How to Pivot From Lead Gen to Demand Gen: a CMO's Guide

Cognism’s CMO, Alice de Courcy, joined the team when there were only three marketers and our main focus was events.

In those early days, marketing at Cognism was based on classic lead generation tactics - gated content, trade shows and MQLs.

But over time, Alice identified that - even with an effective lead generation engine - they could only scale so far under this approach.

When comparing this to the data under a demand generation approach, it was hard to argue against demand generation as the way forward. Which led Alice and her team to make the leap from lead gen to demand gen.

What was behind this transformation in Cognism’s marketing? And how did she make it happen? 

Scroll 👇 for Alice’s unmissable insights into pivoting from lead gen to demand gen.

Why should you pivot from lead gen to demand gen?

B2B marketing has definitely changed over the years.

Today’s buyers have more information at their fingertips than ever before. All it takes is a quick Google search for someone to learn almost everything they need to know about a product.

This means that marketers are no longer influencing buyers in-market.

They’re moving themselves in-market.

By the time your buyer comes directly to you, they’ve already...

• Asked questions in communities.
• Discussed your service with their peers.
• Evaluated various tools and solutions, including your competitors.

So how do you market in this new era?

For Alice, the key is moving away from lead generation and embracing demand generation.

She said:

“Our focus has shifted from easily measured and tracked channels to channels in which buyers actually make decisions, such as the dark funnel and dark social. That’s where our energy is going now.”

To truly understand why demand generation is the way of the future, Alice looked back at the old state of marketing:

“The old idea of marketing was that we’d have always-on content ads running across LinkedIn and Facebook to our ICP. This would generate direct downloads of our content.”

“In turn, that content would be followed up with an outreach cadence where our sales team would try to book a meeting with them and eventually win a deal.”

The new state of marketing, demand generation, is all about shifting your mindset.

You don’t want to push people into your funnel prematurely after they’ve downloaded your content. Because that’s not how people realistically buy. 

Downloading a report on the state of cold calling in 2024 doesn’t equal intent to buy sales intelligence software. 

So why would you follow that action with a sales motion that doesn’t fit the intent? You’re more likely to annoy them and lose their trust versus convert them if they’re not already considering your tool.

Instead, you should focus on direct demand and declared intent. Alice said:

“We’ve moved to ungate our content. We still serve this via paid social to our target audience, but we’re rebuilding our approach to retargeting funnels specifically for those users who’ve engaged with specific content.”

“We’ll send them bottom-of-the-funnel content that’s very product-focused, like video snippets, testimonials and use cases that are all ungated and friction-free.”

This means all of our content at Cognism is freely accessible to anyone who wants to read it, we do not require contact details or any other information up front before consuming. 

The result?

“We’ve been generating direct demand, true intent demo requests. These people come to us and say they want to buy our product.”

In other words, rather than us collecting a bunch of lukewarm leads (realistically these leads were pretty cold…) and asking our sales team to reach out to them.

We instead put out valuable content to stay front and centre with our ICP until they decide they need a product like ours. And then they come inbound to us. 

A big part of this shift is focusing more on the dark side of marketing: 

Dark social and the dark funnel.

If you aren’t sure what they are, Alice provided a quick definition:

“Dark social is a business term coined by writer Alexis Madrigal; when he wrote this article for The Atlantic, dark social encapsulates ‘invisible’ shares via private channels like messaging apps, email and text, i.e., any private channel your audience is sharing your content on that can’t be tracked.”

“The dark funnel is a term that means the places that buyers are engaging and making decisions that no attribution software or tracking can account for.”

This is important because it forces marketers to consider the intricate ways in which buyers buy. It isn’t a linear process that it might once have been. Many purchasing decisions now occur within these untrackable spaces. 

What was the problem with lead generation?

Alice explained why lead gen was no longer viable at Cognism.

“In 2021, we ran a typical lead generation marketing strategy.”

“This meant putting forms in front of our content. We were gating it to generate MQLs for our sales team to follow up on.”

“We spent a lot of time creating gated content and maintaining processes that allowed our sales team to follow up on any leads generated from it.”

Cognism’s marketing team did this very well. Thousands of content MQLs were generated per quarter; see the orange bars on the chart below 👇

The blue on the graph represents Cognism’s declared intent inbound.

