Does your marketing team suck?

Check your setup before you hire, fire, cut or increase the budget again

This one is for the CEOs and leadership teams of B2B orgs with lean orgs, small marketing teams, selling tech or professional services with 6-12-18 month sales cycles and deal size big enough that nobody buys on impulse, who secretly or openly think their marketing team sucks. You've been hiring, firing, raising the budget, cutting it, adding headcount, taking it away, and nothing works.

And yes, sometimes you did hire the wrong people. But more often, it's the setup.

I've been seeing variations of these things happen since my first job some 15 years ago, across consulting, big tech, big tobacco, and back into tech. Different industries, different countries, same patterns.

Here we go. A list of things you can look at that will make your org's marketing suck less, without adding budget or headcount.

1. Be honest with yourself, your head of marketing, and your wider leadership team about what you think marketing is, and agree on your position as a company: what is marketing for, in your company?

Some scenarios:

• Marketing = on-demand assistants for sales and the org

• Marketing = partner and contributor to pipeline

No position is necessarily bad, and there's no wrong answer. You know what your business needs. But being honest about what you think of marketing as a function, and what marketing could do for your business, will help you and your organization focus on the things that actually grow the business. You won't spend and lose time on unnecessary topics. Which takes me to #2.

2. Measure marketing on their actual scope

If marketing = on-demand assistants for sales and the org, with no say, influence, or veto on strategy, go-to-market, or company plans, then it's very far-fetched to measure this team on pipeline creation and contribution. If your marketing team spends most of its time creating slides for sales and channel presentations, assembling slides, and moving them from random PPT templates into the company's approved template while fixing fonts, font sizes, and colors, then you can mostly measure volume:

• number of slides

• number of presentations

• how happy sales is with the service

Add a very, very indirect, far-away influence on win rate, sales cycle, and business growth. They're part of the process, so there's some percentage of influence there but not significant.

If marketing = partner and contributor to pipeline, with say, influence, contribution, or even veto on company strategy and the go-to-market plan, then you can measure:

• marketing-created and assisted pipeline

• return on marketing spend

• win rate

• sales cycle

The problems usually show up when, officially, you say your marketing function is a partner and contributor to pipeline, but unofficially, in reality, you treat marketing as assistants for sales and the org. Or a combination of both. The combination is what actually leads to the worst results, and to your marketing team actually sucking. They will not be able to produce a strategy, execute on it, and also produce Suzan from Sales' slides on time and with excellent quality.

A note on Suzan: she's a composite. Every company has one. Different name, different function, a different gender etc.

If you actually need to provide this type of support to your org/sales team, you're better served by deciding marketing = on-demand assistants and sticking with it. It's not the best setup, but you'll still be better off than striving for "jack of all trades" assistants for the business or sales org plus pipeline co-creating partner. Most likely you don't have the staffing to do both well, or even decently, and you will spend significant time managing the drama and chaos that comes from that setup.

Some behaviors to notice in your org, to figure out where you stand and whether your official position holds up unofficially:

• Everyone uses and delivers company materials on company-approved templates. When someone doesn't, the most senior person in the room calls it out, professionally but firmly. Otherwise you're making your marketing function the company's brand police, and an ineffective one, because the random, non-approved template was already shown in front of the CEO and nobody blinked. Marlena from Content policing the culprit afterwards won't make much difference…

  
  

• If you have approved messaging and positioning, are you using them? And when you hear someone using retired or invented messaging, is the most senior person in the room calling it out? Same as before: Marlena from Content can police them until she's blue in the face, and it will have no effect if the CEO or another senior leader lets it slide. You'll end up with two sellers describing your company differently on the same day, and no amount of marketing budget or sales genius, not even Ogilvy himself, should he come back to life and offer his comms services, will save you from the DYI messaging and blurring the company's positioning as a result.

  
  

This is just a sample of behaviors. There are many variations and symptoms. Notice the tension between what you say you want to happen and what actually happens, and how the most senior people in the room respond when they're not worried about how it looks. This leads to #3.

3. Uphold the standards

If marketing = assistants for sales and the org, you can't look at them for marketing-created or assisted pipeline. Those souls don't touch it, because they're too busy making Suzan's slides match on font size.

If marketing = partner and contributor to pipeline, don't slap their wrist because they didn't turn the logo from blue to yellow at Suzan's suggestion, or because they refused to clean Suzan's slides. This is the team that, after working with your LOB leaders and leadership team (LT), proposes the brand, messaging, positioning, and GTM strategy and plan, and starts executing it.

Also, if you or your LT take two months to approve the plan, the strategy, the proposal, you might have the problem that you're not clear on what your marketing function is and does in your company. You have that tension between what it should be and what it actually is. As I said, you'll be better served if you have clarity what this team is and does in your company, not the shoulda, woulda, coulda.

4. Beware of the pet-peeve-driven strategy

I used to work for a boss who had an aversion to the word "brand." Everything had to be demand generation or tied to sales. As a result, the strategy, the plan, and the execution were all demand gen and sales-driven, and despite everyone's best efforts, the pipeline and the revenue failed to materialize. The conclusion was that marketing was too slow, missed the point, the copy wasn't sharp, the design was off. Basically, marketing sucked.

