The Death and Rebirth of Demand Gen in 2025: What Works in 2025 (and What Doesn’t)

SEO Used To Work

It worked really well too. In fact, it used to be the heart of inbound marketing for B2B, especially when you marketed to SMB. You'd optimize pages, build backlinks, climb the rankings, and traffic would follow. It still kind of does.  But much less so. 

What's Actually Happening

Google's #1 result used to get 28% of clicks. Now? 19%. That's a 32% year-over-year collapse. [Source: GrowthSRC Media study]

Position #2 fell even harder, from 20.8% down to 12.6%. Nearly a 40% drop. [Source: GrowthSRC Media study]

Almost half of global searches on Google now end in "zero-click." People get their answers directly from AI-powered snippets and never visit a site.

HubSpot has lost 50-80% of its organic traffic this year depending on the source. [Sources: Ahrefs, Semrush data]

And it's not just SaaS. Thirty-seven of the top 50 news domains saw declines in 2025, some losing up to 40% of their traffic.

Gartner predicts search volume overall will shrink 25% by 2026 as people turn to AI engines instead of search engines. [Source: Gartner, Feb 2024]

This isn't a temporary dip. The infrastructure of search changed.

GEO and AIO Aren't the Answer... Yet!

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is exploding. The market's going from $886M in 2024 to $7.3B by 2031.

GenAI search ad spend will hit $25B by 2029.

Generative AI search usage jumped 270% in twelve months.

But GEO and AIO referrals are inconsistent and the volume is tiny compared to what SEO delivered. Nobody's replacing their lost SEO traffic this way.

The Great Reinvention: Demand Generation Channels

It's not just search. Every channel is being reinvented. The playbook from 2019 doesn't work anymore. Here's what's fading and what's actually working.

What's Fading

Mass email blasts Reply rates collapsed from 5-7% in 2022 to 1-5% in 2025. [Source: Hunter.io State of Cold Email Report] Inbox placement is down to 28%. The spray-and-pray approach is dead. Generic outreach gets deleted or marked as spam.

Company-branded social posts LinkedIn company page reach is negligible. Sometimes just 1-2% of followers. Your carefully crafted brand posts? Nobody sees them. The algorithm killed corporate content.

Big webinars The 500-person Zoom webinar with a pitch deck? Done. Attendance is down. Engagement is worse. People are Zoom-fatigued and can smell a sales pitch from the subject line.

Paid ads without precision CPCs keep climbing. Attribution is messier. The old "spray budget and optimize" model doesn't work when your CAC is rising faster than your revenue.

What's Working

Executive-led personal content Personal posts from execs drive 39% more engagement than branded ones. [Source: LinkedIn data] The channel didn't die. It just moved from logos to people. Authenticity wins. B2B buyers want to hear from humans, not brands.

Hyper-personalized email (under 100 recipients) Campaigns targeting fewer than 50 recipients have an average reply rate of 5.8%, compared to 2.1% for campaigns with over 1,000 recipients. [Source: Hunter.io] Quality over quantity. Research-driven, human-sounding outreach that references real context.

Small, exclusive events Executive roundtables. Vertical-specific mini-summits. Invite-only sessions with 15-30 people. Always-on engagement beats one-off blasts. These events build relationships, not just leads.

Owned newsletters Direct access to your audience. No algorithm. No platform risk. Brands with strong owned newsletters control their distribution. They're building assets, not renting attention.

B2B podcasts 50% of B2B marketers are increasing podcast budgets in 2025. [Source: Content Marketing Institute] Why? 90% of companies investing in branded podcasts are satisfied with results. 75% of listeners stay attentive through entire episodes. Podcasts build trust at scale.

Private communities (Slack/Discord) RevGenius grew to 50,000+ members. Online Geniuses has 35,000+ marketers. Exit Five, Pavilion, Superpath—all thriving. These aren't just networking groups. They're demand generation engines. Members help each other, share opportunities, and build real relationships. No algorithm can kill that.

Short-form video and LinkedIn clips Repurposed podcast clips, teardowns, quick takes. Native video on LinkedIn gets 8x higher engagement than links. YouTube shorts and clips extend reach. The format matches how people consume content now.

Every traditional channel is either declining or transforming. The new advantage? Authenticity, personalization, and owning the relationship with your audience.

The Great SaaS Disruption

But here's the deeper problem. While marketing teams scramble to adapt channels, the entire business model underneath them is being disrupted.

Customers Are Building Their Own Solutions

ICPs are choosing AI to do tasks that required SaaS subscriptions just two years ago. Marketing teams are building custom GPTs, agents, and workflows that replace expensive MarTech tools.

Need email sequences? Build a custom GPT. Want campaign analysis? Train an agent on your data. Marketing automation? Claude or ChatGPT can handle it.

25% of US companies reduced spending by up to $70,000 by using GPTs instead of traditional SaaS tools. [Source: Statista] Marketing teams aren't just using AI as a supplement. They're replacing entire categories of software.

The MarTech landscape added tools at 9% growth in 2025, but usage is fragmenting. [Source: MarTech Landscape 2025] Teams are building internal solutions and abandoning point products. Why pay $50K/year for a tool when you can build a custom agent for free?

AI-Native Competitors Are Disrupting Legacy SaaS

New companies are entering every category with AI-native approaches that are cheaper, faster, and more effective than legacy solutions.