These leads were generated whenever somebody submitted the “demo request” form on the Cognism site. As you can see, these leads increased ever so slightly quarter on quarter.

So what was the issue?

Alice said:

“Although we generated thousands of content MQLs, we weren’t seeing them translate into revenue.”

“In fact, when we looked at the conversion rate of content leads from MQL to SQO, we saw that it sat around 2% while inbound MQLs converted to SQO at 20% on average.”

The bottom line was:

Cognism marketing was spending most of its time working on gated content that only produced a tiny minority of MQLs.

Meanwhile, most SQOs were coming from inbound, and this trend was increasing every quarter.

See the charts below for evidence of this 👇

Why was this happening? 

For Alice, it all boiled down to assumed intent vs direct intent.

Assumed intent:

“When someone completes a form to access content, they’re showing intent for that content but not necessarily for our product or service. Therefore conversion rates are low.” 

Direct intent:

“When someone completes a demo request form, this demonstrates direct intent. It’s a hand raiser for that person to speak to someone in your company.” 

“Therefore, they have intent to purchase your product - which is then shown in conversion rates.”

Why did Cognism pivot to demand gen? 

Alice gave us this pie chart 👇

She told us:

“As you can see, inbound made up 85% of our closed-won revenue, while content made up just 15%.”

“And despite generating 31,562 content leads in 2021, the number of closed-won deals was only 46. That’s a conversion rate of 0.14%.”

For her, this wasn’t scalable. It led her to ask these questions:

“Why are we focusing on increasing content MQLs when they only contribute 15% of revenue?”

“Wouldn’t it be better to switch our focus to the 85%?”

4 steps for moving from lead gen to demand gen

Alice’s mission was clear:

She had to focus energies on the 85% and create more declared intent inbounds.

To do this, she implemented four strategies 👇

1. Turning marketing into a media agency

Alice explained what this strategy looked like in practice:

“We’ve been building what we call a ‘media machine’.”

“That is, we think like a media company. We want to create value-led and entertaining content that educates, delights and builds brand affinity with our ICP. With that brand affinity, we create demand for our product.” 

Cognism has gone through a number of iterations when it comes to content strategy, specifically around what our content should cover. But what became clear when looking into the data is that our audience responds best when we share insights related to what we are known for. 

In other words, when we talk about cold calling and outbound for our sales persona and this fundamental strategy switch towards demand generation for our marketing persona.

In this way, tying content back to what we want to be known for also helps us tackle an issue many brands face when it comes to brand marketing.

‘I’ve heard of Cognism and love your content, but what do you do?’

Because what we want to be known for feeds into what our product does, e.g. helps salespeople with outbound and cold calling, and helps marketers to build lists (either allowing sales to continue to get leads while they focus on demand generation efforts or to better target for their demand generation campaigns).

We then distribute this content across media machine channels to deliver consistent value. We have found that one-off actions have far less impact than repeatable formats, such as weekly podcasts.

We call these our ‘value loops’. Places where our ICP can continually come to consume content and get value. 

Alice said:

“Our media machine has built a community that’s invested in Cognism; our followers talk about us positively on social media (dark social!) and this perpetuates and accelerates demand.”

As the Cognism community has grown, Alice’s team has seen some staggering results:

Podcast

Revenue Champions was a podcast designed to encapsulate both sales, marketing and revenue operations subjects under one roof. From its conception in 2020, this podcast grew at a rapid rate, with a 421% increase in 2022.

However, since the start of 2023, we decided to split the podcasts out in order to better cater to each persona, creating specific content for each department. In other words, we started a podcast for marketers, a podcast for salespeople, and a podcast for RevOps professionals. 

In half the time it took to get these results for Revenue Champions, we surpassed the collective numbers listening to these podcasts by 64%. 421% increase in 2022.

Newsletter

Our newsletters are not designed to be a round-up of content we have produced as a method of distribution. Instead, we want these to be a source of valuable information that people want to receive and engage with. 

Therefore, the links and resources we include are carefully selected and chosen based on their relevance to the topic being discussed, adding value to the conversation. Rather than being new pieces we want to bump the views for. 

