Most B2B marketing still runs on a single number: the marketing qualified lead. Jon Miller is one of the few people who can tell you where that number came from, because he helped build the system that produced it — first at Marketo, where he helped create the marketing automation category, then at Engagio, then at Demandbase.

What makes this conversation different is that Jon went back and diagnosed his own creation. He’s not quietly onto the next thing. He’s saying, out loud, what the MQL got wrong about how people actually buy — and he’s careful to credit what it got right before he takes it apart.

The short version: roughly 95% of buyers have built their shortlist before they ever talk to a seller. The MQL was designed to catch the last 5% who raise their hand. So the real question isn’t how to optimize lead capture. It’s what you do with everyone who isn’t ready yet — the 95% the old model was built to ignore.

We get into why buying behaves more like weather than a vending machine, the three-tier model Jon uses instead of MQLs, why he thinks legacy automation tools can’t keep up, and how the best CMOs are quietly rewiring what they report to the board. If you’ve ever felt like you were pedaling into a headwind running the playbook that used to work, this one’s for you.

About Jon Miller

Jon Miller founded Marketo in 2006 and helped define the marketing automation category. He went on to found Engagio, which was acquired by Demandbase in 2020, served as CMO at Demandbase, and is now building Phave, an AI-native marketing automation platform.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Jon Miller and his journey
01:24 Diagnosing the MQL model
03:27 The gumball machine / nonlinear buying idea
07:23 What the MQL got right
10:14 The three-tiered model of engagement
14:22 The role of CMOs in modern marketing
18:17 AI’s impact on marketing automation
19:55 The Spotify playlist analogy
22:53 The Peppers and Rogers/one-to-one thread
24:43 Common mistakes moving off the MQL
25:25 The three CMO dashboards
27:25 Advice for CMOs making the shift

A few things worth taking away

• The MQL started as a good idea — a contract between marketing and sales — and got gamed over time as teams chased volume.
• Buying isn’t linear. With six to sixteen people on a buying committee researching in places you can’t even track, “run a campaign, get a lead” no longer describes reality.
• Hand raisers are the gold standard, but waiting for them means you only ever talk to the 5% who already built their shortlist without you.
• Jon’s three tiers — hand raisers, MQX, and MEX — give you a way to work the 95% instead of ignoring them.
• When you move off MQL volume as your headline metric, expect the numbers to drop before quality and conversion rise. Set that expectation early, or you’ll hit a buzzsaw.
• The strongest CMOs report pipeline across all sources to the board and stop fighting over who sourced what.

A few lines that stuck with me

“Put your quarter in, get your gumball out. Put your campaign in, get your MQL out. I just don’t think that’s the way buying works.” — Jon Miller

“If you only wait for somebody to raise their hand, you’re talking to the 5% in market. And they’ve already built their shortlist without you.” — Jon Miller

“You can’t get there with a rules-based system. You just end up with spaghetti.” — Jon Miller

Resources mentioned

• The B2B CMO Project — research on the strategic CMO and the three-dashboard model
• Mike Bosworth, Solution Selling
• Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One Future
• Kathleen Schaub, Marketing in the Great Big Messy Real World

Transcript

Brian Carroll (00:05) Welcome to The B2B Roundtable, where we go inside the ideas, people, and decisions shaping modern revenue teams and how they actually work. I’m Brian Carroll, and today my guest is Jon Miller.

I first met Jon way back in 2006, when he founded Marketo and helped build the marketing automation category as we know it today. In 2015 he founded Engagio, which was acquired by Demandbase in 2020. Now he’s building Phave, an AI-native marketing automation platform.

Here’s what makes this conversation different from other podcasts you’ve listened to: Jon didn’t just build the next thing and quietly move on, the way a lot of founders do. He’s gone back and started diagnosing the problems with something he previously created. He’s talking about what’s wrong, and why it’s failing buyers today.

And here’s why it matters right now. Before they ever talk to a seller, 95% of buyers have already designed their shortlist. The MQL is built to capture the last 5% who self-identify. What about the 95% who haven’t yet?

So, Jon — when did you first start thinking the MQL model was broken, not just underperforming? How did you get there?

Jon Miller (01:24) It started, more than anything else, during my time at Demandbase. After we merged Engagio and Demandbase together in 2020, the first thing I did was help the product team unify the two platforms. But then in 2021, I took over as CMO.

And I had my playbook. This is how I do it: I create definitive guides, big, rich, meaty pieces of content. You run lots of other thought leadership, like webinars, and you generate leads from all of it. Most of those leads won’t be ready to buy right now, and that’s okay — that’s why you nurture them and score them. You know a little something about that. Then eventually, when they’re ready, you pass them to sales. That was the playbook, and it’s the playbook I ran at Marketo.

To a degree, it’s the playbook I ran at Engagio too, although there we also layered on an account-based motion that we’ll get to. So here I am at Demandbase, running that playbook, and the exact same tactics that worked for me at Marketo just weren’t working.

At Marketo, it felt like I’d had a tailwind pushing me forward, making everything work better. At Demandbase, it felt like bicycling into a headwind. That’s what got me thinking: okay, what’s going on here? Over time, I diagnosed multiple problems — like most complex things in the world, there were many reasons it wasn’t working.

Jon Miller (02:56) But more than anything else, it came down to three things. One, buyer saturation. Two, the fact that the traditional model missed important things like brand. And three, the fact that the MQL is really focused on people, not accounts. We can dive into any or all three of those.

Brian Carroll (03:15) I want to understand what you noticed was broken first. As you’ve reflected on it and done the research — what are we getting wrong about how buyers buy today?

Jon Miller (03:27) Let’s start with the core philosophy behind the MQL: that you can run a campaign and get a meaningful response that’s valuable on the other side. That’s how we thought of it at Marketo. If I needed more MQLs, the natural response was, well, let’s run more campaigns.

It trained us to think of buying like a gumball machine. Put your quarter in, get your gumball out. Put your campaign in, get your MQL out. And I just don’t think that’s the way buying works. Arguably, in the early days of Marketo — simpler buying committees, heavy demand, lots of latent need for our product — okay, maybe you could argue there were elements where it worked then.

But fast forward to today, and buying is much more complex. There are six to sixteen members of the buying committee, not one person. And as you said in the intro, that whole committee is going through a complex set of research — happening not just on our website, but increasingly off it, in closed communities and in conversations with AI agents, all invisible to traditional tracking.

When you have that kind of complexity, the model of marketing as a simple linear gumball machine starts to break down. Kathleen Schaub coined a really good term for this, which connected to my math and physics background. She called it “marketing in the great big messy world,” and she pointed out that marketing is actually a complex, nonlinear process — not a simple linear gumball machine.

Jon Miller (05:19) I studied complex nonlinear processes in college, and it turns out that’s the origin of what’s now called chaos theory. The weather is a complex nonlinear process. The stock market is a complex nonlinear process. And these processes are known, among other things, for their unpredictability — their sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Japan. Most people have heard that one.

If you embrace the fundamental idea that buying is just as complex as the weather, then it’s an impossible task to say, “I’ll run this one campaign, and that will lead to buying.”

Brian Carroll (05:46) That’s right.

Jon Miller (06:03) Or, “Where did this deal come from?” “Well, they stopped by the booth at the trade show.” No — it’s a much more complex system than any of those simple explanations can really capture.

Brian Carroll (06:16) The gumball machine analogy hits on something people are really struggling with. Attribution. The MQL has been elevated all the way to the board — board members and CEOs care about it because it’s a visible KPI. And there are a lot of misses in how we think about it, because we don’t actually know how many MQLs become real customers. Partly because of what you just described about how buyers buy.

You wrote something on LinkedIn about a three-tier model — this marketing-engaged layer, where people are consuming content but not showing buying signals yet. Most demand gen teams would say those aren’t worth chasing, because there’s no buying intent yet. Can you make the case for why that’s wrong? Why is that exactly where the fight is being lost?

Jon Miller (07:23) It’s worth starting by saying there was some real goodness in the original concept of the MQL. Specifically, it was a contract between marketing and sales. Marketing said, “I’m only going to pass you things that reach this bar, where there’s strong evidence this is worthy of sales attention.” And sales said, “Okay, I commit to this service-level agreement for follow-up.” That was a genuinely good thing about the MQL.

The problem is that over time it got bastardized. Under pressure to hit pipeline targets, some marketing teams gamed the scoring thresholds. I saw so many companies basically say any responder to any campaign was an MQL. And I’d think, that’s not what it was.

That behavior — driven by the desire for more MQLs — is exactly what led sales to start cherry-picking and ignoring most of them. So what was sales cherry-picking? Hand raisers.

