Your Marketing Generates Leads, But Does It Help Close Deals?

By David Ronald  

We marketers love to report our on successes. 

Website traffic is up; campaign engagement is strong; lead generation exceeded expectations. In summary, marketing-qualified leads are pouring into the sales pipeline. 

But there’s one question every CEO needs to be asking:  

Is marketing helping us win more business? 

Generating leads is important, but it’s only one part of the customer acquisition process. 

If those leads don’t turn into opportunities, and those opportunities don’t become customers, marketing may be creating activity without delivering business value. 

For technology companies looking to scale, the opportunity is to move beyond measuring marketing by how many people it attracts and start measuring how effectively it helps convert prospects into customers.  

In this blog post I explore five ways marketing can do more to close deals.

1. Stop Measuring Marketing Success by Lead Volume Alone

Lead generation is an essential marketing function, but not all leads are created equal. 

A campaign might generate hundreds of leads yet produce very few qualified opportunities. Another campaign might generate a smaller number of leads but result in several high-value customers.  

So, which campaign is more successful? The answer should be obvious, but companies often focus on lead volume because it’s easy to measure. 

Instead, marketing should evaluate performance across the entire funnel, from initial engagement through closed business.  

Consider tracking these metrics:

• Lead-to-opportunity conversion: What percentage of leads become legitimate sales opportunities?
• Opportunity-to-customer conversion: How often does the company win deals once an opportunity enters the pipeline?
• Pipeline generated: How much potential revenue can be attributed to marketing programs?
• Marketing-influenced revenue: How does marketing contribute to deals throughout the buying process?
• Sales cycle length: Are marketing activities helping prospects make decisions faster?

No single metric tells the whole story. 

Together, however, these measurements help reveal whether marketing is attracting the right buyers and helping move them toward a purchase. 

The goal isn’t to abandon lead generation. It’s to connect lead generation to the outcomes the business actually cares about.

2. Find Out Why Deals Stall or Are Lost

Marketing teams often focus on the beginning of the buying journey. They develop campaigns, publish content, optimize landing pages, and encourage prospects to request demonstrations.  

But what happens after a prospect enters the sales pipeline? 

Do buyers understand the product’s value? Are they concerned about implementation complexity? Are competitors telling a more compelling story? Is the prospect struggling to build internal consensus or justify the investment? 

These are questions marketing should help answer. 

Start by working with sales to review recent wins, losses, and stalled opportunities. Look for patterns in the reasons prospects give for not moving forward. 

For example, if prospects consistently say they don’t understand how your product differs from alternatives, the problem may be positioning and messaging. If they recognize the value but struggle to justify the cost, marketing may need stronger business-case materials, customer evidence, or ROI tools.  

If deals repeatedly stall because buyers cannot get internal approval, content designed to help champions communicate the business value to other stakeholders could make a difference. Every stalled deal contains information marketing can use to improve future results. 

The key is to turn that information into action rather than treating lost deals as a sales problem alone.

3. Give Sales the Content It Needs to Win

Marketing teams produce a tremendous amount of content: blog posts, ebooks, webinars, social media updates, product announcements, and thought leadership. 

These assets can build awareness and attract potential customers. But do they help a salesperson answer a difficult question, overcome an objection, or persuade a buying committee? 

That’s a different challenge. 

Sales teams need materials that address the specific concerns buyers raise during the decision-making process.  

Examples include:

• Competitive comparisons that explain meaningful differences between your product and alternatives.
• Customer success stories that demonstrate how organizations like the prospect achieved measurable results.
• ROI calculators and business cases that help buyers justify the investment.
• Technical and implementation guides that address concerns about deployment, integration, and risk.
• Executive presentations that connect the product to strategic business priorities.

The best approach is to involve sales in content planning. Ask salespeople which objections they hear most frequently, what information prospects request, and what materials would make their conversations more effective.  

Then prioritize content based on its potential to influence buying decisions. 

It’s also important to measure whether salespeople actually use the content and whether it helps advance opportunities. Downloads and page views are useful indicators, but they don’t establish that a piece of content is helping close deals.

4. Help Buyers Understand Why They Should Choose You

In crowded technology markets, products can sound remarkably similar. Competitors may all promise greater efficiency, better visibility, lower costs, or improved productivity. 

When every vendor makes similar claims, buyers have difficulty distinguishing between them. 

That creates a problem for sales. Representatives must work harder to explain why their company is different, and prospects may default to familiar vendors, lower prices, or the option that seems least risky. 

Marketing can address this by developing a clear, differentiated value proposition. 

Start with three questions:

• Who benefits most from our product? Identify the customers whose needs and priorities align most closely with what you offer.
• What business problem do we solve particularly well? Focus on the outcomes customers care about rather than a long list of product features.
• Why should customers choose us over the alternatives? Identify differences that matter to buyers and can be supported by evidence.

Customer interviews are especially valuable here. Your internal assumptions about why people buy may not match the reasons customers actually choose you. 

