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Luan Wise www.b2bmarketing.com

Content and Communications

Reach is down. Engagement is shifting. And we’re probably measuring the wrong thing

Reach is down. Engagement is shifting. And we’re probably measuring the wrong thing.

Every few months, the same topic reappears. Reach on social media is down. Algorithms are suppressing organic content. Nobody's seeing anything anymore. The feeds are broken.

And sometimes, the data agrees. Sometimes, it doesn't. What it almost never does is tell a simple story -  because marketing measurement has never been simple!

Two new studies put some useful numbers behind the social media measurement challenge. Buffer analysed over 52 million posts across 10 platforms. Metricool looked into 673,658 LinkedIn posts from more than 63,000 accounts. Together, they complicate the narrative in the most useful way possible.

What ‘success looks like’ has changed

Yes, some platforms are showing declining engagement rates. Instagram's median engagement rate fell from around 7.4% in 2024 to around 5.5% in 2025 - a 26% decline.

But here's what that number doesn't tell you: Instagram has increasingly steered users toward views as its primary success metric, which means the traditional engagement rate formula may simply be measuring less of what Instagram is actually optimising for – it was designed for a feed of static images. It doesn't capture saves ("I want to come back to this") or sends ("I want someone else to see this"), neither of which shows up in a public count. The metric didn't break. The platform moved on, and the formula didn't follow.

Meanwhile, Facebook's median engagement rate rose to around 5.6% in 2025 (up from around 5.0% in 2024), Pinterest climbed 23%, and X, despite remaining at the bottom of the engagement-rate rankings, saw a 44% relative gain.

So, is social media performance dying? Not across the board. What's really happening is that each platform is evolving its own definition of what success looks like - and the core metrics we've been using for years aren't keeping pace.

"Engagement" isn't one thing

This is the part most reporting gets wrong. When we talk about engagement rates across platforms as if they're comparable, we're mixing up fundamentally different measurements.

LinkedIn, for example, includes clicks in its engagement rate, while most other platforms don't. The Metricool LinkedIn data highlights this issue; look at the year-over-year numbers for LinkedIn Company Pages: impressions down 10%, likes down 13%, comments down 17%, shares down 11%. On the surface, it looks like a platform losing steam. And if those were your only metrics, you'd probably be worried.

But clicks, the interactions that don't show up publicly on your posts, rose by 5%. Every time someone swipes through a carousel, watches a video, or follows a link, LinkedIn tracks it. When you include those invisible interactions, overall engagement rate went up, from 12.21% to 13.90%.

LinkedIn now surfaces impression metrics for comments, meaning the conversation itself is being measured for reach. And posts don't just generate engagement; they drive profile views and follower conversions that don't register as "engagement" in most reporting dashboards, but are often the actual business outcome the post was trying to achieve.

A post that gets 200 likes and converts 40 profile visitors into followers is doing more useful work than a post that gets 500 likes and sends nobody anywhere. Most analytics tools report the first number. Virtually none report the second.

People are interacting with LinkedIn content more than ever. Just not in ways anyone else can see. And that's not just a LinkedIn story.

Instagram’s most valuable engagement signals — saves and sends — are invisible to everyone except the creator and the algorithm. A save tells Instagram that this content has enough value that someone wants to return to it. A send tells Instagram that this content is worth someone's social capital to share privately.

These are higher-intent signals than a like, and they're exactly the ones the traditional engagement rate formula was never built to capture.

And then there’s the role of comments; not just as engagement, but as content in their own right. The original post is often only the starting point; the real narrative, social proof, and persuasion increasingly unfold in the comment thread.

Across nearly two million posts from 220,000+ accounts on Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Bluesky, posts where creators reply to comments consistently outperformed those where they don't — on every platform studied.

The estimated engagement lift: Threads +42%, LinkedIn +30%, Instagram +21%, Facebook +9%, X +8%, Bluesky +5%.

The Like button: a great 2009 answer. Just not a 2026 one.

The Like button turned 17 this year. When it launched in 2009, there were no carousels, no Reels, no Stories. The feed was a chronological stream of status updates and photos. Engagement meant just one of two things: you pressed a button, or you left a comment.

