Don't Drill Dry Holes

Today, we are judged on performance numbers, pipeline, MQLs, SQLs and revenue. But that’s not always an indicator of graft, talent, or tools.

You could be the best oil rigger, have the finest drill, make the deepest, best holes in the world, but if there is no oil below your feet, no amount of graft or talent will reap the reward of a bucket of the black stuff.

Or maybe a better analogy for 2025, you could have the best, most efficient photovoltaic cells in your innovative, industry-leading solar panel, but, if, like it has been here in the UK for the last few days, pissing down with rain during short winter days, your electricity numbers will be dreadful.

You can’t fix that with better tech, you need more bloody sunshine.

This is where the confusion starts. The business often uses “lead generation” and “demand generation” interchangeably, even though demand generation itself comes in two very different flavours.

1. Demand in the market to solve a problem.
2. Demand for your solution to solve it.

The second one, demand for our solution, we can influence as marketers with brand, content marketing, and thought leadership, creating a pool we can fish in with our lead generation.

If there is demand for your solution and you still can’t generate leads… that’s on you.

But the first one is like a phrase my chum Robert Rose often uses; it’s like gravity and gravity doesn’t care.

If there is no market demand to solve a specific problem, or the number of people who give a shit about it is too small, no amount of enthusiasm to change the world, evangelism, cool technology, being the leading, innovative doohickey, all the features and functions, or marketing graft will change that.

And yet, in B2B, we are often high on hopium* and skip this fundamental step.

We’re handed something “brilliant”, brimming with features and functions for an aspirational buyer. We hire salespeople to sell it, and they, quite reasonably, need a pipeline. But without taking a breath to ask if anyone out there actually gives a fuck, the conversation jumps straight to: we need more leads.

Where are the leads?

And we work hard to answer that question, when we should be asking:

• How many people genuinely feel this pain?
• How many care enough to act?
• How many have urgency now?
• How many have the budget?
• How many can we reach?
• And how many can we realistically win?

Whether you are panning for gold, drilling for oil, or selling a B2B solution, prospecting starts with a sophisticated, data-driven survey of the land.

You could have the finest product, the best marketing team, the biggest budget, a top agency, and you can drill baby drill, but if you’ve skipped this critical go-to-market step, then you’ll come up empty.

However good you are at drilling.

* "Hopium" - I love this, credit to Louis Fernandes and What's Broken in GTM and How To Fix It, where I nicked it from.