Use those insights to refine website messaging, sales presentations, product demonstrations, and competitive positioning. 

When buyers quickly understand what makes your company different and why that difference matters, sales conversations can focus more on solving their problems and less on explaining what your product does.

5. Make Marketing and Sales Accountable for Shared Outcomes

Even a strong marketing strategy can underperform when marketing and sales operate independently. 

Marketing may celebrate the number of leads delivered, while sales complains about lead quality. Sales may struggle to close opportunities without explaining what buyers need. Both teams can hit their individual activity targets while the business misses its revenue goals. 

The solution starts with shared accountability. 

Marketing and sales should agree on what constitutes a qualified lead, when an opportunity is ready for sales engagement, and how leads should be followed up. They should also establish a regular process for reviewing pipeline performance, conversion rates, stalled deals, and customer feedback. 

A practical starting point is a monthly revenue-focused meeting where both teams examine three questions:

• What’s working? Which campaigns, messages, content assets, and channels are contributing to qualified opportunities and closed business?
• What’s not working? Where are prospects dropping out, and what patterns emerge in lost or delayed deals?
• What should we change? Which specific improvements will have the greatest potential to increase conversion and revenue?

These meetings should lead to decisions and action items, not just another reporting exercise. 

Marketing can then adjust campaigns, messaging, and content based on what sales learns from buyers. Sales can improve its follow-up and use marketing insights to make conversations more relevant. 

Over time, the two functions become more effective because they're working toward the same business outcomes.

Conclusion

Generating leads is not the finish line. It’s the beginning of a process that turns potential customers into paying customers. 

Marketing creates the greatest business value when it helps the right buyers recognize a problem, understand the available solutions, see why your company is the right choice, and build confidence in their decision.  

That requires more than effective campaigns. It requires an understanding of the sales process, close collaboration with sales, compelling differentiation, useful buyer-focused content, and metrics that connect marketing activity to business results. 

If you're a CEO or marketing leader, start with a simple exercise: review your last ten closed-won deals and ten lost or stalled opportunities with your sales team.  

Look for patterns. Identify where marketing could have helped. Then choose one or two improvements to test over the next 30 days.  

You may discover that the biggest opportunity isn't generating more leads. It's doing a better job of converting the interest you've already created into revenue.

The most effective marketing teams don't just fill the pipeline. They help the business turn that pipeline into customers. 

Thanks for reading. 

Are you interested in exploring how to ensure your market campaigns are contributing to review? If so, feel free to get in touch. My email is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

10 Best Practices for Managing SDRs Successfully

By David Ronald  

Sales development representatives play a critical role in building the sales pipeline.  

They identify prospects, create initial engagement, qualify opportunities, and generate the pipeline sales teams depend on.  

But managing sales development representatives (SDRs) effectively requires more than setting activity targets.  

The best SDR organizations combine clear strategy, strong coaching, effective messaging, technology, and continuous improvement.  

In this blog post I examine 10 best practices for managing SDRs successfully.

1. Invest in Onboarding

Effective onboarding should cover the company, customers, competitors, product value proposition, personas, prospecting process, messaging, and common objections.  

The goal is to help SDRs become credible business partners, and not simply people who can make calls.

2. Make Coaching Continuous

In my experience, great SDR managers are coaches, not just supervisors. Listen to calls, review emails, analyze performance, and provide specific feedback.

Explain what worked, what didn't, and what the SDR should try next.

3. Measure Success Around Outcomes

Calls and emails are important, but they are inputs, and not the ultimate goal. You should consider measuring outcomes such as qualified meetings, sales-accepted opportunities, pipeline generated, and conversion rates.  

Use activity metrics to diagnose problems rather than as the sole measure of performance, and then address these problems.

4. Define Your ICP Clearly

SDRs need to know exactly who they should target. Define your ideal customer profile by company size, industry and business model. Define your ideal contact profile around buyer persona, pain points, and buying triggers.

The more specific the ICPs, the more effectively SDRs can prioritize their time.

5. Lead With the Buyer's Problem

Prospecting messages should focus on why the prospect should care, and not simply on what the company sells. Give SDRs relevant business problems, customer proof points, industry insights, and messaging frameworks they can personalize.

6. Create a Culture of Experimentation

Embrace trying something new, on a regular basis. Encourage SDRs to test new messaging, personas, channels, sequences, and approaches. Measure the results, document what works, and continuously improve the team's playbook. Don’t be afraid to fail.

7. Don't Confuse Activity With Productivity

High activity doesn't necessarily produce results. Examine the entire funnel: outreach → conversations → meetings → opportunities → pipeline. If performance drops at one stage, determine whether the problem is targeting, messaging, skills, or qualification.

8. Use Technology to Improve Effectiveness

Sales engagement platforms, AI, intent data, enrichment tools, and conversation intelligence can reduce administrative work and improve prospecting.  

But technology should help SDRs have better conversations, not simply generate more activity.