Vertical AI startups are achieving 80% of traditional SaaS average contract values while growing at 400% year-over-year. [Source: Kavout AI Disruption Report] They're building from scratch with AI at the core, not bolting AI onto old infrastructure.

Bain predicts that in three years, any routine, rules-based digital task could move from "human plus app" to "AI agent plus API." [Source: Bain Technology Report 2025] The cost curve of foundation models dropped 80% in just two months. OpenAI's o3 model shows this trajectory isn't slowing down.

A16z reported a 60% surge in funding for AI-first startups, while early-stage SaaS investment declined. [Source: Andreessen Horowitz] The market is voting with capital. AI-native wins.

The Warning Signs: PMF Under Siege

This disruption shows up as red flags in B2B sales and marketing metrics:

Prolonged sales cycles. Buyers are waiting to see if AI solves their problem cheaper.

Lower ASPs. "Why pay $100K when your competitor offers an AI solution for $20K?"

Products becoming "non-essential." If a custom GPT can replicate 70% of your value, you're vulnerable.

Decisions being pushed. Budget holders are freezing purchases until the AI dust settles.

These aren't temporary headwinds. They're signals that Product-Market Fit is being redefined underneath you. Companies that sold workflow automation are competing with $20/month ChatGPT subscriptions. Platforms that charged for data analysis are up against free Claude projects.

The Economic Vise Tightens

While companies work to reinvent their PMF, they're forced to spend heavily on R&D. Building AI into products isn't cheap. Retraining models, rebuilding infrastructure, rethinking UX—it all costs money.

But here's the problem: they can't afford the same funnel economics anymore.

Low conversion rates are deadly. When your product is being disrupted, you can't waste leads.

High CAC is unsustainable. If competitors acquire customers at 1/3 your cost using AI-driven growth, you lose. CEOs telling marketing to "just add more leads" or "add more pipeline" in this situation is suicidal—it accelerates burn and makes CAC worse.

Leaky funnels are fatal. Every dropped lead, every lost deal, every churned customer accelerates the death spiral. Yet it's often not Sales' fault. When PMF shifts, leaks increase no matter what you do. Yes, you can do better product marketing. Yes, you can do better enablement. Yes, you can be less sloppy with follow-ups. But none of that masks the main problem.

The whole GTM has to evolve quickly.

And that puts even more pressure on teams already drowning in channel chaos, AI tool overload, and unrealistic expectations.

Marketing Teams in the Middle of the Storm

For marketing leaders, this transition is brutal.

Results keep dropping, but expectations keep rising.

Teams are told to master AI tools while still delivering short-term growth.

Best practices don't last years anymore. They barely last a quarter.

Leaders are asked to do more with less, constantly reinvent execution, and figure out AI-driven strategies while under the gun. The cost of falling behind is higher than ever.

What Actually Works: Owning Your Audience

It's not all doom and gloom.

While traditional channels collapse and business models get disrupted, new strategies and tactics are emerging that work exceptionally well. Marketing teams that adapt are seeing massive efficiency gains and pipeline growth they couldn't achieve with the old playbook.

The companies winning right now are doing three things:

1. Building owned audiences instead of renting attention from algorithms
2. Leveraging AI workflows to do more with less
3. Focusing on depth over breadth with hyper-personalized, high-value engagement

Let's be clear about what's working.

The Channel Reinvention (Quick Recap)

Remember what we covered earlier:

• Executive-led content drives 39% more engagement than branded posts
• Hyper-personalized email (under 50 recipients) gets 5.8% reply rates vs 2.1% for mass campaigns
• Small, exclusive events (15-30 people) build relationships, not just leads
• Owned newsletters give you direct access without platform risk
• B2B podcasts see 90% satisfaction rates and 75% completion
• Private communities like RevGenius (50K members) and Exit Five create demand gen engines
• Short-form video on LinkedIn gets 8x higher engagement than links

These aren't theory. They're working now.

AI Workflows That Actually Drive Pipeline

Here's where it gets interesting. AI isn't just replacing tasks—it's enabling entirely new workflows that weren't possible before.

1. AI-Powered Content Multiplication

Teams are taking one high-value asset (a customer interview, product demo, executive discussion) and using AI to create 15-20 derivative pieces:

• Long-form blog post → AI generates SEO-optimized article
• Video recording → AI creates clips, audiograms, LinkedIn posts, thread summaries
• Customer call → AI extracts quotes, case study angles, product insights

Example: Jedox used HubSpot's marketing automation with AI to develop advanced workflows and audience segmentation, resulting in 54% increase in MQLs and 12-20% reduction in sales cycle duration. [Source: HubSpot Case Study]

2. Hyper-Personalized Outbound at Scale

Custom GPTs trained on your ICP data, past winning emails, and product positioning can generate personalized outreach that actually sounds human.

• Build a custom GPT with your brand voice, customer pain points, and value props
• Feed it prospect research (LinkedIn, company news, funding announcements)
• Generate tailored sequences that reference specific context

Example: Stanley Black & Decker used AI-powered programmatic advertising to set up targeted Google Search ads for local dealers, decreasing cost per lead by 49% and increasing dealer leads by 163%. [Source: Measure Marketing]

3. No-Code Automation Workflows

Tools like Gumloop, Zapier, and Make.com let marketing teams build sophisticated automation without developers:

• Scrape competitor content → analyze positioning → generate counter-narratives
• Monitor LinkedIn mentions → trigger personalized outreach → log in CRM
• New lead fills form → AI qualifies → routes to right rep with context → schedules meeting

Example: Klarna used generative AI workflows to cut image production costs by $6 million and reduced development cycles from six weeks to seven days. [Source: Measure Marketing]

4. AI-Driven Lead Qualification and Routing

AI analyzes behavioral signals, firmographic data, and engagement patterns to:

• Score leads more accurately than traditional models
• Predict best-fit accounts before they even engage
• Route hot leads instantly with full context to sales

This eliminates the "spray and pray" problem and ensures sales works only qualified opportunities.

