After nearly two decades in B2B and SaaS marketing, there are a few things I’ve stopped being polite about. Not universal truths. Just the convictions I bring into every engagement, the ones that shape what I push back on and what I push hardest for. Four of them matter more than the rest.
Positioning is the work. Everything else is dressing.
Most B2B businesses don’t have a marketing problem. They have a positioning problem. You can run a beautifully executed campaign, strong creative, clean funnel, and still watch it fall flat. Usually because the claim underneath it, who you are and why anyone should care, isn’t clear. Or it is clear, and it sounds exactly like the four other companies pitching for the same job.
Get positioning right and everything downstream gets sharper for free. Every campaign, every piece of content, every sales call. Get it wrong and you spend the year doing more activity to make up for a story that never lands. It’s also the bit most businesses skip, because it’s hard and abstract and doesn’t produce a tidy deliverable for the Q3 plan. Which is exactly why it’s where the work should start.
Buyers don’t move in a straight line.
Funnels are a useful model and a poor description of reality. Real buyers form opinions over months, in dribs and drabs, mostly when they’re nowhere near ready to buy. They read something. A colleague mentions you. They notice an ad, forget it, notice it again. Eventually a need surfaces and they shortlist three names off impressions they don’t even remember forming.
So the job isn’t to convert someone the moment they raise their hand. It’s to be present, credible and memorable through the long stretch when they’re not. By the time they’re comparing vendors, the decision is mostly made. Here’s the uncomfortable part: the work that actually moved them happened months earlier, and your attribution model can’t see it. Last-click reporting credits the final ad and quietly defunds the brand-building that did the real work. Lead scoring promises a precision it doesn’t have. Drop LinkedIn for “more pipeline-focused” tactics and it tends to backfire within a quarter, you just won’t get a report that tells you why.
Half the job is sales and marketing speaking the same language.
When marketers feel unrespected, it’s usually because they’re handing over leads sales doesn’t want. When sales is short of pipeline, it’s usually because they’re binning leads marketing swears are good. Both are working hard. Neither is happy. The fix isn’t another process or a new tool. It’s definitions. What counts as a qualified lead? What does ready-to-buy actually look like? When you and the head of sales answer those in the same words, everything downstream gets easier. When you can’t, no amount of automation rescues it.
Which leads to the part nobody writes into the marketing plan: a good chunk of marketing work isn’t marketing at all. It’s the conversation with the sales lead that decides what marketing is even meant to be optimising for. Skip it and you’ll run beautiful campaigns toward a goal sales never agreed to.
Real thought leadership is something someone could disagree with.
Most of what gets called thought leadership is so safe no one could possibly object. Five tips for better subject lines. Why customer experience matters. The future of AI in your industry. It says nothing, so it can’t be wrong, and it does nothing for you either.
The real thing stakes a claim. It commits to a view not everyone shares. That’s what gives it shelf life, and what gets you remembered when a buyer goes looking. If you read your own content and feel completely comfortable, it’s probably too bland to be working for you. Be willing to sound like you actually think something. The buyers you want are looking for exactly that, not another list of best practices they could find anywhere.
Measure impact, not activity.
Marketing has been counting the wrong things for years. Emails sent. Posts published. Leads generated. These tell you the team was busy. They don’t tell you the business is in a better commercial position than it was. The worst offender is the one most boards still ask for: lead volume. The MQL is a vanity metric dressed up as a commercial one. A pile of leads sales won’t call isn’t pipeline, it’s activity with a number next to it.
The numbers that matter are the commercial ones: pipeline contribution, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, win rate against the competitors you actually lose to. Those connect marketing to revenue, and they’re what earn the function the trust and the budget to do the strategic work. If your dashboard is mostly engagement metrics, you’re managing the appearance of marketing. If it’s mostly commercial ones, you’re managing the function.
None of it is complicated. It’s just the stuff that’s easy to skip when you’re busy. If this sounds like the way you’d want your marketing approached, get in touch.