After nearly two decades in B2B and SaaS marketing, there are a few things I’ve stopped being polite about. These are the convictions I bring into every engagement. The ones that shape what I push back on and what I push hardest for.
None of this is universal truth. It’s what I’ve taken from nearly two decades in the work. Take what’s useful.
1. Positioning is the work. Everything else is just dressing.
Most B2B businesses don’t have a marketing problem. They have a positioning problem.
You can run a perfectly executed campaign, with strong creative and a clean funnel, and watch it fall flat. The underlying claim about who you are and why anyone should care isn’t clear. Or worse, it’s clear but it doesn’t differentiate you from the four other companies pitching for the same business.
Positioning is where the leverage lives. Get it right and every campaign, every piece of content, every sales conversation gets sharper for free. Get it wrong and you spend the rest of the year doing more activity to compensate for a story that doesn’t land.
It’s also the work most businesses skip, because it’s hard and abstract and doesn’t produce a deliverable that fits cleanly in a Q3 plan. That’s exactly why it’s where the senior marketing work should start.
2. Strategy and execution should live in the same head.
The standard agency model (strategy team here, execution team there, account manager in the middle translating) is broken for most B2B businesses. The strategist doesn’t see what’s actually deliverable. The executor doesn’t understand why decisions were made. The account manager’s job is to keep both sides happy, which usually means letting the work get diluted.
Marketing decisions should be made by people who also have to live with them. If I write the strategy, I should be the one explaining to the developer why the homepage copy needs to change. If I plan the campaign, I should be the one writing the email subject line. The translation tax kills more good marketing than bad ideas do.
This is one of the reasons fractional works for B2B businesses that have been burnt by agencies. One senior person. One point of view. All the way through.
3. B2B buyers don’t move in a straight line.
Funnels are a useful model and a poor description of reality. Real B2B buyers form opinions over months, in dribs and drabs, mostly when they’re not actively in market. They read something. They hear a colleague mention you. They notice an ad. They forget. They notice again. Eventually a need surfaces and they short-list three companies based on impressions they don’t fully remember forming.
The job of marketing is not to convert the buyer in the moment they raise their hand. It’s to be present, credible, and memorable during the long stretch when they’re not raising it. By the time the buyer is comparing vendors, the decision is mostly already made.
This is why content matters. It’s why brand presence matters. It’s why dropping LinkedIn for “more pipeline-focused” tactics usually backfires within a quarter.
4. Sales and marketing alignment is most of the job.
When marketing teams complain about not being respected, it’s usually because they’re producing leads that sales doesn’t want. When sales teams complain about not having enough pipeline, it’s usually because they’re rejecting leads that marketing thinks are perfectly good. Both are working hard. Neither is happy.
The fix isn’t process. It’s definitions. What is a qualified lead? What does ready-to-buy look like? What’s the messaging journey from first touch to first call? When you and the head of sales can answer those questions in the same words, everything downstream gets easier. When you can’t, no amount of automation will rescue it.
Half the senior marketing work I do isn’t marketing. It’s the conversation with the sales lead that defines what marketing is supposed to be optimising for.
5. Real thought leadership is something someone could disagree with.
Most content marketed as “thought leadership” is generic enough that no reasonable person could object to it. Five tips for better email subject lines. Why customer experience matters. The future of AI in your industry. It says nothing, so it can’t be wrong.
Real thought leadership stakes a claim. It commits to a specific view that not everyone shares. That’s what gives it shelf life and creates the recall that gets you remembered when buyers go looking.
If you read your own content and feel comfortable, it’s probably too generic to be doing any work for you. Be willing to sound like you actually think something. The buyers you want are looking for that, not for another list of best practices they could have found anywhere else.
6. A senior marketer’s first job is making the case for marketing.
In most growing businesses, half the marketing job is internal. You’re explaining to the founder why brand work matters before you ever get to do any. You’re justifying the investment in content when sales hits a slow quarter. You’re translating marketing impact into language the CFO actually engages with.
Marketers who can’t do this end up stuck doing tactical execution, because that’s what gets funded. Marketers who can do this get to do strategic work, because they’ve earned the trust and the budget to.
It’s not glamorous. It’s not the work people get into marketing to do. But if you can’t justify your function in commercial terms to your CEO, you don’t get to do the function the way it should be done.
7. Measure impact, not activity.
Marketing departments have been measuring the wrong things for years. Number of emails sent. Number of posts published. Number of leads generated. These tell you whether the team was busy. They don’t tell you whether the business is in a better commercial position than it was.
The metrics that matter are pipeline contribution, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, sales cycle length, win rate against named competitors. These connect marketing to revenue. They make the case for marketing that the senior leader needs to make (see lesson 6).
If your marketing dashboard is mostly engagement metrics, you’re managing the appearance of marketing. If it’s mostly commercial metrics, you’re managing the function.
If any of this sounds like the way you’d want your marketing approached, get in touch.