5. Real-Time Content Optimization

AI tools now evaluate content performance against business goals (not just traffic):

• Clearscope assesses content against buyer intent and competitor positioning
• AI analyzes which blog sections drive conversions vs bounces
• Multimodal AI processes webinars/demos to identify high-engagement moments

Teams iterate faster and create content that actually converts.

The GrowthX Framework: Two Pillars That Work Well

1. Your Audience Is Your Moat

Zero-click journeys will accelerate. SEO traffic will keep falling. Paid ads get more expensive. Algorithm changes will keep wrecking plans.

But the audience you own? Nobody can take that away...except yourself.

This is the core insight from GrowthX's approach: stop renting attention from platforms and start building assets you control.

Owned audience means:

• Newsletter subscribers who opted in to hear from you
• Private community members who actively engage
• Podcast listeners who choose to download every episode
• Social followers you migrate into owned channels

The companies seeing 24x organic growth aren't chasing traffic. They're building relationships that compound. When GrowthX helped clients publish 4,000+ pages and deliver 6.5M organic visits, it wasn't about gaming algorithms. It was about creating content their audience actually needed and owning the distribution.

2. Content Is Still King—But It's a Different Game

Content hasn't died. The approach to content has completely changed.

The old model: Publish blog posts. Optimize for keywords. Hope Google sends traffic. Pray people convert.

The new model: Treat content as a product.

GrowthX's Content Strategy for AI Search framework shows exactly how this works. It's a 2-hour workshop breaking down how to get brands cited in AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google.

Here's what "content as product" actually means:

Constant refinement. Content isn't published and forgotten. It's updated, repurposed, improved based on performance data. One piece becomes 15 derivative assets optimized for different channels and formats.

AI-powered production. Teams using GrowthX's AI workflows are seeing 10x increase in content velocity without sacrificing quality. They're publishing 12 articles per week across multiple topics—something impossible with traditional methods.

Expert-in-the-loop model. AI handles scale. Humans handle strategy, quality, and brand voice. This hybrid approach is what's driving results like 3x high-quality content production in 6 weeks.

Distribution-first mindset. Content is designed for discoverability—not just in traditional search, but in AI chat, social platforms, communities, and owned channels. The goal is to be cited, referenced, and shared.

Conversion optimization. Every piece is analyzed: Which sections drive engagement? Where do people bounce? What converts visitors into subscribers? The content evolves based on these signals.

The GrowthX Results Speak

Companies following this framework are seeing:

• 5x traffic growth with 1,700 pages published
• 2x traffic increase in just 2 months
• 100K+ organic visitors monthly
• Consistent, week-over-week click growth

This isn't about volume for volume's sake. It's about creating a growth engine that:

1. Produces content that earns trust
2. Distributes it to build reach
3. Converts that reach into leads
4. Turns leads into revenue

The old SEO playbook is dead. But content—done right, with AI, distributed smartly, and owned by you—is more powerful than ever.

GrowthX's Content Strategy for AI Search workshop breaks down the full framework, and their AI-led growth approach shows how to implement it.

Think of content as a product now. Something you constantly refine, update, and repurpose using both human creativity and AI workflows.

Build community as your channel. Workshops, teardowns, exclusive sessions. This is where real engagement and resilience come from.

How to Actually Do This

Stop chasing visitors. Start capturing and deepening relationships with the people you already have.

Segment ruthlessly. Tailor your email, LinkedIn, events, and newsletters to smaller groups based on real behaviors and needs.

Create exclusive experiences. Invite-only AMAs. Roundtables where people actually talk. Teardown sessions where you solve real problems live.

Build always-on platforms. Private Slack channels. LinkedIn groups. Discord servers. Places where your audience hangs out and helps each other.

Turn customers into ambassadors. Let your most engaged users co-create with you. Give them early access. Ask them to shape what you build.

Treat content like a product. Keep refining it. Update it. Repurpose it. Make it better based on what actually works.

Own your distribution. Pull followers from social into newsletters. Get newsletter readers into private communities. Move people up the engagement ladder.

Communicate like a human. Share wins. Tell stories. Let execs show up as themselves, not as corporate spokespeople.

The Companies Winning Right Now

They're doing six things differently:

1. Stopped chasing algorithm-dependent traffic. No more praying to Google. Build owned channels: newsletters, communities, podcasts that they control.

2. Reinvented their demand gen playbook. Mass email blasts and big webinars are out. Hyper-personalized outreach, executive-led content, and small exclusive events are in.

3. Leveraging AI workflows ruthlessly. Content multiplication, automated personalization, no-code workflows. Doing 10x more with the same team.

4. Treating content like a product. Not publish-and-forget. Constant refinement, AI-powered production, distribution-first mindset, expert-in-the-loop quality.

5. Navigating the SaaS disruption head-on. While competitors freeze, adapting their GTM, owning their economics, and building moats customers can't bypass with ChatGPT.

