6 Reasons Why Your Demand Generation Strategy is Not Performing and How to Fix It
15 min
Executive summary
Due to changes in modern buyer behavior, B2B marketers today have moved beyond lead generation as a top priority of marketing performance. Instead of purely filling funnels, connecting brand impact to measurable revenue outcomes has become increasingly important. As a result, demand generation is an essential strategy for creating compelling, engaging experiences across the entire buying journey.
If your demand generation efforts are not achieving measurable performance and business outcomes, it may be time to rethink your strategy and align it with current buyer behaviors. This guide outlines the most common reasons why demand generation programs fail to meet business goals, and provides proven solutions to bring demand generation closer to revenue:
Read the full guide for six key areas that affect demand generation performance, and how to address these issues.
Determining the factors that lead to the success (or failure) of a demand strategy is not always straightforward. This is often due to the long-term nature of programs and the duration of B2B sales cycles, which, according to the 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report, can take up to a year to finalize.
There are recurring drivers for why a demand strategy might not meet expectations, all of which can be addressed with accurate data and approaches to better understand your buyers’ pain points and needs.
This article breaks down six top reasons why your B2B demand generation strategy might be underperforming and the best solutions to enhance outcomes.
1. Short-term expectations for long-term strategies
Demand generation is a long-term strategy, but its impact is not limited to conversions at the end of the sales cycle. Throughout the buyer’s journey, it drives measurable outcomes, such as increased brand awareness, engagement, and pipeline progression, that are essential steps in moving buyers toward conversion.
Given the extended length of B2B buying journeys, the full impact of a demand strategy may not be immediately visible on a monthly or quarterly basis. However, short-term tracking remains crucial, as it provides the insights needed to drive the outcomes outlined below.
Effective demand generation today is about connecting every marketing interaction with measurable revenue outcomes, ensuring that all activities contribute to the growth of the brand and the full buying group, rather than focusing solely on individual prospects.
For this reason, it is important to establish tangible benchmarks and goals to steer your demand generation strategy and demonstrate its evolving performance. This is particularly important for Account Based Marketing (ABM), which requires resource-intensive planning and execution.
Below is an example of how to monitor demand generation performance throughout long cycles:
Typical B2B buying cycle (11 months)
How to track performance throughout demand generation strategies
Determine short-term goals and KPIs (monthly or quarterly)
Establish realistic, short-term goals that support your long-term vision and the business outcomes you want to achieve from your demand generation strategy.
Examples of KPIs to monitor include:
Bolster your demand strategy with short-term actions
Applying paid media tactics, such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and targeted display (also known as programmatic display), generates an initial touchpoint with potential buyers, who can then be routed to dedicated lead nurturing cadences. This allows organizations to assess performance to inform follow-up and next steps.
Here are some actions that could be applied:
Leverage social selling and events
Sales teams play an important role in complementing marketing-led efforts by building direct relationships with prospects and validating interest. Events are also particularly effective for building relationships, allowing sales to engage prospects in meaningful ways that deepen trust and naturally encourage progression through the buyer’s journey.
Two effective social selling tactics include:
Apply omnichannel engagement across the buyer journey
Modern B2B buying groups expect consistent, valuable interactions across digital, human, and partner-led marketing channels. Effective demand programs orchestrate these touchpoints to maintain momentum throughout long sales cycles. By aligning content, messaging, and experiences across touchpoints, you can meet buyers wherever they are in their process.
Channels can include social media, email, events, search, answer engines, and partner networks.
Some effective omnichannel engagement examples include:
2. Unoptimized budget for the scope of the demand strategy
Optimization is key to ensuring goals and expectations are met, especially when maximizing the impact of budgets. Therefore, making the most of your resources will ensure the longevity of your demand generation strategy, as well as encourage buy-in from stakeholders for future iterations.
How to make the greatest impact from your budget
Focus on key industries or accounts
Utilize your buyer personas and Ideal Client Profiles (ICPs) to determine key markets, as well as analyze prospects in your pipeline that are most likely to convert. This allows you to strategically prioritize your budget.
Practical targeting applications might look like this:
Maximize impact through channel and partner ecosystems
Collaborating with trusted partners, industry networks, and channel alliances can extend reach without proportional budget increases. Using established partner relationships enables you to access new buyer groups, benefit from shared marketing resources, and co-create targeted campaigns that reduce acquisition costs while increasing credibility.