Jon Miller (08:31) I’ve talked to some CMOs who say that’s the only thing they report now: hand raisers. People explicitly asking for a sales connection. And that makes sense — these are people you want to talk to. But I think it’s a hundred percent too passive.

Jon Miller (08:49) And it’s too late. If you only wait for someone to raise their hand, you are by definition only talking to the 5% in market. Those people have already created and aligned on their shortlist without you, which means you’re column B, fighting an uphill battle at best.

Mike Bosworth wrote Solution Selling a while ago, and there’s a lot of wisdom in that old book. The idea of solution selling is that helping a buyer see pain they haven’t prioritized — bringing latent pain into an active evaluation — is really valuable. And if you can be the vendor guiding that process, you help shape the buying criteria. So the question is: how do we make that happen?

One way is an investment in branding. Building a brand that creates urgency around the problem you solve, builds a connection between your company and the ability to solve that pain, and generates positive feelings around that connection — that’s incredibly valuable. We could do a whole other podcast on branding.

But there’s the question of how you tie solution selling together with the goodness the MQL brought to the table. Because solution selling gone wrong just becomes cold calling, and that’s not good for anybody.

That’s why I came up with the three-tier model. The top tier is hand raisers. Let’s all agree that’s the gold standard — it’s what sales wants more than anything, and we should track it. But then there are two other tiers. Tier two I call MQX.

The X is important, because making the X stand for “lead” usually isn’t the right answer — unless you have a low-value, highly transactional purchase that one person can make. Most of the time, it’s a more complex buying committee. So I’d generally say tier two should be MQA — marketing qualified account — or even MQBG, marketing qualified buying group. As a sidebar, MQBG is a mouthful, so I usually drop the M and just call it a QBG.

What these all have in common is some signal that there’s a good chance this account or buying group is actually in an evaluation stage — starting to form their shortlist or consensus, maybe they already have. You’re not waiting for them to raise their hand. If you can reach out to those companies at the right time…

Jon Miller (11:46) …in the right way, it can be valuable. The key is that MQX does not mean this person is ready to buy. It means marketing believes, based on the data, that this account might be in market. There’s an interesting debate about whether we should even call it “qualified,” because it’s not qualified the way a salesperson uses that word.

I like using it because it’s a familiar mental model, but you could also call it a marketing recommended account or a marketing indicated account. If the word “qualified” carries baggage at your company, fine — use something else. Then there’s my third tier.

Jon Miller (12:27) I call it MEX — marketing engaged account. This is really the 95% that aren’t in market. You could cold call into that 95%, but the idea of MEX, as opposed to just your target account list, is that it’s someone from your target list who’s also engaging with your brand and ideas. There’s some level of engagement, even if there are no buying signals. They’re showing interest in your topic, even if not intent to purchase. Odds are that’s a warmer outreach than a truly cold call.

But 100%, do not reach out to that person and pitch a demo or a sales meeting. This is about what Bosworth calls solution selling — helping them understand and quantify the cost of the status quo, and creating hope about what the future could be, maybe by sharing examples of what other companies are doing.

That’s not how typical SDRs reach out today. It’s a one-to-one way of building brand and awareness. And a person with “sales” in their title might not be the right person to do it — which is why some companies have MDRs, market development reps. But that means different economics and different compensation. You can’t pay an MDR on this quarter’s pipeline if what they’re doing is planting seeds for a year from now.

Brian Carroll (14:13) That’s right.

Jon Miller (14:13) So that was a lot of framework. But I think hand raisers, MQX, and MEX make a lot of sense.

Brian Carroll (14:15) A lot was going through my head listening to that. You brought up brand, you talked about engaging differently, and you touched on how SDRs work. The current playbook has an SDR follow up on a scored lead, incentivized one way: get a demo, schedule an appointment. So they’re focused on the last mile, the end of the buying process — but the majority of leads they talk to are nowhere close to that. They’re in the early stages.

You’ve been digging into this through CMO dinners and conversations. How are CMOs responding right now? What are you seeing and hearing, and what do you think teams need to do to get from where they are to where they need to go?

Jon Miller (15:21) I see a wide variance in how marketing leaders are responding to these pressures. This is a dramatic oversimplification, but you can bucket most marketing leaders into either a strategic CMO or a tactical CMO.

The tactical CMOs, whether they want to be or not, work at companies that primarily view marketing as pipeline generation. They’re pressured into the traditional playbook and traditional metrics — MQLs, marketing-sourced or marketing-influenced pipeline. These CMOs will give the right kind of acknowledgment — “I know the MQLs aren’t right, and I’m reporting on these other things too” — but they still feel like, “Yeah, but I have to report the MQLs.”

The strategic CMOs are the ones elevating the role. First and foremost, they’re executives of the company who bring their understanding of the market and the customer, so they’re in the room when strategic discussions happen. It’s the concept of the CMO as chief market officer, not chief marketing officer. Those CMOs are driving conversations about the changing buyer, the importance of brand, and the need to think long-term, not just short-term.

Jon Miller (16:54) That said, they’d all agree that pipeline is permission. Even a strategic CMO, if they’re consistently missing pipeline, doesn’t get to go invest in the big new brand project. They get that. But how they tackle it, and how they talk about it, feels a little different. That’s probably the biggest delta — and it runs through into the dashboards they present, how they interact with their peers, and how often they talk to the CFO and about what.

Brian Carroll (17:29) It sounds like the tactical CMOs are more subject to that gumball-machine dynamic — MQLs, driving demand, generating the numbers. And for the strategic CMO, it’s not that they ignore those things; demand generation still matters. But they’re thinking bigger picture about strategy, like how important brand is in B2B.

I want to pivot to one of the challenges all of us are dealing with right now — not just brand, but the technical environment we’re operating in. I’d like to talk about how AI is changing what’s possible. Whether you’re a strategic or tactical CMO, it has a huge influence. What can you do differently for these marketing-engaged leads, for example? How might we approach that?

Jon Miller (18:35) Part of the problem is that tools like Marketo — which I obviously helped create — were built around the mental model of the MQL, of marketing as a linear, simple buying process. In rules-based platforms, very much if-this-then-that, you end up with static nurture paths. You’re lucky if you have two or three paths for two or three personas, let alone understanding the right thing for each person in each account.

When you embrace the modern buying process, where 95% aren’t ready to buy, you need to create latent pain, stay in touch with that 95%, and then catch the signals when they might be becoming qualified — pre-hand-raiser, but ready to reach out. The legacy tools like Marketo just can’t keep up with that. The nurture tracks are too rigid and too limited for engaging the broad market before they’re ready to buy. And they’re too email-centric for when you don’t have permission for a huge fraction of that database.

The analogy I like is that instead of putting people in specific nurture tracks, we want to create a personalized playlist for each person. I like playlists because people understand Spotify. There’s a whole library of songs that could play at any time. But…

Brian Carroll (20:19) That’s right.

Jon Miller (20:20) …what their AI does is think about me — what I’ve liked and listened to, what I’ve engaged with, what I haven’t listened to in a while — and it builds a playlist for me. Even if you and I both like 80s songs, we’ll get different playlists, because we’re different people who’ve engaged with different things. Every single person on Spotify gets a completely unique, personalized playlist.

Can we use AI to apply that same idea to marketing? For the 95% that aren’t in market but that I need to engage over time, let’s craft a personalized playlist for each of them — based on who they are, where they work, what else is happening across their buying committee, and what we know about them.

If we have opt-in permission, that playlist should include email touches — but it won’t always. Sometimes it’ll involve advertising. It might involve LinkedIn touches. It could be a whole variety of ways to interact, by picking the right offer, the right channel, the right content, and the right time.

So legacy marketing automation is rule-based and list-based. It’s too person-based, meaning you can’t really build playlists that look at the account level and go multichannel into advertising.

Jon Miller (22:01) One other thing, which we haven’t talked about: our whole conversation so far has focused on net-new business — acquiring the new customer, the new account. But a lot of these concepts — hand raiser, MQX, MEX — also apply to post-sale, especially for expansion into new buying committees, product qualified leads or accounts, and product adoption campaigns. The legacy tools don’t handle any of that well either, and new AI-enabled approaches can. Which, not surprisingly, gives you a pretty big hint at what I’m trying to build at Phave.

Brian Carroll (22:28) So Phave — that’s what you’re working on right now. AI-enabled marketing automation to deliver these personalized, one-to-one journeys. It sounds like the promise is kind of like what I was reading way back in Peppers and Rogers’ one-to-one marketing, except now we can actually do it — the way you described with the playlist. Anything you’d add?

