Demand Generation vs Lead Generation

Explore the differences, connections, and strategies to leverage both approaches for maximum growth impact.

Demand generation and lead generation often overlap, but their goals and tactics differ significantly. In this webinar, a panel of marketing experts will clarify these concepts and discuss how to align them with business objectives. Learn how to build a strategy that balances awareness with conversion-focused initiatives.

Key Takeaways

• Demand generation is top-to-mid funnel, focused on awareness, consideration, and engagement; lead generation is bottom-of-funnel, focused on sales-ready leads and handoff to sales.
• Branding acts as both a filter and a net, helping the right customers self-select in and others out, which is cost-effective.
• Lead gen metrics include MQLs, SQLs, conversion rates, cost per lead, landing page conversion, and lead source performance; CRM systems are essential for tracking and automating these metrics.
• Avoid spreading budget too thin; focus on campaigns rather than one-off tactics, and use strategy to say no to ineffective channels.
• Marketing strategies must be dynamic and regularly reassessed; creativity and adaptability are key, especially in challenging economic environments.
• For executive dashboards (e.g., EOS companies), focus on operational and revenue-driving metrics (occupancy rate, average daily yield, CAC, LTV, units sold/conversion rates) rather than granular marketing activity.

Resources Mentioned

• Increase Engagement and Generate Qualified Leads: Turning Attention into Action
• Demand Generation 101: Build a foundation for a strong program
• Does your business need more leads? Balance quick wins with building a demand generation strategy

Full Webinar Transcription

Introduction and Context Setting

Jessica Berg: Hey everyone. Welcome to all you amazing punctual people. I’m Jessica. I will start my intro in like a minute just to give everybody coming in hot from a different meeting a second to get in here. But we’re so excited to have this conversation with you and happy, happy Wednesday. Yay. It is a little odd. I feel like being in the webinar format where we can’t see the rest of your faces or see your chats. It’s a little bit like finger guns at each other. 

But yeah, I think I will just kick it off, be super respectful of people’s time because there’s so much good stuff for us to dig into with these lovely CMOs. So I will start out by introducing myself. I’m Jessica Berg. I’m Director of Business Development at Authentic and I am joined today by some of the amazing, brilliant marketing leaders in our world that are going to share some insight on demand versus lead gen marketing. But before I dive into that, I’m going to give you a little bit of a quick intro to Authentic into this webinar series as a whole, kind of the context that we’re arriving here in. 

So Authentic is a community of fractional chief marketing officers. We work with growing businesses as their marketing leaders, but on a flexible and part time basis. We like to lovingly say that we help organizations Overcome Random

Acts of Marketing® and take the next right step towards confident growth. We mostly work with small and medium sized businesses between 5 and 100 million in revenue. There’s definitely exceptions to that, but that’s our sweet spot and we work with people across industries across the US and a few across the world which is really fun. We love the work that we get to do. 

So this webinar that you’re here joining us in is part of our Authentic Growth® webinar series. And these are all real issues, topics, challenges that we encounter in the clients that we work with every single day. Our CMOs have so much rich experience that I’m, I’m super excited for them to start spouting off to you. But our goal is to give you a glimpse into our Chief Marketing Officer’s strategies and kind of take you under the hood to how they think about these challenges and then you know, it’s some heady stuff. A lot of it depends. But hopefully you come away with some thought starters, some really practical advice or ways that you can bring some of these ideas into your own businesses or just maybe reframe some of your thinking if you’ve been doing things only a certain way for the past few years. And from an audience standpoint, this conversation is geared primarily towards business owners and revenue leaders. 

But we know we’ve got a variety of different folks joining us today. So even if you’re an early career marketer, if you were an agency partner or some other type of executive leader, we are so happy you’re here. We’re super fired up to spend the next hour ish with you and just a couple like super fast housekeeping items before I turn it over to our CMOS to introduce ourselves in this like Zoom webinar world. Whether you’re new to Zoom webinars or not, if you see at the bottom bar on your screen there is a Q and a little question mark icon. At any point throughout the webinar, please fire and type in your questions into that space. 

That’s going to be the place where we look for your questions later, but we’ll hold those until a dedicated Q and A time at the end. So if you’re like me, the thought will fly out of your brain as we get into it. Type it in any time, but we’ll just come back to it at the end of the webinar. Also, this is being recorded so if you’re a note taker, go off, take your notes, but just know you’ll get a link to this recording after the fact so you don’t have to perfectly capture or remember every brilliant nugget that you hear. And then finally mark your calendars. Our next webinar in this authentic growth series is coming up on July 23rd and it is focused on navigating uncertainty which like who knows who knows her and then building lasting business value within entrepreneurial companies. So that’s going to be fantastic. Can’t wait for that. But it’s coming up on July 23rd, so if you’re interested, watch your inbox, watch your website and you’ll. You’ll see some more information and registration info coming out for that one pretty soon. 

So, so excited. Without further ado, I’m going to turn it over to our illustrious CMOS to introduce themselves. I’m going to look to you first, Veronica, if you want to give yourself an intro.

CMO Introductions and Perspectives

Veronica Markol: Sure. And since it’s obvious we’re not going alphabetical, I’m guessing it’s either by height or length of time in the industry. I have been in marketing long enough that I remember what right reading emulsion down is. And that also gives you an idea of how much of the marketing expanse I’ve worked in Right. Because I owned my own agency. So I’ve really touched every aspect of marketing. And the other, the other part about that is even though I’ve worked for enterprise level companies today I’m going to really focus on comments that are going to come from the SMB world because I owned a small business and so I really understand the constraints and the worry that you go through when you are the one who’s responsible for payroll and making rent every month. 

So I’m going to really come from that perspective. I have worked, as I said, across all industries. B2C, D2C, B2B. All of them. And so yeah, I’ve got a lot of experience and I spend a lot of time helping companies that are either building their marketing foundation or they’re going through some kind of seismic shift where they’ve got a change in leadership, a change in how they’re going to market. And the way that I help them is I really specialize in crafting messaging that helps connect them to their target audience in a meaningful way that helps drive results. So that would be me in a nutshell. So who’s next?

