Beyond Lead Generation: Embracing Value-First Content to Build Trust in B2B SaaS

From Lead Capture Obsession to Long-Term Brand Building

Demand generation in B2B isn’t a new concept, yet many B2B SaaS companies still act like lead capture is the only goal, gating every whitepaper and chasing form fills to satisfy short-term targets. This overemphasis on immediate leads can be self-defeating. Research indicates that companies have “over-indexed on demand capture at the expense of brand building,” creating future pipeline problems “when buyers don’t know you exist.” In other words, a singular focus on quarterly MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) might appease finance in the short run, but it neglects the slow-burn value of brand familiarity and trust.

The challenge for marketing leaders is shifting stakeholder mindset, especially among finance and executives, from fixating on short-term lead counts to investing in long-term brand value that pays dividends over extended buying cycles.

Marketers often remain under pressure to “deliver leads, leads, and more leads” because those metrics are tangible. But many of the most impactful outcomes in marketing are intangible, think brand trust, influence, share of mind, buyer familiarity. Just because trust or brand sentiment can’t be neatly scored in a spreadsheet doesn’t make them less important. In fact, forward-thinking B2B teams now recognise that trust is becoming a key performance driver even if it’s not a traditional KPI. As LinkedIn’s Mimi Turner aptly put it, “Marketers spend too much time chasing clicks… But many of the most influential voices in the buying process never click. They’re evaluating whether your company is the right kind of business to engage with.” Influence happens off the radar of our marketing automation and that’s exactly where a value-first, trust-led approach shines.

Intangible Influence vs. Tangible Targets

This disconnect between intangible influence and tangible targets is at the heart of the lead-gen to trust-gen evolution. Marketing leaders need to help their organisations appreciate that building brand credibility, audience loyalty and broad awareness is a legitimate investment and not just a “nice-to-have” afterthought. Consider that businesses balancing brand and demand see dramatically better results (e.g. 208% higher revenue contribution, 40% shorter sales cycles ), proving that brand trust pays off in measurable ways over time. Yes, we still need to fill the funnel, but perhaps the funnel itself is too narrow a view. It’s time to measure what truly matters: being known, trusted, and considered by your market. Those factors translate into future revenue, even if they don’t all show up as immediate lead conversion stats.

One way to bridge this gap is to start treating trust and familiarity as metrics or at least as strategic priorities alongside lead volume. For example, are you increasing your share of voice in your category? Is your content changing perceptions or starting more conversations in the industry? These are soft metrics, but they signal whether your value-first content is doing its job. By educating, inspiring or helping your audience without immediately asking for something in return, you build goodwill and credibility that makes the eventual sale much smoother. The key is patience and confidence and having the conviction to invest in trust-building activities even when the payoff is longer-term or a bit harder to attribute.

Marketing to the Entire Buying Group (Not Just One Lead)

Another reason to move beyond gated e-books and single-lead targeting is the reality of B2B buying today: it’s a team sport. Big SaaS purchase decisions are rarely made by one person in isolation. On the contrary, the average B2B buying journey now involves a group of roughly 10–23 people (often spanning multiple departments and roles) and can drag on for many months . One recent analysis set the typical B2B buying cycle at 211 days from first touch to close, that’s about seven months of research, internal discussions, demos, and consensus-building. Crucially, much of this journey happens before a prospect ever talks to your sales team, or even fills out a form. Dreamdata found 70% of the buying process occurs “outside the sales pipeline”, essentially in self-driven research and deliberation . This means your marketing must influence the buying committee long before any single lead raises their hand.

It’s not just the length of the cycle, it's the range of people involved. Large buying committees typically include not only the obvious decision-makers (e.g. the budget holder or the head of department) but also “hidden” influencers like procurement, legal, IT, and finance . LinkedIn and Bain & Company’s research highlights that these “hidden buyers” wield near-equal influence as the project’s “target” buyers and they often have veto power driven by risk or compliance concerns. The bigger the group, the harder it is to get a yes for B2B marketers. Significantly, the Bain/LinkedIn study found that being widely known across the entire buying group can outweigh price or product features when it comes to final selection . In fact, vendors are 20× more likely to be chosen if the whole buying group already knows who you are on day one. Familiarity breeds trust and trust tips the scales in your favour when that 15th stakeholder asks, “Who are these guys? Can we trust them?” If your brand name is already recognised and respected by everyone around the table, you’ve effectively shortened the decision process by building collective confidence upfront.