Jon Miller (22:54) It’s funny you bring up Peppers and Rogers. In the intro, you said I’m an entrepreneur who keeps coming back and revisiting what I’ve done before. The way I describe my journey — from Epiphany, the company before Marketo, where I wasn’t a founder, to Marketo to Engagio and now Phave — I’ve been on a journey to deliver on the one-to-one future.

Each of those companies would have said we’re trying to do one-to-one marketing. Each got us closer, but not quite. What I’m so excited about, living in 2026 in the age of AI, is that I think we’ll finally be able to deliver on what truly is one-to-one marketing, as envisioned by Peppers and Rogers back in 1992.

Brian Carroll (23:47) That vision has been around a long time, but with every iteration we’ve struggled to get there. There was always some limitation. And it seems like right now, the promise of AI to actually deliver on it is real.

Jon Miller (24:02) You can’t get there with a rules-based system. You just end up with spaghetti.

Brian Carroll (24:05) Yeah. Anyone who’s built very complex nurturing journeys knows there’s an eventual breakdown. The more personalized you want to get, there are only so many if-then statements and branches you can build before it gets too complicated — and it still doesn’t do what you’re trying to do.

For listeners thinking, “Okay, what does this mean for me right now?” — how can someone move their organization away from MQL logic? And what are the most common mistakes you’ve seen teams make when they try?

Jon Miller (24:43) The common mistakes. First, doing it alone, without full alignment and buy-in from the rest of the executive team. The single best thing a CMO can do is enlist the head of sales — and the head of post-sale, if they exist — and propose the new set of metrics as a team. That’s number one.

Number two, when you start changing these things, set the expectation that quantity is likely to go down. The quality will go up and the conversion rate will go up. But if people don’t expect the raw numbers to be lower, you can run into a buzzsaw and get into trouble.

What I recommend is that CMOs be very thoughtful about their measurement architecture. We actually published a research report about the strategic CMO on the B2B CMO Project website, where we talked about three types of CMO dashboards.

The first is what you show the board. At the board level, these should be business outcomes. First off, the best strategic CMOs own pipeline — they report on pipeline created, new and expansion, across all sources. That last piece is the key. You’re not reporting marketing-sourced or sales-sourced; you’re reporting on whether there’s enough pipeline for the business. Because at the end of the day, if there is, the board doesn’t care who sourced it. And if you believe in complex nonlinear buying, trying to track where a deal came from is a fool’s errand.

From there, marketing can share in reporting other key metrics — opportunity win rates, net revenue retention, customer acquisition cost. The last board-level one is marketing efficiency: total pipeline generated per dollar of marketing investment. That’s your top level.

Your second level is CEO- and CFO-level indicators. This is where things like hand raisers and MQAs kick in, along with pipeline quality and brand health. Then you save everything else for the marketing team’s operational metrics — including MEX, that third tier: market development metrics, account engagement, program performance. That’s all important, but it doesn’t belong in your CEO- or board-level reports.

Brian Carroll (27:25) If you could go back and have someone give you advice on what to do differently — what advice would you give a CMO who’s ready to make this shift?

Jon Miller (27:36) Some of what I already said — building a committee, working with your peers — is really important. But if I had to narrow it down to one thing, it’s this: earn your seat by being a business executive first.

Surface problems, in marketing and in the market, before other people do. That builds credibility. Spend a lot of time with your peers — the CRO, the CFO. Understand their challenges. Then you’re in a better position to demonstrate how marketing helps them, not just marketing.

And own the customer voice. I alluded to this earlier, but it’s the single most powerful thing the chief market officer can bring to these strategic discussions. If you’re a strategic CMO who’s established that level of credibility, people aren’t going to question the metrics you report — whether it’s MQLs, MQAs, or anything else — because they know you’re a strategic part of the leadership.

Brian Carroll (28:42) Excellent advice, Jon. We’ve covered what I hoped we would today. This matters so much, because as the buying dynamics have changed, people need to approach things differently. What you’ve shared is going to help a lot of people start thinking about how to address the 95% who aren’t in market.

We’ll share the resource Jon mentioned in the show notes. Jon, thank you for joining us today. I’m excited to see how things develop as you build Phave, and I’m really glad you could be on the show.

Jon Miller (29:15) Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Activity is up. Pipeline looks healthy. MQLs are flowing. The weekly report says the machine is running.

And yet. Deals slip. Follow-up breaks down. The numbers say one thing. The hallway conversations say something else.

Here is what I see again and again inside complex B2B GTM systems: the dashboard is not lying to you. It is only showing you part of the story. The downstream part. The outputs.

What it almost never shows you is where the buyer got stuck.

The default is to optimize what’s visible

When revenue slows, most teams reach for the levers they can see. More leads at the top. Better sequences. Tighter cadences. New tools. Another dashboard.

None of that is wrong, exactly. The problem is that it assumes the system underneath is working. That when a lead comes in, the right things happen in the right order. That the handoff carries context. That the follow-up is relevant. That the buyer’s reason for reaching out survives each transition.

That assumption is almost never tested. Not because people don’t care, but because dashboards are not built to show it.

What dashboards often miss

Let me give you two examples from my own work. They are different kinds of problems, but they share a root cause.

I filled out a client’s form myself because their MQL dashboard said inbound response was working.

The autoresponder arrived. Fine. But the sales follow-up didn’t come. Not that day. Not the next. Three days later, the first human email landed. It had no reference to what I had asked about. No context from the form. No connection to the reason I reached out.

On the dashboard, I was still a lead.

In the buyer’s experience, the momentum was already gone.

That is operational friction. The mechanics broke. The dashboard didn’t see it.

I saw a different version of the same problem with a SaaS company. I sat in on a dozen SDR call recordings in their Gong platform.

The analytics were capturing data. They weren’t capturing motivation.

On paper, the scoring model was sophisticated. ICP fit, engagement tracking, time-weighted degradation so older activity counted less. MQL volume was rising. But lead-to-demo performance was declining.

The dashboard showed more qualified leads. SDRs were saying the quality felt weaker. And when we listened to the calls, the issue became clear: the best conversations were not coming from the highest engagement scores. They were coming from buyers who showed real motivation to solve a specific problem.

The model was treating broad engagement as a proxy for intent while missing the touchpoints that actually correlated with better conversations.

So we did a lead score teardown. We looked at where the best conversations were actually happening. We reweighted the score around real buying signals, rebuilt the SDR playbook around customer motivation, and trained the team to listen for what the buyer was trying to solve, not just whether the lead had enough points. Lead-to-demo volume recovered and grew 25% within four months.

Both examples point to the same gap. The dashboard was reporting one reality. The buyer path was telling a different story. And the dashboard was winning the argument — until someone went looking.

The trap

Here is the pattern I see most often.

Teams invest heavily in measurement. They build dashboards, track metrics, run attribution models. All useful. All necessary. But over time, the metrics start to feel like the work. The report becomes the product.

And teams start optimizing the report instead of repairing the system.

They improve conversion rate by tightening the definition of MQL. They improve response time by measuring from a different starting point. They improve pipeline coverage by counting deals with no recent activity. The dashboard gets cleaner. The buyer experience stays broken.

This is not a people problem. Good people get trapped in this pattern all the time. It happens because the incentives reward what is visible and measurable. The friction between the lines of the report goes unexamined.

The work that doesn’t show up

The work that protects buyer momentum in a complex B2B system is often the work that has no line item on the dashboard.

Walking the buyer path yourself. Filling out your own forms. Reading your own autoresponders. Checking whether the handoff carries context or just carries a name. Asking whether the rep knows why this person reached out, or just that they did. Looking at what happens between the moment someone raises their hand and the moment a human responds with something relevant.

There is no widget for this. It does not produce a chart.

But this is where you find out whether your system is earning momentum or quietly killing it.

Where did the buyer hesitate? Where did context disappear between marketing and sales? Where did a scoring model mislabel intent? Where did a sequence create friction instead of removing it?

Those questions do not live on a dashboard. They live on the buyer path.

Better questions to ask

If you are feeling the gap between what your dashboard says and what your pipeline actually delivers, start here.

Where is momentum actually breaking?
Not where is the conversion rate lowest. Where does a real buyer lose the thread? Those are different questions with different answers.

Where does context disappear?
When a lead moves from marketing to sales, does the rep know why that person reached out? Or do they just know the name and the company? That gap is where deals begin to erode.

Where are your buyers confused?
Not frustrated. Confused. Because confusion creates silence, and silence looks like disinterest on a dashboard.

One more thing

I walk the buyer path before I touch the dashboard. Every form, every follow-up email, every handoff. That is where the real diagnostic work happens.

I am not arguing that dashboards are bad. Dashboards are useful. I use them every day. But a dashboard is a set of indicators. And indicators only help if you understand what is happening underneath them.

