The demand generation landscape has undergone significant changes over the past year, with a heightened focus on generating high-quality leads. Companies that surpassed their goals prioritized precision and nurturing strategies.
This insight is one of many from Activate’s State of Demand Gen 2025 report, which highlights key trends from the past year. The report emphasizes the rising importance of Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs) as a key metric, though their definitions vary widely across organizations. Additionally, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in demand generation is gradually increasing, particularly in content creation, though it is still in its early stages.
Activate’s CEO Chris Rooke shared further insights, including how leadership is increasingly recognizing demand generation as a critical driver of high-quality leads and revenue, smaller companies remain optimistic despite economic uncertainty keeping budgets relatively flat and which content assets are delivering the highest ROI .
Demand Gen Report (DGR): Chris, thanks for taking time out of your schedule for us. The report shows a clear shift toward high-quality lead programs. What defines a “high-quality lead” in 2025?
Chris Rooke: A “high-quality lead” is defined in the report as a “Late-funnel, HQL/SRL” lead. In this context, a permissioned prospect has passed several qualification layers, from data accuracy to pain point identification to sharing detailed information about the account and buying stage to further verifying they are in an active process and have a high level of readiness to engage with a solution provider.
DGR: What is the strategic implication of marketers who beat their goals prioritizing more targeted, customer-centric content types?
Rooke: The strategic implication we see is marketers who beat their goals know what problems they’re trying to solve, they understand their target audience, and the messaging to engage and advance that audience through their respective buying journeys. It boils down to knowing the audience you need to reach, the problems they need to solve, and engaging on those customer pain points.
DGR: The report shows nearly 70% of marketers met or beat goals despite flat budgets. What’s the strategic story here? And how should leaders interpret the budget optimism gap between small and large companies for the coming year?
Rooke: The strategic story here, and this bears out in other areas of the report, is marketers who met or beat their goals are more likely to be focused on measurable activities, particularly demand gen, where they can directly attribute investment to pipeline and revenue. That shift toward data-driven, measurable outcomes is likely helping marketers meet or beat goals without budget growth, albeit at the expense of harder to measure tactics like branding, which have traditionally been underfunded in B2B.
When it comes to comes to the budget optimism gap, it’s likely that larger enterprises are focused on driving efficiencies and doing more with the same or less. Larger brands are accountable to public markets, so they keep cash reserves in an uncertain economy. On the other hand, smaller challenger brands, VC-backed, and/or pre-IPO companies are in a different position and may view this as an opportunity to spend more aggressively to chase market share even at lower margins. That divergence is likely driving the optimism gap.
Economic Confidence
DGR: Why are marketers still fixated on MQLs when pipeline and revenue are the stated measures of campaign success?
Rooke: This could be due in part to the infrastructure underpinning our industry, meaning many systems in use today are MQL-focused and tied to individual records. Another factor at play here is when marketers look at pipeline, they often look at the individuals tied to an opportunity and then tie that back to the campaign-level to measure attribution and ROI.
While there may not be an easy way today to measure the creation of Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs), it makes sense that MQAs are often what convert best to revenue. Today, the primary way marketers go about this is generating more and more MQLs and leads. Over time, however, as marketers are able to buy and measure MQAs more easily, we could see investments shift to MQA-driving tactics that tie even closer to pipeline revenue outcomes.
DGR: With 89% of marketers positive about hitting their KPIs, where does this confidence come from amid economic uncertainty?
Rooke: This is a combination of marketers increasing understanding of the problems they’re trying to solve and the audience to engage to progress the buying process, coupled with the increasing move to measurability and more predictable activities that drive pipeline revenue. Another factor are KPIs may be adjusting to reflect today’s market and thus are becoming more achievable; a new normal compared to prior years where marketers’ goals were proving extremely hard to achieve.
DGR: Goal-beaters favor high-quality lead programs, while others lean on social and search. What does this reveal about strategy?
Rooke: There’s a similar story here in that marketers who focus on pain points, solving problems they know about, and measuring those outcomes, also understand that acquiring leads with a higher level of readiness to engage or speak to a salesperson is more likely going to lead to the direct outcome of a pipeline opportunity being created versus alternate tactics.
To us, this reveals that goal-beaters are more likely to focus on tactics where pipeline revenue outcomes can be directly achieved, measured, quantified, and attributed. The shift to deeper funnel or higher quality makes sense because it’s measurable and, most importantly, it works. Meaning, when a lead has been highly vetted, has buying authority and a budget at a company that is in-market, they tend to convert at a higher rate. It just makes sense.
Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools
DGR: How can leaders strategically use AI for more than just content creation to drive tangible demand generation results?
Rooke: There are many areas where brands can strategically use AI to drive enhanced demand gen results. In planning, AI can play a pivotal role defining the ICP (can include analysis of pipeline and closed/won/lost data), creating audience cohorts, expanding persona lists. In flight, AI can enable brands to ingest, organize and act on a broader, deeper set of engagement signals, better personalize nurture, and speed up the sales process with more effective next actions.
DGR: Live events and case studies deliver the highest ROI. How should CMOs rebalance their content portfolios accordingly?
Rooke: I think we’ve seen CMOs rebalance a return to live events over the past couple of years, likely back to where we were pre-Covid.
For case studies, a key challenge for marketers is just the sheer difficulty in securing them. They require a marketing conversation with sales, which is not always easy given the tension that can exist between those orgs. Once a customer is identified, sales will typically reach out, followed by the customer agreeing and moving on to legal for approval, which can also be challenging.
Still, case studies remain powerful, and year after year respondents consistently rank them as high ROI, so I think we’ll see more of them over the coming year despite the challenges in securing them.
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DGR: How does aligning demand generation with executive strategy directly correlate with exceeding performance goals, as the data shows?
Rooke: Demand gen remains the most consistent, reliable source of “predictable pipeline” for B2B brands. Brand leaders who recognize this naturally view demand gen as essential to their growth, tend to closely align their marketing and sales organizations, build demand gen into their growth plan, and as a result are high performing.
In other words, when executives and leadership view demand gen, or anything else for that matter, as a key part of the way to connect sales with the right people at a target account at the right time, you tend to have a more thoughtful investment, measurement discipline, and strategic alignment around it.
We experience this first-hand as we partner closely with clients to fuel their pipeline and revenue outcomes. So, the direct correlation makes sense and continues to be validated year after year in our annual report.
DGR: Looking at all the data, what is the single most important action a B2B marketing leader should take now?
Rooke: Be clear on how data is being measured, and what problems are keeping them from scoring higher on those success metrics. With that clarity, marketers can focus on doing things that help them achieve those success metrics/goals , while addressing any measurement shortfalls in between.
For example, each year we see more respondents moving their measurement to revenue and pipeline. This means the things that can be tied most directly to revenue and pipeline will naturally score the highest on those success metrics and show the highest ROI.
This is why high-quality, deep funnel leads are seeing such interest in this year’s survey. They are directly tied to the outcomes marketers want and need, and the bottom-line impact marketers are increasingly held accountable to.