We’ve found this approach has had a massive impact on our CTR for newsletters. Going from an average of 2% per newsletter to 8%.

Live events

We regularly host Cold Calling Live events which is a series of cold calling training sessions with experts in the field for SDRs. 

In the last year, we have doubled the number of registrants signing up for the events and more than doubled live attendees, with a 51% attendance rate. 

This, in turn, has led to an increase in high-quality inbounds that know Cognism and the product.

2. Restructuring the content team for demand gen

The old content model - pre-planned content calendars, a focus on volume instead of conversions - didn’t fit the new demand gen world.

Alice had to split Cognism’s content team into two pillars, with each pillar focusing on the two sides of demand gen.

Capture demand

“To capture demand, you turn up where the demand already exists. You have limited control over how you influence scale here.”

SEO is Cognism’s main capture demand tactic. Here, the team is structured like so:

• SEO marketers are specialists and focused on just one type of content - blog and written content.
• It’s mostly forward-planned, with a defined list of keywords to target.
• It’s measured in two ways: on conversions and demand generation metrics such as Google rankings, organic/branded traffic increases and traffic value.

Recently, Cognism has focused on the ‘money keyword’ strategy to SEO. This is essentially prioritising the keywords with high intent. The ones you’d only really be searching for if you’re in-market and ready to buy a product like Cognism.

“If we had a roulette wheel in front of us and we were betting on the board, which keyword do we think represents the most traffic that is the most likely to be in-market?”

Since 2023, we’ve achieved:

• 77.27% increase in organic traffic.
• 89.34% increase in $ traffic value.
• 35.18% increase in ranking keywords..
• 38.33% increase in blog conversions.

Create demand

Alice believes:

“To create demand, rather than gate your content, you run an always-on, all the time, to all your ICP approach.” 

“You go from asking, ‘how much am I willing to pay for a form fill?’ to ‘how much would I pay for someone in my ICP to actually read and engage with my content?’” 

“By ungating and distributing your content in the right way, you begin to create demand for your product. This leads to increased declared intent inbounds. With create demand, you have control over how you scale.”

To get this right, Alice pioneered a new role - a content producer inside the demand gen team.

Demand Generation Content Managers sit within the demand generation team as an agency style resource for Demand Generation Managers to work with.

They’re responsible for:

• Fueling and optimising the media machine for Cognism personas. They’re not limited to any one content format and obsess about how they can add value.
• Closely monitoring asset engagement in order to make recommendations on how these can be evolved and improved over time. 
• Producing the content assets used for ‘big rock’ campaigns. They work closely with subject matter experts to keep this content highly original and valuable.

Alice says:

“I like to think of my different marketing functions as agencies and my DG Managers as business unit owners.”

“There is a lot of specialisation in marketing. This can prove challenging as you scale. With more and more work happening in silo.”

“The best way I can describe it is as a number of independent agencies. Each team owns clear goals and business responsibilities and has oversight of processes end-to-end. They are specialists in their fields.”

“DG Content Managers own all our media machine content. This is our always-on, create demand motion, including content such as podcasts, newsletters, live events and more.”

“They also produce more TOFU thought leadership content (optimising for search) and produce what we term ‘big rock’ content that we use for campaigns, think Diary of a CMO or our recent Cold Calling Report.”

“And then our DG Managers own targets for pipeline and revenue in their specific regions or segments.” 

“They come up with initiatives to reach our ICP in order to reach these business objectives. Whether this is more targeted ABM campaigns, distribution of media machine content, ideating on ‘big rock’ campaigns or developing paid ad campaigns.” 

3. Dedicating resources to content distribution

For demand gen to work properly, you need to invest in content distribution.

The idea behind distribution is to produce content your buyers love. Then, by distributing it effectively, they’ll start to share it with their peers.

For example when we produced Alice’s Diary of a First Time CMO, we created three different versions. A physical book, a digital book and an audio book.

This is because the formats people enjoy engaging with differ. And we were catering to as many as possible because we knew this content had a lot of value, and we wanted to get as many people engaging with it as we could.

As with all marketing techniques, you need to work out a strategy and framework before you get started.

Alice said:

“The minute you decide to go ahead with content distribution, start labelling different types of content you’re producing to fill that framework and figure out what you want to do with that content.”

