Lead generation fails because it treats buyers as targets instead of people with context. The solution isn’t better tactics. But building a myth (positioning/identity) that attracts the right buyers organically.
Lead gen and the sales pipeline is a story as old as the barter system, but instead of a merchant screeching in the market.
Sales leaders scream in the digital marketplace.
There’s a reason you aren’t getting sales or even a healthy pipeline – your services and products don’t entice your buyer because you are after their money.
It’s a negative loop; one that your buyer is caught up in, too.
And it’s affecting the economy similarly to a crash, and AI is exacerbating the problem. The inefficiencies that you are feeling and can’t yet put into words?
The loop is the cause of it all. Okay, not all, but it is the fulcrum, and the ripples of its effect are all the other causes.
The scope of this problem is complex. Can you really build a pipeline, especially a lead gen pipeline, to improve sales?
If we are to do that, then it must not be underplayed that this is a paradox. Because asking lead gen to build a sales pipeline is asking someone to build a house with only foundations and no bricks.
No, lead generation builds trust and gives marketing and sales teams the data to close deals. The pipeline that most agencies deliver is a list of individuals who match your preference. And every time your sales team calls them, they either don’t know who you are or get annoyed.
So what should one do?
Here’s our 2 cents on it.
What do businesses get wrong about lead generation and sales?
Any organization that deals with a server experiences what is known as a cyberattack at least once.
What is involved in this attack?
- Bad actors
- Malicious Intent
- Exploitation of data
But what does that have to do with lead generation at all?
Essentially, today’s lead generation has become a continuous cyberattack. And this has happened unknowingly and slowly.
How?
In Game Theory, people who do good and people who cheat both fail.
Yet, one party survives- and that is the copycat.
The copycat learns and adapts.
So what happened? Marketing and sales raced to gain the most revenue and became data farms.
The industry spammed Google’s search with repetitive blogs, using SEO grey-hat and black-hat techniques.
But this worked, and people started copying these techniques, making most business communication seem transactional instead of relational (the ideal)
The Lead Gen Negative Loop
Vendors → Revenue-based tactics → Works → Gets Copied → Buyers’ Remorse Sets in → Buyer-Vendor relationship sours → Revenue Drips → Pivot to Aggressive and Borderline Malicious Revenue Tactics → Trust Erodes.
And B2B lead gen becomes an echo chamber of derivative marketing advice and sales, which end up nowhere.
A loop that started to earn revenue became a vicious loop, trapping buyers and vendors in a push-and-pull game of one-upmanship.
However, the winners of this game are the teams that give buyers what they want. Or the big brands that have made a name, and influencers that gain their trust.
These, too, become a gimmick that frankly even industry professionals are tired of.
The lead generation engine for the modern sales leader.
Every vendor is a buyer and every buyer is a vendor of some sort. This holds true across all domains.
And the ecosystem involves each other. A marketing professional will look at marketing and be influenced by it.
The programmer with programming practices.
Salespeople with other sales strategies.
The exposure of knowledge in daily lives means everyone influences each other’s work. But this means our frustrations are shared. As a sales leader, you face the same ecosystem: you want and need high-quality leads to build a sales pipeline.
Same for marketers. Some are better at it, some are mediocre, and some are plain bad. The ideal is to be good at it. But everything valuable is hidden behind data mining.
You share your data or money, and an organization will give you information. Case in point: HubSpot’s The State of Sales Report or McKinsey’s $1200 reports.
They are valuable, but their inherent value is based on what you give them. Yet, we use this data to empower our teams and sell solutions. Solutions that instead of creating a win-win situation, focus on revenue generation. Instead, it’s a propagation of problem-solving-problem-solving.
Their IT stacks are complex, and sales are failing across the entire market- everything becomes a problem to solve.
But no one is concerned with the core problem: treating buyers as people with contexts and multi-layered issues.
You treat the symptom and hope the cancer cures itself?
But here lies the good news: –
A possible solution
The frustration is shared. There’s a good chance many readers of this piece agree with what is being said. They have faced the same issue ad infinitum.
“What is our lead generation pipeline? It’s bullshit. Most calls have gone nowhere, and the deals remain unclosed.”
Especially for services, this rings true.
Services are hard to crack. And easy to replicate.
There are two strategies that organizations miss:
- Their revenue is based on their value
- Value is based on perception.
Big brands leverage this. They identify themselves with self-created myths.
Google is SEARCH.
OpenAI is AI.
Apple is PRODUCTIVITY.
This method is not monopolized by big brands. It’s a lead generation tactic everyone can adopt. And most high-performing teams are doing so.
Value is myth.
Lead generation, or let’s give it a better term, customer acquisition, can only take place when the buyers can attach themselves to your brand.
In order to do so, your service or product must focus on what makes it different. This assumes there is a difference in what you do- whether that’s pricing or customer service. But you must be rooted in myth.
For example, Ciente delivers leads, but what is the brand’s myth? It is trust. The myth is trust-making, and this piece is a part of it. An echo that reinforces what the brand stands for. Through this, we build an organic pipeline of people (read: leads) that want and require agencies that operate on trust.
It was right there in the market gap. The myth is to reinforce this point again and again. And the market supports it- there is ample data just on the fact that lead gen agencies underperform their basic tasks.
All we had to do was: –
- Create the promise
- Deliver it.
This gives us leverage- the content then becomes a vehicle to propagate the message and create interest within the buyer.
The action items for lead gen in 2025 and beyond.
Since every B2B content needs actionable takeaways. We will distill the thesis here for a clearer understanding of what this means. This is purely a framework; you can break it and mold it however you want.
1.) Perception – Does your brand solve a tangible problem for your buyers?
2.) Vendor Perception – Do you treat the buyer as relational nodes instead of transactional? Can you adopt this perception for experimentation at your stage?
3.) Myth Making – Does your method and value create a natural myth? This usually does happen naturally. You will notice your myth aligns with the market gap.
4.) Value Creation – Perception creates value. It is based on how you do your services and build your product. The USP arises from the methods.
5.) Customer Acquisition- Do the methods above help drive better CA? And CAC: CLV ratios?
That’s it.
There isn’t a 7-step program that you need to spend your days copying. No one can replicate your context or your buyers’ behavior. You need to derive your own insights and try to fit them in frameworks. And if they don’t work, abandon them.
Including this one.
If you can’t identify a meaningful difference, you have a product problem, not a lead gen problem.
There is a harsh reality that many buyers will face: businesses do lie to you.
The reason behind it is that the changing economy rewards revenue-based behavior. Agencies and product teams must increasingly deal with copycat solutions and cheaper alternatives, which buyers may prefer in the short term.
The only way someone can differentiate is by actually solving the problem people are facing in the first place. Novel idea, right? Look at all the good companies that exist today; they do it.
They give buyers what they want or generate demand through storytelling. But if you can’t do that, no amount of lead gen is going to fix that pipeline.
Buyers have become wary of what you are selling. And if they don’t find it, they will lose interest and move on negatively, and that impacts your brand’s name in the process.
The question isn’t how do we get them in the door. That part’s easy.
Think about making them stay. And the only reason they will stay is because you add value to their lives.
