Demand generation is the part of B2B marketing that is supposed to end in a sales conversation, which makes it the easiest thing to sell and the hardest thing to buy. Every agency in the category promises pipeline. Almost none will agree in writing on what counts as pipeline, who qualifies it, or what happens when the leads arrive and sales says they are not real. The gap between a good engagement and an expensive one is almost never the tactics, which are broadly the same everywhere. It is the definitions, the attribution window and the handover. This page covers what the work actually consists of, how the money is usually structured, and the specific questions that expose a volume shop before you have paid it for a quarter.
What the work actually is
Strip the category language and four activities remain. Audience definition: agreeing which accounts and roles are worth spending on, which is dull, is usually done badly, and quietly decides the outcome of everything after it. Content that answers a buying question rather than describing your product, because a B2B purchase involves several people who each need something different before they will endorse it internally. Distribution: paid search on high intent terms, paid social for cold reach, email to an owned list, and increasingly a targeted account programme. Measurement that follows an enquiry through to a qualified opportunity rather than stopping at form fill. A proposal that is thick on the third activity and thin on the first and fourth is a media buying proposal wearing a demand generation label, which is a legitimate product but should be priced as one.
How the money is usually structured
Three shapes dominate and they suit different buyers. A monthly retainer covering strategy, content and campaign management is the common default: predictable, easy to compare, and prone to drifting into activity that fills a report. A project fee for a defined programme, for example a launch or a single account based campaign, tests an agency cheaply and is the sensible first purchase for a buyer with no history with the firm. Performance based structures, where part of the fee tracks qualified opportunities, sound like the fair answer and are usually where the definition fight lands, because the agency controls the top of the funnel and your sales team controls the bottom. Whichever shape you pick, media spend should be a separate line from agency fees, and the agency's cut of media should be stated as a figure rather than folded invisibly into a blended rate. Note also that many buyers separate the pipeline programme from the underlying B2B demand generation services they want run month to month, and pricing each on its own terms usually costs less than one bundled number.
The questions that expose a volume shop
Ask what a marketing qualified lead means in their model and who wrote the definition. Ask what happens to a lead your sales team rejects, and whether rejected leads are removed from the reported total or quietly left in it. Ask what attribution window they report on, since a B2B deal cycle that runs two quarters cannot be honestly assessed on a thirty day view. Ask which parts they run in house and which they subcontract, particularly content and paid media. Ask to see a report from a real client account with the names redacted, and read whether it moves from spend to opportunities or stops at impressions and clicks. Finally, ask what they need from your sales team every week for this to work, because an agency that says nothing is either extremely confident or has not thought about the handover, and the second is far more common. Any answer that treats the sales team as a downstream recipient rather than a participant is a forecast of the argument you will have in month four.
Setting the engagement up so it can be judged
Before campaigns start, three things need to exist. A single source of truth for enquiries, meaning the customer relationship system rather than the agency dashboard, with the agency granted access so both sides read the same numbers. A written definition of a qualified opportunity signed off by whoever runs sales, not by marketing alone. And a review point set far enough out to be fair, typically one full sales cycle plus a month. Agree in advance what a disappointing result looks like and what happens next, because that conversation is easy while everyone is optimistic and impossible when the quarter has missed. Keep ownership of the ad accounts, the list and the tracking with your company. An agency that resists any of this is telling you something useful at the cheapest possible moment.
Questions people ask about demand generation b2b agency
Retainer or project for a first engagement?
Project, if the agency will take one. A defined programme with a stated deliverable and an end date tests how they work, how they report and how they handle a disagreement, for a bounded cost. Convert to a retainer once you know. Agencies that only sell twelve month retainers to new clients are optimising for their revenue predictability, which is reasonable but is not your problem to solve first.
How long before pipeline shows up?
Paid channels produce enquiries within weeks. Whether those enquiries become opportunities depends on your sales cycle, so a business with a six month cycle should expect roughly two quarters before the picture is honest. Content led demand takes longer still. Judge early months on leading indicators you agreed in advance, not on closed revenue that could not physically have arrived yet.
Should the agency get access to our CRM?
Yes, read access at minimum. Without it the agency optimises toward the metric it can see, which is form fills, and you get more of the leads your sales team already rejects. Giving them visibility of what happened downstream is the cheapest way to align the work with the outcome you are actually buying.
What about cold email as part of the mix?
It is common in B2B and it is regulated. The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide sets out what commercial email must carry, including honest headers and subject lines, a clear opt out and a physical postal address. Ask any agency proposing outbound email who is legally the sender, whose domain is used and how opt outs are handled, before the first send rather than after a complaint.