The reality was a bit more nuanced. No matter how much money, effort, and focus you put into demand gen and sales-driven activities, if you don't show up in search for your buyers' pain points, if your site says one thing and the sales presentation says another, if you expose your business expertise one prospect at a time, then, assuming you have good market fit, most likely you have a brand problem.

If you or your sellers find yourselves explaining your company after 2-5-10-15-20 years in business, you have a brand problem.

You can't solve a brand problem with more demand gen. You solve it with a brand strategy and plan. But of course, if brand is a forbidden word, you'll be stuck in this "nothing works" cycle.

5. Be honest about your marketing problems

Continuing the brand battle royale: after some time in the market, if you're still using the full corporate presentation at every first sales meeting to explain who you are to your buyers and channel, you have a brand problem. Acknowledge it and solve it.

If you're losing the deal in negotiation, you have a problem with your proof of concept. Acknowledge it and solve it.

6. Be honest about what you can measure, and what you're willing to do for the sake of measurement

Do you know those pesky forms with those pesky fields? Raise your hand if you love them… I especially love that "How did you hear about us?" question. Let's be honest about who it's for. Not the buyer. The slide that goes to the board to prove that marketing is data-driven and not an arts and crafts shop.

Marlena the buyer says: I'm on your website, checking you out. Trust that when I have enough info and I'm ready to buy or engage with you in any way, I will find a way. I'm a grown person who knows how to find an email or a phone number. No amount of unwanted emails and personalized comms will make me buy or engage sooner. If you have cool content that will make me smarter, better, feeling better about myself, etc, I will happily give you my email for you to email me at your heart's content, until I am finally ready to part with my dollars or my company's dollars, and trust that I am not making a mistake (when my dollars) or end up losing my job (when my company's dollars).

Marlena the marketer adds those pesky forms anyway, to justify her existence. That's marketing for the wrong audience: the buyer gets the friction so the board gets a number and the marketing budget and Marlena from Content survive another quarter.

In marketing, there's no framework in this world that will accurately, factually tell you how much money a demo generated. There are frameworks, and a lot of plumbing, that will give you some signals of performance.

Now, be honest about what you can measure. Meaning the infrastructure you have or are willing to invest in, and the time your team will spend measuring, tagging, tracking, and trying to make sense of the data.

And be aware of what you're willing to do to your customers for the sake of proving whether marketing works or not. We say in our materials that we care about our buyers, but that doesn't stop us from adding friction to their journey for the sake of justifying marketing's existence.

7. Prioritize. Actually prioritize.

If you have a lean team, accept that they can only do so much. I know we're living in the age of "do more with less," AI for productivity and content generation, and all that jazz. You still need to prioritize if you're limited on headcount. You can't do it all with three people.

Yes, AI can help produce more volume and cut time on production and on low-value, repetitive tasks. But good-quality output still takes time. Creativity takes time. So does aligning with Suzan and chasing Suzan on the offering, on the customer experience, and so on.

So prioritize. What's the focus: which service lines, which channel, which buyer? Because with three people and an intern, you will not catch them all.

8. Be a safe space where marketing (and other teams) can share challenges and solutions

Are you unhappy and think your marketing sucks? Check in with these people. Ask them what they'd stop doing if they could, and don't punish the answer. Create a safe space where they can share challenges and solutions. And actually be a safe space. Have you seen the job market? Between the state of the job market, the AI job apocalypse, and enough experience to know that the heroes die early in the movie, I think real honesty can only be expected in a safe environment. We all have bills to pay, kids to send to school, mortgages. Bills that arrive no matter what.

When marketing doesn't suck, you can make more money. From search to closed won deals, when done well, given the necessary time, marketing gets you increased win rate, shorter sales cycle, the ability to hold your price and not discount your way to get your buyers to sign. So maybe, as we enter Q4 and we're all looking anxiously at that pipeline, we can ask ourselves: did we create the conditions for this function to perform and actually do marketing? Marketing for our buyers to find us and understand we can solve their problems? Or did we spend the last 10 months convincing Suzan that turning the logo from blue to yellow is not a good idea? Or sending reminders to the leadership team to approve the messaging?

At the end of the day, marketing still happens: the marketing team marketing internally, the sales team marketing one prospect at a time, everyone's busy, and despite everyone's best efforts and intentions, the pipeline is giving anxiety.

Fixing these situations doesn't take more budget, more headcount, a fancy agency or a marketing guru. It takes an honest look at your setup and your culture, and the decision to stop making avoidable mistakes. Start with #1. Once you've decided what marketing is for in your company, everything else on this list gets a lot easier.

Marlena from Marketing

Sometimes chasing people to approve the draft. Sometimes doing marketing.

The opinions here are my own and don't represent any past or present employer or client. Suzan and every other example are composites, drawn from patterns I've seen across 15 years, several industries. Any resemblance to your Suzan is a sign of how common this is, not of who I've worked with. No salespeople were harmed in the making of this piece.