When it comes to B2B growth marketing strategies, particularly in sectors like fintech, SaaS, and payments the conversation often circles around a few familiar terms: demand gen, lead gen, ABM, MQLs. But what do they actually mean in practice? And how do you choose the right mix for your business stage and goals?

With 6 to 10 stakeholders involved in most B2B buying decisions, average sales cycles running 12 to 18 months, and only 5% of your ICP in-market at any one time, “growth” becomes less about channels and more about strategy. This piece explores the real differences between these different growth marketing strategies and why the MQL is under pressure, and how different tactics fit (or don’t) depending on your context.

What’s actually on a B2B growth marketer’s plate?

Growth marketers today aren’t running campaigns. They’re running cross-functional engines. Here’s what that includes:

• Demand creation – content, brand, SEO, events, podcasts
• Demand capture – performance marketing, paid social, CRO
• Conversion support – sales enablement, messaging, product marketing
• Revenue expansion – lifecycle marketing, upsell, retention
• Attribution – connecting activity to pipeline and revenue
• Community – Slack groups, forums, WhatsApp chats, in-person meetups – where trust is actually built

Demand Gen, Lead Gen, ABM – What’s the difference?

Demand Generation

Demand gen is how you build awareness and authority with the 95% of your ICP who aren’t ready to buy yet. It’s long-term. It’s brand-driven. It’s about creating content so valuable your audience would pay for it and then giving it away for free. But it goes deeper than brand visibility. In many tech businesses, demand gen is about category creation. That means showing your audience a new way of working, or highlighting a pain they didn’t even realise they had. When your product is solving a problem that your ICP hasn’t labelled as a priority yet, demand gen becomes a strategic education tool.

This is why it’s hard. You’re not just marketing a solution you’re shaping the narrative, shifting mindsets, and earning the right to be in the consideration set when the timing is right. It shows up through podcasts, events, newsletters, founder-led content, organic social, and community engagement. It’s harder to attribute, but when done well, it creates the conditions for future revenue.

Martech stack: You’ll need content management systems, CRM integration, analytics platforms, and increasingly, intent data tools to track downstream impact.

Lead Generation

Lead gen is often misunderstood. It’s not about collecting as many names as possible and tossing them to sales. That’s the old MQL play and it doesn’t cut it anymore. Modern lead gen is about identifying engaged contacts who could be in a buying cycle and nurturing them appropriately. That means:

• Capturing signals of interest (not just emails)
• Delivering tailored content and messaging post-conversion
• Using behaviour-based scoring to understand buying readiness

Lead nurture is a key part of this process. Whether it’s email journeys, remarketing, or SDR-led outreach, the goal is to stay relevant without being intrusive. It’s about guiding prospects from curiosity to commitment.

Martech stack: To do this right, you need marketing automation (like HubSpot or Marketo), lead scoring logic, behavioural tracking, and CRM visibility for the sales team.

ABM (Account-Based Marketing)

ABM flips the funnel. It targets specific, high-value accounts with tailored, multi-channel campaigns. When done right, it’s tightly aligned with sales and focused on a clear ICP. It’s high effort, high cost, and slow payback. For early-stage businesses, ABM can be a risky move unless marketing, sales, and leadership are deeply aligned. Without that, it’s just expensive outreach that burns budget and morale.

Martech stack: ABM platforms (like 6sense or Terminus), intent tools, CRM integrations, and orchestration tools to coordinate messaging across email, ads, and sales outreach.

What Is an MQL, and Why Is It Under Fire?

An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a prospect who fits your target profile and has shown interest by downloading a resource, attending a webinar, etc. But here’s the problem: interest doesn’t mean intent. Too many MQLs go nowhere. Sales follow up. Silence. Or worse: pushback. They became popular because they were easy to track. But that ease has come at a cost with bloated pipelines, frustrated SDRs, and KPIs that don’t connect to revenue.

So What Should You Track Instead?

The real indicators of marketing impact today include:

• Pipeline contribution – per campaign, per tactic
• Conversion rates – MQL to SQL to Opp to Close
• Deal velocity and size – how fast and how big
• Intent signals – third-party data, account engagement, content consumption

Martech can help here with firmographic overlays, behaviour-based scoring, and sales alerts. But it only works if your ICP is clear and your content is actually useful.

There’s No One-Size-Fits-All Strategy — So What Matters

Early-stage companies are often tempted to go all-in on ABM. But without clear messaging, shared targets, and tight sales-marketing-exec alignment, it rarely pays back quickly. Instead, community building can be a faster, more credible route: think developer forums, Slack groups, or product-led events.

Growth-stage businesses face pressure to scale. This is where the risk of “lead gen at all costs” shows up. High MQL numbers don’t matter if they’re junk. Focus shifts to quality, relevance, and shared accountability for pipeline.

At every stage, the challenge is the same: aligning what you’re doing with what actually moves the needle for your business. There’s no universal playbook, only patterns, trade-offs, and context-driven decisions.

Two Parallel Tracks: One for the 95%, One for the 5%

There’s a lot of attention placed on targeting the 5% of your market that is in an active buying cycle. It makes sense, it’s the most visible opportunity to drive revenue. But the less visible, often underfunded part of the equation is what’s happening with the other 95%.

That group isn’t ignoring you. They’re just not ready. And when they are ready, what they remember matters more than what you sent them yesterday.

This is where a lot of the nuance in B2B growth lives, balancing short-term pipeline needs with long-term brand relevance. Some companies invest heavily in building presence, trust, and credibility with their broader ICP, accepting that payback is slow but enduring. Others lean into identifying high-intent activity signals and moving quickly with precision plays to convert that attention into action.

Neither approach is inherently better. But in a landscape where only a small fraction of your market is actively looking, many teams find value in thinking about these as parallel tracks rather than opposing strategies. One is about visibility and patience. The other is about timing and readiness.

This isn’t about doing everything at once, but about having a clear view of how both can contribute to growth depending on your team, your model, and your market.

Final thoughts…

The debate shouldn’t be “lead gen vs. demand gen vs. ABM.” It might be more useful to ask: What’s most likely to work for our stage, our audience, and our revenue model? In B2B especially in fintech, SaaS, and payments there’s more than one way to grow. The real challenge is choosing the right mix for you and being honest about what it’ll take to make it work.

If you’d like help with your Growth strategy GingerTree Marketing can help. Get in touch today.