9. Connect SDRs and Marketing

Marketing can provide target-account insights, content, campaigns, competitive intelligence, and customer stories. SDRs provide real-world feedback about objections, messaging, competitors, and buyer priorities. 

Create a continuous, collaborative, and synergistic feedback loop between the two teams.

10. Establish Clear Handoff Criteria

Define what constitutes a qualified meeting and ensure SDRs and sales executives agree. Criteria might include account fit, persona, business problem, timing, and buying process. Track what happens after the handoff to identify problems in qualification or targeting.

Final Thoughts

Successful SDR management is about creating a system in which the right people contact the right prospects with the right message and continuously improve based on what the market tells them. 

The strongest sales development organizations align people, process, technology, messaging, and measurement around one objective: creating qualified pipeline that the sales organization can convert into revenue. 

Thanks for reading. 

Are you interested in discussing how to manage your SDR team successfully? If so, feel free to get in touch. My email is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

Too Many Products Fail Because of a Bad Launch

By David Ronald  

Too many companies invest millions in developing new products only to undermine that investment with an ineffective launch.  

According to McKinsey research, more than 50% of product launches fail to hit their business targets, despite the enormous resources companies put into developing and bringing those products to market. 

There are plenty of reasons why launches fall short, but one is particularly frustrating because it’s entirely within marketing's control: a lack of engagement in a product launch.  

I've worked on more than one marketing team where a product launch became little more than an exercise in going through the motions. 

The product team did the hard work of building something new and potentially valuable, but marketing simply pulled out the familiar launch playbook: write the press release, update the website, create some social posts, send an email, give sales a new presentation and schedule a webinar.  

There was no enthusiasm; no creativity. 

The activities were completed, but no one stepped back and asked questions such as, “What can we do better to make this launch successful?”, and, “What can we do different from our prior product launch?” 

In this blog post I explore what you can do to make sure your next product launch is a huge success.

(You may also be interested in this blog post: Too Many Product Launches Are Unsuccessful.)

A Launch is Not a Checklist

The problem begins when marketing confuses executing launch activities with creating a successful launch.  

The team produces the required deliverables including a press release, blog post, website updates, email campaign, social content, sales materials and perhaps a webinar, but never develops a strategy for turning those activities into meaningful market impact.  

The work gets completed, the launch date arrives and the team moves on, without asking whether any of it actually captured customer attention, created demand or increased the likelihood that the product would succeed.  

None of these activities is inherently wrong, and most will have a legitimate role in a launch. The problem is what happens when completing them becomes the strategy rather than a means to achieving something more important.  

A successful launch isn't one in which every marketing deliverable has been completed on schedule. It is one in which the right customers notice the product, understand why it matters, believe the claims being made and take some form of action.  

That could mean requesting a demonstration, starting a conversation with sales, signing up for a trial, attending an event or simply changing the way they think about a problem.  

Achieving that requires more than execution. It requires marketing to think strategically about how to create attention and demand rather than simply executing a predetermined list of activities.

Don't Confuse Activity with Impact

Marketing teams are often under pressure to demonstrate that they are doing something, particularly when a major product launch is approaching.  

The natural response is to produce things: write the blog, create the graphics, schedule the social posts, build the email campaign and organize the webinar. By launch day, there can be an impressive amount of activity to report, complete with content calendars, campaign metrics and lists of completed deliverables.  

But activity isn't the same as impact, as we all know.  

The real questions are whether the campaign made a prospective customer stop scrolling, gave a salesperson a compelling reason to call a customer, made an existing customer curious enough to request a demonstration or gave an industry analyst something worth discussing.  

If the answer to those questions is no, producing more content isn't necessarily the solution. The problem may be that the team hasn't developed a compelling enough story or found a creative way to make the product relevant to the people it needs to reach.

Make the Market Pay Attention

A product launch should create a meaningful response in the market.  

That doesn't necessarily mean spending enormous amounts of money on an elaborate event, celebrity endorsement or flashy advertising campaign. It means giving customers a reason to pay attention and creating something that feels more significant than another corporate announcement.  

Consider the difference between saying, "We're excited to introduce our latest AI-powered solution," and telling a compelling customer story about a problem that previously seemed extremely difficult to solve, then demonstrating how the new product changes what is possible.  

The first approach announces a product. The second creates a reason for customers to engage with the company.  

Marketing should be looking for that story: What has changed in the market? What customer problem has become more urgent? What assumption is being challenged? What can customers do now that they couldn't do before?

Those questions should shape the launch strategy rather than being treated as afterthoughts.

Start with the Problem, Not the Product

Another symptom of a launch that’s destined to fail is starting with the product itself. 

Launch messaging often begins with phrases such as "Introducing our new AI-powered platform" or "Today we are excited to announce our latest solution," followed by a long list of features and capabilities. 

This may accurately describe the product, but it doesn't necessarily give customers a reason to care. After all, buyers are dealing with business problems that need to be solved now; they're not simply waiting for another product announcement. 

