How To Navigate the Pipeline Crisis

Unlike many marketers, I’m not particularly prone to hyperbole, and thus “crisis” is not a word that I use lightly.  But I think saying “pipeline crisis” is warranted today when discussing what’s happening in marketing and is a key underlying cause for the broader malaise in SaaS growth. 

You don’t need to look far to find signs of a problem:

• SaaS stocks, as measured by Bessemer’s Emerging Cloud Index are down 3.4% year to date.
• Customer acquisition efficiency is down.  Earlier this year, median CAC payback periods hit 57 months, implying a staggering almost five years to recoup the cost of acquiring a dollar of net-new ARR.
• Pipeline coverage ratios are running below their required targets.  The top reason for missing sales targets is insufficient pipeline coverage and Cloud Ratings shows stated coverage of 3.6x vs. target coverage of 4.1x.  (I can hear the cries of CROs everywhere saying, “please, just give me more at-bats!”)
• Articles about the web traffic crisis are ubiquitous, from Rand Fishkin’s must-read posts on zero-click marketing to CJ Gustafson swimming outside his normal lane with a post entitled Google Zero.  The web is transitioning into a series of walled gardens and what’s left over is increasingly front-run both by Google search and, of course, answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini.
• Earlier this year, Andrew Chen put it bluntly:  Every Marketing Channel Sucks Right Now.

Add it all up and you can summarize this rather grim picture — as the Exit Five newsletter recently did — with Nothing Works Anymore.

I see this every day in my work with dozens of SaaS companies.  Because many companies are missing bookings targets by roughly the same percentage as they are missing pipeline coverage targets, I believe this is a pipeline crisis, and not a conversion rate crisis.

The struggle is real.  If you’re facing it, you are not alone.

Against this cacophony we hear a lot of talk about “brand vs. demand.”  The argument being that since demand generation programs are working less effectively, marketers should increasingly allocate dollars to brand programs.  It’s not a bad argument — in part because I believe that marketers over-rotated to highly measurable marketing during the go-go days — and thus a swing back to less directly measurable marketing is a good idea. 

(Aside:  I’d argue that marketers didn’t over-rotate on their own.  They got an assist from CEOs and CFOs who were only too eager to invest exclusively in marketing programs that delivered a clear short-term return and ignore the underlying complexity in B2B sales, effectively living-the-lie that is marketing attribution.  We don’t sell toothbrushes here, people.  Nobody goes to a tradeshow and buys a $250K enterprise solution — or even a $25K one — based on one interaction with one person.  But I digress.)

The question, of course, is what to do about it?

What Others Are Saying

A lot of smart people are weighing in, so I thought I’d provide a few links before sharing my own take.

• Kyle Poyar wrote a great post called The 2025 State of B2B GTM Report.  (Subtitled “What’s Working in GTM?  Anything!?”)  My favorite part is the GTM Scorecard, a quadrant that maps channels by popularity and likely impact.  The underlying report is full of good ideas, GTM tool recommendations, and survey data.
• The aforementioned Exit Five post, despite its title, is actually about what is working with answers derived from an informal poll of community members.
• Scale recently published a State of GTM AI report which provides survey data on AI within GTM, focused largely on high-level use-cases and a two-phase adoption model.  (Jadedly, if we’re going to do less effective work, then let’s at least do it more efficiently.)
• If your issues are more strategic, such as identifying and targeting sub-verticals, then you should read my friend Ian Howell’s book, Smart Conversations.

What Would Dave Do?

I’m going to build upon a popular comment I made on Kyle’s CAC payback period post.  Consider this a sister post to What To Do When You Need Pipeline in a Hurry, but this time not focused on the hurry, but on today’s environment.

Here’s what I would do:

• Think holistically.  You might only be the CMO, but you need to look across all pipeline sources.  The job is to start quarters with sufficient coverage and notably not just to hit marketing pipegen goals.  If outbound is working, reallocate money to it.  If AEs can generate more pipeline (e.g., formal targets, more direct routing of inbound), then do it.
• ABM.  Substitute across-the-board campaigns with targeted outreach on key accounts, leveraging both marketing and human channels (e.g., SDRs), both digital and dimensional assets (i.e., physical things like branded Moleskines), and intimate live events.  As an old CRO friend says, “if by ABM you mean us picking our customers as opposed to them picking us, then I am in favor.”
• Events.  People are tired of working from home all day and champing at the bit to get out and press the flesh.  This includes major tradeshows, annual user conferences,  and roadshows all the way down to field-marketing dinners and sporting event boxes.
• Get good at AEO.  It’s quickly replacing and more effective than search.  It’s also more winner-take-all.  There is plenty of content out there on how to do it and agencies eager to help.  Read these two articles for starters.
• Leverage the CEO via social media (e.g., LinkedIn), podcast appearances, and speeches.  And LinkedIn doesn’t just mean a few posts, it means an overall strategy.
• Use your AI message to put butts in seats.  We’re still in the stage where people are confused about AI and nothing puts butts in seats like confusion.  Do educational webinars, videos, and content.  Educate people but be sure to do it en masse.
• Leverage AI tools and workflows.  Review Kyle’s report, particularly the part on the GTM tech stack.  Read Paul Stansik’s practical posts on AI, including how to avoid slop.
• Build first-party audiences.  If you can no longer pay a reasonable amount to reach other people’s audiences, then you’re going to need to build your own.  While this is a slow burn, over time you’ll be happy you did it.  Build a Substack, a YouTube channel, a quality newsletter, or a podcast.
• Leverage partners.  They can account for 20-30% of your pipeline and usually bring opportunities that close faster and with a higher conversion rate.  If you have a partner program, leverage it.  If you don’t, start building one.  It’s another slow burn, but you’ll be happy you did it.
• Check your nurture tracks.  Long-term nurture is easily forgotten.  Measure recycled leads.  Report on your tracks.  Ensure you’ve built specific tracks for competitive loss and bad timing.  A/B test them, the flows, and the content.
• Understand why you lose.  While I believe most companies have a coverage problem, not a conversion problem, I like to win anyway and if your conversion rates are below 20-25% you need to understand why.  Do quantitative win/loss via CRM reporting, listen to call recordings, and do win/loss interviews to understand what’s really going on.
• Invest in customer success.  While I know this doesn’t help with pipeline coverage (except for expansion), always remember that the cost to backfill churn is CAC-ratio * lost-ARR.  Thus, if your CAC ratio is 2.0 and you lose $2M in ARR, it’s going to cost $4M to backfill it. The easiest – and most cost-effective — way to keep the ARR bucket rising is to limit leakage.
• Join a community.  In times of change it’s important to have colleagues you can talk to, so I’d not only keep in close touch with existing peers, but join a marketing community like Exit Five to engage in shop talk.