The report might be clean. The buyer path might still be broken.

The only way to know is to walk it.

When was the last time someone on your team filled out your own form, read your own follow-up emails, and experienced your system the way a buyer does?

“I’m still continuing to be frustrated at this expectation that marketing needs to sort of spend a dollar, get a dollar.”

Her company had $13 million in pipeline against an $8.5 million sales target. That is over 150% coverage. On paper, they were fine. More than fine. They had built what most revenue teams would consider a healthy cushion.

They still missed the number.

The Metric That Feels Safe but Is Not

Pipeline coverage has become the default confidence metric for B2B revenue teams. The logic sounds reasonable: if you need $8.5 million in closed revenue, and you have $13 million in pipeline, you have room.

But coverage only measures capacity. It answers one question: did we create enough opportunities to have a mathematical shot at hitting the target?

It does not answer the question that actually matters: will this pipeline convert?

That is the gap. And it is where most revenue teams lose the thread.

There is a related confusion that makes this worse. Pipeline and forecast are not the same thing. Pipeline is everything that could close. A forecast is what will close, based on documented evidence of buyer commitment. Most teams treat every deal in the pipeline as a potential contributor to the forecast, which inflates the number before anyone looks closely at it. A healthy pipeline and a reliable forecast require two different lenses. Coverage only tells you the first one looks full.

When leadership sees 100% or 150% coverage, they feel safe. They stop asking hard questions about the pipeline itself. They assume the math will hold. Coverage becomes a proxy for confidence, and confidence becomes a reason to stop looking.

That is the trap.

Where Revenue Actually Leaks

Her company did not have a pipeline creation problem. They had a pipeline integrity problem. The revenue was leaking, but it was not leaking at the top.

Before you can even diagnose where the leaks are, though, you have to reckon with something uncomfortable: the data you are reading has already been shaped before it reached you.

Reps classify deals by how they feel, not by what the evidence says. A deal advances to late stage because the conversations feel warm, not because the buying committee has aligned. A close date stays in the quarter because moving it out feels like admitting defeat. A deal that should be marked at risk stays in the forecast because no one wants to be the person who shrinks the number.

This is not a character flaw. It is the natural result of a system that rewards looking good over being accurate. When the incentive is to protect the number, people protect the number. The data leadership reads on Monday morning has already been filtered through that pressure by Friday afternoon.

Which means the three places where pipeline breaks down are even harder to find than they appear, because you are trying to diagnose system problems with data that was already compromised.

Here is what I mean. There are three places where pipeline breaks down that coverage cannot see.

The qualification layer
Opportunities get created because they passed a threshold (a form fill, a demo request, a scoring trigger). But the qualification criteria are loose, or the criteria mean different things to different people. Marketing counts it as pipeline. Sales looks at it and sees something they cannot close. The opportunity exists in the system. It does not exist in reality.

The handoff layer
A lead moves from marketing to sales, or from an SDR to an AE, and something gets lost. Context disappears. The buyer’s situation, urgency, and questions do not travel with the record. The AE starts the conversation over. The buyer loses momentum. Sometimes the buyer just stops responding.

The follow-up layer
An opportunity is real, qualified, and well-handed-off, but the follow-up cadence is inconsistent. Three days pass before the first outreach. A week passes between meetings. The buyer’s attention drifts. Another vendor fills the gap. The deal does not die dramatically. It just goes quiet.

None of these failures show up in a coverage number. Every one of them shows up in a missed target.

Coverage Measures the Start, Not the System

The reason that company missed the number at 150% coverage is the same reason most companies miss: they measured the beginning of the process and assumed the rest would work.

Pipeline coverage tells you whether marketing and demand gen did their job at the top. It says nothing about what happens after that. It does not measure whether qualification is consistent. It does not measure whether handoffs preserve context. It does not measure whether follow-up happens with the right speed and the right substance.

When you treat coverage as a forecast, you are betting that every stage of the system downstream will perform. If you have never measured those stages, you are not forecasting. You are hoping.

This is where CEO confidence erodes. Not because marketing didn’t deliver pipeline. Because the pipeline didn’t deliver revenue.

The Question That Changes the Conversation

Most pipeline reviews start with: “Do we have enough pipeline?”

That is the wrong first question.

The better question is: “Of the pipeline we have, how much of it is actually going to move?”

That question forces you to look at quality, not volume. It forces you to ask what is happening at each stage of the buyer’s journey through your system. It forces you to measure the things that coverage does not measure: qualification consistency, handoff integrity, follow-up discipline, and buyer momentum. And the way you ask matters: “Where are we on this deal?” produces a story, but “What has the buyer committed to?” produces evidence.

She was not frustrated because marketing was underperforming. She was frustrated because the system could not convert what marketing was building. The pipeline was there. The revenue system underneath it was not.

If your coverage looks healthy and your revenue still feels hard, the problem is not at the top. It is in the middle. And you will not find it by creating more pipeline.

You will find it by tracing what happens to a lead after it enters the system.

Want to know where your pipeline is leaking?
Take the free GTM Lead Leak Assessment, a 10-minute diagnostic that shows you exactly where qualified buyers are falling out of your system.
Take the Assessment

Back in 2014, someone sent me a video on a Tulsa, Oklahoma business that changed the entire way I approach sales and marketing.

The first thing that caught my attention was that Mother Teresa had publicly endorsed the business. “Wait,” I thought. “Mother Teresa endorses businesses?”

The second was that the CEO got nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

This amazingly compassionate company?

A collections agency.

Yes, you read that right.

I was shocked.

How helping drives better results

The CEO of the company, CFS2, had decided to rethink the collections agency business model.

Instead of browbeating debtors, they decided to offer free services to help their customers pay their bills by renegotiating their debt, helping them find jobs, and getting them back on their feet.

You can’t get money from a customer who has none, so how might we help them do better financially?

Here’s the 3-minute video from CBS News:

Yes, it’s a great feel-good story.

But you may be asking yourself: what was the bottom line impact of giving away all these free services?

CFS2 was 200% more profitable than any of its competitors.

They’re making double the profit by doing good.

The CBS news anchor closed by saying CFS2’s strategy was kindness, but I thought they had it wrong.

I saw CFS2’s strategy was built from empathy.

Here’s what I mean:

They were putting themselves in their customer shoes, and this changed their business model.

After watching the video, I knew in my gut that I wanted to try something different.

My “Jerry Maguire” moment for empathy

I love the Jerry Maguire vision scene. This is the one that keeps him up at night… and he has the moment of clarity that sparks THE Mission Statement.

The emotional buying journey: people often start with hope and quickly descend to despair when they realize how hard it is to get others to buy in. Help them.

Many of us have had Jerry Maguire moments, where the difference between what we know is right and what we are actually doing becomes clear to us.

I thought if a collection agency can do this in an industry with terrible customer experience, what would happen if we tried something like this in B2B?

What if we just focused on helping customers, no strings attached?

The next day in our Monday morning meeting I talked with our CEO and then my sales team.

We watched the video together as a team.

I always felt like the best marketing and selling feels like helping (because it is).

Now, I wanted to really do something.

I asked, “What do you think about us focusing on helping instead of converting people into leads?”

I waited.

Crickets.

Eventually, someone asked, “If we do this, how will we get leads and sales?”

This started a bigger conversation.

Getting better at helping customers

What’s the reason people fill out a form for your content or to register to access a webinar or other resources?

Are people excited to hear from us?

No. They’re crazy busy.

Who wants yet another business development rep calling them, right?

People are looking for answers to questions. They have jobs that need to get done.

So what if we helped them do just that?

Understanding motivation with empathy

So we focused on doing this:

Getting a better understanding of what motivated people to access our content in the first place so we could get them what they wanted.

How could we help them and give them clarity?

Empathy map drawing

Inspiration from hotel concierges

As we talked about our approach, and what we could do differently, I thought of hotel concierges.

What’s a hotel concierge’s goal?

To help meet the needs of guests and perform various tasks including making recommendations.

Do concierges give the same advice to all hotel guests?

Of course not. It’s based on what the guest wants to know.

Concierges focus on the task the guest wants to get done and help them do it.

With that in mind, we started to test this strategy:

First, we needed to know our potential customer’s motivation for engaging our content (i.e., the WHY). And then help them get what they wanted with no strings attached.

Next, I asked my team to throw out scripts, and our qualifying approach, and we considered how we might change our approach to model hotel concierges.

To get the process going, we started asking:

• What are the most common questions they’re trying to get answered with our content?
• What frustrations could we remove for potential customers and improve their experience?
• What content and resource roadblocks could we remove?
• What wins could we help them achieve?
• How could we be a plus to their day, so they feel good about talking with us?

