So... you're looking for pipeline?

When I joined ElevenLabs, we didn't have a B2B Marketing function. We didn't need one — we didn't have enough sales people to respond to all of our contact sales form submissions. Finally, by the end of 2024, we were starting to get on top of our inbound. I think we had to hire about 30 sales people to get to that point. It was time to start running some campaigns in pursuit of more pipeline. What I am about to say may be obvious, but people seem to forget it. B2B sales cycles are long. And no matter how long you think yours is, it's longer — because you probably can't track the first dozen or more touchpoints in the awareness and consideration journey. A deal that closes in Q3 may have started with a LinkedIn post someone half-read in Q1. So if you want pipeline, and you want it now, you should start by looking as close to the bottom of the funnel as possible. Work your way up from there. Step 1 — The easy pickings Because ElevenLabs sells consumer and prosumer products in addition to Enterprise solutions, we get more site traffic than a typical B2B company. Tens of millions of visits more, actually. Buried inside our self-serve user base is a meaningful number of people who work at companies that could be large Enterprise customers. They signed up on their own, they're using the product, and nobody from sales has ever spoken to them. The goal of Step 1 is to find those people. We do this through a combination of firmographic and demographic enrichment — overlaying data on who our users are and where they work — alongside product usage signals. A user who has been active for three months, is hitting API limits, and works at a 2,000-person financial services company looks very different from a hobbyist who signed up once and never came back. We score users based on that combination of signals and route the best-fit, highest-intent accounts to sales. One note on getting started: if you're early in building your scoring model, index more heavily on product usage than firmographic data — because you probably don't actually know what your ICP looks like yet. Let your users tell you. The ones who get real value from the product will show you through their behavior, and that's a more honest signal than any demographic profile you'd construct upfront. You are not creating interest that didn't exist. You are identifying interest that was already there and making sure it doesn't go unnoticed. It is the highest-leverage starting point precisely because the cost of acquisition is so low — these people already found you. Step 2 — The upper lower funnel Once you've worked through your existing user base, the next layer is people who know they have a problem but haven't signed up yet. The clearest signal of intent you can get from a stranger is a Google search. If someone is searching for "text to speech API for enterprise" or "voice AI for contact centers," they are telling you exactly what they need. Paid search lets you intercept that moment. The audience is narrow, the conversion rates are relatively high, and the intent is unambiguous. We layer in SEO for the same queries so that we're showing up organically over time as well. The second piece is retargeting. Not everyone who visits your site converts on the first visit — most don't. But if someone visited your enterprise pricing page or your API documentation, they've shown you something about why they came. We run retargeting ads on LinkedIn specifically for those high-intent page visitors. LinkedIn is expensive for cold audiences, but for retargeting a warm audience of people who already know you, the targeting precision justifies the cost. Together, search and retargeting form a tight loop around the bottom of the funnel: catch people in the moment of intent, and stay in front of the ones who didn't convert immediately. Step 3 — The mid funnel Steps 1 and 2 are about finding people who are already close to a decision. Step 3 is about building a relationship with people who aren't there yet. Mid-funnel is for the buyer who is aware of the problem space, interested in learning, but not ready to talk to sales. They're reading industry content, following practitioners they respect, and forming views on which vendors seem credible. Your job here is to be part of that education — and to earn trust before they ever enter an evaluation. Step 4 — The long slog Above mid-funnel, you're no longer trying to convert demand — you're trying to create it. This means building awareness among people who don't yet know they need you, and educating a market that may not fully understand what's possible. I have a lot to say about building a full funnel marketing engine but that's for another time.