A hundred likes on your posts and still no new customers: what’s going wrong?

Sales and marketing have been at odds for years. Marketing creates visibility, builds brand awareness with a niche audience, and hopes that prospects will reach out on their own at the right moment. The problem is that B2B products are often complex, and there isn’t always a direct trigger for a prospect to make contact unless there’s a serious problem. Not every solution has that luxury.

We firmly believe, especially in cybersecurity, that spamming is not the answer. That’s why we embrace the philosophy behind demand generation: build brand awareness with your own niche audience, so prospects know you exist and come to you when they’re ready for a new solution. We still fully stand behind that idea.

However, it has a side effect we want to be honest about. Sales receives fewer names than before, back when you had to leave an email address to download every whitepaper. That gave a concrete sense of progress: here’s a lead, something I can work with. With demand generation, you see how many interactions there are on LinkedIn posts and how an audience gradually warms up. We had hoped that sales would pick up on the fact that the same prospect had liked five posts and that it was time to send a message. Only they often don’t, and that’s not because they’re bad at their jobs. They simply don’t have access to the same data as marketing.

Sales, meanwhile, isn’t interested in a philosophy. They want names. That’s a legitimate expectation.

In this article, we explain how we’re trying to bridge the gap between marketing and sales, what our philosophy is, and how we plan to report on this over time so you can see what works and what doesn’t.

Interest is often there, the connection isn’t

The problem is rarely a lack of interest. Prospects like posts, visit web pages, and follow people on LinkedIn. They show signals of interest, but don’t always send a message asking for a product demo.

There can be many reasons for this: they don’t see the problem as urgent or serious enough, the budget isn’t there, or they simply want to gather more information before starting a conversation. This specific problem may not be a priority for whatever reason, or perhaps there’s no time right now for a proper implementation of the product.

The other extreme doesn’t work either: cold outreach where salespeople jump at the first sign of interest. It’s the fastest way to permanently put off someone who might have been interested. Especially in cybersecurity, where a quarter of email addresses are often burner addresses. That says enough about how people in that sector deal with unsolicited approaches.

Finding the right place and the right moment

Demand conversion is about navigating the narrow path between those two extremes. Use the available signals to understand when someone is truly receptive, and then approach that person in a way that matches the relationship you’ve already built. That means not waiting until someone reaches out on their own, but also not forcing your way into a conversation that hasn’t started yet. It’s about timing, tone, and the right person.

Digital signals help with that. When someone repeatedly likes your content, visits your company page, or responds to a shared topic, that gives you information about where that prospect is in their decision-making process. Tools like Clay make it possible to track those signals automatically and link them to concrete follow-up, at the moment it makes sense.

Where things go wrong in practice

The bottleneck isn’t the data. It’s the connection between marketing and sales.

Marketing sees the majority of the signals. Sales has the relationships and conversational skills to act on them. These two worlds often don’t communicate well enough. The result is that marketing shares data, sales doesn’t know what to do with it, and opportunities go untapped. Meanwhile, mutual frustration grows.

It doesn’t help that many sales teams are accustomed to physical contact, to a handshake at a trade show or a good conversation at a networking event. Those skills are valuable, but their digital equivalents require different competencies. Someone who is good at in-person selling isn’t automatically skilled at reading digital signals or writing a message that lands at the right moment.

Building a relationship before you need one

What works is investing in genuine connections before there’s any direct sales intent. That sounds obvious, but it requires discipline. Sending a message because you genuinely found someone’s post interesting, sending a connection request because you work in the same industry, sharing an article because it’s relevant to someone in your network: these are small things that lay the foundation.

When a commercial opportunity does arise later, the difference is enormous. A message to someone who has been following you for a while and knows who you are lands in a fundamentally different way than a cold message to a stranger.

Being honest about what we don’t yet know

Demand conversion isn’t a clearly defined process you can implement off the shelf. It’s a search for the right balance between visibility, timing, and human connection. We don’t have all the answers yet, and we want to be transparent about that. What we do know is that the current situation, where marketing and sales operate in parallel without connecting, is not the solution.

The best approach is one where a prospect feels they’re being reached out to at the right moment, by someone who knows them, about something that’s relevant to them. We’ll be reporting on this in the coming period: what we’re trying, what works, and what doesn’t.