Now, swiping through a carousel is engagement. Saving a post to return to later is engagement. Sending something to a colleague with a note is engagement. Clicking through to someone's profile after reading their post is engagement. None of these behaviours fit into the original model, and yet they're now among the highest-intent signals a platform receives about whether content is actually working.

The platforms have been quietly reweighting their algorithms around these user behaviours for years. What's changed is that the gap between what the algorithms are measuring and what most social media managers are reporting. The conversation has not moved on from asking about followers and likes.

The format gap

Both studies independently arrived at the same finding: the formats that dominate in posting volume are almost never the formats that perform best.

On LinkedIn, images account for around 49% of all Company Page posts, and video another 25% — so nearly 75% of all content. Yet carousels, which make up just 7.6% of posts, earn a 49.52% engagement rate. Images earn 5.77%. Video earns 6.91%. Metricool's headline finding: carousels get 11x more interactions than images, yet images are posted 6x more than carousels.

Metricool also found that LinkedIn posts including a direct question see 77% more comments than average, and posts with a specific call to action to comment see an 80% increase. That's not a hack, it's simply designing content to invite a response rather than passive consumption, and measuring whether the conversation happened, not just whether the post was seen.

There’s a similar story on Instagram — and it’s really a reach story. Reels get 36% more reach than carousels, putting your content in front of people who’ve never heard of you. But carousels earn 109% more engagement per person reached, meaning the people who do see them are going much further in. These aren’t competing findings; they’re pointing to two different strategies for two different goals. Reels are for reach — discovery, new audiences, the top of the funnel. Carousels are for depth — getting the people who already follow you to go further in. The mistake is treating “best format” as a single answer when the platform is really asking: best for what?

And top tip, add music to your carousel and Instagram will treat it as a Reel.

And it's worth mentioning polls on LinkedIn, which reach nearly three times more people per post than any other format and are simultaneously the least-used format of all.

Part of the tension here is operational: we're often not creating content that aligns with the engagement outcomes we're actually worried about. Instead, we're defaulting to what is easiest, familiar, or historically “standard” within teams.

Reach: the right question

So is reach actually collapsing? The honest answer is: it depends what you’re posting, and why. Organic reach has undeniably become harder on some platforms — LinkedIn impressions for Company Pages fell 10% year-on-year, and algorithm-driven feeds mean fewer posts surface to non-followers by default. That’s real.

But reach is not evenly distributed — it’s format-dependent. LinkedIn polls reach nearly three times more people per post than any other format on the platform, yet they’re the least-used format of all. On Instagram, Reels consistently outperform carousels on raw reach. The platforms aren’t suppressing content uniformly; they’re rewarding formats they want to promote. Knowing which formats those are is the more useful question than asking whether reach is “up or down” overall.

And here’s the more fundamental point: reach was never the destination. It was always a proxy — a way of estimating whether the right people might have seen something. If your content is generating the outcomes you actually care about (pipeline, profile growth, inbound enquiries, qualified conversations), then lower headline reach numbers are almost irrelevant. A post seen by 500 of exactly the right people that drives three meaningful conversations is doing more useful work than a post seen by 50,000 people who scroll straight past. The question worth asking isn’t “how do I get more reach?” — it’s “is my reach reaching the right people, and are they doing anything as a result?”

The boring truth about consistency

In the analysis of 4.8 million observations across approximately 161,000 profiles on Facebook, Instagram, and X, Buffer found that accounts that went quiet for a week consistently underperformed their own baseline growth rates. They called it the "no-post penalty."

The headline isn't that you need to post more. It's that going quiet has a penalty.

What engagement is really becoming

The shift from public to behind-the-scenes engagement isn't a temporary algorithm quirk. It reflects something real about how people use these platforms now — more intentional, more private, more likely to save something for later or send it to one specific person than to perform a public reaction to it.

For individuals and organisations, the metrics worth building dashboards around are increasingly the ones that don't show up in the public domain.

And underneath all of it, the findings from both studies point to the same foundational behaviours: show up consistently, use the formats that generate intentional engagement, and be social on social.

And when someone asks whether your reach or engagement is down — ask them what happened next. Because if the right people saw it, engaged with it in ways that mattered, and something moved as a result, those are not metrics problems. That's the whole point.

