Enterprise B2B marketing teams are spending a LOT of money on demand generation. Most of them aren’t sure it’s working, and the data from this report tells them why.

The goal of this report is to surface where the structural misalignments sit between how budgets get allocated, how performance gets measured across functions, how much spend disappears into overhead before generating pipeline, and what the top-performing teams do differently on all four fronts. The differences are significant, consistent, measurable, and worth learning from.

We surveyed 310 enterprise marketing leaders across demand gen, revenue marketing, growth marketing, field marketing, marketing ops, and ABM functions. We split the results by a clear performance benchmark: teams where marketing-sourced deals contribute more than 21% of company revenue, which we define as top performers, versus those where that number is lower.

The top performer group represents 48.1% of the survey population. Budget size doesn’t explain the divide. The top performers in this sample allocate differently, measure differently, hold more of their spend to downstream conversion accountability, and waste significantly less of it on overhead.

Six findings every demand gen leader should benchmark against

• Paid social is the largest primary spend channel at 22.9%, yet 37.1% of respondents report reducing paid social budgets in the past 12 months, the steepest decline of any channel we covered.
• 44.5% of respondents allocate more than 30% of their total budget to paid advertising. Among top performers, 55.0% keep paid ad spend below 30%, suggesting the highest-converting teams are the most disciplined with ads.
• 52.9% of respondents say more than a quarter of their budget goes to channels they’ve never evaluated on SQL/SAL conversion rate. Top performers have closed that exposure significantly.
• 50.6% of respondents report that more than 20% of their demand gen budget is absorbed by ops overhead, bad lead processing, vendor management, and CRM reconciliation rather than actual pipeline generation.
• Only 16.5% of respondents measure ROI on their largest spend channel by revenue contribution. Among top performers, that figure rises to 23.5%.
• 49.7% of respondents say they’re not confident or not very confident that their current budget allocation will improve revenue contribution next year.

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LeadSpot fielded this research using a structured audience of 310 enterprise B2B marketing and revenue leaders built to reflect the functional composition of demand generation programs at companies with $250M or more in annual revenue across North America and Europe.

Top performers are defined as respondents whose marketing-sourced deals contribute more than 21% of company revenue. This revenue-contribution anchor was chosen deliberately over volume metrics like MQL count or pipeline generated, because it reflects the downstream accountability that distinguishes programs that produce real pipeline from those that produce activity.

Sample Composition

Total respondents	310
Demand Generation	96
Revenue Marketing	72
Growth Marketing	54
Field Marketing	50
Marketing Operations	40
Account-Based Marketing	28
Top performers (21%+ revenue contribution)	48.1%
North America	57.4%
Europe	42.6%

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Paid social is still the largest primary spend channel for enterprise demand gen. It’s also the channel being cut fastest.

When respondents were asked which channel receives the largest share of their demand gen budget, paid social came out on top. 22.9% named it as their primary channel and 41.3% named it as either their primary or secondary channel. By that measure it’s the dominant allocation in enterprise demand generation budgets today.

And yet it’s also the channel respondents are most actively reducing. 37.1% say their paid social spend has decreased in the past 12 months, the steepest decline of any channel in the survey. Only 34.5% report increasing it. That’s a big difference between where money is currently committed and where channel confidence is heading.

The functional breakdown adds interesting context. Demand Gen Directors are the most likely to name paid social as their primary channel, reflecting the volume pressure they typically operate under. Revenue Marketing leaders are more distributed across channels. Field Marketing leaders allocate most heavily to events, with 36.0% naming field events and sponsorships as their primary spend, the highest concentration of any function-channel pairing in the survey.

“We’ve been spending on LinkedIn for three-plus years and we still can’t tell you with 100% confidence what it’s contributing to closed revenue. That’s the honest answer.”

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More than half of enterprise demand gen teams are allocating budget to channels they’ve never evaluated on SQL/SAL conversions. That should be table stakes in our opinion, and it shows up clearly in the conversion data.

One of the clearest structural differences between top performers and the rest comes down to accountability. Top performers hold every major spend channel to SQL/SAL conversion rates before they renew it. When asked what percentage of their budget goes to channels never evaluated on SQL/SAL conversion rates, the answers revealed a serious accountability challenge across most enterprise programs.

