ABM Misfires, Part 2: You’re Not Building Enough Demand Throughout the Funnel

Editor’s note: This is part two in a two-part series on the importance of integrated demand generation and capture in a modern ABM program. Read part one here.

Demand generation and account-based marketing (ABM), once distinct and discretionary functions of B2B marketing, are becoming ever-more entwined growth drivers.

“Old walls … are crumbling as a large portion of marketers now integrate these functions,” write researchers in Demand Gen Report’s (DGR) 2025 benchmark survey. Seven in 10 (71%) DGR survey takers use an ABM strategy — an increase of four percentage points from 2024 — and an additional 23% have one in the works. Two-fifths of respondents say they’ve combined their demand gen and ABM processes. “This move away from siloed activities toward a holistic strategy is reshaping how businesses approach growth,” researchers write.

As ABM and demand gen continue to coalesce, long-term success will depend on personalization throughout a buyer’s entire journey — from discovery until well after a sale closes.

A lot of companies forget that last part, says Grant Johnson, a fractional chief marketing officer with Chief Outsiders, a Houston, Texas–based firm that pairs organizations with part-time executives, and founding advisory board member of the CMO Huddles digital community for B2B CMOs.

Johnson advocates for close collaboration between teams like marketing, sales, and customer success to provide ever-more “business value" following a win by “delivering on the next thing [the client needs] to have solved.” 

Demand starts with a strong brand

“For years, many B2B marketing leaders have prioritized short-term demand gen tactics at the expense of building long-term brand value,” Forrester researchers write. “That must change if B2B marketing organizations are to build a durable foundation for growth.”

Marketers can start by taking stock of their target buyer groups, which are often younger — and bigger — than meets the eye. Three in four buyers are Gen Zs or millennials who came of age online and “are accustomed to fast, intuitive, self-serve buying experiences” that can be hard to come by in B2B, according to Forrester.

To bridge the gap, the firm advocates for brand-centric activities like paid media partnerships and influencer relations programs that support the growing sway of third parties, such as journalists, podcasters and social media creators, on decision-making. In their recent survey, 30% of millennial and Gen Z buyers said that they include 10 or more of these external perspectives in their buying processes. 

Aside from leading the charge on influencer-informed decision-making, leaders under 40 involve nearly twice as many stakeholders in buying decisions as older executives do. And marketers might want to widen the aperture even more if pipelines are running dry. When return on an ABM effort falls short of expectations, it can signal the need to “look beyond the primary target and consider secondary audiences — those who influence the decision-making process,” says Lily Yao, VP of Marketing for the American Marketing Association.

In the pharmaceutical sector, for example, legal counsel helps shape marketing decisions, Yao says. “Messaging, creative and even media placement must pass legal review and comply with strict regulatory requirements, making legal teams a key influencer of marketing executives,” she explains.

Because buyers of all stripes also turn to the coworkers, managers and vendors they’re already using for insight and guidance, a deep bench of internal and external influencers can help marketers build and radiate a strong, authentic brand.

Embedding relevant metrics like loyalty and reach, meanwhile, can cue leadership to the connection between creative brand building and hard business outcomes because, as Forrester notes, “demand marketing efforts cannot succeed over time if they remain unsupported by brand.”

Next-gen lead-gen content stops the scroll

As discovery evolves at warp speed, demand-gen standbys like case studies, guides, and e-books must be augmented by modern experiences fit for savvy digital natives.

Per Bain, about 60% of searches on traditional engines such as Google and Bing now end without the user progressing to a destination site. At the same time, platforms powered by large language models are “surging in popularity,” the firm notes. As zero-click search proliferates, B2B clickthrough rates are falling by as much as 30% in categories like software, meaning marketers might want to start optimizing their informative content for generative engines (emerging processes called GEO and AEO) by “creating fresh, original and well-structured content that’s easy for AI to scan and include in responses,” Louise Downing writes for Informa TechTarget.

Aside from flocking to zero-click, nearly half of Gen Zers prefer searching on social media over traditional platforms — often on their phones.

“Gen Z gravitates towards short-form, visual content that’s easy to digest, quick to share, and mobile-friendly,” Downing writes. “Instead of wading through lengthy reports or dense whitepapers, they expect instant value — delivered through eye-catching formats like videos, infographics, carousels and reels.”

To win their attention, longer-form content can be repurposed into bite-sized social snippets — quotes or quick tips set to a trending TikTok sound, for example — that deliver value in less than 90 seconds. Downing points to Cisco’s cohesive “snackable” social content that layers visuals — behind-the-scenes footage, employee expertise spotlights, and funny riffs on trends — with compelling captions so messages land even on mute.

The right tech can help (with caveats)

An ever-growing array of vendors is touting GenAI-powered solutions to drive demand throughout the funnel, but the jury is still out on which — if any — are the right enablers for most.

“The consensus is that AI’s effectiveness is still limited, not by a lack of vision, but by practical barriers,” write Forrester researchers. “Key obstacles include the difficulty of integrating these sophisticated tools with existing technology and a widespread shortage of specialized in-house expertise.”

Given the steep investment required by ABM platforms, Johnson says it’s important to determine whether they’ll deliver sufficient payoff before pursuing a large-scale implementation. But he’s also witnessed their immense potential.   

At a recent CMO Huddles meeting, Johnson saw a vendor’s demo of AI-powered demand gen technology that showed a visitor to a company’s website one of 4,000 personalized experiences based on the corporate domain they used to access the site, along with the organization’s segmentation data.

“The CMO who had adopted it in the audience just said, ‘It would blow your mind how much more efficient our demand gen now is,’” Johnson recalls. The executive claimed his team had seen as much as 100% improvement on relevant metrics, such as bounce rate, thanks to the newfound granularity of their inbound magnet.

“Whatever thing you try to show the customer down a certain path … if that doesn’t suit them, they bounce. They go off your site. They stop the process,” Johnson says. “But if you served up a personalized site that’s unique to their business, can you imagine how much more likely it is that they’re going to engage with you?”

Johnson notes that such a platform is likely too heavy-duty for the scrappy startup — he estimates a price tag in the mid-five figures — but that implementation isn’t nearly as arduous as you might expect. It took just 30 days to set up the demo client’s 4,000 segment-based experiences, he remembers learning. 

This is 10% experimentation

“The pressure across public and private companies continues to [be], do more with less — become more efficient and more effective,” Johnson says.

The right approach can help. Johnson abides by a 10% rule, where 10% each of budget and bandwidth is invested in experimentation, paving the way for eureka moments — and providing a safe space for the rapid, repeated failures that often precede them.

When it comes to disruptive tech such as GenAI, Johnson believes that everybody should embed it into their work for the tasks and subfunctions that make sense “because that’s how you can get the collective impact faster than one person you rely on as a subject matter expert,” he explains. “What if they leave the company?” 

That said, not everyone has an appetite for things like vibe coding, so he also recommends assigning a dedicated innovation role on the team. “You should lean in, but you have to do it pragmatically,” he says. “You really need someone on your team … to continue pushing the envelope as to what’s possible because otherwise you won’t discover the breakthrough.”