“You need to be very agile in your approach. You don’t know what’s going to take off and be worthy of a very high-level distribution."

Keep in mind that a lot of your distribution will happen in dark social. Your buyers will share your content in places that aren’t immediately obvious or measurable.

For example:

• Private messenger apps.
• Comments on social media.
• Community groups and subreddits.

To name just a few!

Cognism toyed with having a team member who was solely focused on distribution. It was their job to be on those platforms daily, monitoring conversations and mentions and responding when things took off.

Later, the strategy changed to working with subject matter experts (SMEs). These B2B influencers already had their own followings in the industry and could distribute Cognism’s content to far wider audiences than before.

4. Revamping the paid social account structure

So far we’ve delved into what happened in the DG and content teams.

What about the PPC team? 

Alice set the scene:

“As we were moving away from collecting leads, we ungated some of our content and created ‘awareness campaigns.’”

“This was a great place to start; it’s important to keep things simple in the beginning. Still, we soon found this broad-brush approach had limitations.”

Alice identified some gaps in this approach:

“We began by focusing on TOFU and BOFU content but soon realised there was a lack of focus. We over-indexed on a lot of actionable checklists and scripts but had very little strategic content.”

“We also filled our BOFU bucket with case studies. We weren’t showcasing our product enough.”

“There was also the problem of ICs vs decision-makers. We needed to diversify our messaging for those who use our tool day-to-day vs decision-makers buying on behalf of their teams.”

The new paid social account structure looked like this:

The structure was split between awareness and remarketing and included four distinct content buckets, all with different content and goals.

Specific objectives (traffic, reach, conversions) were assigned to each bucket.

And each bucket served a different persona with uniquely tailored content.

Alongside these were separate remarketing buckets, again all with different aims (product, social proof, demo).

An important point to mention here is that different marketing objectives, whether that’s reach, engagement, CPC or CTR, they all need to ladder back to a core business metric or outcome that you are trying to influence.

We operate under an outcome-based marketing approach when it comes to our paid strategy, where everything we do across all channels is done with a clear objective in mind. For example, we increase closed-won accounts, pipeline, revenue, MQLs, SQOs, and MBs or MAs.

It’s great to know how to run PPC campaigns across various channels, but you should never lose sight of the core business KPI you are trying to affect.

For this strategy to work, Alice and her team had to ditch the conversion mindset.

“How many leads did we get?”

“This question is the death of all campaigns. Even looking at what directly attributed pipe in your CRM will kill it.”

“Learn to accept that you will generate inbound demand that you’ve lost attribution on.”

Alice’s advice? 

Instead, focus on engagement metrics; these will help you to assess how well your ICP is reacting to your campaigns.

“Use broad measures of inbound demand to draw conclusions on effectiveness.” 

“Of course, any directly attributed demand is a bonus and still a good measure of success. Always include them in reporting.”

And in terms of reporting, Alice said there are two main areas you want to track:

Reach and engagement

• Impressions, reach, video views, frequency.
• CTR, engagement rate, likes, comments.
• Qualitative feedback/shares.
• Traffic, time on page, bounce rate.

“We run three comparisons to measure effectiveness:

1. Performance over time.
2. Performance against benchmarks.
3. Performance against existing campaigns.

“This gives us a good idea of when something is starting to dip or diminish. Then we either adapt it or switch it off.”

Conversions

• Leads, anonymous conversions, goal completions, pipeline.

“Measure what you can attribute, but more importantly, measure what you can’t.”

“It’s good to be able to see what direct conversions your campaigns are generating. The more the better, always.”

“But you don’t use this as your north star. It will lead you down the wrong path.”

“Take a look at general trends, too! This combined with engagement metrics will show you the success of a campaign.”

Pivoting to demand gen: what’s the impact on sales? 

Marketing doesn’t exist in a silo; it’s closely tied to sales, and no more so than at Cognism.

When Alice’s team made the leap from lead gen to demand gen, what was the impact on sales?

One thing that happened was the creation of a brand new role - the Marketing Development Representative.

Alice said:

“This is a specialised role that sits in our sales team. They deal with all of the direct intent demand that we generate in marketing.”

It’s been developed as a promotion from the normal SDR role.

Why?

