If you work in B2B sales and marketing right now, you’ll know just how noisy things have become. Too many cold emails hitting inboxes. Too many tools promising to “revolutionise” your funnel. Too many dashboards that don’t quite connect the dots.

Scaled Founder, Simon Penson has been fortunate to see this play out from multiple vantage points:

  • As an operator building one of the UK’s first true demand generation teams inside an agency more than a decade ago.
  • As a consultant and board advisor reviewing 100s of sales and marketing plans every year across agencies, SaaS, and tech-enabled services.
  • As an investor, backing Clay – one of the most exciting new players in the modern RevOps toolkit.

From this vantage point one thing is clear: the landscape is shifting faster than most leadership teams realise. Those who don’t keep up risk being left behind.

Why the Landscape Has Become So Complex

If you feel confused by the current world of RevOps and demand generation, you’re not alone. The truth is, the rules have shifted dramatically in just the last few years.

A decade ago, “outbound” meant a few SDRs hitting the phones and a Mailchimp campaign landing in someone’s inbox once a month. Today, a buyer in almost any B2B sector is bombarded from all sides: emails, LinkedIn messages, retargeting ads, and automated calls.

“A single decision-maker can now receive 50+ cold approaches every week. Volume is no longer the advantage it once was.”

Overlay that with the explosion in technology. There are now thousands of sales and marketing platforms, each promising to unlock growth through smarter data, better targeting, or AI-driven workflows. The problem isn’t a lack of capability—it’s stitching those capabilities together into something coherent.

A best-in-class stack can absolutely transform your pipeline, but without a RevOps discipline pulling the strings, it quickly becomes a Frankenstein’s monster of disconnected tools, bloated costs, and confusing dashboards.

And then there’s the structural pressure on the business itself. Investors, acquirers, and even CFOs no longer tolerate the traditional silos of sales, marketing, and customer success. They expect a joined-up system where pipeline creation, conversion, and retention are managed as one. That expectation has given rise to RevOps—a discipline that forces companies to stop thinking in silos and start thinking in systems.

When you add all of this together—the noise of outreach, the complexity of technology, and the demand for alignment—it’s little wonder so many leadership teams find this space overwhelming. But complexity doesn’t mean impossibility. It means opportunity, if you know where to look.

Why It Matters Now

This isn’t an academic conversation. It’s existential.

In every sector we work in—agencies, SaaS, consultancies—the winners are those who can move beyond ad-hoc lead generation and build a repeatable, scalable system for creating demand. That’s what demand generation is at its best: not chasing scraps at the bottom of the funnel, but actively shaping the market so that prospects come to you already primed and informed.

At the same time, RevOps is no longer optional. Without a central operating model tying sales, marketing, and customer success together, you end up with three competing truths:

  • Marketing reports “record MQLs.”
  • Sales say “pipeline is dry.”
  • Customer success complain “the leads don’t stick.”

A modern RevOps function creates one version of reality—data, metrics, and accountability that span the entire buyer journey.

And here’s the kicker: the pace of change means if you’re not evolving, you’re falling behind. Competitors with cleaner data, sharper segmentation, and better automation will out-execute you every time.

We’ve seen it in the hundreds of sales and marketing plans we review each year. The gulf between those keeping up and those lagging behind is widening. The former are building demand engines, standing up RevOps teams, and deploying martech stacks that are genuinely fit for 2025. The latter are still running on outdated playbooks from 2018, wondering why pipeline has slowed to a trickle.

“The companies that get it right won’t just grow faster—they’ll become acquisition magnets, commanding stronger multiples.”

Where to Start

If you’re a founder, board, or leadership team, the first step is getting a shared language for this space. Too often conversations about RevOps and demand gen collapse under acronyms. Below is a starter glossary that cuts through the jargon.

Glossary of Key Terms & Tools

RevOps (Revenue Operations) – The alignment of marketing, sales, and customer success into one operating model, with shared metrics and centralised systems.

Demand Generation – Programmes that create demand for your product/service, usually top-of-funnel (brand, content, campaigns) but increasingly accountable all the way to pipeline.

Lead Generation – The narrower act of capturing leads, often confused with demand gen but actually a subset.

ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) – The description of the “perfect fit” account you want to sell into, based on firmographic and behavioural traits.

Persona – The decision-makers within your ICP, broken down by role, challenges, and buying triggers.

Intent Data – Signals that show which companies are “in market” for your solution (e.g. search behaviour, content consumption, hiring patterns). Providers include Bombora, 6sense.

Enrichment Tools – Platforms that pull additional data on leads/accounts (e.g. Clay, Clearbit, Apollo).

Sequencing / Outreach Tools – Tech that automates multi-step outbound cadences across email, LinkedIn, and calling (e.g. Outreach, Salesloft).

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) – Core sales database, e.g. Salesforce, HubSpot. Needs to be “RevOps-enabled” to avoid siloed data.

Marketing Automation – Tools that manage email nurture, lead scoring, and campaign workflows (e.g. HubSpot, Marketo).

ABM (Account-Based Marketing) – Programmes targeting a tightly defined list of accounts with personalised messaging and outreach.

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) – The full cost of acquiring a new customer, across marketing and sales.

LTV (Lifetime Value) – The projected revenue/profit from a customer over their lifespan.

CAC:LTV Ratio – A critical RevOps metric showing the efficiency of customer acquisition.

Attribution – The method for assigning credit to touchpoints across the buyer journey. Still messy, but essential to track.

Data Hygiene – The ongoing process of cleaning, de-duping, and validating your CRM and marketing databases. Poor hygiene kills RevOps.

Closing Thought

The noise in sales and marketing isn’t going away. If anything, the rise of AI-driven tools will make it louder. The winners won’t be the ones who adopt the most tools or send the most emails – but those who understand the system end-to-end, align their teams under RevOps, and build demand engines that actually create pull.

We’ve seen it first-hand in the hundreds of B2B plans we review each year. We lived it when we built one of the UK’s first demand gen teams. And we’re seeing it again as investors in tools like Clay.

The playbook is changing fast. The question is: are you keeping up?