95% Of B2B Leads Are Like Unripe Avocados. Patience And Generosity Win The Business When They Ripen.

Research consistently shows that at any given moment, roughly 95% of your B2B buyers aren’t in-market. They’re not evaluating vendors, running RFPs, or ready to take a meeting. The brands that win aren’t the ones who squeeze hardest and demand the demo. They’re the ones checking in, nurturing, and patiently earning the right to engage when the time is right.

That’s the organizing principle behind how Sam Faillace runs marketing at Paramark, a marketing measurement company helping growth-driven brands make smarter marketing decisions.

"Leads are like avocados," Faillace says. "Every salesperson would love to have a perfectly ripe one handed to them, but that’s just not how it works. You might encounter a hard avocado, and it might take nine months for it to become ready." With a career spanning Microsoft, Shutterfly, and Sunbasket, Faillace brings a consumer marketer’s instinct for emotional resonance into a B2B world obsessed with automation and attribution. His answer to an era where every brand sounds the same isn’t a better tech stack. It’s generosity, patience, and the discipline to show up long before a buyer is ready to move.

• Lead with what's interesting: Faillace sees B2B marketers following a predictable instinct to race toward outcomes like ROI, efficiency gains, and pipeline metrics before they've given anyone a reason to care. In his view, this is a fundamental misstep and one he's actively working against. "A lot of B2B brands go directly to ROI, but you need to take a step before that and ask, 'What is our point of difference? Why are we interesting? Why should you pay attention to us?'"

• Crafting a message that lands: For Paramark, which helps marketing leaders identify and act on acquisition opportunities, those questions led somewhere concrete. The brand's target audience is ambitious, career-driven marketing leaders who want to win. So, instead of leading with platform features or performance benchmarks, the company's positioning focuses on the competitive edge of seeing opportunities others might miss and getting the advisory support to actually act on them. "It's insight and action paired together in order to create outcomes," Faillace says. "Yes, there's ROI, but I don't lead with that." It's a subtle shift with significant downstream effects. When your positioning starts with relevance to the person, not the product, Faillace says, you create the conditions for a message to actually land.

The same philosophy shapes how Paramark approaches content and distribution at a time when LinkedIn rewards people over brands and email inboxes are overwhelmed. Automation has made both channels simultaneously more efficient and more forgettable. Faillace's response isn't to out-automate the competition, but to out-human them. "We share original content with real perspectives, not AI slop, and I think people respect that. That's what shines through," he shares.

• Differentiating with a human touch: One of Faillace's biggest performance drivers has been the decision to bring on a marketing manager who is genuinely funny, thoughtful, and willing to engage from the Paramark LinkedIn handle like a real person. "You can tell there is a human behind our handle now," Faillace says. "You can't AI that. It couldn't generate the kind of authentic interactions we're having." The results have been concrete. He says Paramark now reaches roughly 50% of its ideal customer profile audience on LinkedIn, driven not by forced ad spend, but by identifying which organic posts are already resonating and amplifying those through paid.

• Emails worth reading: Email follows a similar framework. The team sends a monthly newsletter built around genuine usefulness, including thought leadership from the CEO, event recaps, and market perspectives that recipients actually want to read. "I walk into a conference and people say, 'Oh, I know your CEO. I get his email newsletter,'" he says. When prospects are referencing your CEO by name before a sales conversation begins, the content is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

• Give before you ask: The overarching principle Faillace returns to is one he calls leading with generosity. "Let's not ask for things. Let's give. If you are generous in your perspectives, your content, inviting people to things, that's attention. You're giving them a gift of something."

None of this means Paramark ignores AI. But how Faillace deploys it reveals something important about the model. Rather than layering automation across every touchpoint, he hired a dedicated GTM engineer, embedded directly with the marketing team, whose job is essentially to protect the generosity-first strategy from collapsing under its own weight. The way Faillace describes it, the GTM engineer isn’t there to replace human judgment, but to make sure the humans never have to choose between authenticity and scale. "We’re not adopting AI to check a box," Faillace says. "We’re starting with the outcome we want and only using it where it actually supports the strategy." That distinction matters more than it sounds. In most B2B orgs, automation creeps into relationship-building until the whole operation feels mechanical. At Paramark, the GTM engineer absorbs operational complexity like data enrichment, workflow sequencing, and signal monitoring so the team’s human bandwidth stays reserved for the moments that actually build trust.

In practice, this looks like a series of deliberate handoffs between machine and human. When a prospect reaches a demo-ready stage, an automated process verifies the company against ICP criteria, identifies and enriches key stakeholders, and loads those contacts into a LinkedIn ad set, often within 48 hours. The result is a surround-sound effect: decision-makers who aren’t yet in a sales conversation start encountering Paramark’s thinking before anyone picks up the phone. "When Paramark comes up in a week or two, there’s some familiarity," Faillace says. "We didn’t cold-call our way in. We were already in the room." AI also feeds the intelligence layer. Call recordings, account signals, job changes, and engagement gaps roll into daily alerts that surface which relationships need attention and why. But the response is always a human call. "It’s still up to the human to use their judgment about how to communicate, and how and when," Faillace says. The GTM engineer builds the infrastructure. The team decides what to do with it. That’s the bridge between generosity and automation that most B2B teams miss. Automation handles the complexity of staying present at scale. Generosity determines what you do with the presence once you have it.

• AI flags, humans decide: AI also surfaces the intelligence that humans act on. Call recordings, account signals, job changes, and engagement gaps feed into daily alerts that flag which relationships need attention and why. Still, Faillace holds firm in the response always being a human decision. "It's still up to the human to use their judgment about how to communicate, and how and when."

• Personalization can't be fabricated: When it comes to personalization, his team applies deliberate constraint. "When it's an automation, I try to keep it relatively simple and not try to pull facts about people that are publicly available and assert them, because it looks fake. People are just too savvy to it." Human outreach, he says, requires human nuance.

Perhaps the sharpest insight Faillace offers is about what B2B marketers get wrong when they over-index on attribution. He explains that touch-based models create a kind of false precision, capturing touches you can see while missing the conversations that actually drive decisions. "When I pop into marketing community Slack channels, I see the conversations going on. 'I need a vendor for this. What do you guys recommend?' Those are the conversations that matter. I can't quantify that touch. So let it go." What he can control is showing up consistently, authentically, and generously across the channels and moments that compound over time. In a market saturated with automation promising instant results, Paramark's bet is on the longer arc, building trust that gets the brand into consideration when the right moment arrives.