The billion-dollar black box

In an airport, if there was something wrong in the control tower, you’d rightfully assume that planes wouldn’t fly. Why is it different when it comes to building pipelines?

Across the IT channel, the airwaves are full – there’s no shortage of marketing and sales activity. Campaigns are built, budgets are deployed, partners are engaged, and spiff days are attended.

Everyone is moving, but often it’s hard to see the runway

Off they go, and from the ground, everything looks very busy. Campaigns in flight, crews are working, systems are ‘go’, a few leads taxiing, reports are issued.

From the air, it appears well-orchestrated. Yet speak to buyers on the ground, and a different picture emerges. For them, engagement feels fragmented, and conversations lack context; calls tend to be opportunistic and way out of kilter with anything they have going on right now.

Buyers aren’t waiting at the gate anymore

Today’s buyers don’t move in a straight line. They circle, revisit, quietly building their own understanding before wanting to engage commercially. Trying to funnel them through the speedy boarding line doesn’t cut it for them.

Technology purchases are a serious investment in any business, making their behaviour even more pronounced. These decisions carry risk, involve multiple stakeholders, and demand confidence and trust long before commitment is made

What buyers expect is continuity; a sense that the organisations trying to reach them understand where they are in that process. What they often experience instead is a series of disconnected interactions. A piece of content here, an email, a call, a LinkedIn request there.

The strain is showing in different ways

This lack of coordination surfaces differently depending on where you sit.

For established channel businesses with enterprise-grade demand systems, the symptoms are subtle at first. Campaigns continue to run, leads continue to come in, but progression becomes less predictable. Expanding into new audiences without diluting relevance becomes increasingly difficult.

For vendors working through channel partners, the challenge is more structural. Investment flows into MDF, activity is executed across multiple partners, but the line of sight into what’s actually working is limited. Understanding where engagement is building and which partners are contributing to it is hazy at best.

When it comes to partner recruitment, the same pattern repeats. Outreach is broad, or based on existing relationships, which may not bear any relationship to the ability to take products and services to market.

Newly funded businesses face a different pressure altogether. They are expected to grow quickly, yet the infrastructure required to generate and interpret demand at scale takes years to build. They don’t have that time when their investors are looking for a return.

Distribution, meanwhile, is caught between expectation and capability. Without direct visibility into end-user engagement, performance depends heavily on partner execution. When those partners are stretched or under-equipped, outcomes suffer.

Across all of these scenarios, there is movement and a significant amount of investment. But there is very little shared understanding of what is actually happening between first touch and commercial outcome.

What clarity changes

When organisations talk about improving demand generation, the conversation often turns to doing more. More campaigns, more channels, more content. In practice, improvement tends to come from seeing more clearly and identifying where waste occurs.

When you can observe how an account is engaging over time and buying cycles, patterns begin to form in the data. Interest becomes visible before it is declared and priority becomes easier to assign.

Sales and marketing harmony

When timing isn’t guesswork, sales have more confidence in what marketing is doing for them. Marketing can see which activity is contributing to meaningful engagement, not just surface-level interaction.

• Sales teams are no longer approaching accounts cold. They are stepping into conversations with context.
• Partners engage with relevance, informed by what buyers have already shown interest in, rather than working from static lists.
• For vendors, investment becomes traceable. MDF is no longer a cost centre to be justified after the fact, but a lever that can be adjusted in real time.
• For those building partner ecosystems, recruitment becomes more focused. Engagement itself becomes the signal of alignment.
• For newer entrants, the gap between ambition and execution narrows. They gain access to an environment where engagement is already happening, rather than needing to create it from scratch.
• For distribution, the distance between themselves and end-user demand reduces. Insight replaces assumption.

Why is a control tower needed?

In aviation, the control tower doesn’t fly the planes. It makes sure everything happening around them is visible, coordinated, and timed correctly.

Demand generation now requires a similar function.

A programme with a single command centre provides that vantage point. It brings together outreach, content development, production, execution, and engagement into a single, coherent view. It allows businesses to see not just what has happened, but what is happening.

• Is our content working?
• Which accounts are active?
• Where is interest building?
• How is engagement evolving?
• And where action is required?

Crucially, it makes that view available across marketing, sales, and channel partners.

If you outsource any part of your motion – whether to agencies or partners, this is where most demand generation models break down today. Insight exists, but it sits in fragments. Campaign platforms hold one view, CRM another, and partners often operate with limited visibility altogether.

In complex sales environments, delay is often the difference between pipeline progression and stagnation.

When activity doesn’t equal momentum

There is a difference between activity and momentum. Activity can be created, whereas momentum has to be understood and supported.

When businesses operate without a clear view of an individual buyer’s engagement, they tend to rely on volume to compensate. More outreach, more follow-up, more vanity leads. Sometimes you strike lucky on a few deals, but more often it creates diminishing returns.

When engagement is visible and shared, behaviour changes. Effort becomes more targeted. It’s when sales conversations become more relevant and progression becomes more consistent.

It doesn’t remove the complexity of selling into large organisations. But it does reduce the guesswork.

A more practical starting point

For leadership teams, the challenge isn’t recognising that demand generation needs to improve. Most already know that.
The more useful question is whether the current model provides a clear enough view to act with confidence.

• Can you see how engagement is building within your target accounts?
• Do your partners act on that insight with the same level of clarity?
• Can you trace investment through to meaningful commercial movement?

If the answer to those questions is uncertain, then the issue is unlikely to be effort or intent and more like lack of visibility across everything. Once that’s clear, the next step isn’t to do more of the same.

ASSET: The System video