18 months' time, if you've done this consistently, you'd be in a far stronger position, where you are getting more opportunities coming to you, when your outreach is more effective because you've got more familiarity. Yes, you've got to hustle in those 12 to 18 months, in that period leading up to when typically you start to see the results, but if you fast forward to 12 months' time, if you have put the effort in, you're gonna be in a far stronger position.

(18:01) Craig: So, but that's again just to reinforce this — not to say that you can't generate short-term opportunities through demand capture, and it's a far more considered approach that means you won't burn your whole audience, your whole market, with a very sort of spammy kind of outreach approach.

(18:21) James: Absolutely. I can touch on that a little bit as well, because I think what we probably haven't explained very practically is what we mean by demand capture in that kind of world. What we mean is using something like HubSpot's buyer intent tool, or others, to listen for when people are researching particular topics that are relevant to you. They may not know about you, they may never have heard of you. Using HubSpot's buyer intent tool again to see when people have visited your website — of course they will know about you in that case — or looking for signals such as job changes, new hires, and using those insights to prompt a response or a piece of outreach to somebody that may be more likely to be in that buying journey, rather than hitting everyone and hoping for the best. So I'm not sure if we've been really clear about what we mean by that, but hopefully that helps.

(19:10) Craig: Yeah, and just the last point before we move on, I think — it's so easy, and we see this so often, that companies try to commit to a demand generation program, they haven't got the right processes in place, they haven't got the right resources, and they quickly lose momentum, and then they just revert back to what most companies have if they're not investing in demand generation — a heavy reliance on referrals, supplemented by a sort of yo-yo approach to lead generation. So that means the pipeline is lumpy, and they always end up in a sort of growth plateau — they hit a ceiling and they just can't really grow beyond it. We all know referrals are great, but they're so unpredictable, so unreliable, you never know when you're gonna get them. With lead generation, again, it's just not an effective way of generating opportunities — you're just really relying on a little bit of luck at getting in at the right time. So this is why it's so unpredictable — if you're waiting for referrals, you've got a hit-and-miss lead generation program running, you're never gonna grow beyond a certain point, because it is just not predictable, and everyone wants predictability when they invest in marketing.

(20:25) James: Because referrals should be those cherries on top, shouldn't they? If you've got this always-on demand generation system where you're constantly communicating, sharing your expertise with the 95% so that you're known and trusted when they move into the 5%, you've got demand capture that recognizes when people are moving into that and then triggers outbound lead generation, and that should deliver much more consistent pipeline growth over time. If you're getting referrals on top of that, they should be the cherries on top, as I said.

(20:58) Craig: If you're only relying on referrals, it's so unpredictable, it's so precarious as a position to be in really, isn't it. So, let's say you're running a demand generation program — we still see a lot of programs running with the old playbook, so very much orientated around MQLs, gated content, and not really thinking about the channels that the content they produce is gonna be distributed through.

(21:30) James: Now, we've done another podcast on this whole thing, so we're not gonna go into huge detail, but we very much think, for any demand generation program, you need to take a channel-first approach. This is where things have really changed, and what's working in 2026 is really a focus on creating specific types of content for different channels, and each channel will have its own objectives — it'll generate different types of outcomes, some channels are better for discoverability, others are better for conversion. A basic example of that is LinkedIn is great for discovery and building authority, your website is really there for conversion. YouTube is great if you can get people to watch longer-form video, cos the longer they spend with you, the more they're gonna trust you, understand your expertise.

(22:23) Craig: So, not gonna get into that, as I say — we've got another podcast on our channel that talks about this at length, another one on buyer intent as well, so definitely recommend checking both of those out, but they really cover the more modern approach that works in 2026. So another thing to add into the mix really, particularly if you're an organization engaged in complex B2B sales, long sale cycles, large buying groups, deals that are hundreds of thousands of pounds plus into the millions — it's not gonna be very easy to generate lots of leads from a standing start.

(23:04) James: You've gotta build a lot of trust, haven't you, to do that. Sorry for cutting over you — we talked a lot today about having to generate trust in order for people to come to you and engage with you in a buying process. There's a certain level of trust needed to sell a $15 widget on a SaaS platform, and there's a whole new level of trust when you're trying to sell £100,000, up to a million-dollar kind of consulting framework or program.

(23:47) Craig: Yeah, so we spoke with a CEO some time ago, comparing us with an agency that focused on SaaS — the conversation was like, well, it looks like their website, they're creating 30 leads in the first 90 days for a SaaS company — that's because the leads are out there to be generated. If you really think about it, for complex sale, how many opportunities are there for a large-scale transformation program that's north of a million pounds? There just aren't that many opportunities out there, so you're not gonna generate loads of leads like that.

