“Our demand gen efforts stopped driving pipeline,” shared a challenged CMO from a $45mil SaaS company. The other marketing leaders in the huddle jumped into action, diagnosing the issues and offering testable solutions. It was time to get into the weeds.

What to Do When Stuff Stops Working

Pause. Breathe. Look at the data. Talk to your peers. Form hypotheses. Test some quick fixes that will buy you time to identify the bigger issues (most likely your overall go-to-market strategy relative to competitive actions).

Look at the Data

“I’d be looking at historical trends of the leads that came from inbound channels,” advised a fellow Huddler. “If you can segment these leads by industry, persona, or title perhaps you’ll see some trend lines and a vein of gold which you can lean into,” they added. “If you can see things that converted down the funnel into pipeline before, double down on those activities,” the Huddler concluded.

Find Your Blunt Instruments

Every CMO needs to have some “blunt instruments” that attract prospective buyers. For many B2B CMOs, webinars play that role. They are inexpensive to produce, and if the topics are timely and the content informative, your audience will respond. “Perfect is the enemy of good when it comes to webinars," noted one CMO. “Even when we can’t find a client to join the webinar, we can still generate a goodly amount of MQLs,” they added. [Do you have some blunt instruments? If yes, what are they?]

Are You Scaring Off Your Prospects?

Eager to fill the pipeline, many marketers accidentally scare off their buyers. It starts when a prospect provides their contact info on a form in order to download content or join a webinar. Shortly thereafter, an overeager, under-trained 22-year-old SDR starts hounding the prospect. The bridge gets burned faster than you can say, “DQ.”

To address this problem, some marketers are testing LLM-driven virtual agents. These agents are trained on your content and can offer visitors a curated experience. The goal is to keep the visitor engaged on your website longer than the usual “land and leave” type. Even a modest uptick in time spent on your website can have a dramatic impact on downstream conversions. [Are you testing virtual agents? If yes, please share your learnings.]

Dancing with ABT

While we’re covering the basics, think ABT as in “always be testing.” No, duh, right? The only nuance I can add here is that many tests are focused on the wrong outcomes. For example, some A/B landing page tests are measured on the quantity of form fills. The result can be a lot of time-wasting follow-up on “leads” that aren’t worth the pixels they’re imprinted upon. Ideally, you’re able to track the visitor beyond the landing page to an action that indicates genuine interest (like watching a demo or checking out your pricing page). Better yet, the buyer contacts you when they’re ready.

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Written by Drew Neisser