 

 

Sources: Buffer, State of Social Media Engagement 2026; Metricool, LinkedIn Study 2026

 

9 min read

Author: Luan Wise

Mark Choueke b2bmarketing.com

Career

Mark Ritson called me unqualified, so I did something about it

I hated being called out by Ritson as ‘unqualified’ so I trained; now I share my experience with students at B2B marketing’s best Academy 

I fell into marketing. I trained as a journalist. 

When it came to the point at which we had to make career decisions, journalism was the nearest thing I could think of to all the things I was good at or considered fun: meeting and chatting to people; building relationships and winning their trust; writing, telling stories; finding stuff out that someone somewhere was trying to keep secret and - on regular occasions - genuinely holding powerful figures to account. 

A few weeks ago, Professor Ritson caused some trademark havoc on Linkedin with a quiz he designed for some Ipsos research; a test whose results he says proves two thirds of us marketers in the UK and US are unqualified and unfit for purpose. 

Like most of us in our teens, I lacked self-awareness. However, one thing I knew for sure even then - and still do - is that feeling ‘tied’ to a desk and repeating the same tasks every day was not an option. Journalism - a profession that does require training if you’re to reach a decent level - fitted. For about a decade I did well, travelled extensively, learned a great deal and laughed a lot. Right up to my last job in journalism as editor of Marketing Week magazine. 

One of my most successful manoeuvres in that role was poaching Ritson from my direct competitor and persuading him to join me as Marketing Week’s top columnist and good friend. He resisted at first because he’s an honorable guy who felt some loyalty to his team and editor but we kept talking and eventually, he was persuaded. 

We formed a good working partnership and he was a key part of any success I had as editor of a big business weekly. 

Some years later, when I’d swapped editorial for commercial (a typical ‘me’ move: the beginning of year four in the highest profile and best job I’d ever had at the time - to get itchy feet and quit to find new adventure); Ritson launched his MiniMBA training programme. 

So successful was his entrepreneurial idea that it became a monster. A decade on,  Ritson has ceased the formal teaching and brand consultancy on which he built his name. 

Drawing on decades of experience both advising global brands and teaching MBA students at the world’s top business schools, Ritson has built the digital, affordable and hence accessible, MBA equivalent training programme for marketers. The MiniMBA trains around 8,000 marketers every year across 40 different countries and boasts a Net Promoter Score of +84. 

By comparison, in the year ending June 2025, the UK’s century-old Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) trained 5,100 marketers and achieved an NPS of +50.5. 

Perhaps one edge that Ritson has over professional trainers is that he didn’t make his career exclusively about educating others. Yes he’s an academic but he;s been in the thick of the jungle too - consultant in the boardrooms of the world’s most famous businesses: Louis Vuitton, Dom Pérignon, Hennessy, Sephora, WD-40, Ericsson, News Corp and countless others. 

That’s why the MiniMBA is trusted to train marketers from the likes of American Express, McDonald’s, Nestle, Red Bull and Tesco.

It was during this huge growth period for the MiniMBA that I found myself on the wrong side of what had become Ritson’s loudest and most repeated attack on the industry. 

Year after year, Ritson would use his platform to call us out - the lot of us, the whole marketing industry - for our lack of formal training and qualifications. 

He told us that if we’re running marketing for our organisations based on what we’ve learned on the job and our ‘natural’ business or people skills, then we were probably doing it wrong. 

I fucking hated it - seeing my mate rant and curse about something so important and - to my mind correct - and knowing I was one of those he was pointing to. 

I felt embarrassed to be herded in with the masses of mediocre marketers around me and told I lacked the required skills to properly deliver in an industry in which I was building some profile. 

Needing to rid myself of Ritson-induced anxiety, I insisted to a new boss that I wanted to make my leadership position ‘real’ and that I’d be putting myself and my marketing team through the MiniMBA as my first big deliverable. 

Sure enough, when I embarked on the MiniMBA I realised just how much I didn't know; just how much there is to know; how small a slice of good marketing practice we B2B marketers actually involve ourselves in, and how much of an advantage trained marketers enjoy.

Ritson and I speak about the training gap and his continuing (and curse-littered) fury at the arrogance of untrained marketers in this week’s episode of the Do More With Less podcast.