A better launch starts with the customer and the problem. Perhaps a semiconductor company is struggling with increasingly complex failure analysis, an enterprise is drowning in data that its teams can't effectively use or a software development organization is spending enormous amounts of time on a task that should be automated.  

Start there. Explain the problem, its consequences and why existing approaches aren't sufficient, then introduce the product as a solution. 

The technology becomes far more compelling when customers understand the business problem it solves.

Creativity Doesn't Mean Gimmicks

Being creative means finding a more effective way to communicate something important.  

Creativity can mean finding an unexpected way to explain a complicated technology, turning a customer success story into compelling content rather than another case study PDF or creating a demonstration that shows the product solving a real problem in a way that customers can immediately understand.  

Creativity can also mean changing the format of the conversation. 

Instead of hosting another generic product webinar, a company could bring customers and prospects together to discuss an important industry challenge. Instead of giving sales another product brochure, marketing could build a campaign around a provocative question that gives salespeople a genuine reason to contact their accounts. 

The objective isn't to entertain people for its own sake. The objective is to earn attention and create engagement in a market where customers are already overwhelmed with competing messages. 

Launches need a Runway

Another mistake is compressing all of the marketing activity into launch week. If customers hear about the product for the first time on the day it is announced, marketing is asking them to understand the problem, recognize its importance, learn about a new solution, evaluate its benefits and decide whether to take action almost simultaneously.  

That's a lot to ask, particularly for a complex product. 

A better approach is to build anticipation.

Start educating the market about the problem before the product is announced. Publish insights, share customer perspectives, discuss emerging trends and create conversations around the challenge the product will ultimately address.

Then the launch becomes the next chapter in a story that has already begun.  

After launch, keep that story going with demonstrations, customer results, educational content, events and new conversations with prospects. The launch should have a runway before launch day and a sustained program afterward.

Everyone Owns the Outcome.

Ownership of the launch should not be confused with responsibility for making the launch successful. 

Product marketing cannot create market awareness, generate demand and drive adoption on its own. A successful launch requires the active participation of the broader marketing organization, sales and other customer-facing teams. 

Product marketing should establish the strategy and challenge the organization to think beyond the standard launch playbook. If the proposed launch looks almost identical to the company's previous launches, that should be a warning sign.  

Yes, the product marketing team should be asking what can be done differently to capture attention, create demand and materially improve the product's chances of succeeding in the market. But it should not be left to product marketing to craft and execute every element of that strategy. 

Conclusion

The biggest shift marketing teams can make is changing their definition of a product launch.

A launch isn't a set of deliverables, a press release or a date on the calendar. It isn't an exercise in checking boxes simply so the team can report that everything was completed on time.

A launch is an opportunity to turn the company's investment in a product into market awareness, customer interest, sales conversations and ultimately revenue.

That requires marketing teams to do more than execute.

They need to think, challenge assumptions, experiment, find better stories and take calculated risks. They need to look at the standard launch playbook and ask whether following it will actually accomplish what the business needs.

Most importantly, they need to recognize that creativity isn't something added to a launch after the strategy is complete. Enthusiasm and creativity must be part of the strategy.

Thanks for reading.

Are you interested in discussing how to make your next product launch a huge success? If so, feel free to get in touch. My email is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.  

10 Tips for Making Your Next Event A Success

By David Ronald

A successful event is about much more than simply putting people in a room and providing food and drinks. 

From customer conferences and executive dinners to networking events, product launches, and industry gatherings, the best events create meaningful connections, deliver value, and leave attendees wanting to come back.  

So, with that in mind, here are 10 tips on how to make your next event a huge success. 

1. Start with a Clear Objective

Before choosing a venue or sending an invitation, define what the event needs to accomplish. Is the goal to generate leads, strengthen customer relationships, build awareness, educate prospects, or create networking opportunities?  

A clear objective will guide every other decision, from the audience you invite and the speakers you select to the format, venue, agenda, and promotional strategy. It also provides a way to measure success after the event. 

2. Know Your Audience

An event designed for CEOs will look very different from one aimed at engineers or prospective customers. Each audience has different priorities, interests, challenges, and expectations, and those differences should shape everything from the event format and agenda to the speakers and activities.  

Understand what your audience cares about, what they want to learn, and what would make them invest their valuable time in attending. 

3. Create a Compelling Reason to Attend

“Come network with us” may not be enough. You need to provide people with a specific reason to show up. A respected speaker, exclusive discussion, valuable insight, hands-on experience, or unique activity can turn an ordinary invitation into something people don't want to miss.

The key is to make the benefit to the attendee clear. What will they learn, experience, or gain by attending that they cannot get somewhere else? A compelling event gives people a reason to prioritize it over the many other demands on their time. 

4. Choose the Right Venue

The venue sets the tone for the entire experience. Consider location, accessibility, atmosphere, acoustics, seating, food and beverage options, and opportunities for conversation.

