70+ Plays for your Demand Gen Library
What a plays library is, why it's missing from most demand gen orgs, and 70 plays to get started.
Most B2B marketing teams are running campaigns. Very few are running plays.
I’ve spent years inside demand gen orgs and consulting with them, and the pattern holds pretty consistently. Teams build out a content calendar, align on messaging for the quarter, get the creative approved, schedule the emails, and launch. Rinse and repeat the next quarter. Maybe they layer in a little segmentation. Maybe they have a nurture track or two.
And when pipeline is slow, they do more of it. More campaigns, more emails, more LinkedIn spend. Push the message out harder. R.A.M. (random acts of marketing) all around.
The problem isn’t that campaigns are bad. Campaigns are necessary. But it’s how most teams are running campaigns when they should also be running plays, and they’re treating those two things as if they’re the same motion.
They’re not. At least not in my mind.
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A campaign is how your brand talks to a market.
It’s your point of view, broadcast to a segment. A campaign tells a story about what you believe, what problem you solve, and why your category matters. Done well, it builds awareness, shapes perception, and warms up your total addressable market over time.
Think: a product launch, a seasonal push, an industry report rollout, a brand awareness series. These are all campaigns. They go out to a defined audience regardless of what that audience is doing right now. The message is relatively fixed. The trigger is the calendar.
A play is how you respond to a moment.
Something specific happens with a specific account or person, and you act on it. That’s the whole premise. A play exists because a signal exists. Take away the signal, and you have nothing to send. The activation (e.g. an email, an ad, a nurture, a dinner invite, etc.) is triggered by an insight you’ve gained.
A play looks like: your target account’s Head of Marketing just posted on LinkedIn about struggling with pipeline attribution. You have a relevant take on that problem. You reach out directly, referencing what they shared. I’d call that a play, not a campaign.
Or: a free trial user at one of your top 10 target accounts hit 80% of the usage threshold that typically predicts conversion. The play is triggered. Sales gets a task. A personalized email goes out.
Or: your best customer champion just started a new job at another company in your ICP. The moment they update their LinkedIn, a play fires.
These things can’t be scheduled.
A play requires a specific response to a specific moment.
That doesn’t mean it has to be manually written every time. Just that the activation should be designed around the trigger. The message, the timing, the ask, and the content all need to connect back to the trigger. If you swap out the trigger and the outreach still makes sense, you don’t really have a play.
The building blocks of a play.
Every play needs four things ideally to function:
A trigger. The specific condition that activates the play. Job change, pricing page visit, webinar attendance, competitive tool in their stack, funding announcement. No trigger, no play. This is the element most teams underdefine. “Website visitor” is too broad. “Pricing page visitor from a Tier 1 account with two or more visits in seven days” is a viable trigger.
A target. The play applies to a specific account, contact, or segment. Combined with your tier framework, this is how you control who gets what level of effort. A Tier 1 account hitting the same trigger as a Tier 3 account should get a meaningfully different play, or at least a different level of personalization within the same play.
An action. The actual thing you’re activating/launching. Could be an email, a LinkedIn message, an SDR task, a direct mail drop, a personalized landing page. The action has to be proportional to the signal. A pricing page visit from a cold account doesn’t warrant an exec-to-exec letter. A multi-visit, multi-stakeholder pattern at a named account does.
A clear connection between trigger and message. The prospect should be able to read your outreach and feel like it arrived at the right moment, even if they can’t articulate why. The message doesn’t always need to explicitly reference what they did, I personally prefer to take the “serendipitous” route. It should feel relevant to where they are right now.
The plays most teams are missing
After mapping this out with a handful of clients and building a play library over the past few months, a few categories consistently come up as gaps.
Most teams have some version of inbound signal response. If you fill out a demo request, someone follows up. Someone signs up for a webinar, they get a transactional calendar invite. Those are plays, even if teams don’t call them that.
Other, less commonly adopted, plays:
Job change plays. A former champion switches companies and lands somewhere in your ICP. This is one of the warmest possible signals you’ll ever see. They already know your product. They likely have an opinion on it. And they just stepped into a new role where they have both the mandate to make changes and the political capital to push something new through.
Proactive outreach plays with a real reason to reach out. Not “just checking in.” Not a generic sequence dressed up with a first name variable. An actual reason. Your team member is traveling to their city. They posted something on LinkedIn about a challenge you solve. Their competitor just went through a product sunset. Reason-to-reach-out plays are wildly underused.
Customer and expansion plays. The entire post-sale motion is usually absent from any plays discussion. A health score drop, an NPS promoter who hasn’t been asked for a referral, a champion who just got promoted, a usage spike that signals upgrade readiness. All of these are plays. All of them generate real revenue. Almost no demand gen team is running them systematically.
Multi-threading plays. A new decision-maker joins an account you’ve been working. A second contact is identified at a stalled deal. These moments are often caught by sales, but they rarely exist as a defined play with clear activation logic and outreach assets ready to go.
Campaigns and plays aren’t competing priorities
One thing worth being direct about: you still need campaigns.
Campaigns build the brand awareness and category credibility that make your plays land better. If someone’s never heard of you and you fire a play at them because there’s a potential partnership advantage, you’re going to get a much colder response than if you’d been building presence in their feed for the past few months.
Leverage them both. The ratio matters depending on where you are. If you’re early stage and relatively unknown, more of your energy goes into campaigns. As you build a bigger installed base, more signal data, and more brand presence in your category, plays start carrying more of the pipeline weight.
But even at the earliest stage, you should have plays. At minimum: inbound follow-up, job change for champions, and at least one proactive outreach play for your top accounts.
A plays library
I’ve been building out a reference library of plays that any B2B demand gen team can pull from, organized by signal type, account tier fit, and whether they’re core (run these regardless of stack maturity) or advanced (require specific tooling or higher personalization effort).
There are 70+ plays across five categories: 1st party signals, 2nd party signals, 3rd party signals, proactive outreach, and customer and expansion. Each one includes the specific trigger that activates it and a starting point for tier fit so you can figure out which accounts get what level of effort.
I’m sharing the full library here as a download. Start with the core plays. Get those running. Then layer in the advanced ones. It goes without saying, every company is different, use this template as a starting point, and customize based on what you know about your company.
*The goal is not necessarily to run all 76.
See ya next week,
Kaylee ✌
Super useful!! Thanks a lot