Why customer empathy matters

I’m fascinated by the neuroscience behind the way people think. Mainly the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who discovered how critical feelings are to our ability to make even the most straightforward decisions.

People, as Damasio says, are “feeling machines that think.” Getting to the root of what a person is feeling is key to connecting with them. So, of course, connecting with your customers is the key to marketing.

When your customers find your content, they’re looking to solve a problem.

In sum, the best selling is helping.

Instead of viewing your customers as objects to be converted, checkpoints along the funnel of your sales process, what if you focused on helping them solve a problem?

We also considered our approach by being the customer and answering:

• If I were on the receiving end, why would I want this?
• What’s in it for me? So what?
• Why is this helpful to me? Why would I want to talk to someone about this?

Positive emotions that drive buying decisions

A new approach

I hypothesized that we’d get sales opportunities simply by helping people get what they were looking for and not focusing on converting them.

But this meant the entire system for our team needed to change because everything was built around converting people to leads.

Commissions were on the line. And we made sure the reps wouldn’t make less money testing this new approach.

But first, we needed to unlearn the habits of qualifying people.

It wasn’t easy.

It required getting lots of buy-in from my team, hours of additional coaching, changing our whole approach, and restructuring commissions.

We took the pressure off of leads, opportunities, and focused on being “customer concierges” to help people have a super helpful experience.

We honestly didn’t know how hard it was going to be.

But in the end, it was worth it.

After six months of focusing on helping people rather than trying to generate leads, we got 303% more sales opportunities!

Here’s what the testing actually looked like.

The three call tests

We ran three sequential tests, each one building on what we learned from the last.

Call test 1: Updated call guide

SDRs moved from scripted qualification to buyer-context discovery.

Call test 2: Optimized messaging

Messaging focused on clearer problem framing and shared patterns.

Call test 3: Motivation-based messaging

SDRs oriented conversations around buyer motivation, urgency, and risk.

Cumulative impact:

In sum, when we stopped trying to convert leads and focused on helping customers get what they wanted, we got triple the results.

Applying empathy

B2B complex sales are way more emotional because the stakes are high.

That’s why the strategy of empathy is especially powerful for B2B complex sales.

Trust matters a lot, but to build trust, you need to connect with people emotionally first.

Sales conversion is the result of building a trusted connection.

I use the analogy that when your customers are trying to make a change in their organization, it’s like a group of people trying to climb a mountain.

Being a buyer sherpa

Stop pulling and pushing people into funnels.

Change your sales analogy from the funnel to helping customers climb a mountain. The customer is the climber, and you’re the Sherpa.

Consider this:

Some people don’t want to climb at all.

Others might want to go to different paths or different mountains.

When they have a larger team making a decision, it gets even more complicated.

The best way to help in this case is to become a buyer sherpa.

As a Sherpa, you can’t do the climbing for the customer. The climber still has to climb, but you can help carry the load, you can provide resources, you can offer guidance and share stories of how other organizations solved similar problems.

Help them.

Emotions influence the buying journey.

Today, technology is making it easier than ever to connect with masses of customers in a way that feels personal.

Data can help us make empathetic decisions, and artificial intelligence and chatbots can move us toward the promise of real one-to-one marketing.

However, without empathy, all that technology ends up feeling inauthentic.

You still need to connect with the human on the other end of the database, to have honest conversations to discover their problems, and focus on how you can help.

After all, your customers are already looking for help, and they’re going to find it somewhere. Why shouldn’t it be with you?

You may also like:

What is empathy-based marketing?

How to improve your account based marketing results

4 ways to adopt human-centered marketing and get better results

New Research: Customer Empathy and How to Solve Buying Problems

The B2B Roundtable Podcast

Nobody could tell you what happened to a lead after it entered the system.

The marketing team was generating volume. The sales team was closing deals. But the space between those two things was invisible. There was no shared view of what happened at each stage, no consistent handoff, no accountability for the gaps. Leads went in. Revenue did not come out at the rate it should have. And nobody could see why.

This is the problem I see most often in complex B2B. It is not a funnel problem. It is a system problem. And the difference matters more than most teams realize.

What the Funnel Actually Does

The funnel is a measurement model. It gives you a way to describe stages: awareness, consideration, decision. Top, middle, bottom. MQL, SQL, opportunity, closed-won.

That is useful. You need a way to talk about where buyers are in the process. You need a way to measure conversion between stages.

But the funnel does not tell you what happens between those stages. It does not tell you who is responsible for moving a lead from one stage to the next. It does not tell you whether the handoff worked, whether follow-up happened, whether the buyer’s context traveled with the record.

The funnel measures. It does not manage.

When companies say “the funnel is broken,” they are usually describing a real problem. But they are diagnosing the wrong cause. The funnel is not broken. The system underneath it, the one that is supposed to move leads through those stages, was never built to work.

The Flywheel Does Not Fix This Either

Over the past few years, a lot of companies replaced the funnel with the flywheel. The pitch was compelling: stop thinking about buyers as people who drop through a funnel and start thinking about them as part of a continuous loop. Attract, engage, delight. Momentum instead of gravity.

The problem is that the flywheel changes the metaphor. It does not change the system.

If your handoffs are broken under a funnel model, they are still broken under a flywheel. If your follow-up is inconsistent, renaming the process does not make it consistent. If nobody can tell you what happened to a lead after it entered the system, calling it a flywheel instead of a funnel does not create visibility.

Think about it. Every team I work with that switched to flywheel language still has the same operational questions: Who owns this lead? What happens after the form fill? Did the SDR follow up? Did the AE get the context? Where did this deal stall?

Those are system questions. The model you draw on the whiteboard does not answer them.

What a GTM System Actually Looks Like

A go-to-market system is not a model. It is the operational infrastructure that determines what happens to every lead, at every stage, in every handoff.

It includes:

• How leads are qualified (and whether the criteria mean the same thing to marketing and sales)
• How leads are routed (and whether routing happens in minutes or days)
• How handoffs work (and whether the buyer’s context survives the transition)
• How follow-up is governed (and whether there are SLAs or just good intentions)
• How accountability is tracked (and whether anyone can see what fell through)

When you build this, the model you use to describe it (funnel, flywheel, something else) does not matter. What matters is that every lead has a defined path, every handoff has an owner, and every gap is visible.

What Happened When the System Got Built

That building products company I mentioned, the one with 20,000 leads and no visibility? We rebuilt the system underneath.

We defined what happened at each stage. We clarified who owned each handoff. We built the routing, the SLAs, the accountability structure, and the reporting that let leadership see what was actually happening to leads after they arrived.

Untouched leads dropped 85%. Pipeline grew without increasing lead volume. The Segment Leader said something I still think about: “Now I can finally tell what happened to a lead.”

That is what a system fix looks like. No new model. No new metaphor. Just the operating infrastructure that was never there.

Other companies I have worked with have seen similar patterns. An $80M IT asset management company that rebuilt its GTM system saw pipeline velocity improve because the system stopped losing qualified leads between stages. A B2B SaaS company that redesigned its buyer path saw trial conversions increase 32%, not because they changed the product, but because the system started working the way it was supposed to.

The pattern is the same every time. The model was not the problem. The system was.

The Funnel Did Not Break

If you are looking at your pipeline and feeling like something is off, consider that it may not be a funnel problem, a flywheel problem, or a model problem at all.

The funnel did not break. It was never the system. It was always just the measurement. The system, the one that moves leads from interest to revenue, is what needs to be built, diagnosed, and maintained.

Start by asking one question: can anyone on your team trace what happens to a lead from the moment it enters the system to the moment it becomes revenue (or does not)?

If the answer is no, the funnel is not your problem. The system is.

Want to know where your pipeline is leaking?
Take the free GTM Lead Leak Assessment, a 10-minute diagnostic that shows you exactly where qualified buyers are falling out of your system.
Take the Assessment

She sent this message:

“Do you happen to have an example of the content mapping document that I could use for reference? I understand the concept, but I’m pretty good at getting bogged down with overthinking the best way to format documents like this.”

I hear versions of this question regularly. The concept makes sense. The execution stalls. And it stalls for a specific reason: most teams try to build a content map inside a system designed for something else.

Content mapping is not a formatting exercise. It is a decision about what your buyer needs to believe next, and whether your content actually helps them get there.

The real problem with most content marketing

You don’t have a content problem. You have a relevance problem.

A lot of content gets created because the product team wants a launch, the quarter needs a campaign, SEO needs a keyword, or someone needs “something to post.”

That’s like walking into a conversation and talking about yourself the whole time. Technically, words happened. Connection didn’t.