Jessica Berg: Amazing. Elizabeth, I’m going to pass it to you.

Elizabeth Hague: Thanks. Yeah, similar to Veronica, I have a panoramic view of marketing. All of the acronyms, B2B D to C, B2C. All of these and more I’m sure. So a few accolades. In my background I shaped a 2.3 billion valuation brand picked up by Vista Equity Group sales loft. If you know them, then you know what that’s all about. Also did two acquisitions as well as earned an award for most inspirational woman in Georgia. Thanks to mentorship and for how much I love to talk about marketing. I specialize in high stakes, 3 million ARR to 100 million ARR. Usually a transformation, brand transformation, revenue growth transformation, leadership transformation. That’s what I specialize in. So I’m excited to be here today.

Jessica Berg: Thank you for coming. Okay Jess. Last but not least.

Jessica Moyer: Happy to be here. My name is Jess Moyer. I am also an Authentic fractional CMO. I have nearly 30 years experience primarily in financial services and fintech. I’ve from you know, consulting advisory agency side to client side and that sort led to a lot of professional services and trusted advisor work. So although I also have all of the experience, the hat that I want to wear today for this group is sort of the B2B mid sized business and specifically consulting professional services, advisory type work and how demand gen and lead gen differs for those types of businesses. 

And just on a personal level, I do feel like Veronica said, sort of a connection to, you know, the SMBs. I grew up, my dad built a business from scratch, a $25 million business. We have a family business in the mix. And so I saw all of those phases and all those pain points and felt like, you know, I was destined to be sort of aligned with people that are in those same positions. So excited to hear what the group has to say and share my perspective with you all today.

Defining Demand Gen vs. Lead Gen

Jessica Berg: Amazing. Thank you. I’m so excited. So kicking things off and maybe setting the table a little bit first. There’s a lot of in depth, maybe potentially technical stuff that we’re going to cover today, but before we get there, let’s just get some shared definitions or kind of table setting info out there. I’ll go to you first, Jess, if you don’t mind, but can you speak to a practical difference between demand generation in marketing and lead generation in marketing?

Jessica Moyer: Sure, sure, absolutely. So I think, you know, at Authentic generally we’re always firstly aligned on what are your objectives and what are your goals and what phase of the buying journey are you targeting with your programs, what tactics, channels, et cetera. Although we acknowledge that the buying journey is not always linear, we do try to align to different phases of the funnel. And so to that end, demand gen is really more top to mid funnel. There can be a fine line between demand and brand, but we think of it as more kind of top to mid awareness, consideration, engagement. 

And lead gen is really about driving those either the handoff to sales or driving those direct leads that are ready to buy or ready to engage with your services. And I think sometimes there can be some confusion because there could be. Sometimes people think of legion as form fills, but you could have nurturing activities or bringing folks into the ecosystem to be nurtured that involve form fills as well. So this can create some confusion. But I think an easy way that I like to think of it is like Google PPC, bottom of funnel, lead gen, nurturing gated content, webinars, that kind of thing, demand gen and I think more the one last thing I want to add, and it’s not really about the terminology, I think where we see the most confusion amongst business owners or you know, C suite leadership is just the purpose of marketing. It’s either where are the leads or sales have got it and you’re driving, you know, ground cover for them. And that leaves this whole big swath of middle funnel activities that can be ignored.

Jessica Berg: Love that. That’s well, this whole webinar is going to be an exercise in restraint for me to not ask a follow up question, but like anything you would want to add.

Veronica Markol: So you know one of the easiest ways to think about demand gen versus Lead gen is if you think about the customer journey. And demand gen is really in the awareness and research phase and then lead gen is in the consideration and purchase phase. And as I mentioned, I often work with companies that are going through the process of setting up their marketing foundation, which often means I’m helping them set up their CRM. 

And one of the things that I really love about HubSpot, for example, is when you go through the lead scoring process, you have to actually think about, okay, where is the point where I’m going to turn a marketing qualified lead into a sales qualified lead and how do we get our leads to become marketing qualified leads? So right when you’re looking at demand gen and you’re using a CRM, things that you’re going to look like you’re going to look at are going to start with visitors to your website, then leads, inquiries, raw engagements and even engagement is a good measure of demand gen. 

And then for lead gen, like I said, marketing qualified leads or MQLs sales qualified leads or SQLs sales accepted leads, opportunities, deals. And one of the things that I always like to think about in lead gen is that’s a good place to start considering bant, which is budget authority. Oh, I can’t remember what the acronym stands for but you can use in time, need and timing. So right that’s you can use BAND to qualify. When does somebody really move into the sales function because it helps determine fit.

Jessica Berg: Love that. That’s so helpful. Any other thoughts?

Jessica Moyer: Just the last closing thought is just best laid plans. You know, does it mean that you may develop what you think is a demand gen program and you know, get somebody that’s ready to buy which would be a great case scenario. Or you, you’re, you’re thinking you’re running legion and you get a lot of just interested folks which I think can create a lot of frustration. But you know, when you’re, when you’re thinking of one outcome but we don’t control the buyer’s journey and so we’re just making sure that we are attacking all areas of that journey.

Addressing the ‘Best Kept Secret’ Problem

Jessica Berg: Love that. Okay, awesome. That’s really helpful. So one of the next questions or things that rose to the top for us in terms of really elevating the questions that we receive on a daily basis. This is so personal to so many of my sales discovery calls or intro conversations with leaders is what we call the best kept secret problem. So many business leaders feel like their service or product or offering is a best kept secret, that they know they have something really high value, they have something that’s really relevant for their potential customers, but they don’t know how to enter their natural habitat or be part of that customer’s consideration set. 

Sometimes also they want to skip demand gen and get right into lead gen because like ROI is real and you know, bringing those customers and sales in to drive all activities is real. So in your experiences, how would you walk folks through? Like, what’s your thinking and mindset? What types of guidance or sort of initial advice do you start to give to those potential clients? And let’s start with you, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Hague: Yeah, no problem. My general philosophy is that marketing is very simplistically just humans talking to humans. Marketing is having a relationship with your customers. And there is a clear sequence to this relationship. Right. So your brand builds the demand, the demand is creating the intent and then that lead generation is capturing the intent. So you have this full spectrum of a relationship that marketing is essentially managing with customers across what we call a customer life cycle. Like, exactly. So the ultimate goal of marketing isn’t just to get leads through the door and book them and be done because nobody wants to be sold to. 

