Best Practices In B2B Demand Gen According To Branch, Axonify, BetterUp, Lessonly, And Airtable

My first Software as a Service (SaaS) company launched in the late 1990s before it was even called SaaS. It was an uphill battle as we tried to educate heads of HR and IT why they should pay us annually, forever, to host their online job boards on our servers. They thought we were crazy. In fact, we burned through $35 million of venture capital in about a year and pulled our S-1 filing in the wake of the notorious dot-com bust of 2000.

Unlike most other startups of that age, we would survive the tech sector reckoning and the company would eventually IPO and get acquired by IBM. This success wasn’t due to “product-led growth” or virality, it was the outcome of good old-fashioned B2B lead generation (now sometimes called Demand Generation).

As SaaS matured, the playbook for acquiring clients became well known and copied. Marketers all spoke the same language which sounded foreign to others. You might overhear, “We need more ToFu content and outbound SDRs if we’re going to get the MQLs and SQLs necessary to hit our MRR. Fill the pipe!” 

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