What content mapping actually means

Content mapping is not about funnel diagrams or automation logic.

Buyers move through predictable uncertainty before they’re ready to act. Different stage, different questions. Different risks. Different fears.

Good content doesn’t push buyers forward. It meets them where they already are.

Effective content marketing starts with listening to customers, then mapping content to how they think, not how we sell.

This is where empathy-based marketing stops being abstract and becomes operational. When you know what uncertainty looks like at each stage, you can build content that actually reduces it.

The four buyer stages your content must support

1. Awareness: “Something’s off, but I can’t name it yet.”

What buyers need at this stage: language to name the problem, context (not a pitch), and reassurance they’re not the only one dealing with it.

Content that works here: educational articles, research and industry patterns, problem-framing thought leadership.

2. Consideration: “How do other companies handle this?”

What buyers need: options and tradeoffs, credible examples, and common pitfalls to avoid.

Content that works: case studies, comparison guides, expert interviews.

3. Intent: “Could this work for us?”

What buyers need: proof it applies to their situation, clarity on effort vs. impact, and less fear of choosing wrong.

Content that works: implementation guides, ROI narratives (not ROI spreadsheets), customer success stories that show the messy middle.

4. Decision: “How do we move forward safely?”

What buyers need: clear next steps, confidence they won’t regret it, and support for internal alignment.

Content that works: demos and walkthroughs, enablement tools (internal-sell decks, stakeholder FAQs), getting-started roadmaps.

Where content mapping breaks down

This is where it gets painfully human.

The client I mentioned had a “content library” spreadsheet with all the right operational fields: content type, description, URL, score change for automation, campaign names, folder structures, platform notes.

All legitimate. Useful for ops.

But sales couldn’t answer the one question that matters in the moment: “What should I send, to whom, right now?”

Most teams don’t start with a blank canvas. They start with a spreadsheet built for scoring and campaign tracking. Then someone says, “Let’s do content mapping,” and the room quietly panics.

What happens next is predictable: the team debates categories instead of buyer needs, everything gets tagged to every stage, and sales still can’t find what they need. The library grows. Buyer clarity doesn’t.

Turning a scoring spreadsheet into a usable content map

I didn’t ask the team to rebuild their system. I recommended adding a buyer-focused layer on top of what already existed.

Here’s what that looked like:

Now the same spreadsheet served two purposes: marketing ops had their tracking and scoring, and sales had stage, buyer, and “why this asset exists” clarity.

This is the same pattern I saw when I helped a B2B SaaS company rebuild their GTM system. Their nurturing had been organized by persona. Content went to the right title, but not at the right time. When we restructured around journey stage instead of persona, the content started doing its job. Trial conversions went up 32%.

Content mapping and lead management are not separate disciplines. They’re the same system. If your content library doesn’t connect to how you qualify and route leads, the map is decoration.

The “one stage only” rule

Every asset gets one primary stage, the stage where it’s most useful for influencing a decision.

Because “this applies everywhere” is how content mapping dies.

If a rep can’t answer “When would I send this, and to whom?” the asset isn’t done yet.

What changed immediately

Once the team started tagging content by stage and job-to-be-done, the conversation shifted. It moved from “How should we format this?” to “What does the buyer need to believe next?”

That’s the point.

How to make content mapping work in practice

1. Start with empathy, not keywords

Talk to customers and prospects. Listen for uncertainty, not just objections. Document real buyer questions verbatim. The best lead nurturing content comes from these conversations, not from keyword tools.

2. Give every asset a job

Which stage does this serve? What uncertainty does it reduce? What decision does it support? When would a rep send this, and to whom?

If you can’t answer those questions, the asset doesn’t have a job yet. This connects directly to having a universal lead definition. When marketing and sales agree on what “ready” looks like at each stage, content mapping has a foundation. Without that, you’re sorting assets into stages nobody agreed on.

3. Measure movement, not just traffic

Are conversations improving? Are cycles tightening? Are buyers arriving more aligned and less confused?

If you’re not sure where your content is working and where it’s leaking, take the free GTM assessment. It takes about five minutes and shows you where the system is breaking down.

The bottom line

Content mapping is not about producing more content. It is about producing the right clarity at the right time.

The best content libraries don’t grow faster. They get clearer.

If your content isn’t reducing buyer uncertainty, it’s noise.

You may also like:

Why content fails when you don’t know the buyer’s bigger story

How to build a lead nurturing content library that sales can actually use

Thought leadership isn’t content. It’s earned trust.

Most teams don’t struggle because they lack automation, tools, or content. They struggle because they’re guessing about the buyer’s journey instead of understanding it.

At best, nurturing becomes educated guessing.
At worst, it becomes scaled annoyance.

And now that AI and automation can multiply messages instantly, bad nurturing doesn’t just waste time. It erodes trust faster than ever.

Key Takeaways

• Nurturing fails when it’s assumption-driven: Programs built on internal schedules instead of buyer behavior scale irrelevance.
• Buyers aren’t linear: Relevance and timing matter more than email frequency or cadence.
• Confidence beats content buckets: Shift from TOFU/MOFU/BOFU to helping buyers feel safe, informed, and aligned.
• Lead management makes nurturing work: Fit, intent, and engagement signals give context to every message.
• AI amplifies what’s underneath: Used well, it increases relevance. Used poorly, it accelerates annoyance.

Buyers don’t experience funnels. They experience relevance, timing, and intent. When those are missing, even “helpful” emails feel intrusive.

Email lead nurturing doesn’t fail because teams send too few messages. It fails because teams guess the buyer journey.

If you’re still relying on cold outbound, start here.

Quick Answer

• Signal-driven: Grounded in real buyer behavior and intent signals, not guessed stages.
• System-integrated: Connected to lead management, sales feedback, and closed-loop reporting.
• Confidence-focused: Designed to help buyers make safe, defensible decisions.

Why Most Email Lead Nurturing Fails

The core problem isn’t email frequency, subject lines, or content volume.

It’s this:

Most nurturing systems are built around internal assumptions, not buyer reality.

Teams design programs based on:

• What they think buyers care about
• What stage they think buyers are in
• What they want buyers to do next

Without real customer insight, nurturing becomes a guessing game.

And guessing at scale is dangerous.

Automation doesn’t fix weak understanding. It amplifies it.

Three Buyer Realities Most Nurture Programs Ignore

1. Buyers don’t move in straight lines (they’re non-linear)

Real buying journeys are messy.

Buyers pause.
They loop back.
They involve new people.
They go quiet while internal conversations happen.

Nurture programs that assume steady, linear progression will always misfire.

Silence doesn’t mean disinterest. Activity doesn’t always mean intent.

2. Interest is not intent

A download, webinar registration, or email click is not a buying decision.

Treating engagement as intent is how:

• Leads get pushed too fast
• Sales gets burned
• Buyers lose trust

Engagement is a signal. Intent is a pattern.

Good nurturing respects the difference.

3. Relevance beats frequency every time

One relevant, well-timed message beats ten “just checking in” emails.

Buyers don’t remember persistence. They remember usefulness.

When relevance drops, volume makes it worse.

Reframing Email Nurturing Around Buyer Confidence

Instead of organizing nurturing around TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content buckets, reframe it around buyer confidence.

Buyers don’t ask:

“What stage am I in?”

They ask:

“Do I understand this?”
“Is this safe?”
“Can I defend this decision internally?”

A better nurturing model looks like this:

1. Early stage: Help buyers name the problem without forcing a solution
2. Mid stage: Reduce risk by showing how others evaluate and solve it
3. Late stage: Support internal justification, consensus, and decision safety

This is where email nurturing stops being a content exercise and becomes a decision-support system.

Where Lead Management Changes Everything

Email nurturing doesn’t work in isolation. It only works when it’s informed by a strong lead management system.

Effective nurturing depends on:

• Clear lead definitions
• Fit and intent signals
• Buying-group engagement data
• Sales feedback and closed-loop reporting

When nurturing ignores these signals, it becomes noise.

When it integrates with lead management, it becomes guidance.

That’s the difference between “drip campaigns” and real progression.

If you want the system view, start here:
How to Do Lead Management That Improves Conversion

The Hidden Risk of “AI-Powered” Email Nurturing

AI doesn’t make nurturing smarter by default.

It makes it faster.

If your assumptions are wrong, AI will help you be wrong more efficiently.

The teams winning with AI aren’t sending more messages. They’re:

• Using better signals
• Adjusting faster
• Stopping messages sooner when relevance drops

AI should amplify understanding, not replace it.