When was the last time that you were like, oh yeah, sell to me. This is great. You want to cultivate a relationship with the place that you’re buying something from. And I also want to encourage any leader that’s listening to this to not try to split hairs on this ROI of like, well, lead, Lead gen is the only thing I want to measure or demand gen is really the only thing I want to measure because you can really measure those things and I only care about roi. Really getting those things in place is pitting marketing against itself to say which one is more important. And that’s not the goal of marketing. You need to create a flywheel of relationships that we can nurture from cradle to grave. Right. So again, like really the whole philosophy of marketing is it’s talking to the right people at the right time with the right message.

Jessica Berg: Love that. Okay, who wants to go next?

Veronica Markol: I’ll jump in. I really love that, Elizabeth. A long time ago, I worked with a group of agency owners to write a book about, you know, the best kept secrets of marketers. And mine was that marketing is the art of having an individual relationship with a lot of people at the same time. Right. Because if you are doing your demand, if you’re doing your brand awareness in your demand gen, well, people will actually feel like you’re speaking directly to them. And the thing that I like to remind clients is that also the people who aren’t your customer will not engage with you. Which some people are afraid of. Right. 

Like they don’t like the idea that what you’re my brand is going to actually help some people self select out. But when you think about it, that’s incredibly cost effective and it means you’re going to deliver on your brand promise to somebody who actually wants that. And I mean it’s just a really important thing to remember that a good brand is both a filter and a net. And, and again, when we’re talking about businesses that feel like they’re the best kept secret, it means they have something valuable but not enough people know about it. And particularly right in their icp, their ideal customer Persona, those not enough of those two people know about it. And good branding will attract more of those people more intently, intensely. But right.

Like at that point, if, if that’s the case, it does mean you’re probably going to want to invest more towards the demand gen than Legion. Right. Because if, if nobody knows who you are, how are they going to raise their hand to raise a question? Right. So it’s just if that’s your situation, you have to think about how you’re going to allocate your budget a little bit differently.

Elizabeth Hague: I’m gonna jump in and just say it’s so funny you said self select out. There’s one thing I said earlier on in my career to a C suite and he never let it go in a positive way. I told him I literally want people to unsubscribe from our newsletter and he’s like why? And I’m like, because it’s just getting us closer to them buying something from us. It just means. And I also don’t have to pay at the time constant contact for the bracket of people on our list that don’t care about our, our services or products. Right. So just as an aside, it’s good to self-select. It’s a net and a deterrent. How, how do I redescribe it? Veronica?

Veronica Markol: Yeah, Love it.

Jessica Berg: Anything to add, Jess?

Jessica Moyer: I’m just gonna. So not necessarily along the best kept secret, but along this kind of flywheel concept. Just give a nod to business development and sales as being part of that flywheel in that mix. Especially because I do work in a lot of large, complex, large dollar sales environments in which, you know, the brand gets mixed with the relationship and the sales team is a huge component of that flywheel. And I think it’s good marketing’s job to get them more at bats and to raise awareness and consideration amongst the target prospects as well as support through mid funnel and even support with materials that help close the deal. 

But I don’t think it’s good marketing, there are some scenarios and I’m sure like digital first all that where good marketing doesn’t mean salespeople. But I do think it’s an important part of the mix. And I just recently read one of our like benchmarking articles from Demand Base which I really loved which said, you know, when you think about demand in lead gen, it’s not about a relay race and a baton handoff. You know, in a complex buying journey and in an engine healthy relationship between sales and marketing. It’s more like a soccer team. You’re kind of bouncing the ball back and forth, maybe you’re going backwards a couple times, you’re sharing between and the ultimate goal is to move down the field and get to what’s best for the organization. 

So I’m a big proponent and we are a big proponent at Authentic of partnership and kind of win-win approaches.

Veronica Markol: I’m sorry Jess, I don’t mean to cut it. It’s really interesting because when you think about marketing the question is like where does it begin and where does it stop? And again, if you think of it in terms of marketing is about managing relationships, it doesn’t. Right. Like once you make that connection with a person, marketing should stay involved through the entire process because let’s face it, how you, how you deliver on the brand promise, right? Like the product or service that you actually get to the customer is marketing. Right. 

Like that experience is the delivery of the promise that you made at the start of the relationship. So for me, right, like, and again, if you have good marketing, you know, marketing and sales should always be aligned because marketing softens the beach for sales. Right. And I have been in some organizations where we got to the point where the sales people really just had to pick up the phone and take the order. And I’m not saying that that’s the case. Right. Like, and I’m not, I love sales people. I’ve been a salesperson. I’m often in the position of selling. 

So I don’t want to make it sound like sales isn’t important because it is. And especially in certain industries, more important than in others. But it is really important to remember that your brand isn’t the logo that’s on your T-shirt. Your brand is how every single person and every piece of material interacts with that customer, client, patient through the entire journey. And it includes how they leave. Right. And that’s you. I, again, because I work with SMBs, I often get involved in recruiting. And one of the things that’s really important to remember is how you exit an employee says a ton about your brand. How you end a relationship with your customer says a ton about your brand. So, you know, don’t forget that. And if you aren’t thinking about it, maybe you need to talk to your marketing person about how you should manage it.

Elizabeth Hague: And not to, like, cut into it, but it’ll tee us up for the next conversation we’re having on measurement. But just to add, like, some places that Veronica was talking about that I think are really important that a lot of marketers don’t actually include in their. Their metrics are things like glassdoor reviews for employer brands, which Veronica was talking about. Glassdoor reviews are huge. That’s a big marketing play for the company. NPS scores. It’s usually typically a product or product marketing thing that should be, you know, a bottom line for the company in general. How satisfied are people with the product, you know, And I also look at churn rate. So customer success. So beyond the experience of sales. Like, yes, we want to partner with sales. I love what you said, Jessica, about. It’s. It’s a relay, you know, it’s not just a baton pass. It’s like a partnership. Right? What, you know, going even further beyond that, like marketing can mine from a churn, you know, or customer success. So. So I can’t wait to talk about measurement next. Okay, Jessica, I’ll let you get back to your job.

