Demand Generation & ABM.

At a large wealth network I ran demand generation across two business lines. The mandate was simple and unforgiving: fill the pipeline, prove marketing sourced it, and do it for less every quarter. So I built the machine to do exactly that, and it drove $107 million in marketing-influenced pipeline and $22 million in closed-won revenue at 27.57 times return on ad spend, work that earned the 2024 Marketing Disruptor of the Year award.

Over two years I designed and shipped more than sixty integrated campaigns across paid, email, website, and webinars, roughly a hundred percent more than the function had ever produced. I moved over eighty-three thousand people from never-heard-of-us to actively engaged.

Efficiency was the whole game

Filling a pipeline is easy if you can spend without limit. Doing it cheaper every quarter is the hard part, and the part that actually matters. I cut the cost per campaign by sixty-eight percent, then drove cost per lead down fifty-seven and thirty-eight percent across the two lines, from two hundred and ninety-five dollars to one hundred and twenty-seven on one, and to a hundred and eighty-two on the other. Marketing-sourced and influenced opportunities reached $7.8 million in pipeline on one line, with a six-hundred-percent year-over-year jump on the second.

Account-based, aimed at intent

The audience was niche and high-intent, the kind that ignores spray-and-pray entirely. So I ran account-based campaigns against major named accounts in the space, and built lead magnets around the exact research my audience was actually hunting for. Downloads rose sixteen percent, webinar attendance climbed seventy percent, and meeting engagements grew to two hundred and forty-four. The account-based engine generated thirty-four percent of total leads and twenty-six percent of opportunities, on a marketing-originated versus marketing-influenced attribution model I co-authored with Sales. Every asset was matched to a funnel stage: awareness content for early leads, interactive and personalized content for the ones close to a decision, and trigger-based emails to reignite the ones who stalled.

Demand gen is engineering a path from never heard of you to booked a meeting, and knowing the cost of every step.

Where demand gen leaks

Most demand generation does not leak in the campaign. It leaks in the handoff, between the channel that generates the lead and the system that is supposed to route it. I know, because I once opened the CRM and found twelve hundred qualified leads improperly staged and excluded from every email, revenue we had already paid to earn, sitting invisible. Fixing that is not glamorous. It is where the pipeline actually comes from.

If you want to see where your own funnel leaks, score it with the Growth Leak Audit. If you want the operator who builds the machine, that is applygro.com.