10 Claude skills for turning ICP research and positioning into a full-funnel pipeline machine.
Demand generation in B2B is one of the most misunderstood functions in marketing. It's not lead generation — though leads are a by-product. It's not brand awareness — though brand plays a role. Demand gen is the systematic effort to create and capture interest in your category and your product, across the entire buying journey, from people who've never heard of you to people who are one conversation away from signing.
Done well, it's the function that makes sales easier. Done poorly, it produces a lot of MQLs that sales ignores and a growing tension between two teams that should be aligned.
Here's how I use 10 Claude skills to run a demand gen engine that actually produces pipeline — not just activity.
Demand creation builds awareness and category interest among people who aren't actively looking yet — content, social, events, thought leadership. Demand capture converts existing intent — paid search, SEO, retargeting. Most B2B companies over-invest in capture and under-invest in creation. If you only show up when someone is searching, you're competing on price in a crowded auction.
B2B purchases involve an average of 6–10 stakeholders according to Gartner. Your champion isn't the only person you need to convince — you need the economic buyer, the technical evaluator, and often legal or procurement. Your demand gen strategy needs content and messaging for each role, not just the person who fills in the contact form.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a lead that's been scored above a threshold based on engagement data — job title, company size, content downloads, page visits. It's a proxy metric, not a pipeline metric. The question that matters is: what percentage of MQLs become Sales Accepted Leads (SALs), then Opportunities? If that conversion rate is low, your ICP definition or lead scoring model needs work — not your volume.
Research by Forrester and others consistently shows that B2B buyers complete 60–80% of their buying journey before ever talking to sales. Most of that research happens in channels you can't track — community forums, LinkedIn posts, peer conversations, review sites. The "dark funnel" is real. Demand gen that only measures attributed clicks is missing the majority of the journey.
Every demand gen strategy fails or succeeds at the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) definition. If you don't know precisely who you're targeting — company size, industry verticals, tech stack, growth signals, job titles in the buying committee — you'll build campaigns that reach everyone and convert no one.
apollo:prospect lets me validate and build out my ICP in real data, not assumptions. I describe my ideal customer in plain English and get back a list of matching companies and contacts with verified details — revenue range, headcount, tech stack signals, and decision-maker titles. I use this to confirm the ICP is actually a reachable segment, not a hypothetical persona.
An ICP is not a persona. A persona is a fictional character ("Marketing Mary, 34, loves productivity tools"). An ICP is a description of the company and role that is most likely to buy, stay, and expand. Start with your existing best customers — the ones with the highest LTV, lowest churn, and fastest time-to-value. What do they have in common? That's your ICP.
Layer intent data on top of your ICP to prioritise which accounts to target now. Bombora, G2, and LinkedIn all surface signals that companies matching your ICP are actively researching your category. That's the highest-leverage point for demand gen — when an in-ICP account is already in the market, your cost of conversion drops significantly.
Build separate ICP lists for your top three verticals rather than one generic list. The same product solves different problems for a 50-person startup vs. a 500-person enterprise. Demand gen that speaks to both in the same message speaks clearly to neither.
Before you can create demand, you need a clear point of view on why your solution is different and why that difference matters to your ICP. marketing:competitive-brief maps your competitive landscape — who's winning what positioning, what messaging angles are saturated, and where the white space is.
The most powerful demand gen doesn't compete on features. It competes on the problem framing. If you can name and own a problem your ICP feels but hasn't been able to articulate, you've built something that's very hard for a competitor to copy quickly.
Positioning is the answer to: "Why should my ICP choose us over the alternatives, including doing nothing?" "Doing nothing" is always an option and often the default — especially in B2B where switching costs are real. Your positioning needs to make the cost of inaction feel higher than the cost of change.
April Dunford's "Obviously Awesome" framework is worth internalising: positioning is made up of competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value for those attributes, target customer, and market category. Run this skill to map your competitive alternatives precisely — most companies underestimate how many "alternatives" their buyers are actually considering, including spreadsheets, internal tools, and services.
Re-run this every six months. Competitive positioning shifts — especially if a well-funded competitor enters your space or a platform player adds features that encroach on your category. What was differentiated 18 months ago may be table stakes today.
marketing:campaign-plan turns your ICP and positioning into an executable demand gen plan. You give it your ICP, positioning, channels, budget range, and pipeline goals — it returns a structured plan across the full funnel: what to do at awareness, consideration, and decision stages, how to split budget and effort, and what metrics tell you it's working.
The plan includes a channel-by-channel breakdown — LinkedIn for targeted awareness, content for organic demand creation, paid search for intent capture, email for nurture — with recommended cadence and content format for each.