What Email Nurturing Looks Like When the System Is Right

When nurturing is grounded in buyer reality and system signals:

• Emails feel timely instead of pushy
• Messages adapt instead of repeat
• Silence triggers learning, not panic
• Sales conversations start with context
• Buyers feel helped, not hunted

Fewer emails generate better outcomes.

The Bottom Line

Email lead nurturing isn’t about moving leads through stages.

It’s about helping buyers move through uncertainty.

That only happens when nurturing is:

• Grounded in real customer understanding
• Supported by strong lead management systems
• Designed to build trust instead of pressure

If your nurturing feels busy but ineffective, don’t add:

• More content
• More automation
• More AI

Fix the system.
Learn the buyer.
Then scale.

Email Lead Nurturing FAQ

What is email lead nurturing?

Email lead nurturing is the practice of guiding buyers through their decision process by delivering relevant, timely information that builds confidence and trust. Effective nurturing is based on buyer insight, not automated schedules.

Why does email lead nurturing fail in B2B?

It fails when teams guess buyer needs instead of understanding them. Without clear definitions, intent signals, and feedback loops, nurturing becomes repetitive and easy to ignore.

How does lead management improve email nurturing?

Lead management provides structure, context, and ownership. It ensures emails respond to buyer behavior and readiness instead of arbitrary stages or timelines.

Can automation and AI hurt email nurturing?

Yes. When automation scales messaging without relevance, it accelerates annoyance and erodes trust. Automation should amplify insight, not compensate for its absence.

What’s the difference between lead generation and lead nurturing?

Lead generation starts the conversation. Email nurturing sustains and deepens it. Lead management connects the two by guiding buyers forward with context and intent.

You Might Also Like

• Lead Nurturing Fails When Teams Guess the Buyer Journey
• Lead Management
• GTM Systems
• Why Most Companies Get Their Ideal Customer Profile Wrong (And How to Fix It)

Not traffic. Not clicks. Not conversion rate theater.

Intent. What the buyer is actually trying to do when they show up.

This post reframes an old landing-page conversation post into something more useful: understanding buyer motivation so your content, messaging, and offers match reality instead of wishful thinking.

Key Takeaways

• Intent beats traffic: Marketing works when it aligns with what the buyer is trying to do, not just how they arrived.
• Three intent patterns matter: Buyers are Explorers (seeking clarity), Evaluators (seeking proof), or Executors (seeking speed).
• The mental contract is real: Content must honor the expectation created by the click or trust breaks instantly.
• Lead management depends on intent: Intent-aware systems prevent mismatch, friction, and sales frustration.

This article resides in the Buyer Psychology & Behavioral Science hub and connects directly to Lead Management, where intent is either respected or completely wasted.

Question #1: What job is the buyer trying to get done?

Forget personas for a minute. The more useful question is this:

What problem is the buyer trying to solve right now?

In practice, most inbound traffic falls into three intent patterns. Not stages. Not funnels. Patterns.

Explorers

Explorers are early. Curious. Often unsure what the problem really is.

They are not shopping. They are sense-making.

• Low urgency
• High ambiguity
• Zero patience for aggressive selling

Your job here is clarity, not capture. If you push too hard, they leave.

Evaluators

Evaluators know the problem and are comparing approaches, vendors, or models.

• Moderate urgency
• Actively weighing tradeoffs
• Sensitive to credibility and proof

This is where most B2B messaging collapses into vague promises. Specificity wins here.

Executors

Executors already decided. They are trying to move forward with minimal friction.

• High urgency
• Clear criteria
• Zero tolerance for obstacles

If you slow them down, they assume you’ll slow them down later too.

The mistake: treating all three like they want the same thing.

Question #2: Are we honoring the intent that brought them here?

Intent doesn’t start on your page. It starts before it.

Buyers arrive with expectations shaped by:

• The content they clicked
• The question they were trying to answer
• The risk they’re trying to reduce

If your message breaks that mental contract, trust erodes instantly.

For example:

• Explorers expect insight, not demos
• Evaluators expect comparisons, not slogans
• Executors expect speed, not storytelling

This is where empathy stops being a value statement and becomes a system requirement.

Why this matters to Lead Management

Intent mismatch is one of the biggest hidden drivers of low conversion, bad handoffs, and Sales frustration.

When intent isn’t recognized:

• Explorers get shoved into follow-up sequences too early
• Evaluators get under-equipped
• Executors get delayed or misrouted

This is why Lead Management improves conversion when it’s built around buyer behavior, not just fields and scores.

Intent-aware systems route, respond, and support differently based on what the buyer is actually doing.

A simple intent check you can actually use

Before publishing, routing, or automating anything, ask:

• Who is this for? (Explorer, Evaluator, Executor)
• What decision are they trying to make?
• What would feel helpful right now?

If you can’t answer those clearly, the problem isn’t copy. It’s clarity.

Bottom line

Buyers don’t convert because your page is optimized.

They move forward because they feel understood.

When your messaging respects intent, everything downstream works better: Lead Management, routing, follow-up, Sales conversations, and trust.

Ignore intent, and you can optimize forever without fixing the real issue.

You might also like

• Customer Empathy and How Buyers Actually Decide
• How Lead Management Improves Conversion
• Universal Lead Definition (and why intent matters more)
• Outbound Without Cold Calling

Here’s why it matters:

You have more channels, content, and technology to reach potential customers. But connecting and building trust with buyers has never been harder.

You know your audience needs what you have to offer, but your messages aren’t connecting. You’ve tried everything: expert recommendations, best practices, the latest tools, and automation. But you’ve hit a plateau, and your results are falling short. It feels frustrating. So how can you connect and convert more customers?

The counter-intuitive answer: it’s empathy. You need to go beyond rational-logic based marketing to understand how your buyers feel. Here’s why:

The well-known neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio stated, “We are not thinking machines that feel rather, we are feeling machines that think.” Damasio made this discovery: every human decision depends on emotion. Every single one. We make each choice somatically. In other words, we feel each decision out. It’s about emotions. You must focus on an emotional connection before conversion.

That’s why you need to understand your customer’s emotional motivators better so that you can know what buyers need to help each step of their journey. Empathy is more than a “soft” skill. It’s an incredibly powerful tool to understand customer motivation and get better results.

Stop random acts of marketing

It sounds simple, but unfortunately, it’s not. According to the CMO Council, “Only 20% of marketers can predict the next best action for their customers.” Forrester Consulting found, “65 percent of marketers struggle to employ emotional marketing as they turn to automation to improve customer engagement.”

End the frustration of building one campaign after another hoping something, anything, will work. You can stop that hamster wheel feeling of working harder and getting nowhere.

Empathy-based marketing defined

Empathy-based marketing is about walking in your customer’s shoes to understand their experience and how we can better help them get what they want. You don’t want to think like the customer. You want to BE the customer. Here’s what I mean:

You need to move away from marketing-centric thinking to customer-centric thinking and speak to your customer’s motivations and from their perspective. Empathy-based marketing is grounded in the following ideas:

• Empathize with your customer’s experience by going into their world to understand
• Think like your clients when they set out to solve a problem and discover each step they may take to solve it
• Look for ways you can help your customers make their lives better
• Provide your customers with what they want by understanding what motivates them
• Help your clients identify and solve problems
• Give customers content and expertise that helps them get clarity
• Empower employees who directly touch customers with the resources, training, and tools to help them

For example, Slack (currently the fastest growing start-up in history) practices empathy in their marketing and empathy is part of their core values. In this interview, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield stated: “It’s very difficult to design something for someone if you have no empathy.”

Additionally, IBM is gearing up to become the world’s largest design company. As part of their boot camps, employees are learning how to apply empathy to connect better with colleagues and clients. They’re learning how to tap into their customers’ and colleagues’ feelings and needs to come up with better solutions. “The need for empathy towards the buyer is huge. It’s a differentiator…” says Doug Brown, former CMO, IBM Systems.

We’ve studied the most successful customer-centric and empathetic companies and marketers to discover what’s helping them connect with customers.

Seven ways you can apply empathy today

Here are seven ways you can apply customer empathy to your marketing and sales.

1. Put your customers first

Your customers aren’t saying, “We need solutions.” Instead, they’re saying, “We need to solve a problem.” So what would happen if you focused on helping them do just that?

I’ve learned you can’t answer “how can I help” unless you know precisely what your customers want. Instead of trying to sound appealing to people, be interested in them. Understand your customer’s motivation (what they want) and make sure it’s something you can deliver.

So much of what we see today are product-centric claims aimed at impressing the prospect. The root word of emotion and motivation is the same. Buyers base most of their actions on feelings and then backfill with logic. That’s why it’s so important to get beyond the product and speak to the results and the emotions the buyer seeks.

