TLDR: Enterprise B2B marketing's obsession with MQLs, email nurturing, and lead scoring is burning budget without driving revenue. Only 5% of your market is ready to buy today—successful revenue-driving CMOs focus on educating the other 95% while aligning marketing directly to pipeline growth and closed deals, not vanity metrics.

Listen to the full conversation with Delfin Vassalo, the CMO who scaled past $1BN in annual revenue leading go-to-market teams through the mindset shift of sales in a market where 95% of ideal customers are not ready to buy.

The Enterprise Marketing Problem: Activity Without Revenue Impact

Marketing directors at billion-dollar companies face a paradox: they have sophisticated marketing technology stacks, detailed attribution models, and countless MQLs—yet sales teams still view marketing as the "people who make PowerPoint presentations."

The fundamental issue isn't execution. It's strategy.

According to Delfin Vassalo, who scaled marketing at a company exceeding $1 billion in revenue, most B2B marketers remain trapped in tactics invented by marketing technology vendors 20 years ago. These tactics—lead scoring, email nurturing, MQL/SQL frameworks—were designed for low-value, high-volume sales. They catastrophically fail in enterprise deals with 6-7 figure price tags and multi-year sales cycles.

The reality of enterprise buying: Complex B2B purchases involve 5-10 decision makers according to research from McKinsey and Gartner. Your sales team talks to 2-3 of them. Marketing can reach all 10. Yet most marketing organizations optimize for individual "leads" rather than buying committees, measure success by form fills rather than pipeline contribution, and chase attribution instead of driving revenue.

Why Traditional Lead Generation Fails in Enterprise Sales

The 95/5 Rule That Changes Everything

Research from Edelman and LinkedIn reveals a critical insight: only 5% of your total addressable market is actively in-market to buy your solution right now. Traditional lead generation exclusively targets this 5%—the people already searching, already comparing, already ready to talk to sales.

What about the other 95%?

These prospects match your ideal customer profile. They have the budget, authority, and need for your solution. But they don't have a project right now. They're not actively searching. They won't fill out your contact forms or download your gated content.

The strategic implication: Companies that educate the 95% through demand generation consistently win deals without competition when those prospects enter the market. Prospects who've consumed your content for 3-6 months don't create shortlists—they call you directly because you've already proven you understand their problems.

The Death of Form Fills

Enterprise buyers learned to game your lead generation system. They use personal Gmail addresses instead of corporate emails. They research anonymously. They deliberately avoid downloading gated content to prevent sales harassment.

Why? Because they've been trained by poor marketing experiences. Download one whitepaper and receive:

• Immediate aggressive sales outreach
• Weekly newsletter spam
• Automated email nurturing campaigns
• Lead scoring systems tracking their every move

Buyers aren't stupid. They recognize these patterns and actively work around them. Your carefully constructed lead generation machine optimizes for a behavior buyers deliberately avoid.

The Enterprise Buying Committee Reality

Enterprise purchases involve multiple stakeholders with different priorities:

Economic Buyer (VP/C-level):

• Never visits your website
• Delegates research to their team
• Makes final purchase decision
• Focuses on business outcomes and ROI

Technical Evaluator (Director/Manager):

• Conducts detailed product research
• Compares features across vendors
• Validates technical feasibility
• Visits your website repeatedly

End Users:

• Care about usability and daily experience
• Influence the selection process
• May never interact with marketing directly

Finance/Procurement:

• Evaluates total cost of ownership
• Compares pricing across vendors
• You may never know their name
• Critical to deal progression

The marketing challenge: Your content must educate all these stakeholders simultaneously. Feature comparison pages for technical evaluators. ROI calculators for economic buyers. Use case documentation for end users. Pricing frameworks for finance.

Traditional lead generation treats each website visitor as an individual lead to be scored and nurtured. Effective enterprise marketing recognizes that each visitor represents one voice in a larger buying committee.

What Doesn't Work: Tactics to Eliminate

1. Automated Lead Scoring

Assigning point values based on website visits, email opens, and content downloads creates false precision. "5 points for visiting the pricing page, 10 points for downloading the whitepaper, subtract 10 points for 3 weeks of inactivity."

Vassalo spent years refining automated lead scoring systems before eliminating them entirely in 2019. The impact on business? Zero. Revenue continued growing without the complex scoring algorithms.