Jessica Berg: Amazing.

Jessica Moyer: No, you.

Measurement and KPIs for Demand Gen and Lead Gen

Jessica Berg: You got it. I love it. So, yeah, teeing up like this is our. Our big, meaty kind of anchor question. Because this is so commonly something that our clients or within our own kind of ecosystems that we’re debating, we’re helping set people up for success. We’re maybe debunking some, like, previously held misconceptions about marketing. 

But the core of this question is how do you, as a marketing leader, set organizations up for success and what KPIs they’re looking at between demand gen and lead gen and then all the stuff in between, again, recognizing there’s so much difference whether it’s a B2C business and the customer is making the purchase directly versus sometimes in a B2B or a sales enabled process where they’re having a conversation with a human and helping them. Yeah, there’s just a lot to cover so maybe I’ll go to you first Elizabeth, talking about demand gen. Yeah totally.

Elizabeth Hague: And just one small thing to share a philosophy or something to think about for anyone out there in listening land. Lots and lots of people are going to say that the brand is not measurable and I completely respect their opinion. I respectfully disagree though. I think it’s inaccurate to say that it’s completely immeasurable because in general, you know, demand for lead gen brands is all part and parcel for marketing. 

Good marketing drives unit economics that drives the bottom line revenue for the business. And really we need to think about things not in contest but departments in contest with each other but in harmony with each other across the business. Right. So things like thinking about it in terms of rather than what are my. What’s my ROI specifically but like upstream downstream lagging and predictive metrics are an easier way to kind of consume what we’re talking about in this webinar. So I have some really great examples of that in general. Like the other caveat I want to say too is you know, should we be measuring every single thing in the business? 

Absolutely not. You know I think it’s really important to talk mostly about revenue driving and unit economics. So how much does it cost to get one customer in the door? How long are they in, you know, do they churn quickly? How often are they buying when we do get them in the door? So back to leading lagging, you know, predictive, all of that kind of stuff. So a few categories. There’s four categories for me. Pipeline, velocity. So just talk about how fast you are getting them in? You know, do they have a good experience during that time from first to last touch point, how many of them are churning? So your churn metrics are people dropping off, are they buying? One company I worked with had a 51% close rate on calls like that. 

Yeah, I saw everyone’s eyebrows like it was enterprise sales. So let’s give credit where credit is due. Enterprise. So they knew about us for a really long time but 51% is that’s all brand. So that’s a really really good predictive metric on how well that’s performing. And the second category is brand search and direct traffic. Those are usually your thumb in the wind of what’s coming next? Are people searching for us? Are they talking about, are they coming to visit us? You know, is it, are they consuming our content? Are they sharing our content with others? Tracking that is vital. Social, Social echo, share of voice, that’s the third category, is really, really vital. Some people are like, oh, that’s hard to track, it’s expensive. 

But if you pick a few really important key metrics for your business to track, it varies from business to business. But really what I love to measure, especially in the share of voice on social media, is how often your company is being mentioned compared to, to competitors and how often competitors are being mentioned. And the last one is a dark funnel. People say you can’t measure anything in a dark funnel. And I again say that is not true because you can always ask, you can sit into sales calls, listen to, you know, the question, like, how did, how did you find us? Listen to the answer. You know, people are mentioning, are they mentioning a CEO’s LinkedIn posts, are they mentioning podcasts? 

You know, what are they, you know, mentioning interviews? You can track those things and it’s important to talk to your whole team about those. But yeah, I would love to kick it off with somebody else and what they think about measurement in general because that was a big, long, rattled list.

Jessica Berg: But it’s so helpful. So thank you. Jess, how about you?

Jessica Moyer: Yeah, I think I love everything you said and yes to all, all the measurements. I would just say that I think sometimes marketing gets a bad rap for, you know, being too focused on leading indicators or people will say vanity metrics, things like, you know, brand search, website traffic, you know, email engagement, database size, database engagement. But I do think that those metrics indicate that you’re on the right path and especially important for earlier stage businesses. But it is our responsibility as leaders to close the loop with the, you know, the, the end of the day, the bottom line results. And I’ll just give us, I don’t know if this is something we share, usually publicly, but Authentic has this great like triangle graphic that shows at each level of the organization what are all the metrics that you’re looking at and talking about. And certainly your marketing team needs to be looking at those leading indicators because you can’t drive growth without healthy channels. And so they need to be watching the health of their channels. And I just think sometimes maybe the conversations happen in the wrong rooms or with the wrong folks and they’re not positioned appropriately. But I do think these, these leading indicators matter for sure.

Jessica Berg: Yeah, that’s such a good point. Just to put a finer point on that. And if anybody is curious about that triangle, like email me or like I would love to, love to follow up because it’s such a helpful visualization that especially for C level leaders, sometimes what we talk about is here all the things that your marketer should be paying attention to. You as the CEO probably don’t need to be paying attention on a weekly basis to your website traffic. Like that’s maybe not the best and highest you see your time. So it’s, it’s, it does all matter. But yeah, that stratification of how often by whom you know and then what is that driving towards is, is a big deal. So Veronica, I’ll go back to you.

Veronica Markol: I think that Elizabeth and Jessica did a great job of answering that question. But one of the things that, and, and again. Right. Like I remember when I bought my agency we had never done a payoff report before and so I introduced a payoff report and it, you know, different phone numbers on different pieces of print materials like you like. But now there’s CallRail. Right. So it’s the same thing. 

So a lot of the tactics for measuring what you’re measuring are still the same, but the way you get to it, like share of voice. When I worked at a ski resort, the way we did that was we went, we counted cars from different states. Right. I mean it sounds crazy but like if, if you don’t have budget for these things and again as I said, I work with a lot of organizations who are just starting their marketing foundation and so everything’s in a spreadsheet or you know, it’s tick marks and so it’s, it’s gathering all of that data. But one of the things that I also like to keep in mind is the quality. So. Right. 

