Dear Marketing Leader,
You’ve done the work. You’ve launched campaigns, stretched the budget, hit the goal when you could, held the line when you couldn’t.
Lately even the wins feel harder. Each quarter takes more: more campaigns, more pressure, more spend. You finally get traction, but it fades. So you rebuild. New copy, new ads, new pages. Not to grow just to stay level. Nothing stacks. The only thing compounding is effort.
Meanwhile, the weight keeps climbing. Sales isn’t closing like they used to. Product launches land, but momentum doesn’t follow. And leadership quietly looks upstream to you:
- What levers can we pull this quarter?
- If we spend more, will pipeline go up?
- What else can marketing try?
When no one knows what to fix, marketing becomes the fallback.
As VP of Demand Gen, I ran every play: lead gen, ABM, brand. Some things worked. But next quarter always reset. The problem wasn’t execution. It was the model. A reset loop that doesn’t scale.
You break out with three practical shifts:
1. From pain/product to shift/stakes.
Most marketing defaults to you have a pain -> our product is the solution. And it might work for buyers in-market but it doesn’t move markets. Instead start with a shift. Something that’s changed in the buyer’s world. Then show the stakes of waiting. The product doesn’t become the hook, it becomes the only viable response.
2. From attribution to momentum signals.
Most reporting tries to prove marketing with attribution. Nice paths, weak causality. It can explain clicks, but it can’t defend what created pipeline. Instead, build a model around your sales cycle, product, and marketing motion. Then test it. Run for lift, and watch the early buying signals that matter in your world. When the lift shows up and the signals move together, you scale.
3. From demand-as-a-role to demand-as-a-function.
Somewhere along the way, demand got reduced to a job title. But it was never meant to be a role—it’s a function. The connective tissue across brand, content, product marketing, and growth. One person can’t do that. And no point-solution agency can either. It takes a team that sees the whole field and owns it with you.
That’s why I built Elevate.
Most agencies are built for volume. And you’ve felt it. Month one is energy. Month six? There’s a new logo, a new focus—and you’re no longer the priority.
We do it differently.
We cap at six clients. That’s it. Same senior team from day one: VP Demand, VP Brand, Paid Director, SEO/AEO Director. Embedded in your Slack, your standups, your CRM. No juniors or handoffs.
We’re not a role. We’re your demand-gen function embedded inside your Slack and CRM and we own the pipeline number with you.
If you’re still stuck in the reset loop—we’re built to break it.
— Jay Baron
Founder, Elevate Demand