The right venue should support the event's purpose rather than compete with it. An executive networking event may benefit from an intimate setting that encourages conversation, while a product demonstration may require more space, presentation equipment, and reliable technology.

Think about how attendees will move through the space, where conversations will take place, and whether the environment encourages the type of interaction the event is designed to create.  

Even practical details such as parking, transportation, Wi-Fi, signage, and restroom access can influence how attendees perceive the overall experience 

5. Make Networking Easy

Networking rarely happens simply because people are placed in the same room. Build opportunities for interaction into the agenda.

Small-group discussions, shared activities, introductions, cocktail receptions, and strategically arranged seating can help break the ice.  

Plus, consider creating natural opportunities for attendees to meet people outside their immediate circles, rather than allowing everyone to gravitate toward the people they already know. 

6. Keep the Agenda Moving

Attention spans are limited, particularly at business events. Avoid long presentations and overly complicated agendas. Mix speakers, discussions, demonstrations, activities, and informal conversation.

Build in natural transitions between sessions and leave enough time for attendees to ask questions, have conversations, and absorb what they've heard.

Avoid filling every minute of the agenda; some of the most valuable interactions can happen during an unstructured conversation over coffee or a drink. Keep presentations focused and give attendees opportunities to participate rather than simply listen.  

A well-paced agenda should feel engaging and purposeful without making people feel as though they're constantly being moved from one activity to the next. 

7. Focus on the Experience

Think beyond the content.  

From registration to the final goodbye, every interaction shapes the attendee experience. Good signage, seamless check-in, quality food, comfortable surroundings, and attentive staff can make a significant difference. 

8. Promote It More Than Once

One invitation is rarely enough. Use email, social media, personal outreach, partners, and direct invitations to build awareness. For important attendees, personal invitations from executives or salespeople can be particularly effective.  

Start promoting the event well in advance and increase the frequency of communication as the date approaches. Each message should reinforce the value of attending rather than simply repeat the event details. 

9. Make It Memorable

Give attendees something they'll remember and, ideally, something they'll talk about afterward.  

A memorable event gives people something to share with colleagues, post about on social media, or mention when describing the experience to others. Those conversations can extend the life of the event well beyond the day itself and help build anticipation for future events. 

10. Follow Up Quickly

The event shouldn't end when the last guest leaves. Follow up while the experience is still fresh. Thank attendees, share useful content, continue relevant conversations, and connect sales or marketing teams with promising contacts. 

A timely follow-up shows attendees that their participation was valued and gives you an opportunity to build on the conversations that began at the event. Personalize follow-up whenever possible rather than sending the same generic message to everyone.  

Measure attendance, engagement, leads, meetings, and other outcomes against the original objective. 

Final Thoughts

A great event delivers on its purpose and creates value for the people who attend, regardless of size or level of production. It’s defined not by how big or elaborate it is, but by how well it aligns with its goals and how meaningfully it engages its audience.

Plan around your audience, pay attention to the details, create opportunities for genuine connection, and follow up afterward. Do that consistently, and your next event will give people a hunger to attend the next one (that’s an intentional pun by the way).

Thanks for reading.

Are you interested in discussing how to make your net event a huge success? If so, feel free to get in touch. My email is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you. 

Why the Traditional Marketing Funnel Is Breaking Down

By David Ronald 

For years marketers have operated with a relatively familiar model.  

A prospect discovers your company, visits your website, downloads something, becomes a lead, enters a nurturing campaign and eventually talks to sales.  

It was never quite that simple, of course, but the model gave marketers a useful framework for thinking about how buyers moved from awareness to consideration to purchase.  

That model is becoming increasingly difficult to recognize.  

Today’s buyers are doing more research on their own, using more sources and interacting with companies later in the process. Increasingly, AI is sitting between the buyer and the information they are looking for.  

The result is a fundamental change in how people discover, evaluate and select B2B vendors. 

In this blog post I explain why the funnel is becoming harder to see and what you can do to address this. 

Your Website Is No Longer the Front Door

The traditional buyer journey assumed that your website was one of the primary places where prospects learned about your company.  

In my opinion that assumption is increasingly outdated.

A potential customer might hear about your company in a LinkedIn post, ask ChatGPT which companies solve a particular problem, read reviews on G2, ask colleagues in Slack for recommendations, watch a product demonstration on YouTube or search for customer opinions on Reddit.

They may do all of this before ever visiting your website.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this behavior because it can synthesize information from multiple sources and present a buyer with an initial answer, or even a shortlist of vendors, without requiring the buyer to visit dozens of websites.

The result is a fundamental change in the role of the website.

A strong website is still crucial, of course, but it is increasingly becoming a validation destination rather than the starting point of discovery. By the time someone arrives, they may already know who you are, what you do and who your competitors are.  

The question is whether your website gives them enough evidence to keep you on the list. 

The Shortlist Is Being Created Earlier

This may be the biggest change of all.

Historically, marketing often focused on generating a broad pool of potential buyers and then helping sales narrow that pool down.