Why lead scoring fails in enterprise:

• Buying committees mean multiple people research from one company—your system can't distinguish between them
• Long sales cycles (12+ months) make activity-based scoring meaningless
• Enterprise buyers deliberately avoid trackable behaviors
• The scoring produces volumes of "qualified" leads that sales rejects

2. Email Nurturing Campaigns

Weekly automated email sequences seem logical: educate prospects over time until they're ready to buy. The reality? Vassalo's experience delivering two newsletters weekly to different audience segments generated exactly zero closed deals.

Email nurturing makes three false assumptions:

1. Prospects want to receive your emails
2. Email consumption indicates purchase readiness
3. Progressive information delivery drives conversion

Enterprise buyers don't wait for your email schedule to make decisions. When they're ready to research, they go directly to your website, ask AI tools, or reach out to their network. Your carefully sequenced content arrives at the wrong time or gets ignored entirely.

The alternative: Make all your best content immediately accessible. Let buyers self-educate at their own pace rather than forcing them through your predetermined nurture track.

3. The MQL/SQL Framework

Ask 10 marketers to define MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) and you'll receive 10 different answers. Sales leaders definitely don't agree with marketing's definition.

This framework came from Salesforce and marketing automation vendors two decades ago. It was never a marketing best practice—it was a product feature that marketing adopted because the technology supported it.

What makes an actual qualified lead:

1. Purchase intention (actively looking to buy)
2. Budget and authority aligned
3. Ready to engage in sales conversations
4. Matches ideal customer profile

If any element is missing, it's not a lead—it's a researching prospect who needs more education.

4. Gated Content

Requiring email addresses to access basic product information, case studies, or pricing creates friction for qualified buyers while attracting tire-kickers who want free content but won't purchase.

Exception: If you're an established thought leader with a strong personal brand, gated content with your specific insights may convert because people already value your expertise. For everyone else, gated content damages conversion more than it generates pipeline.

The Demand Generation Alternative

Demand generation shifts focus from capturing existing demand (the 5% actively searching) to creating demand among the 95% not currently in-market.

How Demand Generation Works in Practice

Scenario: You sell water management solutions to urban planners and civil engineers. These professionals don't have relevant projects constantly—they might work on 1-2 water management projects per year.

Traditional lead generation approach:

• Target people actively searching "urban water management software"
• Capture leads through gated technical whitepapers
• Nurture with automated email campaigns
• Push leads to sales for qualification

Result: You reach only the 5% currently working on projects. You miss 95% of potential buyers.

Demand generation approach:

• Create ungated educational content addressing water management challenges
• Distribute content consistently over 6-12 months
• Build brand awareness and subject matter expertise
• Be top-of-mind when prospects get a relevant project

Result: When urban planners receive a water management project 6 months later, they remember your brand because you've been educating them consistently. They don't create a shortlist—they call you directly because you've already demonstrated understanding of their problems.

The Business Impact

Prospects who've consumed your demand generation content for months arrive pre-qualified:

• They understand your solution
• They trust your expertise
• They've educated themselves on pricing and implementation
• They're ready for substantive sales conversations

Sales calls shift from basic qualification and education to solution design and deal structuring. Sales cycles compress because education already happened through marketing.

Positioning: The First Responsibility of Senior Marketers

Before optimizing campaigns, before measuring conversion rates, before any tactical execution—you must nail positioning.

The Positioning Process

Effective positioning requires collaboration between three groups:

Product/Engineering:

• Lists all product features
• Explains technical capabilities
• Describes why features exist

Sales:

• Shares which messages resonate with buyers
• Identifies actual customer pain points
• Reveals competitive dynamics in deals

Marketing (Facilitator):

• Leads the positioning conversation
• Identifies truly unique features (not table stakes)
• Translates features into customer benefits
• Creates clear value proposition

Critical insight: List every feature your product has. If competitors also have that feature, set it aside for positioning purposes. Focus exclusively on genuinely unique capabilities—these become your differentiators.

Group related unique features into benefit categories:

• Security features → "Enterprise-grade data protection"
• UX features → "Simplified workflows that reduce training time"
• Integration features → "Seamless connection to existing tech stack"

From these benefit categories, develop your positioning statement and value proposition.

Why This Must Happen Internally

External consultants can coach positioning methodology, but the actual positioning work requires internal knowledge that outsiders rarely possess:

• Deep product understanding
• Real customer pain points from sales conversations
• Market dynamics and competitive intelligence
• Company strategic direction

The collaboration benefit: When product, sales, and marketing jointly develop positioning, nobody opposes the resulting marketing materials. People don't oppose decisions they participated in creating.