6. Transforming their marketing teams. Upskilling on AI tools, building custom GPTs and agents, shifting from reactive execution to AI-native strategy. Marketing isn't just using AI. It's being rebuilt around it.

They're turning clicks into conversations. Email lists into communities. Newsletter subscribers into superfans.

That's how you build something durable. Something that survives the next algorithm change, the next AI model, the next platform shift, and the next wave of AI-native competitors.

The Bottom Line

The playbook changed. SEO collapsed. Channels reinvented themselves. AI is disrupting everything from how customers buy to how products get built.

Marketing teams are caught in the middle, expected to do more with less while the ground shifts underneath them.

But some companies are figuring it out. They're building owned audiences. Using AI workflows that actually work. Treating content like a product. And they're winning because they're not waiting for things to stabilize.

The era of algorithm-dependent growth is over. The era of audience-owned growth is here.

AI is Supercharging Imitation: Differentiate or Die Faster

B2B markets are crowded. Every category is packed with vendors claiming innovation, intelligence, and value. From cybersecurity to marketing tech, from data infrastructure to AI tools, the landscape is overwhelming. Both for buyers and technology builders.

Everywhere you look, companies are saying similar things. Everyone has a platform. Everyone is using AI. Everyone is driving outcomes. Customers are bombarded with overlapping messages, and most of them sound identical.

It’s hard enough to break through in normal conditions. But now, we’re dealing with something new: AI is accelerating the speed of imitation.

The moment a message starts working, it spreads. Competitors see it. AI models help them rewrite it, repackage it, and redeploy it in hours. The shelf life of a good idea is collapsing. 

So if you’re building your positioning on the surface, quick copy, catchy taglines, vague benefit statements, it’s going to get lost fast. AI has made it easier than ever to sound smart without being original. 

The Answer: Deep Differentiation

The only real moat left is deep differentiation, not just in product, but in story. In message. In meaning.

That doesn’t necessarily mean inventing a new category or coming up with a clever slogan. It means building a strategic narrative that reflects what customers truly value, what you uniquely deliver, and why it matters now.

Real differentiation comes from doing the hard work: talking to customers, digging into what actually resonates, pulling insights from analysts and advisors, pressure-testing your story with sales, partners, and the market. Then aligning everything, product, marketing, sales, enablement, around that core narrative.

I’ve seen this approach change everything.

How We Did It at Kount

When I joined Kount, we were seen as just another fraud prevention tool. We had good technology, a solid customer base, and a great team. But our message wasn’t breaking through.

So we went back to the source: the customer.

We interviewed dozens of customers, especially those in the enterprise segment we wanted to grow. The insight we uncovered changed everything. Customers weren’t just buying us to block fraud. They were buying access to our network. The signals. The shared intelligence. The trust data.

They were buying into the network effect of identity.

That became our edge. Not fraud prevention. The Identity Trust Global Network.

We built a new messaging framework. We validated it with sales teams, analysts (Gartner, Forrester, 451), partners, and customers. We worked tightly with product and engineering to align the roadmap to the new story. We launched with a rolling thunder approach, internal first, then across marketing, sales, customer success, and the industry.

The results were real and measurable: faster sales cycles, bigger deals, enterprise traction, analyst recognition, and ultimately a 640 million dollar acquisition by Equifax.

The Role of Leadership and Messaging Discipline

One of the most important factors in making this work is organizational support. The company must give the marketing team the space and trust to develop a strategic message, test it rigorously, and launch it with full alignment. This means avoiding the all-too-common pitfall of changing messaging every month based on the latest feature release, campaign result, or executive opinion. Strategic messaging takes time to land, both internally and in the market. Constant shifts confuse teams, dilute impact, and erode credibility. When leadership commits to consistency, messaging has the power to shape perception, drive growth, and become a true strategic asset.

A Deeper Dive: What It Takes to Build Defensible Messaging

1. Start with customer insight. Talk to your customers, especially the ones you want more of. Understand not just what they bought, but why they chose you over others. At Kount, this uncovered a critical insight. Our customers valued the network of trust signals even more than the core fraud prevention features.

2. Build a messaging framework. Once you uncover that differentiator, translate it into a message that is scalable, relevant, and repeatable. Ours became the Identity Trust Global Network. It was not just a tagline. It was a strategic foundation.

3. Validate with stakeholders. Test the message across internal teams, partners, analysts, customers, and industry influencers. Use their feedback to refine clarity, impact, and resonance. Feedback from Gartner, Forrester, 451, and our Customer Advisory Board helped sharpen ours.

4. Align product and roadmap. A message without product alignment is just theater. We worked with Product and Engineering to ensure every release and capability reinforced the Identity Trust story.

5. Build assets around the message.  We rebuilt the website, sales decks, datasheets, videos, enablement content, partner toolkits, and case studies, all aligned to the new positioning.

6. Socialize internally before launch. Sales will not adopt messaging they do not believe in. We pre-launched with internal champions, trained the teams, and gave them early wins to build momentum.

7. Launch with Rolling Thunder. We rolled out with sustained, multi-channel activation: PR, analyst reports, digital campaigns, events, customer stories, and more. The market heard the message consistently, for months, not just a moment.

8. Stick with it. We did not chase the next new thing. The core message stayed consistent, even as we iterated supporting points. This repetition built recognition, trust, and market position.

