‘A perfect storm’: Exploring B2B’s ‘lead gen crisis’

Lead gen has always been a B2B marketing leader’s number one job, argues Paige O’Neill, CMO at employee experience platform Culture Amp. What has changed is the amount of pressure on the marketing team to deliver.

“The buying cycle has changed. That’s the difference here and that’s why the pressure is ratcheted up, because the things we used to do to generate leads, they don’t work as effectively anymore,” she explains.

“When you layer on the changes in the buying cycle; the access the customer has to deep layers of research and information about the company, before they ever even raise their hand to say they’re interested in your products; [then] AI on top of all of that, you’ve got a perfect storm of a lead gen crisis in B2B.”

There are many factors feeding into this storm, not least a pressure on budgets O’Neill doesn’t believe will reduce any time soon. An eight-time B2B CMO, she recalls periods in her career where budgets would condense or expand, but now the cycle is different.

“Whether or not our companies or industries are growing, there’s an expectation that we’re going to get more efficient every year and that we should be able to do it with less,” she notes. “You get more C-level buying committee input into the buying decision because of those factors.”

Crucially, O’Neill believes artificial intelligence has “accelerated” these expectations of efficiency and the speed at which marketers are expected to move.

Over half of B2B brands ‘fail to understand’ marketing’s potential beyond lead gen

Pressure to deliver short-term results is leading brands to prioritise lead volume over value. More than a third (37.7%) of the 450 brand marketers responding to Marketing Week’s State of B2B Marketing survey claim their department is under pressure to deliver marketing qualified leads (MQLs) regardless of quality. For over a quarter (26.7%), delivering leads is their only metric of success.

This is a “scary” place to be, says O’Neill. However, she sees the potential for artificial intelligence to help marketers move beyond an obsession with leads, an approach which not only “dramatically undersells the value of marketing” but wastes time and money. AI could, for example, weed out lower quality leads or eliminate them from the funnel entirely.

“We need to reduce the quantity so we can focus on the quality and focus on improving the win rates, because we can’t process all of these leads that are coming in that are of poor quality,” O’Neill explains. “It’s a waste of everyone’s time. It’s a waste of the marketing team’s time. It’s certainly a waste of the sales team’s time.”

Plan A, B and C

An obsession with leads regardless of quality just kicks the can down the road, argues Barney O’Kelly, head of solutions and product marketing at AlixPartners.

Someone has to sift through those leads, which contributes to tensions between marketing and sales. Furthermore, he believes this mentality reveals a lack of understanding of what drives commercial success.

“If it really is just pure volume, then you are throwing the problem over the fence to somebody else. If that’s what you’re measured to do, that’s all you’re going to do. We need to ask better questions of our marketing department,” argues O’Kelly.

“We need to recognise that they are capable of much more than just hoovering up volume that somebody then needs to sift through and hope there’s a nugget of gold in there.”

While it can be hard for businesses to fully understand their buying population, publishing whitepapers in the hope of gathering email addresses to pump into Salesforce is “data processing” not marketing, he states.

If we’re celebrating that we made our MQL goal, when the sales team didn’t make their number, that marketing function is failing.

Paige O’Neill, Culture Amp

O’Kelly believes it’s not the leadership’s job to understand what marketing does, it’s marketing’s responsibility to demonstrate what they can do beyond lead gen.

“Any marketer worth their salt would look at that very narrow application of their skillset and say: ‘There’s more I can do here,’” he says.

This is where long-term thinking comes in. O’Kelly urges marketers to inculcate a belief in brand strategy across the wider business. His saying at AlixPartners is: “Either everything is marketing or nothing is”.

However, strategic acumen is key and he fears marketers are being boxed into a lead gen corner due to a lack of strategic thinking.

“The conclusion of that problem is you end up with a generation of marketers who’ve only got a hammer and therefore everything looks like a nail. Their toolkit is very narrow and when it doesn’t work, they lack a plan B,” he states.

“The expression ‘There’s no such thing as a bad strategy, just bad execution’, that’s part of the challenge. You can’t be wrong with a strategy, because you’ve got to bring it to life. You’ve got to deliver it through tactics, initiatives and campaigns. I don’t know of a strategy that you can come up with on a Monday and deliver results on a Tuesday.”

Vicious circle

A higher volume of leads may look like certainty in volatile times, but it can create the “dangerous illusion” market demand is strong, warns head of marketing at Workspace Group, Cherry Tian.

Speaking on the latest edition of Marketing Week’s webinar series The Lowdown, Tian argued focusing on lead gen quantity distracts the sales team from quality leads, creating a “vicious circle”.

This is where brand building comes in. However, education is needed as many B2B firms still believe brand building is “completely separate” from lead generation, Tian noted.  

“[Brand] makes the whole marketing funnel work a lot harder and more effectively. It generates more leads for us, but also better quality leads, which ultimately have a bigger impact on our bottom line,” she explained.

“As marketers, we need to work harder to help the business to understand by showing the commercial value of these activities.”

