CHICAGO, June 12, 2025 — Forget every tenet you’ve learned about B2B email marketing and filling the sales pipeline with qualified prospects. Those onetime killer practices have lost their power, says serial tech disruptor Jon Miller.
He should know. As a co-founder of Marketo, the groundbreaking sales-lead-generating platform used by thousands of businesses, he helped to establish what he now describes as “gumball machine marketing.”
There was indeed a time when companies selling their goods or services to other companies could line up prospects with an assembly-line approach, according to Miller. The CEO or CFO would determine how many customers would be needed to meet the operation’s revenue growth goals. The marketing department would learn how many prospects it needed to land for the sales team and then methodically set out to fill the pipeline, using email and bait like gated content to identify prime prospects.
It was as cause-and-effect as buying gumballs from a machine, in Miller’s current assessment. The marketing department would put in however many quarters were needed to buy the number of gumballs—read “prospects”— the suits-on-high needed to meet their sales objectives.
But the prospects started getting wise. They learned that responding to an email or giving their contact information in exchange for downloadable content meant they could expect a barrage of emails or phone calls from the source company.
Plus, marketing departments often found they were allotted far fewer quarters amid today’s challenging business environment to feed the lead-generation machine.
The gumball-machine approach just doesn’t work anymore in B2B marketing, insists Miller. Building a pipeline of sales prospects is much more complicated, he asserts, and the process is likely to become more complex as AI comes into play.
He notes that a likely application of the technology will be screening emails and even automatically responding to them, putting a barrier between marketers and prospects.
The upshot, according to Miller, is an ongoing transformation of the B2B marketing process into a far more complex process. In his vision, companies should invest in research to better understand their targeted customers and how to connect with them on a personal and emotional basis.
Indeed, he contends the most important attributes for a marketer or salesperson in the increasingly complex world will be two old-school strengths: relationships and experience.
Miller will expound on his contrarian views of B2B marketing and sales in a keynote address at G2MarketEdge, the new immersive conference being hosted by IFMA The Food Away from Home Association in August.
The San Francisco event is structured as a hands-on learning opportunity. Instead of sitting in a conference room for days, attendees will visit innovation centers where tomorrow’s go-to-market strategies and tactics are being brainstormed.
Other participating thought leaders include Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist of Gong, a company that analyzes telephone sales calls to identify effective practices. Among the company’s findings: Uttering a cuss word during a telephone pitch can help to close a deal if the prospect should curse first.
Also on the roster of participating tech innovators are Alon Chen, co-founder and CEO of Tastewise, a company that enables companies to use AI as a predictive tool; and Laura Jones, Chief Marketing Officer of Instacart, the food-away-from-home delivery service.
For more information on the event, click here. More information about Miller can be found here.
As Managing Editor for IFMA The Food Away from Home Association, Romeo is responsible for generating the group's news and feature content. He brings more than 40 years of experience in covering restaurants to the position.