How AI Can Help

Ironically, the same technology that accelerates imitation can also help you differentiate, if used wisely.

AI can synthesize customer interviews, summarize analyst reports, surface message gaps, and help you refine your positioning faster. It can spot repetition in your market. It can test variations and gather feedback at scale. It can even help you pressure-test how defensible your message is.

But AI is a tool, not a shortcut. If you do not have a real insight, a unique strength, or a clear point of view, AI will only make your message sound polished and generic.

Final Thought

The speed of imitation has gone exponential. AI is the accelerant.

If you want to stand out, you need more than a message. You need meaning. Built through insight. Backed by truth. Owned by your company at every level.

Differentiate or die faster.

The CMO's New Hat: Chief Marketing AI Product Manager

I recently joined Drew Neisser on the CMO Huddles podcast, alongside Kevin Ruane, CMO of Precisely, and Jeff Morgan, CRO at Elements. We dug into the impact of generative AI on marketing—and one idea came through loud and clear: we're massively underestimating how AI is transforming marketing. 

There are at least three buckets of transformation happening right now:

Scale, speed and outcomes - how we work, how fast and how much we deliver, the quality of what we produce, how we allocate budgets, the structure of our teams, and the skills we hire for. It's evolving daily—with new use cases, features inside existing tools, agent-based workflows, and model updates dropping weekly.

Pipeline and demand generation - buyer behavior is rapidly changing. People are increasingly using generative engines to find answers instead of vendor sites found via keyword searches. The 30%-60% organic traffic and CTR drop for B2B software companies? That's not a blip. Yes, existing methods still work, but they are becoming less and less effective and there's a completely new way of generating demand being built right in front of us.

Teams and skills - AI is transforming every function. We're not even close to understanding or appreciating its full potential. Not just content, graphics, messaging, but demand generation, marketing ops, PR, analyst relations, and more. And yes, it's transforming us, CMOs as well.

The New Hat: AI Product Manager

How do you add AI to the mix when you're already juggling daily priorities, deadlines, and pipeline goals? This is where CMOs need to put on a new hat: Chief Marketing AI Product Manager.

The framework I've developed for this I call the ELEX model - Expand, Land, and Expand.

Expand Your Thinking and Horizons: 10x Impact

Actually, "expand" isn't strong enough. Blow up your horizon is a more relevant term in this case. AI gives us an opportunity to go 10x or even 1,000x instead of 2x. 

Case in point: Swan AI. Three founders on a mission to hit $30M ARR with just the three of them. Two years ago people would have laughed. Today, they're well on their way.

The question isn't just "how can AI help us do more and better what we're already doing?" It's: What could we do now that wasn't possible before?

AI unlocks a 10x multiplier by rethinking the entire system - from how you generate demand to how much you convert into revenue, how you tell a story, how fast you can tell and pivot the message, your PR, analyst relations, tech stack, content, research, competitive analysis. Literally everything in marketing is changing, and it's a golden opportunity to disrupt much larger competitors with smaller budgets and teams.

Product Management Tip: explore, research, ask around, and build a roadmap based on what can have immediate impact, mid-term, and longer-term benefits. Create a quarterly roadmap. It will most likely change as you learn more—that's the point.

Land: Execute Like a Product Manager

This is where strategy becomes action.

Experimentation without execution is just noise. Test specific use cases, measure outcomes, and refine fast.

Here are immediate impact areas based on what we've done and what I've seen work:

Content: Use LLMs to draft, repackage, and scale content—but always with strategic oversight from an experienced writers and SMEs.

Research: Quickly discover trends, news, competitive intel, reports, coverage, social media mentions and sentiment, customer reviews, analyst notes. You can create your own models to automate these workflows, distill insights, and communicate actionable intelligence fast.

Messaging: Accelerate and fine-tune positioning and messaging work with inputs from every source you can imagine. Create messages, landing pages, content, enablement in a fraction of the time—again with oversight from experienced PMMs and SMEs.

Demand generation: We're witnessing a seachange in how B2B marketing works—it's moving from search-engine to GPT user behavior. The time to act is now to grab the opportunity rather than fall behind. There are several new ways of generating demand using fresh approaches, custom models, and new AI tools like Swan AI, Clay, Regie and others.

Pipeline Acceleration: Analyze pipeline and conversion data based on hundreds of signals across systems—SFDC, Marketo, Gong, 6sense, other intent providers, reviews, social media, and other sources —and focus on accelerating the most promising opportunities with automated custom messaging (human in the loop is a good starting point), content, and campaigns. You can automate nurture workflows, identify blockers, and so much more.

Public Relations: Target smarter.  Use AI to find journalists who will most likely write about you, research their previous coverage, develop customized angles and ways to engage them, build customized and automated outreach workflows. Done right, you can accomplish in days what used to take months and several agencies.

Product Management Tip: Update your roadmap into something like a PRD - Product Requirement Document. Complete your "AI product" with expected timelines, costs, people, and outcomes. Concrete priorities, scopes, and timelines. Features in the form of use cases, AI workflows, AI agents, AI products, existing products with new AI agents, custom developments, integrations, and interfaces.

Plan, update, and keep focused on execution and outcomes.

Expand Again: Build a Scalable System

Once you've landed some wins, it's time to build version 2.

