Somewhere along the way, sophisticated B2B marketers decided that “lead generation” belonged in the same dusty closet as trade-show fishbowls and three-ring sales binders.

And having spent more than 30 years in marketing positions, I get it.

Back in the day, B2B marketing was almost entirely sales support. We made the brochures, sell sheets and websites. We handled direct mail, public relations, trade shows, advertising and branding. Our job, more or less, was to make the company familiar enough that when a salesperson finally called, the prospect might actually take the call.

Then the Internet changed the arrangement.

Marketing could publish useful content and attract people who were already thinking about problems the company solved. A buyer found an article, downloaded something useful or attended a webinar, and suddenly sales had a reason to follow up that was a whole lot better than, “Hey, I noticed you’re VP of Operations.”

Then Aaron Ross published Predictable Revenue in 2011, and the whole thing became a machine.

Marketing generated the lead. A lower-cost SDR nurtured it and set the appointment. An account executive ran the sales process and closed the deal.

And man, what a great job it was to be the AE.

That’s where the money was. You didn’t have to spend all day trying to crack into accounts and get strangers to talk to you. Somebody else did the ugly part, and the appointments appeared on your calendar.

There was only one little problem with this beautiful model.

The ugly part was the hardest part.

The MQL bought marketing a seat at the table

Prospecting for new business has always been brutally difficult. To make the Predictable Revenue model work, you needed a marketing engine capable of attracting enough of the right people and giving sales something useful to work with.

For a while, the MQL did exactly that.

Somebody read a problem-oriented article, downloaded a guide or attended a webinar. Marketing automation picked up the behavior, scored it, and when enough interesting activity accumulated, sales got the name.

And sales wanted those names because enough of them converted.

That gave marketing something we hadn’t always had: a measurable contribution to revenue. We could report MQLs and show that some percentage became meetings, opportunities and customers.

It also bought us freedom.

As long as sales was getting fed, marketing could work on the longer game too: brand, thought leadership, education and demand creation.

Marketing deserved a bigger seat at the table because generating demand and finding new potential customers is hard work.

Eventually we got the CMO title to prove it.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way we also decided that being associated too closely with lead generation made us look less strategic.

So we started running away from it.

Then buyers changed the rules

The old system lasted because a content interaction once carried more information than it does today.

If somebody clicked an article about a specific problem your software solved, there was a reasonable chance that problem was on their mind. A salesperson could follow up intelligently and sometimes catch a buyer at exactly the right moment.

Then everybody discovered content marketing.

By the late 2010s, buyers were buried under blogs, ebooks, nurture sequences, webinars and automated follow-up. They learned that downloading one innocent PDF could summon an SDR almost instantly.

Eventually buyers had enough.

They still wanted to research. They just didn’t necessarily want to talk to a rep every time they clicked something.

That’s when people like Latané Conant at 6sense began pushing ideas like No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls. Casey Carey came on our podcast around the same period and called BS on lead gen altogether.

I understood the frustration.

What I don’t agree with is the conclusion we drew from it.

We forgot what a lead actually is

Salespeople still need leads.

They need to know which companies may have a problem worth discussing, which organizations appear to be changing, and where somebody might actually be entering a buying motion.

The real screw-up was taking a person who opened an email or clicked an article and calling that person a lead.

Traditional salespeople already had a perfectly good name for somebody like that: A suspect.

They fit the profile. Maybe they’ve done something interesting. They deserve to be watched and perhaps researched.

But you don’t yet know enough to send sales charging after them.

During the Predictable Revenue years, sales often wanted those suspects because a content click could be useful enough to justify a call. Today, the same person might consume half your website and still have no intention of buying anything.

The signal changed, but we kept the label.

And this may explain why so much B2B marketing says absolutely nothing

Once marketing became determined to prove it was more than sales support, we also started getting awfully uncomfortable with anything that sounded like selling.

You can see the result on thousands of B2B websites.

Some poor buyer arrives with a very real problem and gets greeted with something like:

“The industry-leading AI-powered all-in-one platform for transforming enterprise performance.”

Wonderful.

What the hell does it do?

Buyers don’t normally visit your website because they woke up hoping to experience some enterprise transformation. Something is bothering them. Something costs too much, takes too long, keeps breaking, creates risk or prevents them from getting something they want.

If your marketing cannot speak clearly to that problem, the buyer leaves.

And this is where I think marketing’s fear of becoming “sales support” has done some real damage.

Too many marketers never learned how selling actually works because selling was somebody else’s job. Throw the lead over the fence and let the SDR deal with it.

Except the SDR can’t break into accounts the way they used to either.

Buyers figured that game out too.

Lead generation deserves another look

The opportunity now is to build a much smarter definition of a lead, and AI gives us a shot at doing something we simply couldn’t do during the MQL era.

Instead of waiting for somebody to click an article, we can watch what is actually changing inside the companies we want to sell to.

■ Maybe they keep posting the same RevOps job because throwing more people at the problem isn’t fixing it.

■ Maybe an SEC filing quietly mentions a capacity problem your software happens to solve.

■ Maybe the hiring mix suddenly changes, management starts talking about the same bottleneck on earnings calls, or customer reviews begin revealing a problem that hasn’t yet shown up on anybody’s radar.

And that’s just the stuff we already know to look for.

The really interesting part is what AI may help us discover that we never would have dreamed of tracking in the first place.

Look backward at the companies that became your best customers and ask what was happening three, six or twelve months before they bought:

■ Were there odd hiring patterns?

■ Certain combinations of filings, leadership changes and expansion activity?

■ Technology changes?

■ Changes in executive leadership?

■ A strange sequence of public statements that, by itself, looked like noise but kept showing up before deals closed?

The idea is to let AI find and test those digital fingerprints against actual pipeline and revenue, then keep learning which combinations matter and which are just noise.

That’s a very different game from scoring Bob ten points because he downloaded an ebook.

Marketing still has to create demand, build the brand, educate buyers and shape how the market thinks. But the job now is to attract people who already agree there’s a problem—or help them become aware of one—so that when the right triggers appear, we can put relevant content in front of them and find out whether the problem is important enough to act on.

That same process helps sales narrow thousands of possible accounts down to the handful where something meaningful appears to be happening, identify the people most likely to care, and understand why that account deserves attention now.

That’s what a signal-based approach is designed to do.

Sounds pretty strategic to me—and an awful lot like good old-fashioned lead generation.

If what I’ve said here resonates because your GTM motion seems to get less effective every year, consider signing up for our GTM Analysis. We’ll give you a fresh perspective on how to rethink your entire top-of-funnel motion for the way buyers actually behave today.

It’s free. No quid pro quo. If we uncover something useful, you can decide what to do with it.[→ Get the GTM Analysis]