There was a period when we measured our success by how many B2B leads we could drum up in a single day. It was an era of big volumes and big expectations — when a modest budget seemed enough to keep a constant flow of leads moving over to the sales team. On paper, it looked like a win-win for both marketing and sales, and both marketing departments and martech vendors promoted a simple, repeatable playbook: Define your target persona. Put budget behind form fills (through search ads, content syndication, etc.). Pass every form fill to sales. Generate revenue. But the reality never quite lived up to that pitch. Once those leads landed with the sales team, the cracks started to show: Many form-fill leads weren’t actually ready to buy — they were still just researching. Among the leads that were ready to purchase, plenty weren’t qualified or weren’t a good fit. And an alarming share of form fills turned out to be spam. As a result, sales teams began to lose faith in marketing, because a large volume of leads wasn’t turning into a large volume of closed deals. Sound familiar? In B2B, the notion of a single, straight funnel — where a lead fills out a form, gets passed to a rep, and then becomes a customer — doesn’t reflect how buying decisions are really made. Sales teams see this every day — the buying journey is anything but linear. A prospect might be interested but have no budget, or have budget but…