Like if you’ve, if you’re getting a high bounce rate or the calls that are coming in just aren’t, aren’t the right, if they’re not your icp, then you do have to start thinking about changing your demand gen strategy. And again, you know, it’s even things like I have seen circumstances where a client will tell me who their top competitors are and then I’ll go into Semrush and, and do a little search and, and find out who the search engines are saying the competitors are. And it’s, it’s not even, it’s not even close. So. Right. Like there’s a lot of different ways to slice and dice this. And again, you know, a lot of it depends on what you have been doing? Right, like, and I don’t mean just for brand advertising and demand gen, but what have you been doing to measure is, is that the right thing to be looking at and what are other places that you can go and look at? So yeah, I mean these guys did a great job answering the question. I would just say be creative and how you.

Jessica Moyer: Yeah, I love the creative ideas around like looking at the license plates because I think a lot of people come from big companies where you do these, you know, large brand studies and it’s hard to mimic that on a small scale. So I love the creativity there. Veronica.

Veronica Markol: And there are also, there’s some really cool AI tools that are kind of helping you kind of do some testing with a target audience. That’s an AI target audience. So but again, right, like you just have to be creative and think about how I can get there.

Elizabeth Hague: Exactly.

Jessica Berg: Yeah.

Elizabeth Hague: And adding to that point too, one of the things that I always was a little frustrated with at the, you know, when I would talk to C Suite, they’d be like, like, oh, we can’t afford a brand lift study. And I’m like, no, I know that thing is like a million dollars to do, but it costs virtually nothing to listen to a sales call. You know, it costs virtually nothing to offer. Virtually nothing to offer. You know, grabbing a select few of our best favorite customers and just talking to them, you know, like these are some very low cost. 

It’s, there is lift, there’s work involved and that’s a little extra. You have to be careful about those relationships. But I mean again, marketing is a conversation and that we should have the ability to have those conversations in order to get the real intel we need to pepper into, you know, brand demand, lead performance and ultimately lifetime value and customer acquisition costs and all those beautiful metrics that the CEOs love that.

Jessica Berg: So yeah, we’re touching on some of the next phases. But now I’m going to like to shift the hat to KPIs or metrics that are important to you. For lead gen, this is often the more concrete one. So we covered the fuzzier one or the one that maybe orgs don’t think about measuring as well. But what would you all add to the conversation about lead gen metrics that you’ve used a lot or that you really like. And let’s say, Veronica, I’ll go back to you first.

Veronica Markol: This is where CRM really comes in handy. Really handy. There are other tools that you can use, but it just simplifies it, just automates it. Right. Like it makes it so much easier to do this. And so when you’re thinking about Legion, ultimately we’re measuring how effectively we can convert interest into qualified opportunities. Right. And again, so now I remember that the BANT (budget, authority, needs, timing). That’s one of the ways that you can qualify your leads is do they have the budget? Is the person you’re talking to in a position to make the decision? Do they have a need and is it the right time? But so from my perspective, and again, I’m sure we’ll have some differing opinions, but one of the first things to look at in lead gen is marketing qualified leads. Right. People who fit our ICP and have shown meaningful engagement. 

And again, I have to say one of the things that I love about digging into a CRM is if someone hasn’t gone through the process of developing your lead scoring so you know, what is meaningful engagement? Like, it’s a great process to go through to think about. Okay, what does that actually mean? Like is it three visits to the website? Is it three visits to the website in a form filled out, is it? Right, like defining that is really important. But so that’s the first one. And then you track how many of those become sales qualified leads and you use Bant to determine if they fit or not. And then from my perspective, two of the key conversion rates to look at that tell us if our process is working is our MQL to SQ, MQLs to SQLs. Right. 

So marketing qualified leads that convert to sales qualified leads and then sales qualified leads to customers. And this is where it’s really important that you have that good partnership with sales so you understand where, where it does transition and where it needs to go back. Right. So if, if it’s not moving forward, what do we need to do to help that go forward? And then, you know, some other KPIs to look at are cost per lead, landing page, conversion rate, email, click through, rate lead source performance. Right. So all of those things kind of can help you understand if you’re bringing in qualified sales ready leads.

Jessica Berg: Love that. Amazing. Who wants to take it next?

Jessica Moyer: I can jump in on that just to say. So Veronica covered all the metrics and the importance of the CRM. I think there’s just kind of three things that I like to also look at is I like to stack each Legion channel against, you know, each other. Not to say that I’m going to turn one off and turn, you know, throw all the money one way and say, you know, from an original lead source, all the way down to a sales conversion and a cost per that conversion, how is each channel performing relative to the other channels? And just to also watch the health of that particular channel. I also like to do, you know, sort of that concept that Veronica was saying, which is, you know, the conversion between MQL SQL and SQL sales. But a lot of pipelines are really complex. There could be like 15 stages. 

So there is an opportunity to go between stages and say, how can I as a marketer make an impact even in a small way to contribute to something that Elizabeth talked about which was overall pipeline velocity. And then lastly this sort of overlaps with customer acquisition costs. But I think something that I learned in working even with these ladies and we were talking and preparing for this is that you know, if you’re, whether it’s demand or lead, if you’re tracking to an overall customer acquisition cost, you can keep an eye on, you know, especially in a rapidly growing company, whether that’s getting off track or not as a whole. So I think watching some of these things over time and changes in them, especially in today’s world because it’s so digitally competitive, what could have been a productive PPC SEO channel may be changing. And especially with the introduction of AI and a lot of the small medium sized businesses that we work with maybe don’t have the dollars to compete with like for example, a sales loft or someone of that nature. 

So kind of watching how these change over time and keeping an eye for like, do I have the context behind why that’s changing is my catch up because I just invested in, you know, a sales team or a couple of BDO hires or, or is that something that, you know, things are moving fast and hard and that got a little bit off track and I need to take a closer look at that.