Now, I’d advise anyone to do some marketing training. I’m not close to the courses offered by the CIM or the IPA, but I do know the market lacks really good training aimed at B2B marketers specifically. 

There’s really not much guidance or proper career development around for us. That’s why B2B Marketing United has taken its training offer so seriously so early on in its existence. 

While the internet is groaning with free and paid-for courses teaching isolated skills and tactics: digital advertising, email marketing, content writing and so on; our Academy serves a different (and arguably more pressing) need. 

I remember getting into tech scale-ups and startups around 2014, where young, new starters were more than capable of hacking together tactical campaign skills from YouTube self-training videos. I watched it happen. Anything they wanted to know, new tools they wanted to integrate and optimise - they’d watch a tutorial, practise it, train one another and ‘class’ would be over within 10 minutes. 

Nobody cared about CPD points. They just wanted to get better at their jobs. Fast 

With such an abundance of free opportunities to learn tactics, two half days learning ‘B2B copywriting’ for £800 isn’t really what many B2B marketers need right now.

The evolution of AI and how we use it continues to rapidly thin out marketing functions. Many of my clients at OrbitalX are $50m+ revenue businesses served by marketing functions of just one or two ‘generalists’ plus partner vendors and tech. 

Huge swathes of middle management are being ripped out - often along with expensive senior executives. Young marketers are finding themselves over-promoted too quickly into senior positions with little or no support infrastructure.

Hiring managers have switched their attention to what recruiter Rowan Fisk describes as 'the ability to walk into any conversation, challenge the strategy, and have it received as contribution rather than threat'.

Bosses want "systems thinking over channel depth," writes Fisk, "orchestration over execution; [they want] critical thinking and judgment. The ability to see the whole board and make decisions that hold up across time."

The stuff marketers (young and old) most need to know has changed almost instantly. It’s not ‘digital marketing’ skills. Sure, running a YouTube account, creating videos for Linkedin campaigns, managing paid media and better email marketing are all table stakes. 

But you don’t need to pay to learn them. 

The valuable lessons - tools and behaviours we senior marketers learned over twenty years that the next generation needs to pick up in mere months - include how to 'win' budget discussions with CFOs; how to talk about, plan and deliver pipeline and revenue impact (rather than arguing over the definition of an 'MQL)'; how to say 'no' and make it sound like a 'yes'; how to smash Q1's numbers while building the brand marketing play to prepare the ground for Q4 and beyond.

That's why the three courses you’ll find at the Academy are about marketing leadership as opposed to tactical bits and bobs. The courses aren’t taught by professional trainers but real marketers. Lessons are based on experience; real-life scenarios; the wins; the fuck-ups; and all the lessons and other stuff we wish we’d learned much sooner. The stuff I share when mentoring and coaching. 

If we're to avoid losing the current middle generation of B2B marketers being ousted out of previously secure jobs and a new generation of kids - tech-savvy but short on business smarts - they need a short-cut access to leadership and go-to-market thinking. 

As the business environment changes, so does the way we train and prepare for it. 

We should celebrate it. School’s getting more fun. 

7 min read

Author: Mark Choueke

Fiona Mckenzie www.b2bmarketing.com

Leadership

Real Talk: Fiona Mckenzie, President of Marketbridge Europe. Some CMOs have lost their mojo

Most people who sell their agency spend the first year of the earnout looking over their shoulder. Fiona McKenzie proactively focused on quickly tearing down the walls between two businesses and building something new. Seven months on from the acquisition of her agency Revere by Marketbridge, she is out of earnout, off the legacy systems, and running a near-100-person European operation as its President. She is also, in the same breath, thinking about the CMOs who quietly ask her how to stay in their jobs for another two years.

Rich: What have your new American overlords actually put you on the hook for?

Fiona: Europe is a really strategic part of the overarching plan. Expanding beyond the US was a key strategic initiative and part of their growth strategy. My remit in the immediate term was to take the two businesses that are now together and form part of our European base. Revere has only just finished a very fast integration. We are out of earnout already. We are fully integrated. We are working as one team on the same P&L, everyone aligned, working towards common goals.

In the long term it is continued expansion in Europe across geographies, building out service capabilities aligned to the wider group model. But most importantly, every agency is evolving regardless of whether you are part of an acquisition or not. Clients are layering in AI, layering in technology. They have their own challenges. Agencies have to be evolving constantly to meet those needs.