Because junior sales reps aren’t the best to follow up with direct demand prospects.

Alice explained more about this:

“Often, people have their junior reps following up on direct demand because they say that’s the easiest thing for them to do.”

“However, we believe these reps need to have the most experience because they’re conversing with people ready to buy today.”

“These buyers want to have conversations around complex topics regarding your products, and they really appreciate speaking to experienced reps.”

Early indicators that showed us demand gen was working

Alice spoke about what happened after we made the switch:

“In 2022, we saw a huge increase in marketing investment.”

“If we continued to put that money into lead generation, as we had in 2021, we wouldn’t have seen the growth in closed-won revenue that we had last year.”

“We would have created an enormous number of leads with assumed intent and they wouldn’t have converted to closed-won. Our content leads converted to closed-won at 0.2% on average as opposed to inbounds at 4%.”

Take a look at these graphs:

Alice said:

“Where we increased spend, we’ve seen a direct relationship in the number of inbounds and then closed-won revenue.” 

“We see a lag with the increase in spend and revenue performance of 3x average sales cycle. The increase in closed-won reflects the first budget increase and the second budget increase showed in early 2023.”

The theory behind a demand generation strategy is that it not only drives inbounds but also reduces the sales cycle and increases your ACV.

Alice had her own thoughts on this:

“If prospects are more aware of your company, products and services, then they will come to you ready to buy.”

“This reduces the sales cycle. Whereas in a lead gen strategy, a lot of the education is done in the sales process. This elongates the sales cycle as the prospect isn’t ready to buy.”

You can see this effect in the graph below for inbound vs content sales cycles 👇

How’s it going now?

We’ve been working under a demand generation approach for a number of years now. And while the climate and market has been a tougher environment than when we originally made the switch - we have seen some really positive performance as a result of demand gen as we scale. 

For example, we expanded into DACH and France after validating that there was a significant amount of demand in these regions.

Sticking true to our demand generation strategy, we developed full media machines specific to these countries - rather than simply deploying a rinse and repeat of our UK strategy, only translating our website into French or German. 

Not stopping there - we got subject matter experts and prominent decision makers from target accounts to get involved in our media machine content. Such as live events and podcasts which opened up conversations with accounts that we’d never have had access to before. 

Alongside our demand capture SEO efforts and paid ads.

All of which resulted in us reaching 135% of pipeline target and 120% of revenue of our targets combined for these regions for H1. 

In addition, we’ve started to move up-market, targeting mid market and enterprise accounts with demand gen led ABM plays. Exclusively targeting ‘sweet spot accounts’ and combining digital activity with boutique dinners to engage senior decision-makers.

Here are some of the results we’ve achieved to date:

• 3 net new opportunities generating six-figure pipeline.
• Net new conversations with senior decision-makers from 1-5k companies.
• Net new conversations with senior decision-makers from 5-10k companies.
• Engaged primary contacts in the buying committee to increase speed to close for 2 big opportunities.

Another important result of this initiative is the feedback we received from our sales leader:

“The dinners were pivotal in helping us initiate and progress conversations with stakeholders that we notoriously don’t engage with in the deal cycle.”

Which is brilliant both for our ability to engage with hard to reach decision makers and also for our marketing and sales alignment.

We’ve also noticed some significant efficiency improvements in our lead quality and volume. We have always had strong performance from our paid and inbound campaign types - however these are currently performing better than ever in terms of MQL to SQO%.

And LinkedIn create demand has influenced nearly 2,000 won deals since June 23, with an opportunity win rate +44%.

Key takeaways

Want to implement a demand generation strategy of your own? Luckily for you, we created the DG Playbook course taking you step by step through what we did, so you can recreate this playbook for yourself! But to recap...

• Transform your marketing team into a media agency focused on providing content that your audience actually wants to engage with.
• Reorder your content creators for capturing demand and creating demand.
• Ungate your content and distribute it widely, especially on dark social.
• Work with subject matter experts to level up your content and increase its reach.
• Split your paid social account structure into separate buckets focusing on different personas and goals.
• Ditch the conversion mindset and focus on engagement metrics.
• Employ dedicated and experienced MDRs to follow up with your direct demand prospects.

Most importantly - sign up for a revenue target and leave MQLs where they belong - in the past!