Elizabeth Hague: Yeah, and I love to throw like a little curveball in here too about, you know, I really, really think that marketing, those lead gen metrics aren’t being measured as fully as we could. I think it really should come all the way down to what’s our churn rate in our customer lifecycle journey. Because I think, you know, like yes, measuring MQL to SQL, you know, talking to sales about that experience. But there’s this additional piece here that we can ask ourselves about CHURN and how often people leave because really there’s money to be had here. You know, these happy customers know other people. Can we influence, you know, can we, can we produce a better customer acquisition cost if we institute a Low, lower lift, lower cost referral program, you know, is that helping us get to our ultimate number? 

You know, am I as the marketing leader tasked with this, going to be burning less cash trying to get net new customers who don’t know about us, don’t trust us, maybe already are involved in another competitor and don’t want to leave them just yet? That’s a hard sell. You know, can we talk to people who know, people we like who know great people? You know, so there’s, there are other ways to continue to mine this down. You know, you get even further, get even more creative and even more inventive along the line.

Budgeting for Demand Gen vs. Lead Gen

Jessica Berg: Amazing. Love it. Okay, well I there’s so much else we could say about that, but I want to make sure we have time for the super messy budget question before Q and A. So I this is maybe my biggest lift as the moderator to caveat this question up and down so that our CMOs can be spared from having to do it. But the the kind of meaty, tricky, super it depends question from the preparation that we did for this is around budget really trying to give you all some practical, specific advice around how do you balance like what you spend on Demand Gen vs Lead Gen and all those things. We really have tried to be thoughtful about how to do this and it depends so much and I feel a little bit like I want to be a pharmaceutical commercial or talk to your doctor before you add Lipitor or you know, something like that. 

But some variables for you to consider and to sort of take what our CMOS share with a grain of salt are variables around your budget would include your business model, B2B versus B2C versus B2B two C or whatever, all those lovely acronyms, the industry you’re in. Definitely a lot of what Jess talked about in price point of is this like a, a quick like five buck, you know, decision, or is this an enterprise sale that maybe your customer is considering for six months and has 15 different touch points with your company that matters a lot? Have you laid some groundwork in your brand and your demand gen before you’re investing in lead gen? Or is this all completely new to you? Is your competitive landscape really busy, loud, noisy, or are you bringing something really novel to the market that’s less mature and maybe some of your budget needs to go towards customer education and really building demand that your customer didn’t even know that they needed before. 

So, that’s my way of giving you my disclaimer. But I’m going to turn the mic over in the best way that I can to all of you CMOs to be sharing specific examples of how you’ve managed your precious marketing dollars in these chicken or egg decisions before. And I’m going to go to Jess first, if that’s okay.

Jessica Moyer: Sure, sounds good, Jess. I would just echo a lot of caveats. That said, I’m very confident that anyone on this call could work with a client and look at their mix of, you know, the number of employees, the size, what the mix of the marketing budget looks like, what one client is worth to them, et cetera and you know, lean on benchmarks and percentages and things where things are unknown. 

To set a budget for me, demand gen, I’ve managed anything from 100,000 to 40 million. So it really does depend what I will share, practically speaking, is that one way in which I’ve been able to more carefully manage budget and be more efficient for small to mid sized clients is taking a look at sources of business and really doing kind of an 8020 split and saying, you know, when we think about our target audience, where is the majority of our business coming from? Not a lot of people translate that to icp, but in a lot of the contexts that I work in, it also applies to partnerships, informal partnerships. Because if you’re working in, you know, highly complex financial transactions, sometimes there are multiple parties involved on other sides of the transaction and those can ultimately become referral partners. So if you get a sense, you know, formal or informal, of having majority of referral partner source business in one particular segment, one way that I’ve used demand gen effectively is to really hone in on that segment and position my company as the only solution or the trusted source or the preferred source within that segment. 

Even though there may be other people, you know, trying to capture attention. But if I can show that, you know, I can have more of a one on one conversation within a little more focused area of the business, that can also apply to customers. But in my case I’ve found some real power in that referral side, so I can work with less budget. So that’s sort of just a practical thing without giving you an exact number. But you know, we’re not, you know, going into the millions there. We’re, we’re maybe talking about, you know, 100,000 ish. So that’s the way I’ve been able to bridge that.

Jessica Berg: Love that. Veronica, how about you?

Veronica Markol: So again, I’m going to bring my SMB, both as an owner and somebody who’s worked with a lot of SMBs remembering that, as I said, I often help people build their marketing foundation. And I’m talking about, you know, companies with 400 employees and, and, and who have been around for 25 years and they’re realizing, right. Like, the market shifting. I need to actually, I can’t do this with organic word of mouth anymore. Like, I’m gonna have to start marketing. And I get in there and I’m like, okay, well, what’s your marketing budget? Or what did you spend last year? And they give me a bunch of receipts. Right. 

So when you say, can you talk about budget? It’s like, yeah, but that’s, I mean, that’s how different it can be. And another example I can give you is, right, because what your budget is, how you spend your budget is also kind of based on, as a CEO, how you’ve set up your budget. And again, I’m working with someone right now who’s just now changing their chart of accounts so they actually have an understanding of what is going into the marketing budget. But, you know, I had a D2C client where we were, you know, we were spending. Our only marketing spend was PPC and we were getting 130% return on investment. Right. And so we were doing really well with a pretty small budget because we were very surgical in how we managed it. I mean, we were looking at it every week and modifying where we were spending our money. So we were a really aggressive small business. But in one year, we grew our E-commerce sales for this DTC company. We grew our website sales 1100%. And the way we did that was through inbound marketing, content generation, and lead nurturing. Right. So all lead gen tactics that were happening with human resources, but that didn’t get counted as the marketing budget. 

So. Right. Like when you say, how do you determine the right budget and allocation? I’m gonna, I’m gonna say, what is your budget and how have you allocated it in the past? And then we’ll go from there. Right. Like, because it is. It’s so incredibly variable.

Jessica Berg: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Hague: Yeah. Okay. I clearly am like the bold claim person in this webinar.

Jessica Berg: Love that for you.

