By Brandon Burkman
brandonburkman.com | linkedIn.com/in/bburkman
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A note on this document: I’m Brandon Burkman. I spent the last decade building marketing operations and demand generation engines at B2B companies. In early 2026, I was laid off, and I’ve spent the months since then interviewing for the next role. A few months ago, I wrote a 26-page demand generation strategy document for a company I really wanted to work for. It was thorough, well-structured, and defensible. It didn’t win me the job. After spending weeks thinking about why, I realized it lost for the same reason most demand generation strategy documents lose: it didn’t take a position on anything. This is the document I’d write today. It takes positions. Some of them will piss people off. That’s the point.
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The company: Series A or B. They’ve raised real money. They have product-market fit signals — a handful of marquee logos, some inbound, a sales team that’s closing deals. They just hired their first marketing leader. That leader brought in someone to “own demand generation.”
That someone is you.
You walk in on day one and here’s what you find: a website that converts at less than one percent. A HubSpot instance that someone set up two years ago and nobody’s touched since. A list of 12,000 contacts of unknown quality. Three half-finished case studies. A sales team that doesn’t trust marketing because they’ve been burned before. And a CEO who wants to know what your 90-day plan is by Friday.
If you’ve done this job before, you know the playbook. You’ve read the playbook. Half the people you follow on LinkedIn wrote the playbook. It goes like this:
It’s the safe answer. It’s the answer every consultant gives. It’s the answer I gave.
Here’s why it’s wrong.
That playbook assumes you have time. It assumes the company can afford 30 days of your salary while you produce a customer interview deck. It assumes the CEO will still be patient in week 8 when you don’t have pipeline to show. It assumes your sales team — the one that already doesn’t trust marketing — will keep waiting while you “build foundations.”
None of those assumptions hold at an early-stage company. The runway is shorter than you think. The CEO’s patience is shorter than that. And every week you spend in research mode is a week your competitors are taking conversations with your buyers.
There’s also a deeper problem with the consultant playbook: it produces decks, not pipeline. A 30-day research phase ends with a slide deck full of insights that may or may not be true, because they’re based on what customers told you in interviews — not what buyers do when you put a real offer in front of them. You don’t actually know your ICP until you’ve tried to sell to it and watch what happens.
The inversion of this: start outbound conversations in week one, and let those conversations be the research.