52.9% of respondents allocate more than a quarter of their budget to channels that have never been evaluated on whether they produce qualified opportunities for the sales team. For 17.7% of respondents, that figure exceeds half their total budget.

Marketing Operations leaders are the most aware of this problem, naturally. They sit closest to the data and consistently report higher unevaluated budget percentages than colleagues in other functions, suggesting they can see the challenge more clearly than the teams making the allocation decisions.

“There are channels on our media plan that have been there for two years and I genuinely don’t know what they give us in terms of pipeline. Nobody’s asked, so nobody’s looked.”

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More than half of enterprise marketing teams report that over 20% of their demand gen budget is absorbed by overhead, bad lead processing, vendor management, and CRM cleanup before a single qualified lead reaches sales.

Budget allocation conversations tend to focus on channel mix. They rarely account for what happens to the budget before it reaches the channel. Bad lead processing, vendor QA, suppression list management, CRM cleanup, and the internal headcount required to manage multiple vendor relationships collectively consume a portion of every demand gen budget that almost never appears on a media plan.

50.6% of respondents report that more than 20% of their budget is consumed by overhead before it generates any pipeline. For 18.7%, overhead exceeds 35% of total demand gen spend. Marketing Ops leaders report the highest overhead burden, with 60.0% citing the 21%-plus range, which reflects both their visibility into the true costs of running these programs and the disproportionate share of overhead work that lands in their function.

The overhead problem compounds the unevaluated budget problem from Finding 2. When teams don’t measure which channels produce SQLs/SALs, they can’t identify which vendors are causing all the extra cleanup work and admin costs. The two problems reinforce each other.

“By the time we’ve processed the leads, updated the CRM, managed replacements with three different vendors, and reconciled the invoices, the cost per lead can look nothing like what was on the contract.”

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Demand gen teams measure ROI on CPL. Revenue marketing teams measure it on revenue contribution. Both are right for their function. But when they’re measuring the same budget in different ways, nobody can agree on whether it’s working.

How a team measures ROI on its largest spend channel tells you almost everything about how they’ll defend that channel when the results get questioned. And the measurement divide between functions is significant enough to explain why budget conversations between demand gen and revenue leadership so often end without any resolution.

Demand Generation Directors are the most likely to measure ROI primarily on CPL at 33.3%, a volume-efficiency metric that tells them the cost of acquiring a lead but nothing about whether that lead closes. Revenue Marketing leaders anchor on revenue contribution at 36.1%, which is the metric their CMOs and CROs care about. These two functions are usually tapping into the same budget and presenting different ROI stories to the same leadership team.

Among top performers, 23.5% measure primarily on revenue contribution, compared to 20.3% across the full sample. The difference is modest but consistent: the teams producing the most revenue from marketing are the ones measuring against revenue from the start. See how a true cost-per-SQL framework changes what you think your leads actually cost.

“The demand gen team shows leadership a CPL graph. The CRO shows them a pipeline chart. Neither of them is wrong. But they’re not talking about the same things at all.”

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Nearly half of enterprise marketing leaders aren’t confident their current budget allocation will improve revenue contribution next year. That’s an honest read of the data they’re looking at every quarter, not wishful thinking.

Budget confidence is a leading indicator of where spend reallocations are heading. When nearly half of a survey population says they don’t believe their current allocation will produce better results next year, the reallocation conversations are definitely already happening. The question is where the money is going.

49.7% of respondents are not very confident or not confident at all that their current budget allocation will improve revenue contribution next year. Only 18.4% show strong confidence. Revenue Marketing leaders show the lowest confidence of any function, which reflects their proximity to the revenue accountability they’re being held to and the distance they can see between what the programs produce and what leadership is expecting.

The confidence split maps almost perfectly onto the top performer divide. Top performers express much stronger confidence (22.1% very confident) than the broader population. Their confidence comes from having built programs they can measure.

“I can tell you our CPL. I can tell you our quarterly MQL count. What I can’t tell you with confidence is whether what we’re doing now is going to give us revenue six months from now. As scary as that is.”

Where budgets are heading in the next 12 months

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The top performers in this survey are spending the same budgets but more deliberately, and the differences are consistent enough across all six findings to point toward a clear set of choices.

Across every finding in this report, we see a consistent pattern between teams whose marketing programs contribute more than 21% of company revenue and those that don’t. Budget size, team size, channel access, and tooling don’t explain the performance divide. What explains it is whether teams hold their spending to downstream conversion accountability consistently.