2. Listen and observe to map buyer motivation

Most people don’t listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intent to reply. Listen with the third ear, which means you want to understand the implied assumptions and motivations behind what a person is saying. That’s empathetic listening. And it’s a deeper level than active listening.

Empathetic understanding is not the product of survey data. Too many marketers rely on survey data or focus groups to tell them how customers think and feel, but that’s not enough. You need to get out of the building and observe the world of your customer. It’s shocking how little of this happens.

Here are a few ways to fix that:

• Marketers, get out in the field with your sales team and meet customers face to face
• Pick up the phone or listen to calls your inside sales or sales development reps have with customers (it will be eye-opening)
• Survey customers on your email list to validate what you’ve learned intuitively from listening and observing
• Use empathy maps

It is critical to know what customers want and what motivates them, to think about the client’s experience. Once you do this, you can use your applied empathy to consciously and intuitively understand and see the world from their perspective. It helps you interpret the context and understand the pressures facing your customer.

The key to understanding another person is empathetic listening. Trying to understand everything (including the nonverbal signals) the other person is communicating. What emotions are motivating them? You hear for feeling, for meaning, for behavior and other signs.

3. Develop (digital) conversations, not campaigns

Focus on developing conversations, not marketing campaigns. Don’t err on the side of pushing your agenda rather than extending an invitation to converse. To the customer, it feels like “somebody wants something from me” rather than “maybe they can help me get what I want.”

Do this: invite, listen, converse, and recommend/help.

My point? You need to demonstrate that you’re interested in their world as a fellow human and their motivations. Use empathy maps and personas to understand your customer and how to better connect with them in conversations.

4. The best marketing and selling feels like helping (because it is)

Our marketing and lead nurturing are anchored on this idea. As customers, we can sense when someone’s trying to push us to do something. We know when we’re being treated as objects to convert. Also, we recognize when someone sincerely cares. They’re not trying to push their agenda, and they’re genuinely trying to help us.

Marketing isn’t something you do to people; it’s something you do with people.

Ask this as you approach your marketing: Is this how you want a friend or loved one to be treated?

5. Give potential customers useful content they want

This content organically emerges from the first four points of placing the customer first, understanding them, conversing with them and helping them. But so much of today’s content does not do that.

Much of the content I see lacks that empathetic context, and content without empathy is just noise. And it’s become very noisy in B2B sales and marketing. It seems we’ve become publishing machines, creating content for content’s sake. A friend of mine said the enemy of content marketing is content marketing. Think about it.

Our customers don’t need more content. They need useful customer-centric content that helps them and their colleagues to choose a different path along their journey. You’re helping people change.

Finally, I rarely hear customers use the word content. They call our content based on its utility and how they feel about it: terrific ebook, helpful blog post, useful white paper, fantastic article, excellent video.

6. Proximity is influence

Empower those closest to your customer (your sales team, sales development reps, inside sales, and customer service people) to be able to achieve the points above. We formulate our opinions about companies based on our interactions with their people.

I recently wrote about Dave Gerhardt at Drift. His CEO called him one day and told him “I think we should get rid of our forms.” Gerhardt realized that marketing was becoming more about getting people to convert, fill out forms, or jump through the next hoop. According to Gerhardt, this results in us “treating people like leads and email addresses instead of treating people like people.”

When you give people what they value or find useful without expecting anything in return, you build a connection and eventually trust. It’s an open secret. Try it.

7. Practice empathy personally to set an example

Be the change you want to see. Show others by practicing empathy yourself. This idea requires different thinking to drive a different way of doing. Who needs empathy? Yes, your customers, but also your team, and your co-workers inside your company. I learned that it’s futile to try to make changes outside before we first make changes inside. To make a difference outside our walls, we need to focus inside first. That starts with us.

Why? Scientists have proven that emotions are contagious and can be caught just like a cold. I’ve seen companies that are a mess inside try to make a difference outside. And if it works, it’s only temporary.

I wanted to share a practical empathy example with email because all of us are sending emails right now. Here’s a case from an A/B test conducted by MarketingExperiments. It’s an email sent to potential customers who began a form completion but did not complete it. Note the difference in tone: control versus treatment.

The email on the left was “sales speak.” The tone of the email on the right was changed to be more empathetic and yielded a conversion rate of 7% versus 1.5% for the control email. What’s the bottom line? By just addressing the customer’s anxiety (with empathy) in the tone of the email, they saw a 349% increase in total lead inquiries.

Closing Thoughts

I know this may seem touchy-feely, but it’s not. It has an economic benefit. If we can emotionally connect and give customers what they want, we can create a lasting competitive advantage that will reap more sales, more ROI and revenue.

“I fundamentally believe that empathy is the most powerful force in B2B marketing.” says Alan Cohen, Chief Commercial Officer, Illumio.

IDEO’s Empathy on the Edge puts it this way: “When organizations allow a deep emotional understanding of people’s needs to inspire them, and transform their work, their teams and even their organization at large, they unlock the creative capacity for innovation.”

It starts with your empathy to get out of the mindset of being company-centric (how do I get what I want) to become customer-centric (how do I help them get what they want). The best marketing and selling feels like helping (because it is).

Free empathy marketing resources
Get resources to help you apply empathy to marketing and sales, including the Empathy Map Checklist.

Download the Empathy Map Checklist →

Related Resources

Content Mapping That Actually Works: Align Your Content With How Buyers Think

Buyer Intent Over Clicks: Two Questions That Drive Engagement

Redesigning GTM Around Buyer Motivation: 303% More Sales-Accepted Leads

Why 75% of Buyers Don’t Want Reps and How Framemaking Can Win Them Back (with Brent Adamson)

At one point, someone said something that cut through all the dashboards and acronyms:

“At my last company, our biggest GTM win wasn’t a tool. It was finally getting Marketing, Sales, and Ops to design the system together.”

That comment explains why so many B2B GTM engines still leak revenue.

The GTM Triangle Where Revenue Disappears

Most B2B companies still operate inside an invisible triangle:

• Marketing creates demand
• Sales chases opportunities
• Ops tries to stitch it together after the fact

Leads move between teams. Accountability does not.

The result is familiar: stalled pipeline, mistrusted data, finger-pointing, and endless debates about lead quality. Technology has improved dramatically. Outcomes have not.

This isn’t a tooling failure. It’s a system design failure.

Why Technology Keeps Getting Blamed (and Keeps Failing)

When GTM friction shows up, the instinct is predictable:

“We need a new CRM.”

I’ve watched companies spend seven figures on new platforms, only to label them failures within a year. Not because the tools were bad, but because they were asked to solve a human and operational problem.

Technology can enable alignment. It cannot create it.

No CRM fixes unclear ownership, broken handoffs, or misaligned incentives. It just documents them more expensively.

The Real Problem: Fragmented GTM Ownership

Modern B2B revenue breaks when:

• Marketing is measured on volume
• Sales is measured on closed deals
• Ops is measured on system uptime

No one is accountable for the full buyer journey.

Leads are treated like handoffs instead of shared responsibilities. Each team optimizes locally and the system degrades globally.

A Modern Fix: Design the GTM System First

High-performing GTM teams take a different approach. They stop asking “what tool do we need?” and start asking “how should this system actually work?”

1. Executive GTM Ownership

• Clear ownership of the lead-to-revenue system
• Shared pipeline definitions and success metrics
• One accountable GTM operating model

Without executive alignment, RevOps becomes cleanup, not strategy.

2. Process Before Platforms

• Document the buyer journey end to end
• Define what qualifies movement between stages
• Clarify who owns each transition and why

If the process doesn’t work on a whiteboard, it won’t work in Salesforce.

3. RevOps as a System Steward

• Unified definitions across Marketing, Sales, and CS
• Routing and scoring that reflect real buying behavior
• Closed-loop feedback that informs decisions, not just reports

RevOps exists to protect system integrity, not enforce compliance theater.

What Strong GTM Teams Do Differently

The best teams I work with share a few traits:

• They treat pipeline as a shared asset
• They design handoffs intentionally
• They review failures without blame
• They fix root causes, not dashboards

One CEO summarized it perfectly:

“We stopped treating leads like transactions and started treating them like commitments.”

Why This Still Matters More Than Ever

AI, automation, and analytics will continue to accelerate GTM activity. They will not fix broken systems.

If anything, speed makes misalignment more expensive.

The companies that win won’t be the ones with the most tools. They’ll be the ones with the clearest GTM design and the courage to enforce it.

If this sounds familiar, you may also want to read Why Sales Teams Don’t Update CRM (And What Actually Works). It tackles the same problem from the behavioral side of the system.

Where does your GTM system break today? At definitions, handoffs, or accountability? The answer usually tells you exactly where to start.