✨ Want to watch the full recording? You can here: Webinar – 5x more leads with Demand Gen + AI
From HubSpot funnels to Demand Gen
Jordi starts with a look back at 2015. HubSpot was on the rise, content marketing and inbound marketing were the holy grail. The idea was simple: create lots of blogs and whitepapers, build funnels, capture as many email addresses as possible and let sales chase them.
In practice, he now sees the opposite happening:
- The number of completed forms for whitepapers is going down.
- The number of fake and temporary email addresses is going up.
- Buyers are no longer interested in automated nurtures and clever lead tricks.
A large dark funnel has emerged. People orient themselves in Slack communities, WhatsApp groups, network events and on LinkedIn, often without you being able to measure it precisely. And that is fine, as long as you know what your Demand Gen efforts are delivering at the top and the bottom of the funnel.
A key insight: buyers want to self-educate. They want to see pricing, decide themselves when to talk to sales, and they do not want a phone call straight after a download.
Marketing is not just about leads, but about pipeline velocity
In the old model marketing was responsible for leads and sales for closing deals. In the Demand Gen model these worlds move closer together. Marketing actively helps to build a strong pipeline and to move deals faster through that pipeline.
Jordi uses pipeline velocity (also called sales velocity) as the main KPI. In his explanation it consists of four elements:
- The number of opportunities in the pipeline.
- The average deal size.
- The conversion rate from opportunity to customer.
- The length of the sales cycle in days.
By multiplying these factors and dividing them, you get a clear picture of the speed and value of your pipeline. Demand Gen then becomes more than just “more leads”: it is about better opportunities, higher conversion rates and shortening your sales cycle.
Demand Gen and Trust Gen: moving into the revenue zone
For B2B with long sales cycles it is not only about generating demand, but also about building trust. Jordi visualises this with two axes:
- Vertical: Demand Generation. Putting the best possible offer on the table for your audience.
- Horizontal: Trust Generation. Becoming known, liked and trusted by your ideal customer.
Your audience moves from anonymous visitor into the engagement zone and eventually into the revenue zone. Demand Gen is the engine that makes your brand visible with the best information on the channels where your ICP spends time. Trust Gen is what makes people choose you when they are ready to buy.
Step 1: define your ICP and build a Target Account List
The foundation of strong Demand Gen is a crystal clear ICP. Not “everyone with a VAT number”, but a concrete picture of your ideal customer:
- Industries.
- Company size.
- Region.
- Type of DMU and roles.
- Characteristics your best customers share.
With his clients, Jordi starts by analysing the existing customer base. He looks at two axes: value (customer value) and fit (how well the customer fits your business). Customers in the green quadrant with high value and high fit he calls “elephants”. For these top customers he investigates what they have in common: revenue, number of employees, region, type of organisation, logo value and how happy the team is to work with them.
Those criteria are then translated into filters in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This produces a Target Account List of roughly 1,000 to 2,000 companies. In his example he works with about 2,000 accounts. This is the list his Demand Gen activities focus on. Not “the market in general”, but exactly the companies you would love to sit down with tomorrow.
The effect: less noise, less wasted budget and much more repetition with the right companies.
Step 2: Demand Gen with content fuel for your ICP
Once the ICP and Target Account List are in place, the real Demand Gen work starts. Jordi works with five types of “content fuel” that form the basis for all other assets:
- Customer cases: interviews in which customers talk about the collaboration and the results.
- Video interviews: for example, the CEO spending 20 minutes every two months answering questions.
- Webinars: like the conversation with Leadinfo that this blog is based on.
- In person events: trainings, masterclasses and roundtables, preferably at your office.
- Podcasts: expert conversations that contain lots of small insights.
The power lies in repurposing. One podcast or webinar becomes:
- A blog article.
- A LinkedIn newsletter.
- Multiple LinkedIn posts for personal and company profiles.
- An email newsletter.
- Thought leader ads on LinkedIn that give the best posts extra reach within the ICP.
- Promotion for the next webinar or event.
Jordi uses transcript tools and AI to pull the key points from a 40 minute webinar and turn them into a blog. The important part is that the input is good: a clear audience, example texts and the core insights from the webinar. With a fixed “super prompt” he prevents the output from sounding like AI and keeps the tone human.
