In most B2B businesses lead generation, or individual qualified "lead gen” more accurately, is at the core of business marketing - certainly for the tech sector. The merits of focusing on groups of buyers influential in a large corporate purchase over an individual executive is not new, but what is has a veteran B2B marketing analyst warning that almost every sector in B2B is still “focused on completely the wrong thing”. And the required shift that Kerry Cunningham, a former Forrester Principal Analyst now at US-based 6Sense, says is needed from B2B marketers has the backing of the Global VP and Head of Marketing at engineering giant ABB, Jo Woo, who agrees “traditional lead metrics are outdated”. B2B marketers must ditch their “obsession with counting leads”, she says, just as sales teams too must rethink their approach. For Andrew Haussegger, CEO at specialist B2B agency Green Hat, part of the fix is to “free the content”. That is, stop putting content behind a gate in order to capture leads – because brands need to influence a much broader set of people much earlier. Here’s the conversation that puts the hard data on lead generation.