“The real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader.”

 

Rich: How on earth did you achieve so much so quickly? I would expect a typical earnout to be at least 12 months.

Fiona: A big part of the success was the fact that I spent a lot of time with Fiona Shepherd, who was leading Europe at the time, even ahead of the announcement. We had very transparent conversations, not just with her but with the rest of the leadership team. When you go into these discussions and you have decided that a particular brand is right for your agency’s next stage of growth, you have to go into the diligence phase and trust the process. Keep it human.

I spoke to any agency leader that would let me buy them lunch ahead of going through that process. I asked them for their war stories, understood the journey through the sales process, asked them what they would do differently. So, I felt I went in with my eyes open. I was almost overly human. I wanted to have conversations outside of all the spreadsheets and finance.

The advice I always give now is: if you are about to go out to market to sell your business, have a holiday before you go out, not after. Because the real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader, not just to the team you have led but to the team you are going to be working with. And everyone has had their own journey of how they got there.

I practised what I preached on that one. We got to the point where we had a number of LOIs (Letter of Intents) and then we went on a two-week holiday and signed the LOI when we came back. So, we could go into diligence full throttle. I always do my best thinking on holiday. Your mind slows down, you think about the big picture, and you come back with real clarity on what comes next.

Bob Ray, our CEO, says something to people when he talks to them in smaller groups that has always stuck with me. He says: “no one here chose to work for Marketbridge”. So, you have to be really respectful. People chose to work for Revere. They ended up in here. I tried to over-communicate during the process to explain to people why it was the right move.

It was also a real divide and conquer effort on the integration itself. I cannot lead everything, nor can a few of us. You have to empower people in the right roles and trust them to get on with it. Seven months on and we are all on the same systems, working to the same goals. That allows you to move at pace. And that is what you need to do in this market.

Rich: It sounds like you went into a marriage wanting to build foundations and settle down, rather than going in thinking about what happens when you get divorced.

Fiona: Exactly. And as someone who has been through divorce, it can be a very complicated and traumatic experience. You can only make the right decision in the moment. My experience before Revere was a few other agency brands. I had had a little experience of acquisitions and mergers with other agencies, and sometimes you can have a happy divorce and sometimes it can be a really bad divorce.

In this instance, I was joining under Fiona Shepherd as the leader of Europe. I do not think at the time she necessarily had plans to step out so quickly. But I think she always had a vision for what Europe could look like. She really saw that our team would be the next step for that vision. And the success of the integration meant she felt she could step back and hand over the reins. She has been in this industry a long time and it is a big decision.

Now, funnily enough, everyone wants to buy me lunch. Which is quite good fun. You just do not have enough hours in the day.

Rich: I’ve heard you say that a lot of CMOs have lost their marketing mojo. Why?

Fiona: There are a large number of restructures that continue to take place. That creates fear in role. And there is a constant need to prove ROI. Essentially, they are in defence mode. There are very few businesses or marketing leaders that are able to step out into that proactive mode as much as they try, because they are exhausted. They constantly feel like they are fighting a battle and justifying their existence.

I very much see agencies as a comfort blanket for those CMOs, but also as their superpower. How can we be here to protect you? How can we help you? A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to wider stakeholders. So, my team and I become that outlet.


“A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to the wider stakeholders. So, we become that outlet.”

 

Rich: I see a lot of CMOs in a form of paralysis out of fear. Like the housing market. Sitting still, nervous to move, nervous to remodel.

Fiona: Yes. And I can tell you, having hosted my own event for people out of seat, people put on a brave face but underneath it there is real struggle. You get a real sense of what brands are expecting from CMOs when you speak to people trying to go into those roles. A lot of people are not even wanting the CMO role anymore, for that reason.

I went into a meeting with a CMO at a global enterprise organisation, someone I had seen online, clearly very capable from everything I had heard. My objective going in was to position our agency well. We had worked with her previous employer for over seven years, so I wanted to get in front of her early. As you build trust through the meeting, slowly people break down and expose how they really feel. At the end of the conversation, she flipped it entirely and turned to me and said: “what advice would you give me, so I am still in my role in two years?” I walked out and thought, God, what a turn of events. I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.