Partnership-driven demand strategies can be activated through:
Increase efficiency with AI-enabled campaign optimization
AI tools can analyze campaign performance as it happens and adjust targeting, messaging, and channel allocation to maximize returns. This allows teams to make data-driven budget decisions, eliminate underperforming tactics faster, and focus resources on initiatives with the highest likelihood of converting priority accounts.
AI can optimize campaigns in the following ways:
3. Targeting and messaging are not aligned with buyers
Demand generation strategies can stay ahead by continuously adapting targeting models to meet changing buyer needs.
ICPs and buyer personas can shift as changes in the macroeconomy impact an industry’s priorities and how its players adapt, resulting in stale data.
How to enhance targeting and messaging for your buyers
Keep your ICPs and buyer personas updated
Ensure that your buyer profiles are updated regularly (ideally by quarter) so that strategies are aligned with current buyer preferences. When doing this, it is important to consider the broader buying group, which, according to Voice of the Buyer 2025, can contain as many as 15 diverse members, each with unique interests.
According to the 2024 Demand Gen Survey, 51% of buyers reported that the nurturing content they receive is too generic and irrelevant to their needs, highlighting the impact of poor personalization on engagement.
Prioritize prospect targeting for greater account engagement
Concentrating resources on the most relevant accounts delivers greater long-term value than trying to reach as many prospects as possible. ABM enables your team to focus on high-fit opportunities and craft precision messaging that resonates with multiple members of the buying group.
This approach is particularly effective in the current defensive buyer climate, where, according to the Voice of the Buyer 2025 report, operational efficiency and risk mitigation drive buying decisions.
Using advanced intent platforms, partner insights, and first-party engagement tracking, identifies accounts that show early buying signals. This enables proactive engagement before the buying group makes direct contact.
Targeting better-fit prospects can be achieved through:
Audit performance and conduct surveys
Keep track of KPIs to determine what benefits, copy, and imagery are performing best with your audience segments. It is also key to survey clients and prospects to gain insights into their opinions and recommendations for your organization.
Some KPIs to track can include:
Prioritize channels your audience frequents
Rather than spread your budget across all channels, determine those where your buyers conduct the majority of their research as a buying committee. Adopting an omnichannel approach with these key channels provides a richer brand experience for your audience.
Channel-focused strategies might include:
Adapt targeting for larger and more diverse buying groups
As buying groups expand, each stakeholder may prioritize different outcomes and require customized information and insights.
With 67% of buying groups led by directors or VPs and 51.4% including managers (Voice of the Buyer, 2025), messaging must address both senior decision makers and mid-level influencers. Segmenting content to the specific priorities of executives, managers, technical evaluators, and end users ensures that all members of the buying group receive relevant insights that support their role in the decision process.
This is necessary for speeding up consensus and increasing the likelihood of moving high-value deals forward.
Tactics for addressing diverse buying committees include:
Below is an example of strategies to address and engage buying group members with strategic content:
Buying group member
Priorities
Content types
Executives (VP, C-Suite)
Strategic ROI, market positioning, risk mitigation
Business case briefs, ROI calculators, industry trend reports, executive webinars
Directors / senior managers
Operational efficiency, budget alignment, team impact
Solution overviews, case studies, competitive analysis, implementation timelines
Technical evaluators
(IT, Engineers)
System compatibility, security, scalability
Technical datasheets, integration guides, product demos, proof-of-concept trials
End users
Ease of use, productivity, workflow fit
How-to guides, feature walkthrough videos, product FAQs, quick-start templates
4. UX and buyer enablement are not prioritized
Developing a rich buyer experience requires time and care to ensure the buying journey is personalized and memorable. While a recent study undertaken by Adobe and London Research shows that 52% of B2B companies now have a strong focus on personalization (up from 38% in 2022), many organizations still struggle to fully prioritize the resources needed to deliver this experience.
Short-term revenue pressures often take precedence, leaving personalization efforts underdeveloped, its importance.
To truly enable buyers, strategies must support all members of the buying group, providing relevant insights, educational resources, and experiences that empower confident decision making throughout the entire journey.
Enabling buyers to make confident purchase decisions means:
The bulk of the modern buyer journey takes place in the dark funnel. This is the online and offline research, discussions, and decision making that happen before a prospect engages with your brand directly. Enabling buyers early (with content where they are) is what wins share of mind.
There are simple solutions to build a relevant user experience (UX), which will empower your demand generation strategy and drive engagement, as well as improve client retention.
How to improve UX and buyer enablement
Identify attrition points in the buyer’s journey
Determining when and how most prospects disengage from marketing efforts will allow you to improve retention. This can be achieved via UX research, surveys, or by monitoring when most prospects stop engaging with outreach (which should be evident in your CRM).
