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If you’re on a B2B team right now, you’re probably seeing the same thing: fewer leads, longer sales cycles, and more pressure to prove revenue impact.
When revenue is under pressure, marketing teams feel it. Lead targets go up, scrutiny increases, and every dashboard suddenly matters more. You add more forms. More gating. More “efficient” campaigns.
I’ve been in that seat, and I want to make one thing clear: this isn’t a case for valuing impressions over revenue. It’s a case for understanding what actually drives pipeline when buying slows down.
If revenue is the ultimate goal, doubling down on short-term lead optimization right now is often the fastest way to make downstream performance worse.
The Reality: Fewer Buyers Are Ready Right Now
Buyers aren’t disappearing. They’re delaying, reprioritizing investments, and saying “maybe next year” more often than they’re saying “right now.” This isn’t primarily a messaging problem or a targeting problem. It’s an economic problem.
We typically assume about 5% of your addressable audience is in active buying mode at any given time. I’d argue it’s even lower right now. What are you doing with the other 95%?
If you only optimize for capturing buyers who are ready now, you’re ignoring the vast majority of potential future business. They’re the audience that will determine your next quarter and your next year.
That’s where your brand actually matters: as a revenue asset that compounds before someone is ready to buy.
Brand Isn’t a “Nice To Have”, It’s a Financial Lever
When teams say brand is “hard to measure,” what they usually mean is that its results don’t show up cleanly in a quarterly report. That doesn’t make it optional, it makes it a lagging indicator.
Financially, brand works more like infrastructure than a campaign. It reduces friction across the funnel over time, lowers the cost of acquisition once demand returns, and shortens evaluation cycles when buyers are finally ready to engage.
That’s why cutting brand investment during a downturn often creates the illusion of efficiency while quietly eroding future revenue capacity.
According to Nielsen marketing mix models, brands that go “off-air” can lose roughly 2% of long-term revenue per quarter, and it can take 3–5 years to recover that lost equity once media investment resumes.
For B2B companies with long sales cycles, that lag compounds. So while it might feel “efficient” to cut back, pause, or retrench, the brands that stay present with purposeful, memorable messaging are the ones buyers actively seek out when budgets open up again.
Brand in B2B Is Not “Fluff”
In B2B, brand is often dismissed because it’s associated with vague awareness metrics or creative exercises that feel disconnected from revenue. That’s not what effective brand investment looks like. 
Brand, in practice, is about building familiarity and credibility before a buyer enters an active evaluation cycle. When someone finally needs a solution, they don’t start from zero, they start with a shortlist shaped by memory and trust.
Research popularized by Les Binet and Peter Field shows that:
- Rational, value-prop-driven messaging drives short-term activation
- Emotional, outcome-focused messaging drives long-term growth
- This pattern holds in B2B just as much as it does in B2C
LinkedIn’s B2B research shows a striking disconnect: only 4% B2B marketers measure impact beyond six months, even though brand payoff plays out over years. That gap explains why brand is often underfunded. It’s not because it doesn’t work, but because it doesn’t fit neatly into quarterly dashboards. The teams that understand this aren’t choosing brand instead of demand. They’re using it to make demand generation work harder and convert faster.
You Still Need Lead Gen, But With Brand in the Mix
None of this replaces the need for strong demand capture. When buyers are actively researching, marketing needs to show up with clear messaging, relevant offers, and a frictionless path to engagement.
But in the current environment, brand-led demand capture is often more efficient than demand creation alone.
People convert easier when they already know you. LinkedIn’s research shows that B2B audiences exposed to both brand and acquisition messaging are up to 6× more likely to convert than those exposed to acquisition alone.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Here’s how we think you can actually do this:
1. Reallocate, don’t just expand
This isn’t about adding net-new budget. It’s about being more intentional with the budget you already have.
That might mean shifting a portion of spend away from aggressive mid-funnel capture toward creative that reinforces outcomes, credibility, and differentiation, especially in channels where buyers are already paying attention.
The goal isn’t more impressions. It’s stronger memory.
2. Measure the right things over the right time horizons
Short-term efficiency metrics still matter, but they don’t tell the whole story in long sales cycles.
Leading indicators like branded search lift, recall, and sustained engagement trends often provide earlier signals of future performance than quarterly MQL counts alone. Over time, those signals show up where leadership cares most: pipeline velocity and win rates.
3. Stay present even when the pressure is to pull back
When budgets tighten, many teams pull back at the same time. That collective retreat creates an opportunity.
Staying present during these moments doesn’t just preserve visibility, it increases relative share of voice at a lower cost. Over time, that advantage compounds.
The brands buyers remember when demand returns are rarely the ones that went quiet when things got uncomfortable.
How We Approach This at Our Agency
When teams come to us, it’s often during periods of new leadership, tighter budgets, or shifting expectations from the business. We start by grounding the conversation in outcomes, not channels.
Our work focuses on balancing what the business needs right now with what it needs to be true a year from now. That means supporting near-term pipeline without sacrificing long-term growth potential.
We’re comfortable making recommendations that don’t always optimize for a weekly dashboard, but do optimize for sustainable revenue performance, and we’re transparent about the tradeoffs involved.
A Final Thought
This moment feels hard because it is hard. But it’s not without opportunity.
When demand is delayed, the teams that stay present and invest intentionally in their brand become the ones buyers remember when budgets re-open.
If you’re rethinking how to balance short-term performance with long-term revenue impact, this is exactly the lens we bring to our work at Signal & Stride. We help B2B teams pressure-test their current approach, identify where brand and demand should work together, and build marketing systems that tie back to pipeline and revenue, not just impressions or leads.
If that’s a conversation you’re ready to have, you can get in touch with us.