What CMOs need is to show that marketing is connected to revenue. They need to show that marketing is part of a revenue system. It needs to be process driven. And a lot of CMOs and marketing leaders did not come into marketing to do the role they are actually being asked to do today.


“I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.”

 

Rich: I see a lot of synergies with what happened 10 years ago when marketing automation came in. There was a misguided belief that it would make marketing cheaper. That same conversation has gone up a level again with AI.

Fiona: Exactly that. We are firmly adopting a very proactive and aggressive AI strategy. We did that at Revere and won a couple of awards for the work we did with that adoption. But it is not really about AI. It is about going back to what the client actually has a challenge on.

The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI and into what is it your business is trying to do, what are the goals you are trying to achieve, how can we work together to get you to those outcomes as effectively as possible. If that is using AI as a growth catalyst, great. If it is redefining your workflows, okay, let us look at that.

And for all the hype, we have to remember there are brands in very different situations. I was speaking to a CMO recently who has moved into a global role and is trying to redefine the central regional model. In reality, his team is barely doing digital marketing properly, let alone automated workflow. We have to meet people where they are.

One area where we have moved fast and seen real pickup is generative engine optimisation. We were pretty quick out of the blocks on the GEO story and have been running a lot of client projects in that space. But even there, you cannot look at it in isolation. It ties into a bigger story about how buyer behaviour is changing and how brands need to show up in a world where AI is increasingly part of the buying committee.


“The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI.”

 

Rich: How do you actually help CMOs get their mojo back then?

Fiona: Show them a roadmap to creating a growth system. There are so many directions of travel that people get pulled in, and CMOs just need to know they are on a roadmap. We cannot all change everything overnight. No leader can.

It is always about the roadmap and the process. You cannot ignore the business realities and the needs that have to be met in the short term, but ultimately you have to be visionary and make the right investments for the long term as well. Our job is to help them prioritise. Get some quick wins in. Do not overcomplicate it. But also help them prove investment to grow the roadmap toward long-term growth.

Ultimately that is where people get their mojo. They want to be doing stuff that is meaningful. We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. Everything is about creating a connection. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.

When people lose their mojo, things have got a bit messy. How do we strip it back? They need to be able to say no. They need to be able to prioritise. And it just seems to be, for the myriad of reasons we have discussed, increasingly hard for marketing leaders to do that.


“We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.”

 

Rich: What does success look like for you in 12 months’ time?

Fiona: Being recognised as a category creator and disruptor. Not a typical agency services model. A blend of consultancy services and agency services, bringing in new expertise, creating a new category as a leading growth and go-to-market business. Expanding beyond the CMO buyer, working into the C-suite.

I have this vision of being at your CMO roundtables and people saying: oh, you guys are a different kind of business, they would not consider themselves an agency, they consider themselves a company to support growth. That is what I want to hear. And I am going to be doing everything I can over the next 12 months to make sure we are seen that way.

I will be straight with you. I feel like I have gone from, and I probably would not normally describe it this way, but I will now, from a Championship club to the Premier League. We always felt like a Premier League brand. We just did not have the squad depth.

 

B2B Marketing United publishes practitioner-led content for senior B2B marketers. All editorial is independent.

11 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

football crowd image www.b2bmarketing.com

Demand Generation

Loyalty among the ‘traditional’ marketing channels showing vibrancy and youth in the age of AI

The AI opportunity in ‘go-to-market strategy’ is moving so fast that ‘keeping up’ is currently a daily focus. 

Some of the smartest bosses and businesses around however, still pay attention to marketing channels seemingly long forgotten by the gossip around the LinkedIn watercooler.

Watch any Rory Sutherland interview clips and note how quickly he finds a moment to advocate for direct mail. 

Similarly, UK industry body for commercial TV, Thinkbox now talks about ‘Total TV’ to include the proliferation of advertising opportunities for marketers across a host of new video channels. And while you’d expect Thinkbox to present evidence whenever possible to prove TV remains consumers’ most trusted marketing channel, independent and credible voices like Professor Mark Ritson follow suit whenever asked. 

Still - some revelations still have it in them to surprise me. In marketing channel terms, ‘loyalty programmes’ feel like old news. 