We need to recognise marketers are capable of much more than just hoovering up volume that somebody then needs to sift through and hope there’s a nugget of gold.

Barney O’Kelly, AlixPartners

Tian outlined how Workspace has focused on emotional storytelling on platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram. Unlike rivals that talk up the functional benefits of office space, Workspace shares customer stories across social media, on its podcast series and at events.

The business also invested in connected TV in 2025 to reach its audience in an “incremental way”.

“What we found with connected TV was that even though it didn’t generate a huge amount of leads and enquiries to us, it has really improved the quality of our leads, because people are coming to us with a higher purchase intention,” Tian explained.

“They’re warmed up to our brand, they understand us better, so they’re more likely to convert and therefore more likely to translate into sales and revenue. So again, that emotional engagement beforehand really helped.”

The CTV activity translated into sales, helping the business hit its commercial targets and demonstrate the value of balancing lead quantity and quality.

Back yourself

Of course, not every business is as open to a brand building agenda. Over half (52.1%) of the State of B2B Marketing respondents claim senior leadership fails to understand the potential of marketing beyond lead generation.

O’Kelly urges marketers to “step up”, flex their strategic muscles and back themselves.

“If you’re frustrated with the situation and you think there’s a better way or different things you should be doing, then it’s on you to make the case to do that. And if the business doesn’t respond, you need to make the case again and again,” he states.

“Either your persistence will pay off, or you’ll have honed the argument so well by having all the bits that were less clear, or less compelling, knocked off in those conversations.”

O’Neill agrees it’s incumbent on CMOs to educate the business and position themselves as market experts. She quotes Kate Bullis, managing director of recruiter ZRG, who says: “Marketing is something you do once you understand the market.”

[Brand] makes the whole marketing funnel work a lot harder and more effectively. It generates more leads for us, but also better quality leads.

Cherry Tian, Workspace

However, O’Neill believes too often CMOs abdicate responsibility for strategy and educating the business on the product/market fit.

“It’s hard because some businesses don’t expect the CMO to do that. So, the CMO has to really either push in or find a business where that insight is valued. Not every CMO is able to do it in the business, because the business doesn’t welcome it,” she notes.

“And not every CMO wants to do it. The CMOs that don’t want to do it too often find themselves stuck in this mode of more leads, more leads, more leads – and that’s all marketing can do.”

Short tenures can also work against CMOs under pressure to make their mark quickly and fighting an established business culture. However, O’Neill believes you never have more opportunity to drive change than when you walk through the door.

“Early on in your tenure you’ve really got a stronger opportunity to set from the beginning: ‘I’m going to be focused on strategy in the market and I’m going to be expecting to use data to drive these decisions. We’re going to talk about a bigger picture than just how many MQLs did we bring in the door,’” she argues.

“We have to stop talking about MQLs. They don’t matter.”

‘Dangerous illusion’: B2B marketers on taking lead gen from quantity to quality

O’Neill urges her peers to take attribution “off the table”. At Culture Amp, the team talks about full pipeline, rather than marketing versus sales attribution.

“I hope attribution is dying as a topic of concern. Businesses have spent – myself included – so much time trying to get to full-funnel attribution and the reality is it shouldn’t matter if we’re all contributing to pipeline,” she states.

“We’re measured on the same things and we’re rowing the boat in the same direction, understanding how leads move through the pipeline and what each group is doing to advance that. That’s the healthy dialogue we should be having.”

O’Neill advises marketers to “stop the finger pointing” and align with sales. As she points out, the sales team don’t care about MQLs, they care about the value opportunity in the pipeline.

“If we’re celebrating that we made our MQL goal, when the sales team didn’t make their number, that marketing function is failing because that’s not a company-first viewpoint,” she argues.

Work backwards

If marketers want to rebalance the lead generation conversation, O’Neill advises her peers to position themselves as market experts and frame change in terms of the missed commercial opportunity. Displaying this confidence transfers down to every level of seniority.

Tian has also reaped the rewards of collaborating with sales, switching the focus from lead quantity to conversion rate. Access to data has proved essential in convincing the business to prioritise quality.

“As a business, for a long time, we were focusing on the quantity of our leads. But when we did a piece of data analysis, what we found was that there wasn’t really a linear relationship between the quantity of leads we’re generating, and the sales and revenue,” she noted.

“During the month where we had a huge surge in the quantity of leads, we didn’t necessarily see it was followed by increased sales and revenue. That really helped us as a business to question whether chasing quantity was the right focus for us.”

O’Kelly urges marketers to adopt a thoughtful approach to conversion and gain a richer understanding of the commercial playing field to cement their strategic status. Working backwards from the sale is helpful.

“[Marketers] need to understand what the success criteria is for making money in that organisation and work backwards from there. We often work left to right. We’ve got a lead, let’s take it through the process. It’s qualified, it’s sales qualified, we’ve got a sale,” says O’Kelly.

“You need to start at a sale and work backwards. That would give you greater clarity on what you are trying to go after, which would give you better insight into how you should target and where those people are.”

Read all the State of B2B Marketing series so far here.