About SalesScreen
Company: SalesScreen, a B2B SaaS company, founded in Norway in 2011. Offices in Oslo and New York.
Product: Sales gamification platform. Competitions, leaderboards, real-time dashboards, TV celebrations, and a reward shop — built to boost motivation, visibility, and productivity in sales teams.
Stage: scale-up
Marketing Team: Marketing sits inside a "revenue team" model alongside sales and customer success, all accountable to revenue.
The article focuse on the expertise of Sabih Ahmed, the Director of Demand Generation.
Reactive vs. Strategic: What's Actually Different
B2B marketing is reactive because of how most teams approach buyers.
Sabih Ahmed, Director of Demand Generation at SalesScreen, came from B2C, where waiting for signals wasn't an option. B2C marketers go on Meta or TikTok, target by interest, and hook people before they know they need the product. There's no intent data, just creative, positioning, and the willingness to test constantly.
When he moved into B2B during COVID, he found the opposite: teams that relied on tools to classify intent, waited for signals to appear, and then sent generic outreach to whoever surfaced. The tools told them it was working. The pipeline told them otherwise.
The difference isn't methodology — it's timing. Reactive marketing responds to signals. Strategic marketing shapes conditions before signals exist.
The 5% vs. 95% Model (and Why Most Teams Get It Wrong)
There's a common version of this model that goes: "stop chasing the 5% who are ready to buy and focus on the 95% who aren't." Sabih's version is more precise.
The 5% are not buyers. They're in-market. That means they're exposed to the problem, they might be searching for a solution, or searching for information about the pain. Some of them will buy soon. Most won't. The signal is proximity to the problem, not purchase intent.
The 95% are out-of-market. They may have the exact profile of your ideal customer. They may face the exact pain you solve. But right now, they're not looking.
The practical implication: the same messaging doesn't work for both groups. A bottom-of-funnel ad that makes sense for someone actively evaluating options will land flat — or worse, irritating — for someone who hasn't yet articulated the problem to themselves.
Most B2B teams collapse this distinction and run the same message at everyone. Then wonder why conversion rates are low.
Why G2 Intent Isn't a "Ready to Buy" Signal
SalesScreen tried this. Someone visits your G2 profile, so you run a bottom-of-funnel campaign to them.
Gamification is the best thing in the world. Book a demo.
It didn't work.
After a close look at what was actually happening, the conclusion was straightforward: a G2 visit means someone is in-market. It does not mean they're ready to buy today. They're exploring the category, understanding the space, maybe comparing vendors for a conversation that's still months away.
Running conversion-focused campaigns at this group was the wrong frame. The right question was: what problem brought them here, and what do they need next?
The rebuilt approach: match the message to where in the pain journey the prospect actually is. Introduce the problem first, deepen it, and let them move at their own pace.
What B2C Creativity Actually Adds to B2B
When Sabih proposed testing hook-specific ad copy at SalesScreen, his team pushed back. "That doesn't follow the guidelines." "That's not how B2B works."
What he'd brought from B2C was the expectation of continuous iteration: new ideas every week, new assets, fast cuts on what doesn't move. B2B teams, he found, were wired for 90-day playbooks and one-asset-per-campaign thinking. The creative firepower was simply lower.
Over five years, he shifted the team toward something closer to the B2C rhythm: test weekly, iterate on engagement signals, kill slowly rather than quickly, and lead with copy that hooks rather than copy that describes.
The "needle mover" wasn't the tool. It was the willingness to treat creativity as an operational function.
Replacing Vanity Metrics with Engagement Signals
Clicks and impressions are easy to measure. Sabih killed them as performance indicators.
His view: the gap that most marketing teams miss sits between vanity metrics and conversions. That gap is engagement, and it's systematically undervalued.
The practical reframe was renaming the funnel. TOFU/MOFU/BOFU became Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. The terminology shift forced the team to think in engagement stages rather than funnel positions.
Engagement signals they tracked:
- LinkedIn video completion rates (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%)
- Post expansions
- Repeated exposure to the same brand without clicking
- Ad likes and comments (yes, those)
These signals don't require a website visit. They live inside LinkedIn and tell you who's paying attention well before anyone shows up in your CRM.
The team built 7 to 8 retargeting paths based on a prospect's engagement stage. The rule: don't kill a creative that isn't converting yet, optimize it. If engagement is moving, the conversion will follow.
When the LinkedIn campaigns started receiving likes and comments, the sales team gained something useful: named contacts with known engagement history. Personalized outreach became possible because the marketing work had already established a signal.
The 95%: Creativity, Patience, and Letting Go of Control
Google Keyword Planner reveals something that most B2B teams ignore: problem-focused keywords get roughly 80% of search volume, while software-category keywords get 20%. The 80% is largely your 95%.
You can't convert them with the same message you use on in-market buyers. What you can do is stay in front of the pain.
SalesScreen ran the same message experiment on the 95%. It failed the same way the G2 experiment failed. The fix was the same: let them move through their own research.
The harder lesson was about control. Gartner research puts the number of touchpoints in a modern B2B buyer journey at around 500. You can't dictate that sequence. You can't control where someone goes after they see your LinkedIn ad.
What you can control: which pain points you address, how creative your execution is, and how consistent your presence is over time. Sabih calls it "control the controllables."
