Much of today’s B2B demand generation strategy is based on outdated assumptions. For years, marketers relied on the linear funnel, a step-by-step model where prospects are captured, nurtured, and handed over to sales in sequence. But that framework no longer matches reality. Modern buyers move more independently, conducting the majority of their research in private, long before engaging with your team. So why are so many marketing teams still operating as if they control the journey? This article explores how to modernize your demand generation strategy by aligning it with how buyers actually behave, so you can create real engagement, build trust earlier, and drive growth more predictably.
The Myth of the Linear Buyer Journey
The traditional demand funnel promises a clean, predictable path from awareness to purchase. But in today’s B2B environment, that model is disconnected from modern B2B processes. The buyer’s journey is nonlinear and increasingly self-directed, with 70% of it happening independently across unmonitored channels.
B2B buyers consume content from peers, communities, podcasts, online forums, and review sites. This untrackable activity is often referred to as the “dark funnel,” where brand impressions are made, and supplier shortlists are formed long before a contact appears in your CRM.
Relying on a linear, funnel-centric view in this environment can create blind spots that compromise your strategy, making you:
Focus on Volume Over Quality: The pursuit of MQL targets drives gated content and lead forms, which too often generate low-intent contacts that consume resources without converting to revenue.
Ignore the Buying Committee: Decisions are rarely made by one person. An average B2B buying committee now involves multiple stakeholders, each with different priorities. Having a linear model fails to engage the entire group cohesively.
Mistake Activity for Progress: A whitepaper download or webinar registration is not a buying signal. The old model rewards surface-level activity that fails to reflect true intent or business impact.
To thrive in this new landscape, marketing teams need to evolve from passively capturing demand to actively creating it. That shift starts with rethinking how awareness, trust, and intent are built in a buyer-controlled world.
Shifting From Demand Capture to Demand Creation
In the old model, demand generation meant waiting for in-market buyers to reveal themselves, then capturing that demand through forms, scoring, and follow-up. While demand capture still matters, it’s no longer enough to fuel sustainable growth. Today’s opportunity lies in creating demand before it exists, shaping perception, and building trust well in advance of a purchase decision.
Demand creation is about educating the market and becoming the go-to resource in a specific category. It’s a long-term strategy built on providing genuine value without immediately asking for anything in return. The goal is to establish credibility so that, when the buying cycle begins, your brand is already positioned as the preferred, trusted expert.
This shift calls for moving away from gated assets to open, value-first content designed to improve engagement. Instead of hiding insights behind a form, successful brands are sharing their best ideas freely through:
Podcasts and Video Series: Offering deep-dive conversations and expert analysis that position the brand as a thought leader. These formats build consistent engagement and foster long-term audience loyalty.
Niche Communities: Building or participating in platforms where peers can connect and learn from one another. By showing up where real conversations happen, brands earn credibility through contribution rather than promotion.
Original Research and Reports: Publishing data-driven insights that help customers and prospects understand their own market better. This establishes the brand as a source of truth, not just a vendor, with insights that drive decisions.
The goal is to influence buyers where they already are, not force them onto a pre-defined path. This builds brand equity that pays dividends when a prospect finally decides to engage.
Rethinking Metrics for a New Era
Adapting to new buyer behavior requires abandoning outdated metrics. The MQL is a poor indicator of business impact in a world where buying signals are difficult to track. It measures a single action at a single point in time, offering no insight into the broader context of an account’s interest or the influence of the entire buying committee.
Forward-thinking organizations are moving beyond lead-centric KPIs to measure what truly matters: revenue and pipeline. The key metrics now include:
Pipeline Sourced by Marketing: The total value of sales opportunities that originated from marketing initiatives. It reinforces marketing’s impact on real revenue, not just early-stage engagement.
Pipeline Velocity: This tracks which opportunities move through the sales cycle, a key indicator of lead quality. Faster movement often signals better-qualified leads and more relevant messaging.
Customer Acquisition Cost: It represents the total spend across marketing and sales to land a new customer. It helps gauge ROI and allocate resources more effectively across programs.
Influence on Revenue: Uses attribution models to capture the full set of marketing touchpoints that contribute to closed-won deals. It acknowledges that valuable engagement doesn’t always come from form fills and rewards long-term brand investment.
This evolution in measurement drives tighter alignment between marketing and business strategy. It rewards teams for activities that build momentum in the pipeline and reinforce brand trust rather than chasing short-term indicators that rarely lead to revenue. And the results are clear: B2B companies that track pipeline-centric metrics are more likely to exceed their revenue goals.
The Key Considerations for Modern Demand Generation
Today’s high-performing B2B teams are no longer focused solely on filling the top of the funnel. They prioritize building awareness, earning trust, and enabling buying behavior in a more decentralized, buyer-led environment. To succeed in this new landscape, marketing leaders must anchor their strategies in a few guiding philosophies for building a demand engine that reflects how B2B buyers operate today:
Prioritize Brand Over Gated Content: Shift investment toward consistently valuable, easy-to-access content, such as blog posts, videos, research, and social insights. Forms create friction, but open access builds familiarity and long-term trust.
Measure Business Impact, Not Activity: Trade volume metrics for revenue-relevant KPIs like marketing-sourced pipeline, opportunity influence, and deal velocity. When success is tied to actual outcomes, marketing becomes a driver of growth, not just lead collection.
Enable Buyers to Self-Serve: Offer intuitive access to product details, customer stories, pricing, and key resources without forcing a sales conversation too early. A high-performing website is more like a knowledge hub than a gated tunnel.
Align Marketing and Sales Around Accounts: Evolve from isolated lead management to a coordinated account-based strategy that reflects the multi-stakeholder reality of modern B2B buying. True alignment ensures that tailored outreach and education occur across the entire buying committee, not just in the inbox of a single contact.
By embracing these approaches, organizations create demand strategies that are not only aligned with how buyers actually behave. They’re also built to scale, convert, and establish brand trust that lasts beyond a single sales cycle.
Conclusion
The gap between how buyers behave and how brands market continues to widen, and organizations still clinging to outdated models are missing opportunities. At the same time, they’re actively losing mindshare to competitors who show up earlier, educate more effectively, and build trust long before a sales conversation begins.
Modern demand generation requires bold changes. This means businesses need to start redefining metrics, removing friction, and creating brand-led experiences tailored to how buying decisions are actually made. These changes won’t happen overnight, but delaying them only compounds the cost. The question is no longer whether a different approach to demand generation is needed, but whether your team is ready to lead it.
