Dear Marketing Leader,
Maybe this feels familiar.
Every campaign starts strong, then decays before you’ve even had a chance to breathe. Sales win rates slip, so leadership pushes marketing for more leads. Product launches land quietly, and when pipeline misses, the campaigns get blamed.
Every quarter you rebuild from scratch—new ads, new pages, more budget—just to hold even. Leadership piles the entire GTM burden onto marketing. If marketing delivers more pipeline, everything else will work itself out.
But you can’t outrun this cycle forever. Every reset burns more trust, more budget, more of your team. At some point, you have to flip the odds so the pressure flows downstream to sales to close and product to deliver.
The Model You Were Taught Only Works in a Hyper-Growth Category
Traditional demand gen has been built on brand and pain. You educate buyers on a pain, claim your product as the solution, and prove it with ROI. That worked when your category was expanding faster than your targets. Growth carried everyone.
But that world is gone. Now you’re stuck fighting over the same static pool of in-market buyers because categories aren’t growing faster than your numbers—and pains don’t move your market anymore. So you reset every quarter. You refresh campaigns, rebuild pages, shift messaging—trying to squeeze a bigger slice out of a pool that isn’t growing. CAC climbs because each demo request costs more than the last.
And while you’re refreshing, so are your competitors. They copy what you ran last quarter, they launch the same promises, and soon every campaign looks the same. And in the end, buyers can’t tell the difference. They aren’t convinced one solution is better—they’re unconvinced they need to move at all. Most don’t choose your competitor. They choose the status quo.
Winners Are Breaking Out With a Different Model
Winners aren’t breaking out because they refresh faster or spend more. They’re breaking out because they’ve stopped chasing pains and started creating momentum.
Narrative-driven demand isn’t messaging. It’s framing the shift buyers can’t deny, with stakes so high they can’t keep playing the old game. The narrative forces buyers to adopt a new playbook—one that you define.
Once that playbook becomes the standard for how to win, your product is no longer just another option in a crowded field. It’s the natural next step. That’s the difference. You’re not giving buyers more content or campaigns—you’re rewriting the rules of the game.
And buyers rally around the rules. They didn’t champion HubSpot—they championed Inbound Marketing, the playbook HubSpot created. They didn’t champion Terminus—they championed Account-Based Marketing. Drift was Conversational Marketing.
That’s the flip: from chasing a shrinking pool of buyers to creating new demand around a narrative buyers are compelled to champion.
Proof — We’ve Run This Play
Real Estate CRM Platform (~$17M ARR)
Marketing was stalling while product vision was unclear. We championed a new narrative — Visible Agent — and took it to market. Within two quarters, inbound demos doubled and payback period shortened by three years.
HR Tech Platform (~$13M ARR)
Plateaued after two previous Demand Gen hires. We flipped the script from brand to championed Skills Integrity as the new hiring standard and carried it through paid campaigns. In twelve months, marketing-sourced pipeline grew from $2 for every $1 spent to $18.
The Only Agency That Runs This Play
We embed as your demand function. We cap at six clients, period. We own pipeline alongside you and run the play end-to-end: narrative, content, ads, messaging, and campaigns.
You can finish Q4 with the same decaying model—
Or you can run a narrative that creates momentum and stacks into Q1.
—
Jay Baron
Founder, Elevate Demand