This article was based on the interview with Derek Gerber, Director of Growth B2B at Power Digital by Greg Kihlström, AI and Marketing Technology keynote speaker for the B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
The quarterly marketing review. The MQL number is up, maybe even impressively so. Yet, across the virtual table, the sales leader’s expression is… less than enthusiastic. The pipeline isn’t filling with qualified opportunities, and the revenue needle isn’t moving in lockstep with the lead volume. This is a scene that has played out in boardrooms for years, a persistent disconnect that continues to plague even the most sophisticated B2B marketing organizations. In an era overflowing with data, analytics platforms, and AI-powered tools promising to solve this very problem, it’s a paradox that the challenge of lead quality not only remains but has, in some ways, become more complex.
The temptation is to blame a single channel, a specific campaign, or a flaw in the latest MarTech acquisition. However, the root causes are often more systemic, woven into the very fabric of how we plan, execute, and measure our marketing efforts. It’s a challenge of strategy, not just technology. To navigate this landscape, we need to move beyond surface-level metrics and engage in a more rigorous examination of our go-to-market approach. In a recent conversation, Derek Gerber, Director of Growth B2B at Power Digital, provided a candid look at the compounding factors that lead to poor lead quality and, more importantly, a strategic framework for building a more resilient and effective demand engine.
The Paradox of Complexity: When More Technology Creates Less Clarity
One of the great ironies of the modern MarTech landscape is that our ever-expanding toolkits can often become a primary source of the problem. We invest in sophisticated platforms for data enrichment, intent signals, attribution, and automation, yet the promised clarity remains elusive. Teams, often leaner than they were a few years ago, are now tasked with managing a complex web of systems that don’t always communicate effectively, leading to a state of analysis paralysis rather than actionable insight.
Gerber points out that this technological sprawl, combined with resource constraints, creates a perfect storm for inefficiency and guesswork. The pressure to justify the investment in a six-figure tech stack can lead to a focus on activating features rather than solving fundamental business problems.
“You have tech stacks, more tech stacks, rev-op stacks that are $250, $500,000 a year with all the data analytics tools, all the AI insights that you could imagine all sitting on top of unstructured information that’s completely siloed across multiple different systems. So now you have people, I mean, who are honestly giving their best effort, good people trying to make a living who are completely overwhelmed with the amount of technology in front of them and how to best activate it.”
This sentiment resonates with any leader who has watched their team struggle to connect the dots between dozens of platforms. The issue is rarely a lack of data; it’s the lack of a unified view and the human capital to translate that data into a coherent strategy. Gerber notes that CFOs and CROs are increasingly willing to fund agency partners over new headcount, not because they’ve lost faith in their teams, but because they recognize the need for specialized expertise to wrangle the complexity and make the existing technology investments pay off. For marketing leaders, this is a crucial insight: the path to better lead quality isn’t always adding another tool, but often involves bringing in the strategic discipline to properly architect and activate the ones you already have.
Returning to Fundamentals: The Non-Negotiable Foundation of Strategy
In the rush to deploy campaigns and hit quarterly targets, it’s easy to shortchange the foundational strategic work that underpins all successful marketing. We operate on assumptions about our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that may be years out of date or target channels based on conventional wisdom rather than current data. This “spray and pray” approach is a primary driver of poor-quality leads and wasted budget. The antidote, according to Gerber, is a rigorous, data-driven approach to strategy that must happen before a single dollar of media is spent.
This involves a deep analysis that goes far beyond basic persona documents. It requires a clear-eyed look at the Total Addressable Market (TAM), an understanding of recent buying intent signals, and a data-backed channel strategy.
“We actually come back and show the intent of your ideal audience and your TAM in the last year and in the last 30 days. We then go a little bit deeper and actually showcase the ideal channels for where you should be advertising into based off of Nielsen data that we have. So it actually creates a very solid foundation to show the entire market opportunity, who’s been looking in the last 30 days, where we need to position ourselves, getting into the channels that matter most.”
This is the kind of homework that builds confidence not only within the marketing team but across the entire revenue organization. When you can walk into a meeting with the CRO and CFO armed with data showing precisely where the target audience is active and what their recent intent signals are, the conversation shifts from defending a budget to collaborating on a growth plan. It eliminates the familiar Wanamaker dilemma (“Half my advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”) by focusing resources on the channels with the highest probability of engagement from the right audience. This discipline transforms marketing from a cost center perceived as “running ads for the sake of running ads” into a strategic growth driver.
The Long Game: Rebalancing Brand and Demand in a Self-Service World
Perhaps the most significant tension in B2B marketing today is the perpetual tug-of-war between short-term demand generation and long-term brand building. The pressure for immediate, measurable results often pushes marketing leaders to over-index on bottom-funnel activities, chasing MQLs while neglecting the critical work of building brand awareness and trust. This is a short-sighted strategy, especially as buying committees grow larger and more of the research process happens long before a prospect ever identifies themselves.
Gerber offers a compelling statistic that should be a centerpiece of any marketing leader’s argument for a balanced budget. It’s a simple, powerful reminder that by the time a buyer is ready to engage, their mind is often already made up.
“You can quote me on this, but 81% of B2B buyers who chose a solution in the end knew about the brand from the start. But yet every single conversation that we go into, I’m talking to a lot of leaders that again, effectively are looking to drive performance for the organization, but are way too short-minded.”
This single data point reframes the entire brand vs. demand debate. Brand building isn’t a nebulous, feel-good exercise; it is a direct prerequisite for effective demand capture. In a world where buying committees have expanded to 12 or 15 people and deal cycles are elongating, your brand is the agent working on your behalf inside the target account when you’re not there. It’s what ensures you make the initial consideration set. Investing in thought leadership, community engagement, and creative brand campaigns isn’t taking money away from lead generation; it is creating the fertile ground from which high-quality leads will eventually grow. The leaders who can successfully articulate this relationship and demonstrate the lift that brand provides are the ones who will build sustainable, long-term revenue engines.
Solving the B2B lead quality problem requires a shift in mindset from tactical execution to strategic leadership. It demands that we look critically at our own operations, questioning the complexity we’ve created and asking whether our technology serves our strategy or if our strategy is being dictated by our technology. It’s about having the discipline to do the foundational work—the deep ICP analysis, the journey mapping, the data-driven channel planning—that allows for focused, effective execution. Without this foundation, even the most advanced AI tools will only help us generate the wrong leads faster.
Ultimately, the path forward is one of integration and balance. It’s about integrating sales and marketing around a unified set of data and goals. It’s about balancing the immediate need for pipeline with the long-term imperative of brand building. And it’s about balancing the power of technology with the irreplaceable value of human insight and strategic thinking. For the marketing leaders who feel overwhelmed by the noise, the advice is to take a step back, simplify, and focus. By concentrating on delivering genuine value to a well-defined audience through the right channels, we can finally move beyond the vanity of the MQL and begin having more productive conversations about what truly matters: driving sustainable revenue growth.