This alignment prevents endless revision cycles where sales rejects marketing's messages or product disputes the benefits marketing emphasizes.

How Revenue-Driven CMOs Think Differently

Traditional marketing leaders discuss website traffic, email open rates, and MQL volume. Revenue-driven CMOs speak a different language.

Starting Business Conversations, Not Marketing Conversations

When Vassalo met with country sales managers, he never discussed Facebook campaigns, SEO performance, or website visitors. Instead:

"Where do you see opportunities in the next 6 months? What types of projects deliver the highest profit margins? I see these deals in your pipeline—how can marketing help move them forward? Should we adjust our target account list?"

This shifts the relationship from marketing as support function to marketing as revenue partner.

Account-Based Measurement

Revenue-driven CMOs create country-specific (or region-specific) slides showing:

• Target accounts marketing is actively reaching
• Engagement behavior from those accounts
• Active deals in the pipeline from those accounts
• Conversion status of previously identified opportunities

The conversation: "These are the 50 accounts we agreed to target. Here's their engagement with our content. Here are the 8 deals currently progressing. Do we need to adjust our account list? How can we accelerate these specific deals?"

This beats showing marketing vanity metrics by focusing on what sales actually cares about: accounts in their territory showing buying signals.

The Five Actions for New Revenue-Driven CMOs

When joining a new B2B tech company, revenue-driven marketing leaders follow this sequence:

1. Connect With People

Meet with product management, engineering, and sales. Build relationships before trying to change anything. Your internal stakeholders are your first customers—understand what they do and why they do it.

Sales must become partners, not adversaries. Spend informal time with them. Ask questions. Learn their challenges. Position yourself as someone who helps them succeed, not someone who creates extra work.

2. Ask What's Working and What's Not

Gather perspectives from across the organization. You'll receive conflicting advice—that's expected. Don't commit to changes yet. Just listen and understand current perceptions.

3. Understand Business Objectives

Meet with business leaders to understand:

• Revenue goals for the next 12-24 months
• Current sales cycle length
• Average contract value
• Target customer profiles
• Win rates and typical deal sizes

From business objectives, you derive marketing objectives. Marketing doesn't set its own goals independent of business needs—it supports specific business outcomes.

4. Review Positioning and Messaging

Most companies have unclear, overly complex, or technically focused positioning that doesn't resonate with buyers. Work through the positioning process described earlier to clarify:

• Who exactly are you targeting
• What unique value do you provide
• Why should they choose you over alternatives

5. Start With Deals About to Close

Demonstrate immediate value by helping close deals in the pipeline. What marketing support do current opportunities need? Can you create a custom case study? Build a ROI model? Develop a competitive comparison?

Showing quick wins builds credibility for longer-term strategic initiatives.

Attribution: The Trap That Wastes Time

Enterprise marketing attribution is mostly theater. In high-value deals with 12+ month sales cycles, attributing revenue to specific blog posts or email opens is delusional.

Why Attribution Doesn't Work

The compound effect: Revenue comes from the cumulative impact of all marketing activities. All the blog posts, all the videos, all the case studies, all the LinkedIn content, all the website improvements working together to educate buyers.

Attempting to isolate which single piece of content "caused" a deal wastes enormous time and produces meaningless results.

The consistency requirement: Every marketing asset should reinforce the same positioning and value proposition in different ways. This consistent repetition builds buyer confidence and brand recall.

If your positioning is solid and your content consistently reinforces it, buyers will contact you when they're ready. Which specific asset they consumed last is irrelevant.

What to Measure Instead

Primary metrics:

1. Revenue growth (obviously)
2. Pipeline development with qualified accounts

For long sales cycles exceeding one year: Revenue may not move in your first 12 months. Pipeline growth becomes your leading indicator. Is pipeline increasing with the right ICP? Are deal sizes trending toward target ACV?

Secondary metrics:

• Target account engagement (are ICPs consuming your content?)
• Deal velocity (are sales cycles shortening?)
• Win rate against competition
• Average contract value

Avoid: Measuring website visits, email opens, or form fills as primary success metrics. These activity metrics don't correlate with revenue in enterprise sales.

The AI Search Disruption: Implications for Enterprise Marketing

Traditional search behavior is shifting. Buyers increasingly use ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI tools instead of Google to research solutions.

The Zero-Click Future

Google impressions are increasing while clicks to websites decrease. Users find answers directly in AI-generated responses without visiting your site.

The strategic response: Treat AI tools as additional stakeholders in the buying committee. Your brand must appear in AI-generated responses when prospects research your category.

