B2B SaaS companies are standing at a critical point, where budgets are expanding, yet returns are at an all‑time low.
Unsurprisingly, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) has nearly doubled in just three years. Average revenue growth has slowed to around 22% (KeyBanc Capital Markets)
And this is not a temporary hiccup. It’s a full-blown crisis in how we approach demand generation.
Relying on MQLs, gated content, and rigid attribution is not just outdated. It’s revenue draining. CMOs struggle to prove ROI, sales teams lose confidence in the leads they receive, and buyers are ghosting outdated funnels.
The buyer has evolved. The playbook must too.
The Buyer Has Changed, So Why Hasn’t the Playbook?
Table of Contents
Today’s B2B buyer is not filling out your form. So, what are they really busy doing?
They’re gathering insights in Slack communities, listening to podcasts, DMing peers, watching LinkedIn posts, and lurking silently for weeks, sometimes months, before taking any action.
In fact, B2B buyers now spend only 17% of their total buying time meeting with vendors (Gartner). Most of the journey happens independently and in the shadows.
This is what we call dark social. These hidden touchpoints influence decisions but do not show up in attribution tools.
Here are some critical shifts:
- Buying committees are larger than ever. On average, 6–10 stakeholders are involved (Gartner).
- Deal cycles are stretching. Six to eight months is now standard for mid-market and enterprise SaaS.
- Trust is earned early. It often forms long before your SDR reaches out, often through peer content, customer reviews, or thought leadership.
Visibility matters, but trust is the currency that converts. And trust is built in the shadows.
Dark Social Is Invisible. But Still Drives Decisions
“How did this deal close?”
You check Salesforce. First touch was a Google Ad. Last touch was the demo request. But deep down, we know that
real influence came from a VP comment on LinkedIn, a customer case study shared in private Slack, and a CMO podcast episode.
You are not wrong.
According to LinkedIn, only 10% of B2B journeys are accurately captured by digital attribution models. The rest are fragmented, anonymized, or offline.
Traditional attribution methods (first‑touch or multi‑touch attribution) create a false sense of precision. Maybe because they are measurable, hardly impactful.
Elite marketers are adopting probabilistic and causal models like:
- Incrementality testing (A/B or holdout campaigns)
- Geo‑lift experiments (regional variations)
- Media mix modeling (MMM)
A Forrester case study of a global B2B SaaS firm found that switching to MMM revealed that 20% of their pipeline was driven by brand channels previously misattributed to paid search.
The future of demand generation is not about obsessing over every click. It’s about adopting more holistic models that reflect how decisions are actually made across channels, conversations, and moments that rarely show up in a dashboard.
Again, it should not be about tracking but about doubling down on what is truly impactful.
Breaking Down Silos to Accelerate the Pipeline
What’s the most discussed and least implemented issue in B2B marketing? That’s misalignment between marketing, sales, and operations.
What does each function operating in isolation mean?
- Marketing optimizes MQL volume.
- Sales chases pipeline velocity and win rate.
- RevOps pulls dashboards but lacks strategic influence.
Working in silos creates friction, blame, and delays. In fact, 79% of organizations with tightly aligned revenue teams achieve faster revenue growth (HubSpot). Despite this, most B2B SaaS companies still operate in silos.
Top companies are building integrated Revenue Councils where GTM leaders meet regularly to:
- Share a unified dashboard (not three versions of the truth)
- Agree on shared KPIs like conversion rate, time to close, and customer LTV
- Collaborate on pipeline bottlenecks and play optimizations
This alignment is not just theoretical. It is operational. It changes how you prioritize campaigns, score accounts, sequence outreach, and allocate spend.
When everyone rows in the same direction, friction drops, and the pipeline moves faster.
Your 2025 Demand Gen Road Map
Sales cycles are lengthening, deal complexity is growing, and the pressure to tie every dollar of spend to real pipeline impact has never been higher. Given this background, traditional lead‑based demand generation fails.
This 90‑day roadmap outlines the shift:
Days 1–30 (Foundation):
MQLs are not the primary value in demand generation. This is because single touchpoints, such as gated ebook downloads or demo requests, can be misleading.
Understanding this shift is essential to optimizing the B2B SaaS funnel for quality engagement over vanity metrics.
Here are three specific dimensions to follow:
- Recency: Has the account shown recent intent (last 7 to 14 days)? Fresh activity signals immediate interest.
- Depth: What kinds of actions are they taking? A whitepaper download is useful, but attending a webinar or commenting on thought leadership content shows higher commitment.
- Breadth: Are multiple people from the same account engaging? That usually means an internal buying committee is forming.
By layering these dimensions, marketers can determine not just who is engaging, but how much it matters.
Days 31–60 (Measurement & Attribution):
Now that you have stabilized your team’s structure and tools, you can track the right signals. But buyers today move through untracked dark channels like Slack groups, DMs, podcasts, and community mentions.
Here is how you can make invisible signals visible:
- Use open‑text form fields like “How did you hear about us?” to let real humans tell you what software cannot detect.
- Conduct sales call interviews to surface referral paths, podcast mentions, and non‑clickable brand discovery.
- Use tools like SparkToro or Wynter to help detect passive brand awareness in closed ecosystems like Reddit, LinkedIn groups, or niche Slack communities.
These data points build a qualitative signal layer on top of quantitative tracking. It is not about replacing analytics but making them more comprehensive.
Days 61–90 (Optimization & Scale):
This is the final and most critical step in your roadmap. It requires creating dedicated Revenue Councils across GTM functions.
How these groups work:
- Define joint OKRs across Marketing, Sales, and CS (for example, “Add $3M pipeline with 60‑day velocity”)
- Use AI‑based routing to prioritize accounts and eliminate SDR guesswork
- Perform quarterly post‑mortems to analyze what worked and plan together, not in silos
This transforms the go‑to‑market from parallel efforts to synchronized execution. It is not marketing versus sales. It is one revenue team.
A well-aligned B2B SaaS go-to-market strategy makes this level of coordination not just possible—but scalable.
Final Takeaway
The demand generation world we knew is gone. The buyer has changed. The data has changed. The channel mix has changed.
Staying ahead of emerging B2B demand generation trends is now essential for navigating this evolving landscape.
What hasn’t changed is the mandate: grow pipeline. Drive revenue. Prove impact.
That requires a shift from tracking every click to understanding every influence, from counting leads to building momentum, from silos to unified revenue teams.
This is not about a shiny new tactic. It is about transforming how we think, act, and lead.
Vikas Bhatt is the Co-Founder of ONLY B2B, a premium B2B lead generation company that specializes in helping businesses achieve their growth objectives through targeted marketing & sales campaigns. With 10+ years of experience in the industry, Vikas has a deep understanding of the challenges faced by businesses today and has developed a unique approach to lead generation that has helped clients across a range of industries around the globe. As a thought leader in the B2B marketing community, ONLY B2B specializes in demand generation, content syndication, database services and more.