AI can reverse that process by helping buyers create their own shortlist before they ever identify themselves to a vendor. 

A buyer can ask, "What are the best platforms for solving this problem?" The answer might contain five companies. They can then ask, "Which of these is best for a 500-person company?" and the list gets smaller. They might follow that with, "How does Company A compare with Company B?" At this point, the buyer is already evaluating specific vendors, even though none of those vendors may know the buyer exists. 

G2's 2026 research found that AI chatbots had become the leading source influencing which software vendors make buyer shortlists, ahead of software review sites, market research firms and vendor websites. 

This is a profound shift because marketing is no longer simply trying to create awareness and capture demand but needing to influence the conversation that happens before demand becomes visible. 

Introducing the Dark Funnel

There has always been a part of the B2B buying process that marketers couldn't see.

Buyers talk to colleagues, forward emails, mention vendors in meetings and ask friends for recommendations. Private Slack groups, direct messages, online communities, podcasts and peer networks can all influence a buying decision without producing a trackable marketing interaction.

This "dark" activity has always existed, but the amount of buyer research happening outside traditional marketing channels is growing.

AI adds another layer. A buyer can conduct extensive research inside an AI assistant without generating a website visit, clicking an ad or filling out a form.

From the marketer's perspective, nothing happened but, from the buyer's perspective, a lot happened. They may have developed an opinion about your company, compared you with competitors and decided whether you belong on the shortlist, all without creating a single identifiable marketing signal.

This creates an uncomfortable measurement problem. A marketing team may look at declining organic traffic and conclude that its content strategy isn't working. At the same time, the company's brand may be appearing repeatedly in AI-generated recommendations and influencing buyers who eventually arrive through direct traffic.  

The activity is real but the attribution simply isn't. 

Stop Measuring Only What You Can Track

This doesn't mean marketers should abandon traditional metrics.

Website traffic, leads, conversion rates and pipeline remain important, and companies still need ways to determine whether marketing investments are producing business results. But those metrics no longer tell the entire story, particularly when much of the buyer journey happens before a prospect becomes identifiable.  

In my opinion, marketing teams need to start asking different questions, such as: 

• Are we appearing when buyers ask AI about our category?
• What does AI say about us compared with our competitors?
• Are customers and industry experts talking about us in places we don't control?
• Are our most important claims supported by credible third-party sources?
• Are prospects arriving at our website already knowing what they want?
• And how often are we being included in buyer shortlists?

These are harder questions to answer than "How many people downloaded our whitepaper?"

They are also increasingly important.  

Marketing measurement needs to expand beyond activities that can be neatly attributed to a campaign and start considering whether the company is influencing the broader market in which buying decisions are being made. 

Content Has a New Job

This shift also changes what good content looks like.

For years, marketers created content primarily to attract traffic, generate leads and support SEO. And, sure, those goals still matter, but content now has another job: helping buyers understand why your company matters.

This requires more than publishing generic articles filled with keywords. Companies need content that clearly explains what problem they solve, who they solve it for, how their approach differs, where they are particularly strong and where they may not be the best fit. 

They also need credible customer evidence, useful comparisons, clear explanations of their category and specific proof that supports their claims.

The goal isn't simply to produce more content but to create content that provides enough useful information for a buyer to understand the company and accurately represent it.

In other words, content needs to be useful even when the buyer never becomes a lead.

And that's an important mindset change.  

The objective isn't always to get someone to click, fill out a form or download something. Sometimes the objective is to make sure that when someone asks, "Who should I consider?", your company has a credible answer. 

Marketing Has to Become More Distributed

The old model placed much of marketing's responsibility on a relatively small number of controlled channels: the website, email, advertising and perhaps events.

The new buyer journey requires a broader approach because buyers are forming opinions across a much larger ecosystem. Your brand needs to show up across the places where customers actually learn, compare and validate companies.

That includes search and AI platforms, obviously, but it also includes industry publications, review sites, communities, social networks, podcasts, analyst reports, customer stories and third-party conversations.

This makes third-party credibility more important, not less. You can tell buyers that you're innovative, but a customer saying it is more powerful. You can say you're the market leader, but independent analysts, customers and industry experts can provide evidence. You can publish a comparison page explaining why you're better than the competition, but buyers will still look elsewhere for validation.  

The winning brands will increasingly be those that are easy to understand, easy to validate and easy to recommend. Marketing therefore has to think beyond what the company says about itself and focus on the broader body of information that buyers encounter while researching the category. 

Conclusion

So, what does all of this mean for marketers?

Well, it means the job is getting bigger.

Marketing can no longer think exclusively about generating demand that can be captured and measured. It has to influence demand that may remain invisible, make the company discoverable in AI-driven research, establish credibility in third-party conversations and make the company compelling when buyers finally arrive at the website.

This also means marketing has to work more closely with sales, product, customer success and even customers themselves.