Start with two channels, not six. Most B2B demand gen programmes spread thin across too many channels and get mediocre results everywhere. Pick the channel where your ICP is most concentrated and reachable (usually LinkedIn for enterprise B2B, or content/SEO for product-led growth models) and do that one well before expanding.
Build your plan around your average sales cycle length. If your typical deal takes 90 days from first touch to close, your demand gen programme needs to consistently fill the pipeline 90+ days in advance. Work backward from your quarterly pipeline target to the top-of-funnel volume you need to generate, then plan the activities that produce it.
Include a "land and expand" demand gen track in your plan, not just new logo acquisition. Existing customers are your most efficient pipeline — they already trust you, already have budget, and already know your product works. Demand gen that ignores this is leaving money on the table.
The content that drives the most demand in B2B is content that makes your buyer smarter — not content that sells your product. marketing:draft-content produces this at scale: thought leadership articles, research-backed reports, LinkedIn posts, webinar outlines, case studies, and landing page copy — each aligned to the funnel stage and buying committee role it's targeting.
I use it to build a content mix that spans creation (educational content that builds category awareness) and capture (comparison and use-case content that converts existing intent).
The single most effective B2B demand gen content format is the specific, detailed how-to guide. Not "5 Tips for Better Marketing" — but "How to Calculate Your Content Marketing ROI with a Three-Touch Attribution Model." Specificity signals expertise. Expertise builds trust. Trust creates demand. Vague, general content produces vague, general results.
Develop a point of view, not just information. The most powerful demand gen content takes a clear, sometimes contrarian position — "Why MQLs are the wrong metric for B2B demand gen" will outperform "How to improve your MQL quality" every time, because it creates a reaction and a conversation. Boring is the enemy of demand.
Repurpose systematically. One well-researched long-form piece becomes: a LinkedIn carousel, three LinkedIn posts, an email newsletter, a short-form video script, and five social quotes. Brief Claude with the original piece and ask for each repurposed format — it takes 10 minutes and multiplies your distribution 5x.
Demand gen works through repetition — your ICP needs to encounter your message multiple times across multiple channels before it registers. But if your LinkedIn posts sound different from your emails, which sound different from your ads, which sound different from your sales deck, the repetition doesn't compound. Instead of building familiarity, you create confusion.
brand-voice:brand-voice-enforcement makes sure every piece of demand gen content sounds like the same company, regardless of channel or format.
The most common messaging inconsistency in B2B is between marketing and sales. Marketing says one thing; sales says another. When a prospect gets conflicting messages, trust erodes. Run your sales deck and your top email templates through this skill alongside your marketing content and flag the gaps.
Messaging consistency across the buying committee is as important as consistency across channels. The message your champion hears in a webinar should align with what the economic buyer reads in an executive brief, and what procurement reads in a proposal. Different formats, different depths — but the same core value narrative. Brief Claude on each stakeholder type and get tailored versions of the same positioning.
Run this skill on the content your SDRs are sending in outreach sequences. Sales development is the most human, high-frequency touchpoint in demand gen — inconsistency there does the most damage because it's the first direct conversation your prospect has with your company.
In B2B, most buyers aren't ready to talk to sales when they first engage with your demand gen. They need time, information, and evidence before they'll commit to a conversation. marketing:email-sequence designs the full nurture programme — segmented by buying stage, role, and engagement signal — that keeps your company visible and credible throughout that research period.
A well-built nurture sequence is what turns a content download into a sales conversation three months later. Without it, that lead just sits in your database doing nothing.
A basic B2B nurture has three stages: education (here's useful information about the problem you have), consideration (here's how others have solved it), and decision (here's why we're the right solution). Each stage gets two to four emails, spaced 5–10 days apart. Start simple and add sophistication as you learn what's working.
Build behavioural triggers into your nurture, not just time-based drips. A prospect who visits your pricing page should immediately enter a different sequence than one who downloaded a top-of-funnel guide. Intent signals — page visits, content downloads, email engagement rates — should dynamically move prospects between tracks. This is where marketing automation earns its cost.
Set a clear handoff criterion with sales before you build the nurture. What score or behaviour triggers an MQL? What happens to the lead at that point — immediate outreach, BDR queue, or AE notification? Without that definition agreed upfront, your nurture will produce leads that sit in limbo.
In B2B, credibility is currency. A single inaccurate claim — an overstated ROI number, a customer result that isn't representative, a regulatory claim that isn't substantiated — can cost you the deal you were about to close. marketing:brand-review checks every piece of demand gen content before it goes to your audience.
