Demand Decoded: Demand Generation & Business Growth

Most marketing budget requests fail for the same reason: marketing wants to be treated as an investment but talks like a cost centre. If you want CFO buy-in, especially in a PE-backed business, stop asking for budget and start asking for capital, with clear returns, timelines and risks attached. Dan and Josh unpack why CFOs say no out of uncertainty rather than hostility. Rarely is a marketing bud...

Account-based marketing is one of the most effective ways to win high-value accounts when you build it as a system. Dan shares a practical ABM strategy blueprint, from deciding whether it suits your business to turning intent data into timely plays. He walks through a five-step framework (qualify, define, connect, activate, measure) that gives every stage a clear job. Your total addressable market...

Most marketers in PE-backed businesses can’t explain how their work drives PE value creation through its three levers: EBITDA growth, a higher exit multiple and paying down debt. Dan and Josh show where sales and marketing teams make the biggest difference, and when. They start with the first 100 days, when PE firms look for revenue that doesn’t need a sales cycle, such as price increases, tighter...

You probably understand your CMO’s metrics. But the revenue metrics your CRO, CEO and board are judged on are a different scorecard, and knowing them, from pipeline velocity to the Rule of 40, shows how your work moves the numbers leadership cares about. Josh walks Dan through the numbers, from net revenue retention and forecast accuracy to pipeline velocity, with benchmarks for what good and grea...

A strong quarter feels great until nobody can explain where it came from or how to repeat it. Predictable pipeline is what turns those lucky quarters into repeatable growth, and gives leadership a number they can plan hiring, budget and sales targets around. In this solo episode, Dan explains what pipeline predictability really means: a number, a tolerance range and a track record. He shows why hi...

What happens when someone who has spent years making clients succeed moves into new business sales? In this solo episode, Amanda McGrath, Blend's Director of Growth Consulting, shares what she learned moving from customer success into sales, and which parts of the service mindset helped or held her back. The biggest shift was learning to say no. In service, the instinct is to find a way to ma...

If your LinkedIn strategy still revolves around the company page, your content is reaching very few people. Organic company page reach has fallen sharply, while personal profiles now take the lion's share of the feed and earn far higher engagement. So which LinkedIn post formats are driving reach and engagement right now? In this solo episode, Dan draws on recent algorithm research to break d...

Dan's back from HubSpot's Unbound with a recap full of energy, insight and practical takeaways, starting with Demand Decoded's first ever live show recording on the main stage. He breaks down the panel he ran with HubSpot's Kyle Denhoff and Asja Frost on The Loop, HubSpot's framework for modern B2B marketing, built around expressing, tailoring, amplifying and evolving your...

When private equity buys your business, everything about your go-to-market has to change, and most marketing and sales leaders aren't ready for it. In this episode, Dan is joined by Josh, who brings hands-on experience from both sides of PE deals, to break down what a private equity-backed GTM transformation actually looks like once the deal closes. They explain why recurring revenue suddenly...

Most B2B marketers are still guessing when it comes to AI search. Some are pouring effort into listicles that never get cited. Others don't realise that promoting bigger competitors in "best of" lists can push their own brand out of the answer entirely. In this episode, Dan and Phil unpack how large language models actually retrieve information, including the "fan out" pro...

Pipeline not moving? Most marketers reach straight for the campaign, blaming channels, budgets, or creative. Dan argues that's almost never where the real problem sits. In this solo episode, Dan runs through a five point diagnostic for working out why demand generation isn't converting into pipeline, checking each stage in the order a buyer actually experiences it rather than jumping to...

We're resharing this episode of Demand Decoded because we think it's worth watching again. Looking to improve demand generation in your business, but not sure where to start?  In this episode of Demand Decoded, we strip things back to basics and explore a comprehensive approach to enhancing demand generation across all stages of the buyer journey. From initial demand creation to final co...