For scaling SaaS companies, this is a compelling case to think beyond marketing to a single persona or collecting one lead at a time. Instead, focus on making your company known and respected among the entire ecosystem of potential buyers and influencers in your target accounts. This might mean producing content that appeals to multiple viewpoints, a technical whitepaper for IT, an ROI calculator for finance, a case study for end-users, etc. It definitely means ungating more of your high-value content so it can spread within organisations. If five people on a buying committee quietly read your ungated insights (and you never captured their emails), you’re still far better off than having one “lead” download a gated PDF that never gets shared internally. Being helpful and visible to the whole group is the new goal.

The Altair Framework: Buyer, User, Influencer – Speaking to All Three

How can marketers practically address such a diverse buying group? At Altair, we use a simple framework to ensure our content strategy speaks to the three key role archetypes in a B2B SaaS purchase: the Buyer, the User, and the Influencer. Each plays a distinct role in the decision:

• Buyer (Decision-Maker): The senior decision-maker or budget approver who signs off on the purchase. They care about business outcomes – ROI, risk mitigation, strategic alignment, and vendor credibility. Content for Buyers should build high-level trust and confidence in your company’s track record. Think thought leadership on industry trends, ROI case studies, analyst reports, and content that paints the vision of long-term value and low risk. This helps the economic buyer feel choosing you is a safe decision .
• User (Day-to-Day User): The practitioners who will actually use the software or service. They care about features, ease of use, and whether it will solve their daily challenges. Content for Users should demonstrate tangible value and usability – tutorials, free toolkits, technical demos, how-to guides and product documentation. This builds trust by showing you understand their needs and have a solution that works. Users often start as researchers kicking the tyres, so helping them succeed in a free trial or sandbox can turn them into internal champions.
• Influencer (Recommender/Researcher): The person (or people) who research options, compile recommendations, or informally sway the group’s opinion. This could be an IT architect vetting compatibility, a savvy analyst on the team, or even an external consultant. Content for Influencers should arm them with evidence and social proof. Comparison sheets, integration guides, security assurances, customer testimonials and third-party reviews. Essentially, give the influencers the ammo they need to advocate for your solution. Every B2B purchase typically involves a user of the product, an influencer who researches and recommends, and a buyer who approves the deal, so make sure your content library has something for each of them.

By deliberately mapping content to Buyer, User, and Influencer needs, you ensure no key perspective is ignored.

Being Known, Trusted and Helpful Beats Being Gated

Scaling B2B SaaS companies need to look beyond the old playbook of eBook gates, lead score formulas, and incessant drip emails. The real growth multiplier now is brand trust and familiarity at scale. If your target buyers, users, and influencers all recognise your name and respect your expertise, you’ve essentially pre-sold much of the deal. As Bain & LinkedIn found, simply being well-known across a buyer group can make you the default choice when needs arise . In an era where B2B buying cycles are longer, more complex, and increasingly driven by digital-native generations using search and AI for research, the winners will be those brands that are everywhere the buyer group looks, providing helpful insights, answering questions and offering value without a catch.

This means rethinking our success metrics. It’s not that leads “don’t matter”, they do, but they’re a piece of a bigger puzzle. We should also be asking: are we growing our share of trust in the market? Are we becoming known in the right circles (including among that 10–23 person buying committee)? Are we making it easier for the group to agree on choosing us by addressing their diverse concerns? These ambitions call for marketing that prioritises helpfulness over hardness, education over promotion, and relationships over transactions. By focusing on being known, trusted, and helpful across the full buying group, you’ll cultivate demand more organically, the kind of demand that fills pipelines not just this quarter, but for quarters to come.

The shift from lead generation to value-first content is about playing the long game. It’s about earning trust before you ask for anything. That trust becomes your most powerful currency, shortening sales cycles and tipping decisions in your favour even when multiple stakeholders are involved.

For B2B SaaS marketers: open the gates, share real value, and build a brand that buyers want to engage with.

Do this consistently, and you won’t just generate leads, you’ll generate loyalty, advocacy and a market presence that competitors can’t short-circuit with a few extra ads. The companies that win will be those that stop simply capturing demand and start actively cultivating it through trust and value.

The sooner we as marketers step up to this, the faster our brands can grow in this new era of B2B buying.