Make critical decision information “self-service”
A common attrition point in buyer journeys is when a prospect needs to engage with sales to discover the unique benefits of an offering or fill in a form.
According to 6sense’s Buyer Experience Report, 85% of buyers have already established their purchase requirements before contacting sales, which means that organizations must allow prospects to discover the brand at their own pace, with the fewest obstacles possible.
Personalize at scale with dynamic content and AI
Apply AI solutions to facilitate the creation of personalized content for different buyer personas, such as one-pagers, landing pages, and product pages. This makes messaging more precise and allows salespeople to engage prospects with the most relevant information for their needs.
It is important, however, that all AI-generated content is carefully managed and reviewed by internal experts to ensure accuracy, brand alignment, and appropriateness for each audience.
Ensure that lead nurturing cadences are relevant
To be effective, lead nurturing cadences must deliver timely and relevant educational content that aligns with where prospects are in their buying journey. Regularly reviewing engagement metrics ensures that your messaging stays on track and allows you to adjust cadences if prospects begin to disengage.
By tracking the performance of nurturing cadences and leveraging data from surveys and sales, it is possible to improve the efficiency of nurturing to encourage progression to the bottom of the sales funnel.
You can strengthen nurturing cadences with approaches like:
Embed continuous experience testing and optimisation
Implementing an always-on testing framework for UX elements ensures that the buyer journey remains relevant over long sales cycles. This is especially important as buying behavior evolves and new stakeholders join the process, requiring experiences to be adapted in real time to sustain engagement.
Practical ways to test and refine buyer experiences include:
5. Low-quality and unactionable data
With data privacy regulations becoming increasingly prevalent, collecting high-quality buyer data is more challenging than ever.
Simply capturing basic audience information, such as company size or geographic location, does not provide the actionable insights needed to shape effective demand strategies or understand buyers’ true preferences.
Harnessing intent data can help uncover these insights, but it is only one element of a larger strategy. Successful demand generation relies on a mix of real-time data and buyer signals, from engagement metrics to behavioral patterns, to determine true intent.
Effective programs utilize these insights to continuously optimize campaigns, reveal hidden opportunities, and proactively guide buyers through the full journey.
How to improve data quality and usage
Invest in a first-party data partner
A partner with a proprietary database and content distribution network can allow you to engage key prospects with timely data on their preferences.
Streamline your tech stack for quick insights
Make sure your tech stack allows marketing, sales, and stakeholders to easily obtain insights from demand programs, allowing parties to optimize strategies accordingly.
Start collecting demand intelligence
Establish a demand intelligence methodology at your organization, where prospect data is primed and refined according to its actionability for future campaigns.
Here are some examples of how to collect demand intelligence:
6. Focusing on lead generation over demand generation
Demand generation connects brand trust and revenue acceleration. As a result, over-prioritizing lead volume at the expense of full-funnel demand generation undermines long-term ROI.
Modern demand strategies focus on uniting every touchpoint and area of engagement to tangible business outcomes. Doing so ensures marketing efforts drive pipeline growth, revenue influence, and long-term brand impact across the full buying group.
Focusing solely on prospect volume (lead generation) does not have the same impact as a strategy that generates, nurtures, and sustains high-quality prospects. In fact, lead generation is an outcome of effective demand generation. Without it, capturing a large volume of qualified prospects is unlikely.
How to optimize lead generation with demand
Balance short-term lead capture with long-term demand creation
Demand generation strategies, such as targeted ABM tactics, omnichannel brand campaigns, and buyer enablement content, improve prospect quality and sales readiness. This increases the likelihood of conversion compared to high-volume, low-quality prospect lists.
Measure ROI beyond lead counts
Track how demand generation contributes to pipeline velocity, deal size, and close rates. This creates a more accurate picture of ROI and reinforces the value of prioritising quality over quantity.
To accurately measure impact, demand strategies should track full-funnel metrics such as account engagement, buying group consensus, pipeline velocity, and influence on revenue, rather than relying solely on lead counts or surface-level conversion rates.
Some examples for measuring ROI beyond prospect numbers can include:
Key takeaways
Implement a demand strategy that maximizes revenue
INFUSE demand experts are ready to create demand strategies designed for complex, buyer-led journeys and meeting your performance goals.
Whether you are looking to surface buyer signals, enable decision making with high-value content, or deliver engaging omnichannel experiences, our team is here to achieve it.