Elizabeth Hague: But. But also, like big caveats and what I’m about to say also, I think it, like we were discussing beforehand, all of us CMOs, like, this topic could definitely be a whole other webinar just in and of itself. There’s going to be so many things that are left on set just about this one topic. But one thing to say I think could be, could spark interesting conversation or thoughts for people in the audience to kind of take away. I’ve noticed especially in 2025 this year, specifically with the rise of AI and how competitive search is becoming, how easy it is to create content now really the benchmark for me for display ads and LinkedIn ads really seems to be Again, caveat, caveat. 

The $10,000 to $15,000 a month spend. Anything below that really feels like it starts to fall flat. And I don’t say that to scare anyone because 10 to 15,000 is, like an eye popping number for small businesses. They’re like oh my God, that’s so much. I can’t afford that. The reality of that is in this market with the macroeconomics that we’re dealing with, whatever’s happening this year, whatever’s going to happen this year, the focus really should be on being surgical. Just like Veronica was saying, we really need to make sure that the right message is getting to the right person at the right time. So that means anyone under that threshold, I am seeing them become really diligent on, you know, are they connected to their customers? Are they, you know, making sure that their creativity is fresh? You know, how is every single dollar being spent on those ads? And they’re managing it daily hours, hourly, weekly, whatever it takes in order to make sure that budget is actually effective. 

So they get a good return on their ad spend. 10 to 15 above. They should be doing the same work but they have more room to play. They’ve got way more room, way more wiggle room there. It’s not as detrimental. So just throwing that out there that I’m starting to see this benchmark now. Anything under this threshold, it’s becoming scarier and scarier. Anything above this threshold, it’s still very scary but it’s, it’s, there’s, there’s this weird thing happening in the market right.

Jessica Moyer: Now and you mean like paid? That’s what you’re saying, Elizabeth, Is that.

Elizabeth Hague: Like paid paid paid then specifically lead capture, lead gen, just performance marketing paid.

Veronica Markol: Just how quickly do we need. I want to be mindful of time, but I do.

Jessica Berg: No, you go say your.

Veronica Markol: So you know, and it is a bold statement to say it’s 10 to 15,000 because again, right. Like my D2C customer, we had a geographic target of 150 miles because the product we were selling was so big and we had to deliver it and right. Like it was one of those things when it went down the road. Right. Like nobody passed. So you know, it was a very, very niche market. It was a very, very niche geographic target market. And so. Right. 

Like, we wouldn’t be, well, we wouldn’t have been at that point able to spend $10,000. It just, we wouldn’t have been able to spend it. But what is important to know. Right. Like, and I think this is a really important takeaway for anybody listening if there is a point at which you’re spending so little you shouldn’t bother spending it. And again, that’s going to be variable based on all the things you already mentioned. I don’t have to go through that list again. But when you hit that point, you’re going to be better off spending that money on something else or pocketing it. Right. And, and you have to, again, you need somebody who really understands marketing and how that works in order to make that decision. I’m not advocating that if you’ve got a channel that’s not performing, you just shut it down. Because it could be, there’s, there’s so many other things that you could test to find out, have I hit that number. But that is something that is, I think, really important to remember is you, you can get to the point where you’ve got diminishing returns and it’s just, it’s not, not worth it.

Jessica Moyer: Yeah, agree. And don’t spread yourself too thin. I’ve made that mistake before where I’m trying to launch all the channels at once and then even if I do have the budget, I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to kind of track whether it’s delivering the right results.

Veronica Markol: And that’s another thing that’s really important. And, and this is a little bit off topic, but I always, I always say that the best reason to have a good marketing strategy is it helps you say no quicker. And the thing is that if you have a good marketing strategy, you are also not comparing things in a vacuum because if you’re only looking at one offs all the time, they all look good, but they may not be. And this is the point that one should not think in terms of one offs. Do like, like, that is, do not think in terms of one offs. Think in terms of campaign. Because campaigns have been shown over and over again to perform at such an exponential rate compared to one offs. So that’s it for me.

Final Takeaways and Q&A Highlights

Jessica Berg: That means again, like, shut it down. But I want to make a plug or a cue to folks that if, if this is your moment, you have a question and you want to throw something into the Q and A box, it’s your time. Like, we want to hear your questions. There are no stupid questions like, have at it. So I’m going to turn to you next and, and read some of those questions off to our CMOs. But any parting thoughts from each of you? This, like, if you have like a little nugget or a tip or something that somebody could take away that we haven’t maybe had a chance to touch yet. So going back to you for that kind of final mic drop comment, Veronica.

Veronica Markol: Final mic drop comment. Ooh, that pulls a lot.

Jessica Berg: And not in a, like, pressure y way.

Veronica Markol: So, you know, balancing the budget between Demanded Legend and all of your activities. It is absolutely a strategic balancing act. Right. Like knowing where that number is for you and it’s gonna change. It’s going to be dynamic to think that it’s like, okay, I figured it out and it’s going to work like this next year. It’s not. So you have to constantly be watching it. But what I would say is this is when it comes to the overall value of your company, you cannot go wrong with investing in your brand. And the reason for that is it impacts some of the most key factors of your business. 

And again, when I ran an advertising agency, what I knew was my biggest asset was to walk out the door every day at 5:00 or 5:30 or 6, whatever time it was. But Right. Like it was the human resources. And you have to remember, nobody conducts business with an organization. They conduct business with people. And so if you have a strong brand, the other place you can look to see if it’s working is at the quality of your applicants and the quantity of your applicants. And you know, somebody to think about is Dan Price. He’s the one who was like, from now on, the minimum wage of my company is $75,000. 

I don’t know if you guys remember, it was a big deal. When that company posts a job, they get thousands of qualified applicants in a day, right? So you have to think about, okay, a good brand is gonna. It’s gonna improve the quality of talent that you have. And the other thing is that branding is one of the most effective ways to impact your pricing strategy. A good brand, right. We all know it. Like commodities cannot, cannot demand the same price as a strong brand. That’s the value of your company. So again, right. Like, if you, if you’re talking about investing in your organization. You do not ignore the brand and demand gen. That’s my drop. Drop my mic.

