Walk into any marketing conference, scroll through LinkedIn, or sit in on a RevOps meeting, and you’ll hear marketers proudly declare they’ve moved beyond the antiquated world of lead generation. They’re now sophisticated practitioners of ‘demand generation’, the marketing world’s most ambiguous term, and a supposedly advanced approach to driving growth.

Google now offers demand gen campaigns, and some companies even have whole teams working on it. But here’s the problem: demand generation is a black hole term that escapes definition.

HubSpot says it is “the umbrella of marketing programs that get customers excited about your company’s products and services without trying to explicitly sell to them.”

Salesforce says it’s about “building brand awareness, educating potential customers, and ultimately motivating them to interact with a brand.”

The Marketing Alliance separates demand gen from lead gen: demand gen builds awareness and interest, while lead gen turns that interest into warm leads. Neat, right? Except they also promote moving from lead gen to demand gen in the same article.

So which is it?

Well, the really interesting—and weird—thing is that no matter how people define it, the moment you ask marketers how they measure their demand gen efforts, the answer is usually the same: they count leads.

The origin story of a buzzword

Below is an attempt to retrace the steps of how ‘demand gen’ came into existence.

In a simpler time, B2B marketers had one clear mission: generate leads for sales to follow up on, called MQLs (or marketing qualified leads).

Teams were given targets like “generate 500 MQLs per month” or “keep cost per lead under $50.” As these targets increased, marketers got creative. They started gating everything in sight — ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, even blog posts. Each download resulted in a new name, email, and phone number in the CRM.

Some marketers added qualification questions to their forms. Many didn’t. Cue a flood of ‘leads’ to the sales pipeline.

Sales development reps and account executives soon ran into the harsh reality that most of these leads had zero interest in buying anything. Conversations between reps and leads would look like this:

SDR: “Hi, I saw you downloaded our guide to marketing automation best practices. I’d love to discuss how our platform could help.”

Lead: “Oh, I just wanted the guide. I’m not looking for new software. Please take me off your list.”

Conversion rates from MQL to opportunity were abysmal. Sales teams were frustrated, and marketing was defensive. But instead of fixing the system, we came up with this new concept: ‘demand generation’.

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New label, same problem

In economics, demand isn’t just “people wanting something.” It’s the relationship between price and the quantity people are both willing and able to buy, shaped by market conditions, not marketing departments. Economists will tell you that demand isn’t something a single company creates. It’s driven by external forces like regulation, macroeconomic shifts, and industry-wide trends.

But in B2B SaaS, demand generation has been twisted into a vague umbrella term for anything that doesn’t capture people’s emails.

Content marketing without forms? Demand generation. Thought leadership? Demand generation. Webinars? Demand gen. A brand campaign? That too.

So, here’s the truth: we didn’t have a demand problem, but a lead qualification problem. Many marketers hear ‘lead generation’ and picture high-volume, low-quality systems that stuff the funnel with gated content downloads, hoping something converts. That’s just one, frankly wrong, way of doing lead generation.

The right way focuses on lead qualification and respectful nurturing:

1. Setting the right targets: prioritising quality over volume
2. Qualifying leads thoughtfully: using behavioural signals and explicit interest, not just form fills
3. Nurturing leads with consent: only following up when someone opts in for more, not because they downloaded one piece of content
4. Routing leads intelligently: only sending high-quality leads to RevDev or Sales

A better way forward

Instead of chasing the demand generation mirage, let’s fix what was broken: ask for sales interest explicitly, implement progressive nurturing, and use the right metrics.

When you gate content, add a simple checkbox: “Yes, I’d like to talk to someone about how [your product] could help with [problem].” That alone cleans up your pipeline faster than most expensive tools.

Not every ebook download means intent to buy. But someone who downloads three pieces, attends a webinar, and checks your pricing page? That’s a signal. It might just make sense for your sales colleague to reach out to this person.

And when it comes to measuring success, you must look beyond the mere MQL count. Measure MQL-to-opportunity conversion, pipeline contribution, and eventual revenue impact.

Back to marketing basics

Zooming out, in B2B SaaS, marketing’s job isn’t to generate demand. It’s to:

1. Build brand awareness: make sure your target audience knows you exist
2. Create mental availability: educate consumers about what your solution can mean for them, and be top of mind when buyers enter the market
3. Enable buying: make it easy to purchase when people are ready (online or via sales)

This helps sales close deals more easily and faster, with shorter sales cycles.

Dale Harrison noted in an excellent post that you don’t create demand, you show up when it surfaces. Unless you’re lobbying to try to increase demand for the whole category, your job isn’t to generate demand. Your job is to be the obvious choice for existing demand, or better yet, when potential buyers become in-market.

Drop the jargon, do the work

“Demand generation” won’t fix broken lead processes, or solve MQL abuse, or magically make marketing more strategic. The future of B2B marketing isn’t about inventing new buzzwords.

It’s about getting better at what we were supposed to be doing all along. Quality over quantity, substance over semantics.

MQLs aren’t broken; our approach to them was. Instead of renaming the system, let’s fix it.

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