The top performer profile

• They keep paid advertising below 30% of total budget, while the majority of the broader population exceeds it.
• They measure ROI against revenue contribution rather than CPL alone, and they hold every major channel to SQL/SAL conversion accountability.
• They’ve reduced their unevaluated budget exposure to below 25% of total spend, versus 52.9% of all respondents who exceed that level.
• They report lower overhead burden, which reflects fewer vendor relationships, tighter qualification criteria, less bad lead cleanup work, and a smaller overhead burden in their Marketing Operations function.
• They define top performance as revenue contribution from marketing-sourced deals, not MQL volume targets, impressions, or clicks.
• They plan to increase spend on verified lead programs and intent data in the next 12 months, not on the paid channels where they’ve already been cutting.

“My goal is not, and was never, simply more leads. It was always more revenue from marketing. When we reoriented everything around that, the channel mix stuff sorted itself out.”

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1. Audit your unevaluated budget before your next planning window.
Pull every line item in your demand gen budget and ask one question: do you know what this channel’s SQL/SAL conversion rate is? If you don’t, you don’t know its true cost. Start there, not with the channels you already measure well.

2. Set a paid advertising ceiling and hold it.
The data is consistent: top performers spend less of their budget on paid ads, not more. That doesn’t mean cutting paid social entirely, but it does mean setting a deliberate ceiling, around 30% of total budget, and requiring every dollar above that threshold to justify itself on conversions before renewal. See how content syndication stacks up against paid ads on true cost per SQL.

3. Add revenue contribution as a co-primary metric alongside CPL.
CPL tells you the cost of a lead. Revenue contribution tells you whether the campaign is working. Many enterprise demand gen teams track both but report on CPL to leadership. Flip the order: lead with revenue contribution, support it with CPL as the efficiency metric. Our True CPL Framework shows how the math changes when you account for downstream conversion rates.

4. Reduce vendor count to reduce overhead.
The overhead drain finding is a vendor management problem as much as an internal process one. Every additional vendor relationship adds suppression list reconciliation, replacement processing, invoice management, ABM lists, ICP filters, and internal coordination time. The teams with the lowest overhead have the fewest vendor relationships and the highest accountability requirements for each one. Here’s what to look for when evaluating syndication partners on ROI.

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The following ten questions were administered to all 310 respondents. Response options were presented in randomized order.

Q1: Which channel receives the largest share of your demand gen budget, and which receives the second largest?
Options: Content syndication / Paid social (LinkedIn/Meta) / Outbound SDR / Field events and sponsorships / Intent data platforms / Paid search / AI visibility and LLM programs

Q2: What percentage of your total budget goes to paid advertising across LinkedIn, Meta, Google, and other paid platforms combined?
Options: Under 15% / 15% to 30% / 31% to 50% / Over 50%

Q3: Has your paid social spend increased, stayed flat, or decreased versus last year?
Options: Increased significantly / Increased slightly / Stayed flat / Decreased

Q4: How do you primarily measure ROI on your largest spend channel?
Options: CPL (cost per lead) / SQL/SAL conversions / Pipeline contribution / Revenue contribution

Q5: What percentage of your budget goes to channels you’ve never evaluated on SQL/SAL conversion rates?
Options: Under 10% / 10% to 25% / 26% to 50% / Over 50%

Q6: How does your organization primarily define top performance for your demand gen program?
Options: Hitting MQL volume targets / SQL/SAL conversion rates above benchmark / Pipeline contribution to revenue / Revenue contribution from marketing-sourced deals

Q7: What share of your total demand gen budget is absorbed by ops overhead, bad lead processing, vendor management, and CRM reconciliation?
Options: Under 10% / 10% to 20% / 21% to 35% / Over 35%

Q8: Where do you plan to increase budget allocation in the next 12 months?
Options: Verified lead programs and content syndication / Paid social and display advertising / Field events and sponsorships / Intent data and AI-search optimization

Q9: What percentage of company revenue is currently contributed by marketing-sourced deals?
Options: Under 10% of revenue / 10% to 20% of revenue / 21% to 35% of revenue / Over 35% of revenue

Q10: How confident are you that your current budget allocation will improve revenue contribution next year?
Options: Very confident / Somewhat confident / Not very confident / Not confident at all

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