More importantly, institutionalize your AI strategy:

• Assign AI owners across functions with clear deliverables
• Track outcomes weekly, and evolve your architecture quarterly
• Stay ahead of what's changing—tools, models, techniques

Kevin Ruane said something that stuck: AI isn't just a feature. It's an operating system. The speed of change is relentless, so your approach has to be adaptive and systematized.

Set up a review loop. Run playbooks. Build AI into your team structure. Don't just test AI—operationalize it.

Critical skill: Prompt engineering isn't just a skill, it's a science. A well-structured prompt can be the difference between mediocre output and something transformational. This is where we need to push ourselves and our teams for quality and not just quantity.  That's the difference between successful and failed initiatives.

Final Thought

AI isn't a side project. It's the next operating model for marketing.

The CMO role is evolving. We're not just running campaigns—we're building systems. We're not just leading teams—we're designing how work gets done.

The CMOs who step into the role of AI product manager will unlock speed, scale, and strategic advantage. Everyone else will be playing catch-up.

Fixing the Pipeline with Treasure Ops – From Problem to Permission

Pipeline is Permission

Over the weekend, I kept coming back to one simple idea: pipeline is permission.

It’s not that brand, category creation, or customer experience don’t matter—they do. But without pipeline, none of those things scale. Pipeline is what gives CMOs permission to build, influence, and lead. It’s the most visible indicator of a healthy GTM engine—and the fastest red flag when something’s broken.

Diagnosing pipeline isn't just about counting leads or opportunities. Done right, it reveals everything: demand gaps, weak messaging, sales breakdowns, product-market misalignment, even pricing and packaging issues.

At nearly every company I joined as CMO, pipeline was either the issue—or became the issue to focus on and fix fast. That’s when I leaned on the Treasure Ops model I built. It’s a way to operationalize the diagnosis, create visibility, align across GTM, and systematically fix what’s broken.

The 0.8x Wake-Up Call

A few years ago, month one as CMO. The post-Board meeting turns into a firing squad. One Board member unloads on the CRO:
“You need better sellers. Oracle-style closers. Bigger deals.”

The CRO defends his team. No one’s listening.

I speak up—new guy or not:
“It’s not the sellers. It’s the pipeline. We’re running at 0.8x coverage for the next three months. It doesn’t matter who’s selling—we don’t have enough to sell.”

All heads turn:
“When are you fixing it?”

Challenge accepted.

Eighteen months later, we’re running 3–4x coverage and growing 100% YoY. From negative growth to hypergrowth.

Twelve months after that: a $640M exit from a $90M valuation. Pipeline was the unlock.

So, How Do You Fix the Pipeline?

Treat it like software architecture. Pipeline is a system—complex, interconnected, and constantly evolving. You can’t brute-force it. You have to diagnose, prioritize, and systematically rebuild.

Start by mapping every key component—demand gen, sales motion, messaging, conversion points, segmentation, product-market fit, and more. Then zero in on the top 2–3 failure points. Fix those. Measure impact. Move to the next set.

Build the right teams. Align GTM. Partner tightly across sales, ops, and product. Instrument everything. Report what matters. And yes—embrace AI. It’s a multiplier, not a magic wand.

Pipeline problems don’t get solved in one sprint. But with the right model and mindset, they get solved.

Breaking Down the Pipeline System

Fixing pipeline isn’t just a tactic—it’s a system-wide diagnosis. Here’s how I break it down:

1. Market Intent
Are you creating a category, reshaping one, or competing in an existing space? Each requires a different pipeline motion. Make the wrong call here, and you’ll spend months solving the wrong problem with the wrong playbook.

2. Brand Awareness and Perception
If people know and love your brand—great. Maximize capture.
If they know you for the wrong reasons—perception repair must run alongside demand gen.
If they don’t know you at all—you’re starting from zero and need a different approach entirely. Perception fuels conversion.

3. ICP, Persona, and Target Market
Clarity here is non-negotiable. You can experiment early—but you need to land on a high-efficiency ICP fast, capitalize, then expand. Generalist targeting kills CAC and conversion.

4. Customer Segments and Deal Size
ACV drives everything. Enterprise and SMB require totally different engines, channels, and pacing. Same goes for geo: what works in North America rarely translates directly to EMEA or APAC.

5. Demand Gen Engine
Evaluate everything—definitions (lead vs opportunity), inbound/outbound/ABM/hybrid mix, channel ROI, scalability, CAC. Often, this is where the biggest fixes happen. I’ve rebuilt entire demand engines from the ground up—and it changed the growth curve overnight.

6. Pipeline Hygiene and Speed
Leads rot. Follow-up SLAs, lead routing, attribution accuracy—these aren’t ops details, they’re growth levers. In one case, just reducing first-response time from 30 minutes to 5 tripled our conversions.

7. Funnel Conversion + Velocity
Every stage matters. Every drop-off is a signal. From lead to closed-won, analyze conversion rates and time to convert—overall and per channel. Closed-lost and deferred deals often reveal the real issues: ICP misalignment, product gaps, pricing friction, or weak execution.

8. New vs. Expansion vs. Retention
Most teams start with new logo acquisition. But long-term scale comes from a pipeline strategy that includes expansion and retention. You’ll need all three.

9. Direct vs. Partner
Many start direct. Few prioritize partner early enough. Different motions, different hires, different metrics. But partner-driven scale often unlocks the next phase of growth—and better ROI.

10. Strategic Expansion
At some point, every company wants to go upmarket. Bigger ACVs, executive buyers, higher strategic value. That means a new message, new team motion, and a revamped engine—without breaking what’s already working.