This doesn't mean optimizing for AI clicks (which barely exist). It means ensuring AI tools recognize your brand and solution when synthesizing answers about your market category.

Content Accessibility Becomes Critical

AI tools can't recommend solutions they don't know about. Make all your best content ungated and easily accessible:

• Comprehensive product documentation
• Detailed use case descriptions
• Honest pricing frameworks
• Technical specifications
• Customer success stories

When AI tools aggregate information about your market, they'll include your solution if you've made comprehensive information available.

The Human Decision Remains

AI tools don't sign contracts or approve invoices. They inform human decision-making but don't replace it.

For at least the next 5 years, focus on human buyer behavior and decision-making processes. Use AI tools to empower your marketing efficiency, but remember that people—not algorithms—make purchase decisions in European and North American markets.

Budget Reality: The Under-Investment Problem

Research from BML shows European companies (excluding Finland) invest 7-10% of total revenue in marketing. Finnish companies invest under 2%, with many below 1%.

The business conversation about budget:

"To achieve €30M revenue with our 30% close rate, we need €90M in qualified pipeline. Based on our conversion rates from target accounts to pipeline, we need X investment to generate that pipeline volume."

This frames marketing budget as pipeline investment rather than discretionary spending. Revenue leaders understand pipeline requirements—they can make informed decisions about marketing investment when framed this way.

Pipeline-Focused Metrics

Revenue-driven marketing organizations measure what matters:

Pipeline Contribution

• New pipeline generated from target accounts
• Pipeline progression (velocity through stages)
• Pipeline quality (average deal size, close rate)

Account Engagement

• Percentage of target accounts engaging with content
• Depth of engagement from buying committee members
• Engagement trends over time

Deal Acceleration

• Sales cycle length for marketing-engaged accounts vs. cold outbound
• Win rate when marketing supported the opportunity
• Deal size comparison across acquisition channels

Revenue Attribution

• Direct revenue from inbound qualified leads
• Influenced revenue where marketing supported sales-sourced deals
• Total revenue from target account programs

Avoid: Tracking email open rates, website session duration, or organic traffic as primary KPIs. These activity metrics provide operational insights but don't demonstrate business impact.

Common Positioning Mistakes

Mistake 1: Feature Lists Without Benefits

Listing product capabilities doesn't communicate value. "Our platform includes real-time analytics, customizable dashboards, and API integrations" describes features—not why buyers should care.

Better approach: "Marketing leaders use our real-time analytics to identify which campaigns drive pipeline, allocate budget to highest-performing channels, and prove marketing's revenue contribution to the board."

The benefit describes the business outcome buyers achieve.

Mistake 2: Trying to Be Everything to Everyone

Vague positioning that attempts to serve all possible buyers dilutes your message. "We help businesses improve efficiency and drive growth" could describe 10,000 different solutions.

Better approach: "We help procurement teams in manufacturing companies reduce supplier risk through real-time supply chain visibility and predictive analytics."

Specific positioning seems narrower but actually increases conversion by clearly communicating who you serve and what you solve.

Mistake 3: Ignoring Sales Input

Product teams might prioritize features that engineering finds technically impressive. But if those features don't resonate with buyers during sales conversations, they shouldn't lead your positioning.

Sales knows which messages win deals. Ignoring sales input when developing positioning guarantees marketing creates campaigns that sales won't support.

The Culture Shift: From Support to Revenue Partner

Changing how sales perceives marketing requires consistent behavior over months:

Speak Business Language

Stop discussing marketing tactics in joint meetings. Discuss accounts, opportunities, deal progression, revenue targets, and market dynamics.

Focus on Their Success

Position marketing as helping sales hit their numbers. "How can I support you to close that deal? What do you need for your big presentation? Which accounts should we prioritize?"

Demonstrate Revenue Impact

Show how marketing activities directly connect to pipeline and closed deals. When opportunities from target accounts enter the pipeline, highlight the marketing engagement that preceded them.

Earn Respect Through Results

Marketing earns revenue partner status through consistent pipeline contribution, not by demanding recognition. Focus on outcomes, and perception will shift.

Demand Generation in Practice: Consistent Education

Effective demand generation requires sustained effort:

Content Consistency

Publish valuable educational content consistently over 6-12 months. One viral post won't build demand. Consistent presence demonstrating expertise does.

Message Repetition

Don't fear repeating core messages. Buyers don't consume all your content. They need to hear your value proposition multiple times, in different formats, to remember it.

