Why the Old Lead Gen Playbook Isn’t Carrying Teams Anymore

A few notes on why the old lead gen playbook isn’t carrying teams the way it used to, and what I’m seeing work instead: smaller segments, deeper understanding, and campaigns built on credibility.

The Market We’re All Operating In Right Now

If you’re leading or building GTM right now, you can probably feel this tension—even if you haven’t fully named it yet.

Pipeline targets are still there. Growth expectations haven’t gone away... but the tactics that used to reliably create momentum feel less predictable. Campaigns take longer to convert. Outreach that should work gets ignored. Even strong teams are working harder to get the same results.

It’s not because GTM got harder overnight.

It’s because the environment changed.

Buyers are more protective of their time. Internal decisions are more complex. And trust matters much earlier in the process than it used to.

Lead Generation Isn’t Broken — It’s Just Not Enough Anymore

I don’t think lead generation stopped working.

I think it stopped being sufficient on its own.

For a long time, if you had a decent ICP, solid messaging, and enough volume, you could make progress. You didn’t need to be perfect. You didn’t need to be especially precise. You just needed to keep showing up.

That’s not the market we’re in anymore.

Buyers are still buying. Budgets still exist. But people are far more selective about where they spend their attention. And they’ve gotten very good at recognizing when outreach is generic—even when it’s technically “personalized.”

What gets ignored now isn’t bad marketing.

It’s marketing that doesn’t feel grounded in reality.

The Shift I Keep Seeing: Credibility Before Conversion

Here’s the pattern I keep seeing across teams that are actually growing right now.

They’ve stopped treating campaigns as a way to capture attention and started treating them as a way to establish credibility.

That shift shows up first in how they segment.

Instead of broad buckets, they’re carving the market into smaller, more specific slices based on how companies actually operate:

• where friction shows up across workflows

• what pressures leaders are navigating

• what outcomes matter right now, not in theory

That inevitably creates more segments. Smaller ones. And yes, it’s more work.

But it also changes the tone of everything that follows.

When a campaign reflects a real understanding of someone’s operating reality, it doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels intentional. It feels informed.

At this point, segmentation isn’t about efficiency.

It’s about earning trust before you ever ask for time.

How I Use AI to Speed Up the Thinking (Not Skip It)

This is where AI has been genuinely helpful for me—not as a shortcut, but as an accelerator.

When I’m working on a new segment, I start with deep research in ChatGPT.

Not to write copy.

Not to brainstorm slogans.

I use it to gather the raw material I need to actually understand the segment:

• the operating structure and realities associated with the structure

• where friction shows up across workflows and operating lifecycles

• the macro and micro forces shaping their decisions

• what outcomes matter most—and what consistently gets in the way

The goal is to understand the world they live in well enough that I can talk about it the way they talk about it with their peers.

Once I’ve done that, I move everything into a notebook using NotebookLM.

That notebook is where the thinking gets organized and pressure-tested. I connect ideas. I ask better questions. I start shaping a narrative before I ever touch messaging.

Only after that do I move into persona-specific campaigns.

When you’ve done the work upfront, the messaging doesn’t feel forced. You naturally lead with outcomes and friction, because that’s what’s already top of mind for the audience.

This Changes the Way Campaigns Perform

Once the segment is tight and the narrative is clear, the rest of the campaign looks familiar.

Where should it run?

What’s the right timing?

What budget makes sense?

Those questions don’t go away.

What changes is that you’re no longer trying to convince a large audience to care. You’re speaking clearly to a smaller group you’ve already taken the time to understand.

Lead generation didn’t stop working.

It just stopped working on its own.

In this market, growth comes from precision, judgment, and trust built earlier than most teams are used to. When that foundation is there, the first meeting doesn’t feel like a win.

It feels like the natural next step.

Where Marketing and Sales Have to Come Together

This approach only works when marketing and sales are truly operating as one system.

Deep segmentation, real research, and credibility-led messaging can’t live in a vacuum. Marketing can’t do this work alone—and sales can’t retrofit it after the fact.

The teams I see executing this well collaborate early to:

• identify the right accounts and segments to focus on

• diagnose what’s actually happening inside those accounts

• pressure-test assumptions about where friction shows up and why

Marketing brings structure, research, and narrative discipline. Sales brings lived experience from conversations, objections, and deals that stalled or moved forward.

Together, they develop messaging that reflects reality—not positioning decks. Messaging that sounds like it came from inside the buyer’s organization, not outside of it.

This is where campaigns stop being something marketing hands off and start becoming something the entire GTM team stands behind.

When sales recognizes their accounts and conversations in the messaging, adoption follows naturally. When marketing hears directly where deals get stuck, campaigns get sharper.

That shared diagnosis is what makes the rest of this work compound.

It’s how precision targeting turns into real pipeline and how credibility, once established, carries all the way through the deal—not just to the first meeting.