Until recently, I assumed loyalty was a marketing channel every brand across every sector had already explored, tested, and deployed in their own way. Like email, paid media, or events, it felt fully established and maybe even taken for granted.

Then I met a really cool business called White Label Loyalty. They’re doing amazing things for whole swathes of the B2B marketing community that are yet to properly investigate or even understand loyalty as a viable marketing channel.

This isn’t a case of B2B marketing teams having lacked ambition or neglecting to value their customers. Rather, in sectors like B2B manufacturing, the traditional model makes loyalty feel an unlikely marketing play.

When your products are sold through retailers and distributors, you rarely own your customer data. And if you don’t see the end buyer, it’s a tough job to truly understand how to excite them. 

Without customers’ first-party data, you’ve got zero information on what influences their buying decisions. You can guess that price rules every customer choice, but beyond that rather base assumption and the damaging discounts it encourages, a decent loyalty scheme feels like a non-starter.

This leaves marketing directors under the cosh - being asked to deliver growth while effectively flying blind. They run campaigns without any customer insight, behavioural data, and therefore without a direct relationship with the people who drive their revenue.

Enter White Label Loyalty founder Achille Traore, a soft-spoken, humble yet ridiculously smart visionary. As an ex-professional footballer playing in the Swedish first division and later signed to Barnsley FC - Achille has an amazing story.

After his football career was cut short by injury, he turned his head to business. Achille’s now a celebrated innovator in the tech industry, acknowledged as one of the top 100 Retail Technology Entrepreneurs in UK in Fresh Business Thinking's Shift100 list, associated with KPMG. 

As well as the B2B manufacturing sector, White Label Loyalty powers huge loyalty programmes for the likes of Burger King and PepsiCo. 

I met Achille late last year and he’s fast become one of my favourite B2B marketing leaders. He’s since worked with OrbitalX on a piece of research, revealing that while many B2B manufacturers believe they actually do have access to customer data, most struggle to activate, understand, or use it to drive repeat business.

So when presented with a loyalty solution that’s dead easy to implement and capable of delivering first-party data and a first real connection with the end customer, his clients jump at the chance. With no disrespect intended, it’s their first opportunity to behave like ‘real’ marketers - generating growth based on real insight rather than price promotions and guesswork.

AI-powered insights, predictive analytics, scaled personalisation and speedy routes to demonstrable ROI take loyalty from a tactic or campaign to a key strategic pillar for growth.  

In other words, Achille is bringing loyalty into industries where it’s long been considered out of reach; a marketing channel that seemed to be just for others.

To have found whole sectors - B2B manufacturing and beyond - where old school marketing channels feel like a wide-open frontier and then watching the outlandish success that follows; it’s been a heartwarming experience.

For this 50-year-old, it’s a joyous moment whenever something perceived as old-fashioned makes itself cool again by bringing its phenomenal power and expertise to bear. 



4 min read

Author: Mark Choueke

Luan Wise

AI

LinkedIn's Algorithm Update Is Good News for B2B

If you're playing the long game, because B2B buyers make decisions based on familiarity and trust, this is good news. But you'd be forgiven for missing that, given the volume of hot takes that followed. New hacks. New fears. And, as ever, a rush to share the latest ‘quick wins’ while declaring the old playbook obsolete!

LinkedIn published a full technical breakdown of the update on their Engineering blog. It’s worth reading before anyone else's commentary shapes your thinking.

Here’s the update in their own words:

“While the Feed has long been AI-powered, recent LLM advances gave us the opportunity to rethink what's possible. That's why we're rolling out a new advanced ranking system, powered by LLMs and GPUs, that better understands what a post is actually about and how it relates to a member's evolving interests and career goals."

The algorithm doesn't define success. Your content does.

So what does LinkedIn actually value? The algorithm filters for relevance, evaluating what your post is about, who it's likely to matter to, and whether you're the kind of voice that shows up consistently on that topic. What the new LLM-powered system changes is the precision of that matching, not the underlying logic.

LinkedIn's algorithm update is designed to be more adaptive to evolving user interests, rather than being guided purely by historical engagement data. In practical terms, the old system rewarded familiarity. If someone had engaged with your posts before, they were more likely to see them again.