11. Hyperscaling
The best question a CEO or Board can ask:
“If I gave you $1M / $10M / $100M more—how fast can you grow?”
That’s when you know you have pipeline permission. But not every channel scales. You have to know what will break, what will scale linearly, and what needs re-architecting.

12. Team
Every stage requires a different team DNA. Experience, mindset, and hunger all matter. Structure drives velocity—and misalignment here will stall everything.

13. AI
This is the biggest unlock. AI-first CMOs and AI-native teams will run leaner, move faster, and compete harder—even against giants. AI isn’t a layer—it’s the engine. Embrace it or fall behind.

14. Alignment
Pipeline doesn’t get fixed in a vacuum. Sales, Product, Finance, Ops—alignment here isn’t about meetings, it’s about outcomes. I’ve seen incredible results when GTM leaders lock arms, commit to impact, and leave politics behind. You don’t win alone.

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You Don’t Fix Everything at Once

It’s easy to get overwhelmed. Don’t. That’s where Treasure Ops comes in.

Pick the three biggest unlocks. Focus. Execute. Measure. Move on to the next three.

That rhythm—identify, prioritize, execute—is what turned pipeline from a problem into a weapon at every company I’ve joined.

Analyst Relations: The Most Undervalued Strategic Weapon in B2B Marketing

 

After 20+ years in marketing and six CMO roles across high-growth tech companies, one thing has become crystal clear to me: most companies are doing analyst relations (AR) wrong.

Too many execs treat AR like a checkbox on the marketing plan or see it as a “necessary evil” to get into a Magic Quadrant or Wave. I’ve even heard CEOs brush analysts off, saying “they’re all pay-to-play.” That kind of thinking? It’s not just wrong—it’s dangerous.

Because done right, analyst relations can be one of your most powerful strategic levers across product marketing, demand generation, category creation, and even exit strategy.

Analysts Aren’t a Nuisance—They’re an Extension of Your Team

The best analysts are deeply embedded in the market—they understand trends, buyer behavior, competitive positioning, and industry perception better than most internal teams do. They talk to hundreds of your customers and prospects. They know things.

And if you engage them properly, they become an extension of your product, product marketing, and demand gen teams. But you’ll never unlock that value with “normal” AR tactics—occasional inquiries, reactive briefings, and participation in evaluations like Magic Quadrants or Waves.

That’s a recipe for mediocrity. And in analyst relations, mediocrity doesn’t just mean missed opportunities. It means getting actively hurt by your competitors who are shaping the narrative for you.

The Cost of Neglect: You’re Not Just Ignored—You’re Outsold

If top analysts aren’t deeply familiar with your product, value prop, and differentiation, they fill in the gaps—with your competitors’ messaging. And when prospects come asking for recommendations, guess who gets sent to the shortlist?

You can’t undo that kind of damage easily. AR isn’t something you can “flip on” when a Magic Quadrant comes around. It takes time, consistency, and a real strategy.

The Blueprint for Analyst Relations That Actually Works

So how do you do AR right? Here’s the blueprint I’ve used to drive category leadership and exits in cybersecurity, fraud prevention, and employee experience:

1. Start With the Right Analysts

Identify the analysts who influence your buyers. For B2B tech with IT or security buyers, that’s often Gartner, Forrester, and IDC. Don’t ignore the smaller players like 451 Research—they punch above their weight and often influence the big guys.

2. Inquiries Are Your Secret Weapon

Use them. Relentlessly. Learn how you’re perceived. Learn how your competitors position themselves. Test messaging, get feedback, refine positioning. Inquiries are how you build relationships and drive insight.

3. Briefings Are Overrated (Until They’re Not)

Don’t treat briefings as your first move—they should be your final play. By the time you brief, you should already know what the analyst will say. You should’ve influenced their thinking through repeated, valuable engagement.

4. Build Real Human Connections

Analysts are people. Meet them in person. Host analyst days. Visit them. Grab coffee at a conference. Human connection builds trust and trust builds influence.

5. Bring in Your Experts

Don’t just send AR folks. Involve SMEs. Show the product. Run demos. Ask for feedback and loop it back into product development. Create a feedback loop that adds real value.

6. Surround and Reinforce Your Message

Engage smaller analyst firms to amplify your narrative. Big analysts read their reports and see signals. Share your news, wins, and big moves. Keep them in the loop.

7. Dominate the Magic Quadrants and Waves

By the time evaluations come, the analyst should already see you as a leader. The methodology matters—but only if you’ve laid the groundwork first.

8. Redefine and Own the Category

This is a multi-year effort. But it’s how you build durable competitive advantage. I’ve done this at HP (Intrusion Prevention), Kount (Identity Trust Network), and now at Simpplr in Employee Experience.

9. Build a Scalable Demand Engine

Analysts talk to enterprise buyers constantly. If you're one of the 2–3 vendors they recommend, you unlock a stream of RFPs and qualified opportunities that money can’t buy.

10. Position for Exit or IPO

Companies that dominate categories attract strategic buyers and go public. At Kount, our analyst-driven repositioning led to a $640M acquisition by Equifax. They still use the Identity Trust Network branding we created.

So… Are Analysts Pay-for-Play?

Sure, some are. But overwhelmingly, AR is a skill play. With the right strategy, consistency, and execution, the returns—in insight, influence, and revenue—are exponential.

