We’ve been told that marketing should be lead-driven — efficient, measurable, and ROI-positive. Yet in practice, this objective frequently gets lost in a mist of conflicting metrics, unclear roles, and constantly ever-changing customer or business expectations.

The problem isn’t the idea. It’s the execution.

Modern marketing operates in a complex landscape with numerous moving components. We create content, build the brand, and work on both SEO and AIO as well. The list goes on with outbound campaigns, inbound activities, lifecycle management, product marketing comms, data understanding, demand generation—and a dozen other specialities. They rarely share even the same Slack channel. And still, we’re expected to deliver “leads”.

But leads don’t live in silos. They flow through three interconnected phases in the B2B world and when we sell directly to customers. Customers engage with our brand through various touchpoints, and understanding their journey is crucial for effective marketing. Recognising the interconnected phases of awareness, consideration, and decision, we can tailor our strategies to meet their needs at each stage, ultimately fostering stronger relationships and driving conversions.

Brand, Demand, and Expand

Brand is about awareness — being known before you’re needed.
Demand is about conversion — turning interest into pipeline.
Expand is about retention and growth — keeping customers and increasing their value over time.

Get one wrong, and the others suffer.

“The best companies treat marketing as a full-funnel discipline. Acquisition without retention is just churn with extra steps.”

_{— April Dunford, author of “Obviously Awesome”}

The alignment happens through metrics — not guesses:

• Branded Search Volume (Brand): How many people are actively searching your company or product name. Tracked through Google Search Console or SEMrush. It shows brand mindshare.
• MQL to SQL Rate (Demand): Measures how many marketing-qualified leads are accepted by sales. A high rate means your targeting and qualification are working. Measured in CRMs like HubSpot or Salesforce.
• Net Revenue Retention (NRR) (Expand): Tells you how much revenue you keep (and grow) from existing customers. Over 100% NRR = expansion revenue. Tracked via billing platforms or internal finance ops.

Spread these across one dashboard, and you’ll find the story hiding in plain sight. Too often, teams chase leads without knowing whether they’re building a system that sustains growth or drains it.

Being lead-driven doesn’t mean being lead-obsessed.

It means understanding where the lead fits—and what the next chapter looks like.

Mind the map

To make lead-driven marketing work, you need more than just isolated tactics. You need alignment across phases, metrics, and teams. This mind map breaks down the Brand→ Demand→ Expand model into actionable layers, so you can see the major components of the system behind the strategy.

Which tactics matter most will always depend on the business case. It’s a skill of a good manager is to identify the bottleneck, track the right metrics, and do it without overwhelming the team.

Now ask yourself:

Which of these are you actually tracking — and which do you just assume are “somewhere in the CRM”?

If the answer is unclear, maybe it’s time to align your house before scaling it.

_{Image: Denis Oliveira}