The story being told across the market needs to be consistent, understandable and credible, whether that story comes from your website, a salesperson, a customer review, an industry publication, a LinkedIn post or an AI-generated answer.

Okay, so the traditional funnel isn't dead... 

But the assumption that marketers can see buyers moving through it is. 

The modern B2B buyer may spend days, or even weeks, researching your company without ever raising their hand. By the time that buyer contacts sales, much of the decision may already have been made.

The question for marketers was once, "How do we get buyers into our funnel?" Now it's, "How do we influence buyers before they ever enter it?"

And that is the new B2B buyer journey.

Thanks for reading my blog post.

Are you interested in discussing how to reinvent your marketing funnel? If so, feel free to get in touch. My email is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

How to Write Technical Blog Posts that People Actually Want to Read

By David Ronald  

Okay, let’s be honest.  

Technical blog posts have a problem.  

Too often, they're written as if the primary objective is to prove that the author understands the technology. 

The result is technically accurate, thoroughly researched, and about as fun to read as a software manual.  

But it doesn't have to be that way.   

The best technical content does two things at once: it makes the reader smarter and gives them a reason to keep reading. 

In this blog post I explain how complex ideas can be written about in a way that feels clear, relevant and, ideally, enjoyable.

Let the Writing have Personality

Character comes from small things: a strong opinion, a little humor, a short sentence for emphasis, or an observation that makes the reader think, "Exactly." 

We've all seen the architecture diagram with 47 boxes and approximately 900 arrows, and that kind of observation can communicate more personality than another paragraph about "increasing architectural complexity." 

You don't need to make every sentence funny, either. In fact, please don't. A technical blog shouldn't read like a stand-up routine written by an engineer who just discovered coffee. 

The goal is simply to sound like a person rather than a documentation generator. 

Conversational language, varied sentence length and occasional humor can make even complicated technical subjects feel much more approachable. 

Begin with an Idea

Don't begin by defining the technology. 

Begin with something interesting that creates a question in the reader's mind. Instead of saying, "Artificial intelligence is transforming manufacturing," try something like: "The most expensive data in a semiconductor fab may be the data nobody can find." Now you've created curiosity, and the reader wants to know why that might be true. 

That's what a good opening should do. 

It shouldn't immediately tell readers everything they need to know; it should give them a reason to continue reading.  

A strong observation, surprising fact, provocative question or counterintuitive argument can be much more effective than the traditional opening that tells us a technology is "rapidly transforming the landscape." 

At this point, the landscape has been transformed so many times that it probably needs a break.

Have a Point of View

Technical content becomes much more interesting when the author believes something.  

Don't simply explain that companies are adopting multimodal AI; tell readers what you think about it and why it matters.  

For example: "Adding another AI model isn't going to solve the problem of fragmented manufacturing data. The real challenge is giving AI the context to understand what that data means." 

Now there's an argument.  

The reader can agree, disagree or keep reading to find out whether you're right. That's much more engaging than simply presenting a collection of facts and hoping someone makes an interesting conclusion from them.

Explain Why the Technology Matters

Technical explanations are most effective when they begin with a real problem rather than a definition. 

Rather than immediately explaining how retrieval-augmented generation works, start with the problem: an LLM can be remarkably good at answering questions, and remarkably confident when it doesn't know the answer.  

Then explain how RAG addresses that problem. 

The technology becomes easier to understand because the reader already knows why it matters. A useful formula is problem → why existing approaches fall short → technology → practical consequence. 

This approach provides technical depth while keeping the reader focused on the bigger picture instead of making them wade through three paragraphs of terminology before discovering why any of it matters.

Tell Stories and Use Examples

Even highly technical subjects benefit from storytelling. 

Instead of saying, "Engineers need to correlate information from multiple sources," describe the engineer investigating a failed component: opening a failure report, searching historical test results, examining an image, checking a spreadsheet and asking whether anyone has seen the same problem before. 

Now the reader can see the problem rather than simply being told about it. 

Once they understand the situation, they're much more receptive to an explanation of how technology can help. 

Concrete questions, workflows and scenarios are particularly effective because they turn abstract capabilities into something readers can visualize. "AI can analyze multimodal data" is abstract. "Can we find every previous failure that looks like this one?" is a question a real person might actually ask.

Don't confuse complexity with expertise

Technical credibility doesn't come from using the most jargon or explaining every possible technical detail.  

It comes from knowing which details matter and leaving the rest out. A good test is simple: Am I explaining this because the reader needs to know it, or because I want to demonstrate that I know it? 

If it's the second, cut it. The strongest technical writers understand that expertise isn't demonstrated by making something complicated; it's demonstrated by making something complicated understandable. 

That's especially important when writing for business audiences, who usually care less about how a technology works in isolation than what it enables them to do.  

The goal is to make technical writing more human. The best technical blog posts leave readers thinking two things: "I learned something," and, just as importantly, "I actually enjoyed reading that." 