Winning the Chaos: Lessons from the Battlefield for CMOs

A CMO’s Life Is a Battlefield

A CMO’s life is often a battlefield. We move between high-priority areas and activities daily—sometimes hourly.

One moment, we’re focused on pipeline creation, then we pivot to conversion, strategic messaging, PR, analyst relations, executive meetings, board meetings, team management, customer conversations, content, branding, regional strategies, partner relationships, online commerce, and the countless random requests from internal and external stakeholders.

 And then there are meetings. More meetings. And just when we think we have a handle on it all—unexpected crises emerge.

As a wise man once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

We strategize. We plan. But then reality hits—some moments are electrifying, others feel like a relentless onslaught. It’s easy to lose focus, chase the wrong priorities, or get bogged down in tasks that feel urgent but aren’t truly critical. The cost of misplaced focus? Missed opportunities.

Winning the Chaos: Lessons from the Battlefield

One of the best strategies I’ve learned to manage, survive, and dominate in the chaos comes from the military: Prepare. Train. Execute. Then, when the crisis inevitably hits—adapt and respond.

When chaos erupts, what’s the first move?

Address the biggest, most dangerous threat in front of you. Then move from there.

I love how Jason Redman, a former Navy SEAL and battlefield hero, explains crisis decision-making. His mindset is a masterclass in staying focused under pressure.

How This Applies to CMOs

1. Keep Your Eye on the Main Target

Most of the time, that means revenue and pipeline—new customer acquisition, expansion, and retention. Never lose sight of it.

2. Assemble, Uplevel, and Bond with Your Team

In battle, your team wins the war. It’s both about how AND who. Communication and trust are critical, not just within your team, but across partner teams like Sales, Product, Customer Support, and Finance.

3. Aggressively Build Brand

Think of this as your fortification and air cover. Brand-building doesn’t have to be expensive or flashy—it can be grassroots or highly strategic. But it needs to be intentional, consistent, measurable, and constantly optimized.

4. Arm Your Troops with the Best Weapons

This is where Product Marketing comes in. Sharp differentiation, powerful messaging, competitive intelligence, enablement tools—these are the weapons your team needs to win.

5. Establish Wartime Communications

Metrics and reporting, customer and partner feedback, competitive and social monitoring, analyst relations, press coverage—every data point matters. Analyze, act fast, and adjust as the situation evolves.

Deploy. Battle. Win.

But the fight never stops. The battlefield is never static. Competitors are always moving. Unexpected crises arise. And this is where Jason Redman’s advice is so crucial.

You must evaluate the battlefield constantly. When a critical attack comes, neutralize it—fast—so it doesn’t take you down. But be ready to fight on multiple fronts.

Like a pipeline funnel, personnel issues, and PR crises all hitting in the same week?  Prioritize. Assess based on gravity, impact, and outcomes. Execute. This is where your team and training make the difference. As the saying goes, “A gallon of sweat saves a pint of blood.”

Win the fight. Celebrate. Then take on even bigger goals.

What else is impossible?

200-Mile Bike Ride: Start As Individuals, Finish As A Team!

"We start as individuals; We finish as a team!"

That thought came at mile 199 of a 201-mile bicycle race, as I was getting close to the finish line in Port Hueneme, CA.

I finished a few minutes later, at 9:15pm, as a part of the team of people that I met earlier that day. Many of us started as individuals or small groups and became a team after 200 long, hot, grinding, and windy miles.

It is very similar to the business environment. 

We often start our jobs or projects as individuals.  We meet other professionals as we go.  We build teams that make the most impossible things become possible.  The ability to form such teams separates successful companies from the mediocre ones.

Just like riding 200+ miles in a single day.  What I realized that day is while hard projects (like riding 100 or 130 miles) can be completed through preparation and perseverance, much bigger projects require teamwork to complete.

Prior to that ride, I had completed 100-mile rides many times and 130-mile ride twice. But 200 miles were elusive.  I tried once and was not able to finish it, just to get a DNF (Did Not Finish) status.  It turns out that the missing ingredient was the team.  The team did it! 

The key things I discovered during my first successful 200 mile ride were that strong teams make the biggest difference in extreme situations by:

• Helping each other through situational difficulties, such as shielding against the wind to go faster with less energy spent
• Helping with directions when there are no pointers, it’s dark outside, and when many team members feel lost. One of the team members happens to have planned the ride better, the other one had a better app, and someone else knew that particular area from previous rides. 
• Mentally supporting each other when the going gets tough and the doubts start creeping in about the sanity of the project and the ability to finish

If you think about it, this mimics business challenges as well.  By working closely together, we go faster through overcoming extreme difficulties, we give each other mental support and find directions when we get stuck.  And then we finish and win as a team -- way ahead of a collection of individuals.

The feeling of an accomplishment was immense at the end of the race, similar to the one when you launch a product, or a web site, or close a partnership, or deal that seemed impossible just a few months ago.

The right team makes that crazy undertaking look normal.  With the right team, you push the limits even further, asking, “What else is impossible?”

Just to prove that point, I did another bike race 3 weeks later, to push my limits even further. I completed the STP (Seattle to Portland) ride in one day. 213 miles. 5,200 ft climb.  9,200 calories burnt.

And like in the first race, I started alone and finished as a team! It was much easier than the first time, faster, and more fun.  

And the best thing was that my family was at the finish line to celebrate with me!