Multi-Format Distribution

• Blog posts for in-depth education
• LinkedIn posts for regular visibility
• Videos for product demonstrations
• Case studies for proof points
• Webinars for interactive learning
• Podcasts for thought leadership

Different buying committee members prefer different formats. Provide options.

Ungated Access

Make it easy for buyers to educate themselves. Gated content creates friction at exactly the wrong moment—when prospects are trying to learn about your solution.

The Sales Enablement Question

Revenue-driven marketing creates assets that sales teams actually use:

Deal-Specific Support

• Custom ROI models for specific opportunities
• Competitive battle cards for head-to-head comparisons
• Industry-specific case studies
• Technical documentation answering prospect questions

Account-Based Campaigns

• Targeted content for specific accounts in the pipeline
• Personalized outreach for buying committee members
• Event sponsorships where target accounts congregate
• Account-specific landing pages

Sales Training on Messaging

Help sales teams articulate your positioning consistently. If marketing develops new messaging but sales continues using old language, the disconnect confuses buyers.

Action Steps for Revenue-Driven Marketing

Immediate Changes (This Month)

1. Audit your lead definition: Does your MQL definition include purchase intention, budget authority, and readiness to talk to sales? If not, redefine it.
2. Stop automated lead scoring: Eliminate point-based lead scoring systems. Flag leads based on qualification criteria, not activity scores.
3. Ungate your best content: Remove forms from case studies, product documentation, and pricing information.
4. Schedule sales alignment meetings: Start weekly meetings with sales to discuss pipeline, target accounts, and deal progression.

Strategic Projects (This Quarter)

1. Run positioning workshops: Bring product, sales, and marketing together to document your unique value proposition.
2. Define target account lists: Create specific lists of companies that match your ICP for focused demand generation.
3. Build buying committee content: Develop content that addresses each stakeholder role in the purchase decision.
4. Shift measurement to pipeline: Change primary marketing KPIs from MQL volume to pipeline contribution and revenue influence.

Long-Term Transformation (6-12 Months)

1. Implement account-based measurement: Track engagement and pipeline at the account level, not individual lead level.
2. Develop demand generation programs: Create consistent content publishing schedule focused on educating the 95% not currently in-market.
3. Build sales enablement library: Create assets sales teams request for specific deal scenarios.
4. Establish quarterly business reviews: Present marketing impact in terms sales and executive teams understand: accounts engaged, pipeline generated, deals closed.

The Mind Shift Required

Moving from activity-based to revenue-driven marketing requires fundamental perspective changes:

From: Generating more MQLsTo: Building pipeline in target accounts

From: Optimizing conversion ratesTo: Accelerating deal velocity

From: Measuring email open ratesTo: Tracking pipeline contribution

From: Gating content for lead captureTo: Educating buyers freely to build trust

From: Attributing revenue to last touchTo: Creating compound effect through consistent presence

From: Marketing as support functionTo: Marketing as revenue partner

This transformation doesn't happen overnight. It requires earned credibility, demonstrated results, and persistent focus on business outcomes over marketing vanity metrics.

The Five-Year Outlook

AI will continue disrupting how buyers research solutions. Zero-click behavior will accelerate. But the fundamental enterprise buying dynamic won't change: humans make purchase decisions based on trust, understanding, and confidence that your solution solves their specific problems.

What will remain constant:

• Buying committees with multiple stakeholders
• Long sales cycles for complex products
• Need for education before purchase readiness
• Importance of positioning and clear messaging
• Revenue as the ultimate measure of marketing success

What will evolve:

• How buyers discover and research solutions
• Which channels deliver content to buyers
• Balance between AI-mediated and direct research
• Specific tactics for reaching target accounts

Revenue-driven CMOs adapt tactics while maintaining strategic focus: educate buyers consistently, build trust through expertise, be present when prospects enter the market, and measure success by pipeline and revenue contribution—not marketing activity metrics.

The companies that win in enterprise B2B aren't those with the most sophisticated lead scoring algorithms or the highest email open rates. They're the companies whose marketing organizations understand their role: educating buyers, supporting sales, and driving revenue growth through demand generation that targets the 95% not currently in-market.

About Revenue-Driven Marketing

Generate More helps B2B technology companies shift from lead generation to demand generation, focusing marketing efforts on pipeline contribution and revenue impact rather than vanity metrics. We work with companies selling complex, high-value solutions where traditional lead generation tactics fail to deliver enterprise sales results.