Jessica Berg: I think you dropped it. I love that. Okay, who wants to go next? You want to take it, Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Hague: Yeah. Can we also do another webinar on just brands and help B2B people like to see the value of a brand. Like, please. Yes, Veronica. Yes. Reach. Yeah, I think the, the repeat common theme just to wrap up like, you know, the stance, at least perspective that I’ve had through this webinar is that there are interesting and unique places to think outside the box. As the going gets tough, the chips are down in the business. If you’re trying to do a radical transformation or radical growth from 30 to 100 million or whatever you want, unicorns, whatever your goal is, you know, you need leaders who are going to look at things in a perspective that come from knowledge, but knowledge enough to know where to turn over rocks, to look at unique situations and look for unique areas to get customers. 

You know, your customer success churn rate your plan and expand referrals. You know, your, your lagging metrics, your leading metrics, you know, your dark funnels, your share of voice. Looking at the license plate says Veronica had graciously shared with us. You know, listening to calls, you know, just being unique enough to think like my playbook, you know, sure, I’ve got my run of the mill thing, but each business is so unique, there really should not be a quote unquote exact playbook for each and every person that we work with or every company we work with. It’s all unique circumstances. Hence all the caveats. Right, Jessica? But yeah, I mean, great leaders know that creativity is going to lead the way to like, look for new places to, to drum up cash. So hopefully that helps someone in the future, especially during the rocky year we’re having.

Jessica Berg: Love it. Yeah, absolutely.

Jessica Moyer: I’m just very. 30 seconds. Gonna say just make sure you’re socializing, you’re having conversations about your strategy amongst everybody that it touches because you can have a beautiful, well thought out strategy. And if you don’t have friction points within the organization, it could fall flat. So that’s my last closing thoughts because I see we have five minutes and at least four questions I can see right here. So.

Jessica Berg: Yeah, for sure. Well, yeah, keep, keep peppering questions in like it’s always helpful. So it’s not that we don’t have time for more. We’d love to see some more. But I’m going to go first to Glenn’s question. Thank you. So much for asking it. And I’m going to paraphrase it. He’s asking a question specific to EOS companies and likes really simplifying down those metrics. So maybe I can frame it in terms of how you helped structure a marketing dashboard or a mark like what lead or demand gen metrics are maybe coming up to the executive leadership team in your experiences.

Veronica Markol: Well actually I’m working with a company right now that’s not an EOS company and one of the things they are really trying to move from founder led to the team taking over responsibility. And so right. Like we are having this exact conversation about what are the key metrics that he needs to know to make sure we’re moving the needle where he wants to go. And again I don’t know what your business is and so I’m going to have to apologize but this is a retail rental business. Right. So we haven’t even the occupancy rate was a term they had never even talked about. 

But occupancy rate is going to very much influence the bottom line of the organization. Average daily yield. So geez. I, I really If there’s so there’s demand gen, there’s lead gen and then there’s operational. And if you are the CEO of the organization. I’m not sure and I think I don’t remember who was that touched on this. I’m not sure you need to see how many website visits you’re getting or what the engagement is which are important measures of demand and brand. Right. Like those are really important measures. But I don’t think you need to see those. I think what you need to know is how those numbers affect your bottom line. And again right. Like that’s why you should have a good marketing leader is that person should know which KPIs it’s going to pull the lever to move your business in the right direction and right. Set it up. So you are getting that report in your weekly L10 from your marketing leader.

Jessica Moyer: And I think it depends which L10 you’re talking about. We’re talking about what matters.

Veronica Markol: But I would say here are my goals. I would go to your marketing leader and say here are my goals. What are the KPIs you’re going to report to me so I know you’re doing your job. Yep.

Jessica Berg: Any other little things or like in you’re in a different kind of larger, more SaaS context. Elizabeth, what are the types of metrics that you’ve brought to your executive leaders.

Elizabeth Hague: For lead generation, specifically God metrics. So demand gen in general, lifetime value, customer acquisition costs. So we really, when I’m talking to leaders, I leave out most of the voice, you know, those softer things because they genuinely care about what drives the revenue of the business. So I tailor my conversations I have with anybody with a C title and above to be in the language that they care about. Right. So customer acquisition costs in general. And I work with sales and customer success to really understand how, what, where, when and lifetime value seem to be the most important. Especially in B2B SaaS, the lifetime value of the customer, you know, is it going up, is it going down? 

Those are those, again, those are lagging metrics. But really those are, those are the important ones because they point directly to revenue and revenue is king, especially in the areas that I work with. You know, they want to reach, they want to go to. They’re like, our next goal is 50 million. We don’t care what you do, just get there. Our next goal is ipo. We don’t care what you do, get there. You know, so these kinds of conversations are very more, much more hardcore in that, in that aspect of revenue driving.

Jessica Moyer: One thing I was going to add, and I said like, it depends on the level of the L10, but the only thing I was going to add was, you know, units and average sales and things like that and top line revenue. But I think sometimes in early stage businesses you may want to flash some of the brand and the website traffic and email just to show that you’re looking at it. So our favorite, it depends, but measure. If we’re thinking about measuring what matters, it’s usually cost of acquisition, lifetime value, units sold, units converted, conversion rates, average sale dollar. And then how that ultimately rolls up to the top line. And let’s not forget about the bottom line. But depending on what stage you’re in, if you’re in rapid growth in your investment mode, you know, again, more. It depends. Yeah, I love that. I wanted to take, I saw that question in there about social, but go ahead, Jess, you pick. Which are you gonna.

Jessica Berg: I don’t wanna, I don’t want to end on time. Gotta be here. But yeah, no, there’s so much in here. So I just want to thank everyone so much for joining, especially those of you who have to have a hard stop, and bounce out a year. But, there’s so much more that we could dig into and if there’s anything that we can help with, even if it’s just a conversation or a data point for you. Like, please reach out if anything, that it depends. And like you should be getting good, meaningful information from your marketing team. Or like if we can be helpful in you thinking about how to improve that for yourself. Like, please don’t be a stranger. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much to our amazing CMOS for all your insights. This was a blast. So everybody have a great rest of your day and we will just see you very soon. Maybe at our July 23rd webinar.