Be precise with customer results. "Up to 3x ROI" and "average 3x ROI" are very different claims. If your best customer got 3x and your average is 1.4x, say the average. B2B buyers are sophisticated — they'll discount inflated claims, and when the real number comes out in due diligence, it damages trust at exactly the wrong moment.
In regulated verticals — fintech, healthtech, legaltech — your demand gen content may be subject to the same compliance requirements as your product. Financial promotions, clinical claims, and legal advice standards apply to marketing content. Build a compliance review step into your demand gen production process before it becomes a legal issue.
Check that your demand gen content and your sales collateral make the same claims. The worst credibility hit in B2B is when a prospect's research shows your marketing saying X and your sales team saying Y. This skill catches those gaps before they reach a sceptical buyer.
The question that matters in B2B demand gen isn't "how many leads did we generate?" It's "how much pipeline did we create and influence?" data:analyze takes your CRM and marketing automation data and answers the harder question — which demand gen activities are producing opportunities that close, not just leads that stall.
Export your opportunity data by source, stage, and close rate, and ask Claude to identify which channels and content types are generating the highest-quality pipeline. The results frequently challenge conventional wisdom about what's "working."
Pipeline is a dollar value: the sum of all open opportunities weighted by close probability. A £500K pipeline with a 30% average close rate is worth £150K in expected revenue. Track this number, not just lead count. A channel that produces 50 leads that all stall is worse than a channel that produces 10 leads with a 60% close rate.
Analyse your pipeline velocity — the speed at which deals move through stages. Demand gen that attracts well-educated, intent-qualified buyers tends to produce faster-moving deals. If your content-sourced pipeline moves faster than your outbound-sourced pipeline, that's an argument for shifting budget toward content. Velocity data often makes the case more compellingly than volume data.
Ask: which marketing touchpoints appear most frequently in the deals that closed? Not first touch, not last touch — which touchpoints show up across the most winning deals? That's the content worth investing in more heavily.
Demand gen has high-leverage optimisation points — the landing page headline, the CTA on your most-visited content page, the subject line of the first nurture email. A 20% improvement in landing page conversion rate doesn't cost more to acquire — it just means the traffic you're already paying for works harder. data:statistical-analysis tells you when you have enough data to call a test and when you're just looking at noise.
Start with the highest-traffic, lowest-converting page on your site. That's where an improvement has the most leverage. Even a 5% conversion rate improvement on a page getting 5,000 visitors per month is 250 more leads per month at zero additional acquisition cost. Fix the conversion rate before you scale the traffic.
B2B conversion testing is harder than B2C because traffic volumes are lower and conversion events are rarer. You often can't reach statistical significance on "form completion" alone. Consider testing on a micro-conversion — a click, a scroll depth, a CTA interaction — as a proxy for the macro-conversion. Validate the proxy correlates with the actual outcome before optimising for it exclusively.
Test your value proposition framing before your creative. Changing "Get Started Free" to "Start Your Free Trial" is a creative test. Changing "Save time on reporting" to "Close 23% more pipeline with better data" is a value proposition test. Value prop tests produce bigger lifts and more durable insights.
The gap between marketing and leadership isn't usually about results — it's about language. Marketing talks in MQLs, impressions, and engagement rates. Leadership talks in pipeline, revenue, and CAC. marketing:performance-report translates your demand gen results into the language that gets budget protected and teams expanded.
The report connects marketing activities to business outcomes: pipeline created, pipeline influenced, average deal velocity by source, CAC by channel, and projected return on demand gen investment.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is total sales and marketing spend divided by number of new customers acquired in the same period. It's one of the most important metrics in B2B because it determines whether your growth is economically sustainable. Knowing your CAC by channel lets you cut what's expensive and double down on what's efficient.
Report on the CAC payback period alongside CAC itself. If your average contract value is £24K ARR and your CAC is £12K, your payback period is 6 months — that's healthy. If your CAC is £36K on the same contract, you're underwater. Leadership cares deeply about payback period because it determines how much capital you need to fuel growth.
End every demand gen report with a "next 90 days" section: what you're investing in, what you expect it to produce, and how you'll know if it's working. Leaders who see you operating with a clear hypothesis for the next quarter will trust your retrospective data more than those who feel like you're reporting results without a forward view.
B2B demand gen that works is a system, not a campaign. Each element reinforces the others — ICP research sharpens your targeting, positioning differentiates your content, nurture extends your reach, and analytics closes the loop back to better decisions at every stage.
If you're building a B2B demand gen engine and want a sounding board, get in touch.
hello@kerrycokelekoglu.com kerrycokelekoglu.com