Positioning is the most overlooked fundamental in B2B marketing, and it's the one thing everything else depends on. Get it wrong and no channel, campaign or piece of content can compensate. Get it right and the rest of your marketing engine runs far more efficiently. Dan and Phil sit down with Anthony Pierri, co-founder of Fletch, the positioning and messaging consultancy that's worked w...

Most B2B marketing teams pour their budget into new logo acquisition while ignoring the growth channel already sitting inside their business: their existing customers. Sentiment gets reduced to a single NPS score sent to the wrong person, and by the time an account looks at risk, it's often too late. In this episode, Dan and Josh unpack why customer sentiment needs to be measured continuously...

At the start of the year we made three bold predictions about the channels that would define B2B marketing in 2026. Now it's time to mark our own homework. Dan and Phil react to their 2026 predictions on events, YouTube and AI search, checking what actually played out against what they called back then. They discuss why small, curated dinners are outperforming big exhibitions, why YouTube is...

Traffic is collapsing across B2B. Some brands are down 50 to 60% year on year, yet pipeline and revenue keep climbing regardless. If your dashboard still treats traffic as the leading indicator of success, you're tracking the wrong thing, and you're far from the only one getting this wrong. In part one of this mini-series, Dan and Josh tear through the chaos list: why answer engine optim...

Every B2B marketer is being told ChatGPT ads are the next big channel, but almost nobody's actually run them. There are no keywords, no search volume data, and no way to see what buyers are typing into the chat that triggers your ad. So how do you target, and how do you know it's working? In this solo episode, Dan shares Blend's real testing data from months of running ChatGPT ads,...

Your sales team could be pitching your competitor's narrative right now, and they wouldn't even know it. That's the risk hiding inside AI adoption. As more of your business relies on ChatGPT and Claude to write proposals, RFPs and content, without any shared context or governance, the gap between what's true about your brand and what's actually being published grows wider...

Most B2B marketers think persuasion is instinct. It isn't. It's psychology, and most brands are getting it wrong without realising why their messaging falls flat while competitors' sticks. In this episode, Dan sits down with Phill Agnew, host of Nudge, to unpack the behavioural science principles hiding behind some of the biggest marketing wins in history. They cover why Zoom beat G...

Most B2B businesses are unknowingly marketing for their competitors. They invest in content that educates the market, builds awareness of a problem, and creates real demand, then watch the majority of that demand flow straight to the category leaders already occupying the most mindshare. This is the duplication of purchase law in action, and it's costing businesses far more budget than they r...

Most B2B teams buying intent data are either over-trusting it or barely using it at all. They're treating weak signals as buying intent, spamming entire lists off the back of a topic search, and wondering why response rates look like cold outbound. The tool isn't the problem, the way it's being operationalised is.  In this episode, Dan and Phil cut through the vendor hype and get in...

Most B2B businesses are still hiring and structuring their teams the way they did a decade ago, more headcount to hit more targets, more layers between marketing, sales, and customer success. That model is already breaking.  In this episode, Dan and Josh map out what the GTM organisation actually looks like in the AI era: fewer people, more senior, with entirely new roles emerging, the Growth Arch...

Most B2B content operations don't fail because of a lack of effort, they fail because they were never built on the right foundations. Jumping straight to "let's start a podcast" or "we should post more on LinkedIn" before answering the harder questions about point of view, ICP, and channel strategy is where most teams go wrong.  In this episode, Dan and Phil break dow...

89% of B2B buyers are using generative AI to research vendors. 60% of searches now end without a click. And most shortlists are formed before anyone picks up the phone. If your marketing still treats every buyer the same way, you're not just losing deals. You're being cut from the list before the race has even started.  In this episode, Dan is joined by Josh Bouk to break down why procur...

Website traffic is down, traditional SEO metrics are losing their meaning, and most teams are either not measuring their AEO performance at all or drowning in data they don't know what to do with. In this solo episode, Dan breaks down how to build an AEO measurement framework that goes beyond vanity metrics. From choosing the right prompts to track, to analysing your citation data for strateg...