The pressure to generate pipeline hasn’t gone away, but the channels that used to make that job feel manageable are getting less predictable.
Organic traffic is harder to earn, paid search is changing as AI answers more questions before anyone clicks, LinkedIn is crowded with ads making increasingly similar claims, and outbound response rates have dropped enough that several SaaS CEOs I’ve talked to recently have said some version of the same thing: what worked six or twelve months ago simply isn’t producing like it used to.
The natural reaction is to blame the channel. Maybe LinkedIn isn’t working anymore, Google has gotten too expensive, the targeting is wrong, or the agency needs to go. Sometimes those things are true, but before changing the channel, I’d ask a more basic question: Have you given the buyer a reason to care?
That sounds obvious, but look at most B2B ads and you’ll see the problem pretty quickly. “AI-powered platform for modern teams,” “smarter workflows,” “transform your business,” and similar claims may accurately describe the product, but they ask the buyer to do most of the work to sell themselves.
The buyer has to figure out what problem the product solves, whether that problem matters enough to address now, and why this company is any different from the other vendors making roughly the same claim.
That’s a difficult assignment when someone is scrolling LinkedIn between meetings.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince provided an interesting illustration of just how concentrated ad performance can be. According to a post from Kieran Flanagan discussing Cloudflare’s results, roughly 4% of its paid ads accounted for 95% of revenue.
I don’t interpret that as evidence that paid media is dead. I think it tells us something more useful: a very small percentage of advertising is doing most of the work, which should make us question what separates those ads from everything else before concluding that the channel itself is broken.
Join our Paid Media Roundtable on Sept. 3, 2026→ We’re hosting a small roundtable on how to make LinkedIn Ads work for the enterprise sale. If this is something you’re wrestling with, you’re welcome to join us.
A lot of modern B2B marketing was built around a fairly predictable sequence: create content, gate it, generate MQLs, score those leads, hand them to SDRs, run outbound, retarget the people who engaged, and put more money into the channels that appeared to convert. For a long time, that system worked well enough because there was less content competing for attention, fewer automated sales sequences, and buyers were less accustomed to being tracked and contacted every time they interacted with something online.
Today, the machinery is still running, but the meaning of those signals has changed. Someone who downloads a report may simply want the report, someone who visits your website may be researching for any number of reasons, and someone who matches your ICP may have absolutely no interest in changing what they’re doing. Yet sales is still expected to turn all of that activity into pipeline, which is why I think many companies are looking at weak advertising performance as a media problem when the constraint may sit much earlier in the GTM motion.
The best advertising usually doesn’t begin with the product. It begins with a problem the buyer already recognizes, because once I agree that a problem is real, costly and worth addressing, you’ve earned the right to explain why my current approach may be falling short and what I might do differently.
That matters even more on LinkedIn because the buyer isn’t there searching for software. You are interrupting whatever they came there to do. If the first thing they encounter is a product category, feature list or generic value proposition, they have to stop and interpret why any of it should matter to them. Most people aren’t going to invest that much effort in an advertisement.
A stronger approach is to enter a conversation already happening in the buyer’s head by understanding what they’re frustrated by, what they suspect isn’t working anymore, what they’re spending too much money or time trying to fix, and which assumptions about solving that problem may no longer be true.
That gives you the beginning of a commercial argument rather than simply another way to describe the product.
Messaging matters, but it can’t compensate for a weak offer or the wrong audience. Direct-response marketers have understood this for decades: the message, offer and audience have to work together. A great ad shown to a company with no reason to buy will still fail, while a highly relevant audience paired with an offer nobody cares about won’t fare much better. Even a strong offer can disappear if it’s presented in language indistinguishable from every competitor in the category.
That’s why I’m increasingly skeptical of channel-level diagnoses. If LinkedIn performance falls, the answer may not be another campaign structure; if Google performance drops, another keyword strategy may not fix it; and if outbound stops producing, increasing sequence volume may simply make the underlying problem more expensive. Before doing any of those things, I’d want to understand what problem you’re leading with, who is most likely to be experiencing it now, and whether what you’re asking them to do next makes sense given where they are in the buying process.
Advertising doesn’t operate in isolation, and its job shouldn’t simply be to generate clicks.
Good advertising in B2B helps attract people who agree there is a problem worth solving, which means that when sales eventually talks to them, the conversation doesn’t have to begin by convincing the buyer that anything is wrong.
When marketing and sales carry the same argument into the market, the sales conversation can continue a thought marketing has already started. Instead of opening with a request to explain the platform, a salesperson can begin with a problem the buyer already recognizes and explore why the usual ways of dealing with it may no longer be producing the desired result.
That can make it easier to establish urgency and gives sales something far more useful than another cold list of people who happen to have the right job title.
It also changes the way you think about targeting. Rather than asking only whether a company fits the ICP, you can look for evidence that something has changed inside the account that might create a reason to act.
A new executive, funding event, hiring pattern, strategic shift, acquisition, product launch or public statement from leadership can provide context that makes an account more interesting right now. None of those signals guarantees a sale, but they can provide a much stronger reason to spend money getting someone’s attention than firmographics alone.
If your advertising isn’t producing what it used to, I wouldn’t immediately assume you need a new platform, agency or media plan.
I’d first want to understand whether the constraint is the message, offer, audience, buying signals, sales handoff or some combination of them, because putting more money behind the same GTM problem rarely fixes it.
That’s what we look at in our complimentary GTM Analysis.
We take an outside look at the broader motion to identify the two or three areas most likely to be holding back pipeline and provide specific ideas about what we would test or change first.
Take us up on a complimentary GTM Analysis →
There’s no obligation afterward.
If you’d rather see what the output looks like before deciding whether it’s worth your time, you can download a sample report here.