This blog is for every marketing team currently organised, incentivised, and optimised around lead generation: your current strategy could kill your brand in the age of AI. 

And we don’t say this lightly. Sharp Ahead was literally founded to help B2B marketing teams generate growth—and by growth we largely meant lead generation for hungry, and discerning, sales teams. 

But in the new age of AI search, lead generation is not only the wrong organising principle: leads are the wrong metric, gated content is the wrong strategy, and lead capture is the wrong mental model for what drives B2B marketing success. 

Instead, we argue, demand capture is emerging as the critical stage in the B2B marketing journey, and B2B marketing strategy and teams need to realign or risk having their brand get left behind. 

What is demand capture? 

Demand capture focuses on putting your brand in the places where high intent, in-market buyers are looking. It considers the moment in the buying journey where the demand actively exists and what you need to do to get onto the consideration list of solutions. 

And to understand why Demand Capture is emerging as the critical stage in the B2B marketing journey (for B2B marketers), let’s first consider the funnel itself. 

The marketing funnel, in all its various guises, has long been a useful mechanism for structuring marketing strategies and tactics. 

But B2B (and arguably many B2C) buying journeys couldn’t be further from those neat, linear funnels we like to draw.  

B2B buying journeys are, in truth, convoluted, confusing processes involving multiple stakeholders, sometimes with competing objectives, that can stop, start, go backwards, skip steps, and be influenced by any number of factors. 

The buying funnel is a marketing fiction 

But it is a convenient, and persistent fiction for good reasons: it enables marketers to consider, and strategize around, the touch points that buyers and sellers are likely to have with each other, at different times, in different places, requiring different information. 

And regardless of how linear that journey is, the fact remains that buyers have questions during the journey, and it is our job as marketers to provide answers that help them choose our organisation (and ideally make that decision sooner and for a higher value). 

Not only do we want to answer our buyers’ questions, we also want to do that in a way that progresses the buying journey in our favour. 

(At least in the case that it is a valid target customer for us. If an organisation is trying to buy something and they are not a valid customer, we are in fact better off answering their questions in such a way that helps them to buy from someone else.) 

To help create strategies, content and campaigns that meet this objective, it’s useful to consider what types of questions buyers will ask. 

What questions do B2B buyers want answering? 

In truth there are two categories of questions, the first are what marketers most often think about (and often in terms of the funnel) and the second is much more human and personal. 

Funnel questions: 

• Is there a solution to our problem?  

• Will [this thing] solve our problem?  

• Is [this thing] better than [competitor]?  

• What are the risks?  

• How quickly can we get it working?  

• How much will it cost to buy?  

• What’s the total cost of ownership?  

• What’s the likely ROI?  

• Does it comply with the law?  

• Is it available in other geographies, regions or languages?  

These are all questions to which marketers need to provide easily discoverable answers. But we must also remember that our buyers are people, people with concerns directly related to their jobs, careers and personal success: 

Human concerns: 

• Will I have to go through purchasing or legal and will that be complicated or in any way embarrassing? 

• Will it fit my budget, or will I have to ask someone more senior for more budget? 

• Do I need 3 quotes? 

• Will I look silly if another product or solution is better? 

• Will I have retired or left before the consequences arrive? 

• Could this choice get me fired? 

• Could this choice get me promoted? 

And the biggest concern of all—is it safer to just do nothing? 

Remember, our products and services are not just competing with other providers of those products and services, they are competing with the status quo. 

Where does demand capture fit into all this? 

In the new world of AI search, B2B buyers will decide who makes their shortlists before they fill in any forms or make any phone calls. 

So, gating your content, obscuring your best USPs, or hiding your pricing will almost guarantee you won’t make most shortlists.  

Lead generation targets will kill sales. 

Instead, B2B marketing teams need to focus on providing the information their buyers need to know to get them on the short list: they need to focus on demand capture. 

The AI Search Action Plan 

Need help pivoting your B2B marketing strategy to demand capture?  

In the AI Search Action Plan, we outline the most important, and pragmatic, steps you should take to ready your brand for AI search. 

If you would like more help with your demand capture strategy or AI search optimisation, get in touch today.