Welcome back to the Voice of Experts newsletter. I’m Bruno Gavino. This week, I sat down with Mark Osborne, a highly experienced B2B SaaS advisor and the author of the best-selling book, “Are Your Leads Killing Your Business”. We agreed to skip the usual marketing fluff and get straight into the brutal realities of scaling a B2B revenue engine.
During our conversation, Mark dropped a truth bomb that completely rewired how I view customer acquisition:
“Bad-fit leads are terrible because they’re fundamentally the table scraps from your competitors that are doing a better job of identifying those best fit opportunities in the market.”
Let that sink in. Let’s break down exactly why this happens, and how to stop feeding your business the scraps.
The Dangerous Obsession with Lead Volume
In the B2B and SaaS worlds, valuations are heavily driven by top-line growth. To hit these aggressive targets, founders and marketing teams often become completely obsessed with generating an ever-increasing volume of leads. They believe the math is simple: more leads at the top of the funnel will naturally equate to more proposals, more conversions, and more renewals.
But Mark points out a fatal flaw in this thinking: chasing sheer volume creates massive distraction and stretches company resources until they eventually snap. When you treat all leads equally—spreading your time, energy, and capital across them like peanut butter—you fail to identify the crucial 20% of customers that actually generate 80% of your revenue. Because most leads won’t actually close, only a tiny fraction truly represent those tier-one, best-fit customers.
Eating Your Competitor’s Table Scraps
This brings us back to that core concept. When your business is distracted by trying to serve absolutely everyone, your sharper competitors are actively investing 80% of their resources to win the absolute best deals.
What happens next? They beat you. They take the prime prospects, and you are left fighting over the bad-fit leads—the table scraps.
According to Mark, bringing these bad-fit leads into your ecosystem initiates a “long, slow death spiral”. It isn’t immediate, but here is exactly how these scraps kill your business over time:
They derail your product vision: Bad-fit leads never truly buy into your real product vision or what you are trying to create in your category. Instead, they frequently demand custom solutions tailored specifically to their own operations. You end up building for their unique quirks rather than what the broader market actually needs, pulling you further behind your competitors.
They destroy your margins: Because they don’t fully believe in your value proposition, they will inevitably demand discounts. This erodes your profit margins, leaving you with less capital to reinvest in your product.
They churn in silence: Bad-fit leads will churn out before they ever provide market advocacy. You will never see them stand on a conference stage with you to praise the great results they got, meaning you lose out on the powerful compounding effect of customer referrals.
Redefining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
So, how do we fix this? The answer isn’t necessarily hyper-niching. Mark notes that companies often define their ICP in one of two flawed ways: either far too generically (”anyone with a checkbook”) or so narrowly that the Total Addressable Market (TAM) limits their opportunity for success.
Instead, we need to define our ICP based on specific contexts, needs, and our unique capability to serve those exact requirements. Mark used a brilliant CRM analogy to explain this:
A growing company needs a CRM to help them scale and better service a growing customer base.
A shrinking company needs a CRM to do a better job of servicing the customers they already have and making the most out of a declining market.
Both are buying a CRM, but their contexts are entirely different. If you build a CRM, you must decide which specific use case you are uniquely positioned to solve, and highlight your differentiated capabilities there.
The “Three Ps” and Escaping Founder Dependency
During our chat, I asked Mark a question that I know worries many founders: Does systemizing everything commoditize the business and strip away the founder’s vision?.
His answer was a definitive no. Implementing business systems does not turn you into a commodity. In fact, Mark advocates for building a “proprietary, proven process”. This is exactly what gives prospects the confidence that they will consistently get the same high-quality outcomes.
More importantly, a systemized business is a highly investable business. If your revenue engine relies entirely on the heroic, day-to-day efforts of the founder to close every new deal, the business is too risky to acquire. By implementing robust systems, you reduce your dependence on the founder’s heroics, which actually frees them up to be more strategic and visionary.
The AI Hammer: Stop Amplifying Garbage
Finally, we had to touch on Artificial Intelligence. With so many AI agents automating outreach, I asked if AI was just adding noise to an already fragmented, non-linear buyer path.
Mark’s perspective is rooted in a classic hierarchy of innovation: people, strategy, process, and then technology. He warned that businesses often make the massive mistake of deploying AI technology before establishing a clear strategy or process, which leads to wasted resources and negative outcomes.
AI shouldn’t be used to blindly expand outbound messaging to people who don’t care. “The AI won’t tell you you’re making a bad choice,” Mark joked. In fact, if you ask an AI what is wrong with the Sistine Chapel, it will confidently generate a 30-page report of everything Michelangelo did wrong. If you feed AI “garbage” inputs without guardrails or specific intent, it will just help you execute that garbage at a larger scale.
Instead, AI should be a tool for narrowing focus—identifying true intent signals, making sense of data, and helping stakeholders automate complex workflows like proposal generation.
Final Thoughts
This conversation fundamentally changed my perspective on volume-based marketing. If you are struggling with churn, margin compression, and endless feature requests, take a hard look at your pipeline. Are you closing best-fit customers? Or are you just eating your competitors’ table scraps?
Let me know what you think in the comments below. And remember, in modern marketing, the most relevant offering always wins.
Until next time,
Bruno Gavino
Ah and make sure your order it on Amazon: “Are Your Leads Killing Your Business”