"I have $20k budget. How many leads do you guarantee?"

Sorry, what is called "demand gen" today is a rotten, broken marketing playbook that costs CMOs their jobs.

Old school demand gen aka waterfall marketing indoctrinated B2B companies that there is a predictable revenue model:

-Design gated content

-Run ads and send cold marketing emails aka "nurturing"

-Capture MQLs

-Handover to sales

-Analyze MQL to SQL conversion rate

-Figure out which channel generates more MQLs at lower CAC

-Calculate how many MQLs do you need to hit revenue targets based on the current conversion rate

-Request budget

B2B companies and VCs loved the idea of predictable revenue so much, so they completely recreated GTM around the new broken model.

The core of the new model:

Marketing & sales control the buyer journey and can push buyers.

This immediately widened the definition of target addressable market (TAM) and made companies forget about ICP.

Faster. Predictable. Scalable.

And within this nonsense we started seeing how B2B CMOs tenure is plummeting to 16 months in 2025.

I once attended a meeting where Head of ABM at a well-known (63k+ employees) B2B company presented to head of demand gen of one vertical team the idea of a cross-functional program.

The first thing she heard:

I don't have time for this. I can give you $20k for air cover. How many leads do you guarantee?

We must stop it.

The only way to generate B2B revenue for enterprise products is shifting to revenue marketing: