AMA: OfferFit Director of Demand Generation, Jeff Jewett on Sales / Demand Gen Alignment

First, Demand gen has to move on from anchoring around lead volume and MQLs. Those numbers can look healthy while pipeline misses badly. I focus the forecasting conversation on opportunity creation rates and close rates of marketing-sourced leads because those are what actually connect demand gen activity to revenue outcomes. Discrepancies between sales and demand gen usually come down to different definitions of what counts or different assumptions about conversion rates. The fix starts with a ...Read More

My role in a new product launch or market entry is to plug demand gen into PMM and enablement's process early rather than run a parallel one. PMM owns positioning, enablement owns sales readiness, and demand gen's job is to build programs that put the right message in front of the right buyers. The mistake is launching campaigns before sales knows how to handle the conversations they generate. In practice that means: Getting into PMM's launch planning early to align on target audience and messag ...Read More

In my experience with B2B SaaS, this tension usually surfaces when sales has a shortfall and looks to demand gen to make it up within the quarter. My job is to be honest about what demand gen can and can't do on that timeline. Demand gen typically operates on at least a 60-90 day lag. Programs running today will likely influence pipeline next quarter, not this one. The key is building that lag into goal-setting from the start and setting that expectation with sales. In practice that means: Setti ...Read More

Lead scoring alignment breaks down when marketing builds the model and hands it to sales. Instead, start by sitting with sales leadership and a few reps and asking: what makes a lead worth your time? Push past job title and company size. You want to understand what buying signals they actually pay attention to, what questions tell them a prospect is serious, and what early indicators predict a deal will close. Combine that with historical CRM data to validate their instincts against actual outco ...Read More

The biggest risk in content strategy is building it around what marketing assumes buyers care about rather than what actually comes up in sales conversations. To close that gap, I build regular feedback loops directly with sales. In practice that means: Joining sales calls or reviewing call recordings regularly to hear objections, questions, and language prospects use firsthand Running a monthly sync with sales reps to ask two questions: what are you hearing most right now, and what do you wish ...Read More

Building on the forecasting model above, the metrics I care about most when measuring demand gen's impact on pipeline are: Marketing-sourced opportunity rate: what percentage of open and closed opportunities originated from demand gen programs Marketing-influenced pipeline: deals where demand gen touched the account at some point in the buying journey, even if sales sourced the lead Win rates and average deal size of marketing-sourced opportunities compared to other sources Pipeline velocity: ar ...Read More

This comes up in every demand gen role I've had. My starting point is always to treat it as a legitimate signal rather than a turf battle. If sales is saying leads aren't converting, something is off and it's worth finding out what. The first step is getting to the data. I look at conversion rates by lead source, segment, and persona to see if there's a pattern. Often the problem is specific, not systemic. A particular channel or audience segment is underperforming while others are healthy. That ...Read More