If you can accomplish both, you've done something considerably harder than explaining the technology. You've made someone want to read the next paragraph. 

Thanks for reading my blog post. 

Are you interested in discussing how to write blog posts that people actually want to read? If so, feel free to get in touch. My email is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.

Why Your Content Strategy Needs to Change

By David Ronald  

So, for years, content marketers have followed a simple strategy. 

Identify the keywords customers are searching for, create content around those keywords, optimize the content for search engines, drive traffic to a website, and convert that traffic into leads.

But something fundamental is changing…

Buyers are increasingly using AI to discover information, research problems, compare solutions and decide what to explore next.

And that means your content strategy needs to change with it. 

 

In this blog post I explore how to make the most of the changes and re-tune your content strategy. 

Search Is Becoming a Conversation

We marketers know that traditional search is based largely on keywords.  

For example, a buyer might search, "Best customer data platform for B2B companies."

But AI-powered search allows that same buyer to ask something much more complicated, such as, "We're a 500-person B2B SaaS company with a fragmented customer data environment. What should we look for in a customer data platform, which vendors are strongest for companies our size, and what are the biggest implementation risks?"

And that's a very different search experience.

Google describes this as a more conversational approach to search, allowing users to ask longer and more complex questions and continue with follow-up questions.

For we marketers, this creates an important shift…  

The goal now is no longer simply to rank for a keyword but to become one of the sources an AI system considers valuable when answering a customer's question. 

It's About Answer Optimization

Now, I’m not suggesting that keywords no longer matter.

They do. 

But we marketers need to think beyond individual keywords and start thinking about the questions behind those keywords.

For example, a company selling sales enablement software shouldn't just create content around "sales enablement software."  It should answer questions such as: 

• What is sales enablement?
• When does a company need sales enablement software?
• What should you look for in a sales enablement platform?
• How much does sales enablement software cost?
• What are the most common implementation challenges?
• How does sales enablement software compare with a traditional LMS?
• Which sales enablement metrics should companies track?
• What should a company do before purchasing sales enablement software?

These questions address different stages of the buying journey.

And collectively, they provide something much more valuable than a collection of keyword-optimized articles: a comprehensive body of knowledge around a customer's problem. 

Commodity Content Won't Cut It

AI is making it easy to create mediocre content, and a marketer can ask an AI tool to write an article about virtually any topic in seconds.

As a result, the internet is becoming increasingly saturated with generic articles that repeat information already available elsewhere. 

And this creates a problem for marketers.

If your article simply says what everyone else has already said, why should an AI system, or a human buyer, consider it particularly valuable?

Which is where original thinking becomes a competitive advantage. 

Authority Matters More Than Ever

There's another major change marketers need to understand. 

AI systems can draw on information from across the web. That means your company's visibility on third-party websites, industry publications, communities, podcasts, analyst sites and other authoritative sources can influence how your company is understood.

This makes traditional content marketing increasingly interconnected with brand building and digital authority.

Consider this scenario: 

• Company A publishes 100 articles on its own website but has almost no independent recognition.
• Company B publishes fewer articles but is frequently mentioned by customers, industry publications, analysts, podcasts and other respected sources.

Which company is more likely to be perceived as an authority? 

Don't Abandon SEO

None of this means SEO is dead. I’m not saying that. 

In fact, Google's own guidance makes the opposite point: many established SEO practices remain relevant for AI-powered search. 

But SEO should become part of a larger strategy.  

 And, at the end of the day, I like to think of it this way: great SEO helps search engines find and understand your content. A strong content strategy gives them something worth finding. And brand authority gives them a reason to trust it.  

That's a much more powerful combination in my opinion. 

Measure More Than Traffic

Finally, AI search requires marketers to rethink measurement.

Website traffic will continue to matter. But it shouldn't be the only metric.

We marketers should increasingly pay attention to questions such as: 

• What topics are we associated with?
• Which competitors are being recommended alongside us?
• What sources are AI systems citing when discussing our category?
• Are customers and third parties reinforcing the same positioning we communicate
• Is our content influencing pipeline?

Some of these measurements are still emerging.

And that's okay because, after all, the behavior of buyers is changing faster than the traditional marketing measurement stack. 

Conclusion

Some of the people that I speak with  view AI search as a threat to organic traffic.

But I think that's too narrow a perspective…  

In my opinion the companies that will mean in this new era are going to be the ones that develop the strongest point of view. This means: 

• They'll understand the questions their customers are asking.
• They'll create content that answers those questions better than anyone else.
• They'll build authority both on and off their websites.

And they'll make sure their brand is consistently associated with the problems and categories they want to own.

The AI search revolution is about creating content that is so useful, distinctive and authoritative that both machines and humans recognize its value.

And that’s a much bigger, and much more interesting, content marketing opportunity.

Thanks for reading my blog post.

Are you interested in discussing how to change your content strategy to take advantage of the Ai search revolution? If so, feel free to get in touch. My email is david@alphabetworks.com – I look forward to hearing from you.