The 95% strategy, simplified: show them the problem you solve, show it to them consistently, and be visible when they're ready. Not in three weeks, potentially in six months. The goal is to be the thing they think of when they're finally ready to move.
ICP Beyond Firmographics
Every company does ICP research. Most stop at firmographics: industry, company size, headcount, tech stack. Apollo or ZoomInfo will give you a list in minutes.
The problem: a list of companies that match your firmographic profile is not a list of companies likely to buy from you. Sabih found this out when conversion rates on firmographics-based lists were sitting below 10%.
The behavioral layer is what changed it.
Behavioral signals aren't intent signals. They're indicators of what a company is doing and, therefore, what problems they're probably experiencing. A company that's actively hiring sales reps isn't necessarily in-market for gamification software. But it's on a growth trajectory that makes motivation and performance problems more likely. That's a behavioral pattern worth understanding.
What SalesScreen built over the past six months: a manual process of layering behavioral analysis on top of firmographic data. No tool does this automatically. It takes time. The conversion rate impact was significant enough that Sabih considers it the most important thing most B2B companies aren't doing.
The principle underneath it: you're not selling to companies. You're selling to people who have specific problems at a specific point in their work life. Firmographics can identify the company. Behavioral analysis helps you understand whether someone there is likely to feel the pain you solve.
AI as an Advisor, Not an Executor
Founders upload their homepage to ChatGPT and ask for a marketing strategy. They get output that looks comprehensive. It's generic because the input was generic.
Sabih's framing is more useful: AI is only as good as what you give it. If you haven't done real ICP research, real positioning work, real competitor analysis, AI will reflect that gap back at you in polished prose.
The prompt that changed his results: "Consider you are an advisor I just hired. Your goal is X. How would you react?" Framing AI as a thinking partner rather than a content machine produces different responses. It asks AI to reason, not just to generate.
He uses Claude for content (because it sounds more human), ChatGPT for complex strategic synthesis. The point isn't which tool, it's that you invest time building the context the tool operates on. Documenting your ICP in detail. Creating a voice guide. Attaching research before asking for output.
What AI can't do: execute on your behalf. It can't replace the thinking that produces good strategy. It can't decide which bet is worth making. "AI can help us be 5x more productive," Sabih said, "but it cannot replace us."
The people succeeding with AI aren't the ones with the best prompts. They're the ones who invested in better inputs.
When Strategy Documents Don't Change Execution
Most B2B companies have a strategy document. Most campaigns still don't reflect it.
The gap is the connection from vision to narrative to messaging to campaign to execution. At each handoff, something drops. By the time a campaign brief reaches whoever's running ads, the original logic has been replaced by muscle memory.
Sabih described this as a universal problem: what's written in the strategy deck and what the campaigns actually say are often talking about different things. Teams work in isolation: SEO does its own thing, paid does its own thing. The overarching message breaks apart.
The fix at SalesScreen was a model they call the revenue team: customer success, sales, and marketing as a single unit accountable to revenue. Not ownership of separate functions — collaboration across all of them.
The logic: customer success affects revenue through retention and expansion, not just acquisition. Treating it as a separate silo means losing the feedback loop that makes marketing more accurate over time. In most companies, more revenue growth now comes from retained customers than from new logos. The org structure should reflect that.
Where Founders Should Start
Most growth strategies are built forward. Sabih builds backward first: audit what actually worked, identify what opportunities were missed, and find the low-hanging fruit that could move you from $5M to $6M. The jump to $10M no longer feels like a mountain when you have a clear path to $6M.
The practical steps:
- Don't do too many things at once. Every channel started simultaneously, so none gets enough attention to show real results.
- Invest more time in ICP than feels necessary. Not a HubSpot template with a fictional persona who drinks coffee and plays golf. Real research into the people who bought from you, why they bought, and what made them ready.
- Use AI as an accelerant, not a substitute. If you haven't built the foundation — ICP, positioning, messaging — AI will speed up the creation of things that don't work.
- From $3-5M set a goal of $6M, not $10M. Find the low-hanging fruit that gets you there. Small wins compound.
Lessons
- Reactive B2B marketing is a behavior problem, and fixing it requires changing how you approach buyers, not your tech stack
- The 5% vs. 95% model is about in-market vs. out-of-market, not high intent vs. low intent, and the messaging for each group should be completely different
- G2 visits are a proximity signal, not a purchase signal, so running bottom-of-funnel campaigns at them wastes budget and trains your audience to ignore you
- Engagement metrics (video completions, post expansions, ad interactions) are more useful than pricing page visits for understanding where buyers actually are
- Firmographics alone produce weak conversion rates. A behavioral layer, built manually, changes the picture
- AI delivers generic output when given generic input: the investment is in building the context, not in writing better prompts
- The strategy-to-execution gap is a connection problem: vision, narrative, messaging, and campaigns need to be explicitly linked, not assumed to cascade
- Starting from an audit of what already worked beats building a new strategy from scratch
This article is adapted from a podcast episode of Rebuilding SaaS Marketing by Digital Hunch, where Sabih Ahmed, Director of Demand Generation at SalesScreen, explains how he rebuilt demand generation at a B2B SaaS company: what failed first, what he changed, and what a strategic approach actually looks like in practice.
