The 2025 State of B2B Pipeline Growth Survey from Pipeline360 reveled how marketers are navigating the challenges and opportunities of pipeline growth in today’s business landscape.
The survey found top-performing marketing teams excel in six key areas during a time of economic uncertainty— marketing budgets remaining stagnant or shrinking that make it even harder to scale programs and drive revenue growth. These obstacles come as B2B marketers report what they perceive as unrealistic leadership expectations in a time when email open rates and form fills are declining.
Matt Hummel, CMO, Pipeline360, discussed these finding in the survey, plus strategies, tools, and the role of artificial intelligence (AI) that are shaping the future of B2B content and lead generation.
Demand Gen Report (DGR): What are the top strategies you currently use to drive pipeline growth in your organization?
Matt Hummel: On Pipeline360’s marketing team, we drive pipeline growth by prioritizing data-driven insights, leveraging content and thought leadership, and ensuring tight alignment between sales and marketing. We also regularly spend time in market, meeting face-to-face with customers, focused on building and strengthening our relationships.
We’ve seen these priorities reflected in our own research as well. In our recent 2025 State of B2B Pipeline Growth survey, we found that high performing B2B marketing teams outperform across 6 critical areas:
- data usage
- buyer engagement
- lead nurturing
- content quality
- tech stack efficiency
- sales-marketing alignment
DGR: What is the most significant challenge your team faces when it comes to achieving pipeline growth goals?
Hummel: One of our biggest challenges is economic uncertainty, which has created longer sales cycles and more wary buyers. When your buyers aren’t in-market for a new service or solution, it can be difficult to engage them— especially when you’re faced with limited resources. This makes it all the more important to develop high quality content that provides value to your buyer, so that when they are ready to buy, your solution is top of mind.
DGR: What role does content marketing strategies (e.g., blogs, whitepapers, videos) play in your pipeline generation efforts?
Hummel: Content marketing is one of our most powerful strategies for driving pipeline growth and is integral to nurturing prospective buyers. It’s a core part of our Demand-as-a-Service offering at Pipeline360.
We take an approach called Branded Demand— the strategic convergence of Brand and Demand— that helps ensure brand recognition when sales engages with prospects. In fact, according to our 2024 research, a Branded Demand approach drives nearly 40% stronger performance and delivers higher ROI at scale.
DGR: Are you currently leveraging AI in your content creation process? If so, how? If not, why?
Hummel: Yes, we leverage AI in our content creation process in multiple ways, including brainstorming and idea generation, fact checking, and repurposing existing content to new formats (e.g. summarizing a blog for a social post or meta descriptions for SEO). Interestingly, in our recent study, we found that 36% of B2B marketers see generative AI as valuable for content creation and email optimization.
DGR: How do you think AI impacts the perception of content authenticity from the perspective of your target audience?
Hummel: AI content can feel slightly off— similar to the uncanny valley effect. Think of how AI-generated images often struggle with details like fingers, or how AI-written text sometimes gives itself away with things like missing spaces around an em dash (a telltale “ChatGPT hyphen”).
DGR: What are your biggest concerns regarding the use of AI in content and branding efforts?
Hummel: Just as an agency is only as good as the information you provide it, AI is only as good as the inputs and parameters you give it.
As Greg Verdino from CognitivePath, a guest on our Pipeline Brew podcast said recently, “AI is not a miracle machine, but a mimicry machine. It’s been trained on all of the world’s data, and what that means is at the end of the day, pure AI content brings to the table a raw average of everything else that’s ever been produced.”
DGR: What tools or platforms do you consider indispensable for your marketing and pipeline growth efforts? Why?
Hummel: We have a very streamlined tech stack, by design. Outside of core systems— CRM and Marketing Automation— we also leverage a lead management and data governance tool. Outside of that, we’re regularly exploring new technologies that could help— but we’re primarily focused on “getting back to basics”— talking with our customers, developing high-quality content, and delivering a great end-to-end experience to our customers.
DGR: What kind of metrics do you use to measure the success of your content marketing strategies? Are there certain strategies you find more effective than others for lead generation?
Hummel: For content marketing, we look at quantitative metrics such as website traffic and engagement, but we also value qualitative anecdotal evidence from talking to our customers and prospects. We collaborate a great deal with sales to understand the market and what they’re hearing.
DGR: Looking ahead, how do you see AI influencing B2B marketing and pipeline growth strategies in the next five years?
Hummel: I think AI has the potential to accelerate and enhance B2B marketing programs and pipeline growth. It’s a great supporting tool to fill in the gaps. In our research, we found that with content personalization cited as the top factor that would improve lead nurturing (52%), and email remaining the dominant lead generation channel (66%), AI is becoming the critical bridge between fragmented data and the personalized experiences buyers now expect.
DGR: What does your ideal tech stack look like for driving both efficiency and innovation in marketing?
Hummel: One of the key takeaways from our 2025 State of Pipeline Growth report is that 70% of B2B marketers don’t want more tech; they want actionable insights, and I’d have to agree. Today’s marketers have limited budget and headcount, and don’t have the bandwidth to spend a great deal of time managing our techstack let alone sifting through the more than 15,000 available solutions.
To that end, my ideal tech stack would be one that takes the guesswork out of what I need – more akin to the “service as software” model where I’d have a core but small number of solutions with human intelligence powering and enabling my team to have the insights needed to reach our prospects and customers where they are – when they are ready.