The result: maximum visibility with your ICP across several channels, while the time investment from your team stays limited. A CEO who sits in front of a camera for 20 minutes every two months can fuel months of relevant Demand Gen content.
Hand raisers from Demand Gen
With that constant visibility on your Target Account List, “hand raisers” will naturally appear: people who see you again and again, recognise their problem in your content and raise their hand once they enter an in market phase. They ask for a conversation, respond to an offer or fill in a form.
Jordi emphasises that this is only part of the potential. Roughly 3 percent of the market is actively looking right now. The other 97 percent is not in market yet, but could be in three or six months. Demand Gen ensures you are top of mind with that audience. But simply waiting for hand raisers is not enough in his view.
Step 3: sales intelligence on top of Demand Gen
To get everything out of Demand Gen, Jordi adds an extra layer: sales intelligence. Marketing remains responsible, but works closely together with sales.
The idea is to collect and combine all buying signals from your ICP:
- Which ICP companies visit the website? He sees this via Leadinfo.
- Which people from those companies interact with LinkedIn posts, newsletters or ads?
- Who signs up for webinars or newsletters?
- Which accounts received physical mail or were invited to an event?
Those signals are brought together in a tool like Clay, with the 2,000 target accounts as rows and the different touchpoints as columns. With bulk tagging he imports the ICP list into Leadinfo, so it is immediately visible which website visits come from ICP companies. Very often this surfaces accounts that fit perfectly but have never raised their hand before.
Not every signal is equally strong. A website visit combined with multiple LinkedIn interactions carries more weight than just sending a postcard. By assigning weights to the signals, a leaderboard emerges: a list of ICP accounts with the most and strongest buying signals.
That list is gold for sales. Instead of cold calling, the team always starts with the accounts at the top of the leaderboard. These companies already know the brand, have consumed content and show behaviour that fits an orientation phase. Outbound suddenly feels a lot less cold and aligns with what Demand Gen has already done.
What does this Demand Gen approach deliver?
In the webinar Jordi shares a calculation example. With many B2B clients that have long sales cycles, he initially sees:
- On average four opportunities per month in the pipeline.
- A conversion rate from opportunity to customer of about 13 percent.
- A stable average customer value, for example 30,000 euros in customer lifetime revenue.
With the combination of Demand Gen and sales intelligence he aims for a doubling, but in his example he shows that five times more high intent leads is realistic: from four to twenty opportunities a month. At the same time, the conversion rate rises to around 20 percent after roughly ten months.
The value that marketing adds to the pipeline with Demand Gen and sales intelligence grows significantly. In the example, the monthly contribution from marketing goes from about 15,000 euros to 120,000 euros in expected pipeline revenue.
Important: this does not happen in the first month. The system needs time to start, content needs to be built and signals need to accumulate. Around month four Jordi often sees the first clear lift in pipeline velocity. The condition is that you keep refreshing your content and campaigns. Demand Gen is not a one off project, but an ongoing engine.
Demand Gen in practice: how to get started yourself
Red Panda’s approach is extensive, but the core is concrete and actionable:
- Define a sharp ICP and build a Target Account List in Sales Navigator.
- Aim all your Demand Gen campaigns at that account list.
- Use webinars, customer cases, interviews, events and podcasts as content fuel.
- Repurpose that content with AI into blogs, newsletters, social posts and LinkedIn ads.
- Connect Leadinfo to see exactly which ICP companies visit your website.
- Collect all buying signals in one overview and give sales a clear starting list.
- Treat Demand Gen not as a one off campaign, but as the engine behind your pipeline velocity.
If you do this consistently, you shift the focus from “more leads” to “more of the right opportunities, closed faster”. That is where the true power of Demand Gen in B2B lies.
Getting started with Demand Gen and Leadinfo
Want to watch Jordi’s full explanation, including formulas, examples and tooling? Then watch the webinar with Red Panda.
Are you already working with Demand Gen or planning to start, but missing insight into which companies your campaigns and website actually reach? With Leadinfo you can see which organisations visit your website, which ICP accounts are active and which Demand Gen efforts are attracting the right companies.
Try Leadinfo free for 14 days and discover how to use Demand Gen to grow your B2B pipeline structurally.