(24:09) James: You're not comparing apples with apples, and you've got to be realistic about the number of opportunities — particularly if you're targeting a very small, defined set of accounts. So what we also recommend, if you're looking at new business, is to really try and think about more low-friction, "tin opener" type offers, as we call them, which will get initial engagement within that new logo, but from a buyer's perspective, there's less commitment on their part, less of an obligation — it's an opportunity to sort of feel each other out, see if there's a good fit, and typically it's a great way to build trust, and it's more realistic that you're gonna find more opportunities that are like that.

(24:52) Craig: Yeah, and I think to add to that just briefly — obviously a lot of our clients do this, and the ones we've seen that are really effective are where that engagement has value in its own right. The ones where we've seen them not be effective is, say, when there's an audit that's done — an audit's a good example. Oftentimes an audit has, obviously, a PDF output at the end, and the value of the audit in its own right is very low, because there isn't any change or impact that it has on its own. Things like assessments, whereby immediate returns on investment can be achieved — I'm thinking of one for a client that did a license review that enabled immediate results, because the licenses could be updated and money could be saved immediately. Those things have a much better impact and are much more attractive. So I think the audit is the go-to for people doing this sort of thing, but I do think — and we've done them ourselves, haven't we, successfully — that if you can find something within your service offering that has an immediate, and kind of isolated in its own right, return, then that's the best place to look.

(26:11) James: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The last thing we wanted to talk about was reporting, because this has become a real point of tension, I think, now between CEOs and marketing leaders. I think we've been through a phase over the last few years where the MQL was the kind of main KPI, the main metric that everyone accepted was the right thing to measure. I think we've all learned that that's not the case, and in many respects, you can blame some of the tech vendors — those that kind of came up with this MQL concept — but it's distracted marketeers from what's really important as a measure, and that is the contribution to pipeline. The useful thing with MQLs was that it was more trackable, through a lead form, so you could see the impacts, but the problem with MQLs, as we all know — many, many still use it — is you can't really distinguish between those that are high intent and those that are low intent. You can't really distinguish between the 5% and the 95% with an MQL, cos it's typically based on "we've downloaded a white paper" or "attended a webinar."

(27:24) Craig: Yeah, so it's a big gap, isn't there, between what an MQL is and what an opportunity is. And until probably recently, there hasn't really been anything in place other than, often, an SDR team or a sales team, whose job is to convert that MQL into something which is actually pipeline. And I think a lot of the stuff we talked about earlier, about intent and capture, can help the marketing team take control of that a little bit more, and the tools are now in marketing's hands in order to turn what might previously be considered an MQL into something more concrete and more pipeline, through things like social automation or HubSpot's prospecting agent, for example, things like that.

(28:09) James: The other dynamic at play is that buyers are now not responding to those kind of requests for email submissions, and they're not filling out forms anymore — they don't have to, cos the content's out there, it's freely available, you don't have to sign up through a form to listen to a podcast. What has happened, in parallel, is while the CEOs are looking for more certain KPIs, they're looking for more predictable measures that prove ROI, prove the investment is working — on the flip side, it's got a lot harder for marketing leaders to actually demonstrate that, because buyers are so much more invisible.

(28:52) Craig: So if we take the point earlier where you've probably got a buyer in a complex sale that might go through a year, a couple of years, of engagement with many different forms of content — a lot of it you just can't track. You can't track who's watching your podcast, or listening to it, whether that's on YouTube or Spotify. It's very hard to know how much people are really taking on board your content, or your posts, your messages on LinkedIn. There are ways to find some sort of leading and lagging indicators, but it's very hard to build the true picture.

(29:14) James: And CEOs still want attribution — they want to know, did that marketing intervention have an impact on this particular opportunity coming into the pipeline? So it's become really hard for marketing leaders to demonstrate that end to end, to give the full picture. Software will only take you so far, data will only take you so far — what we've seen work really well is, even when you get someone to a discovery call, or even if there's a form on the website submitted, based on an enquiry, make sure you're asking the question of how people found you, how you ask the question on discovery calls — just get that anecdotal information as well, because you can still then add to the picture, and that helps to justify all the investment you're making in this demand gen program.

(30:17) Craig: So if you found that valuable, please check out our other content on Spotify, on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, also check out our website, Romy Associates dot com, and if you found it really valuable, then we'd love it if you gave us a like or subscribe, and we hope to see you next time.