In my training, I always emphasised engagement as the key to building future visibility. That principle still holds, but this new system now broadens the opportunity, matching content to current interests means your posts can reach relevant audiences beyond those who already know you.

There's also a clear signal on what's being deprioritised. Engagement bait, posts that prompt users to "Comment 'Yes' if you agree”, or posts that feature a video with no relation to the accompanying text, is being actively filtered out. Recycled thought leadership posts that add little in terms of substance or insight will also be downranked. A welcome shift (and long overdue).

If your activity has been built around gaming engagement rather than earning it, this update is a genuine problem. For everyone else, it's an improvement.

The update is good news for anyone producing quality content: when industry news breaks and relevant posts gain traction, the updated system surfaces them within minutes, not hours or days.

But here's what most people are missing

The feed algorithm is one piece of a much larger picture of change. According to Semrush, LinkedIn is now the second most cited domain across AI search tools, sitting ahead of Wikipedia, major news publishers, and other social platforms (Reddit is currently occupying first place).

Semrush analysed 325,000 prompts across three AI tools, ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity, identifying 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited in responses. On average, 11% of AI responses reference LinkedIn content.

Why does this matter? AI responses tend to mirror the meaning of original LinkedIn content closely, your framing, your positioning, your expertise can surface directly inside an AI-generated answer that a potential buyer is reading right now. That's a different kind of visibility than feed reach, and it's one most B2B marketers haven't yet accounted for.

So what earns that kind of citation? Educational, original content published consistently, long-form articles and substantive posts that share practical knowledge rather than promotional messaging.

The research also found that roughly 75% of cited authors post frequently, and about half have over 2,000 followers, so follower count matters less than you might expect. Authoritative content from smaller accounts still breaks through.

One nuance worth flagging for those managing both a brand presence and a personal profile: not all AI tools draw from the same sources. Perplexity tends to cite Company Pages most often, while ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode more frequently surface content from individual creators. That's a compelling data point to have in your back pocket when making the internal case for investing in both, it's not either/or, it's both/and.

What this means for you

The latest algorithm update and the AI visibility data are pointing in the same direction. Stop optimising for the feed. Start optimising for building and maintaining trust.

That means posting consistently on the topics where you have genuine expertise. It means writing with clarity of thought, not volume of words. It means publishing original insight rather than recycled takes. And it means treating LinkedIn less like a broadcast channel and more like a body of work. one that both human readers and AI platforms are actively drawing from.

A word on consistency. Playbooks might tell you to post three times a week, always on Tuesday mornings, and between 8 and 10am. That guidance has its place, but it misses the point. Consistency that matters is consistency of topic and perspective, not frequency for its own sake. Showing up once or twice a week with genuine insight on the things you actually know will always outperform daily posting that says nothing in particular. The algorithm, and your audience, will notice the difference.

Start by auditing your last 90 days of LinkedIn activity against a simple test: does each post reflect genuine expertise, answer a question your audience is actually asking, and come from a consistent point of view? If the answer is mostly yes, this update works in your favour. If not, that's where your energy is better spent.

And don't overlook your profile. The system uses everything LinkedIn knows about you, your headline, summary, skills, and experience, to understand who you are and what you should be associated with. If your profile still reflects where you were three years ago rather than where you are now, the algorithm is working with outdated information. A profile that clearly signals your expertise and focus area makes everything else work harder.

5 min read

Author: Luan Wise

out of home advertising b2b marketing

Demand Generation

Time to let your B2B product enjoy some fresh air

My friend and brilliant brand communications consultant Dan Walker Smith recently published a photograph of a B2B ad placed on London Transport. I’d taken exactly the same photograph on my phone some weeks before.

As a keen follower of Dan, I can tell you that his post on B2B ads ‘out in the wild’ is well worth a read. His analysis on the Vanta ad is brief enough to be a convenient bitesize addition to your media diet today but smart enough to leave you things to think about after. 

It shouldn’t really be newsworthy when a B2B product or service buys and places outdoor ads but it is. Still.

First time I saw B2B advertisers behaving like their B2C cousins was in 2015, waiting for an Uber on a street corner in a part of NYC I didn’t know well. I was with my boss. We were locked in that very particular silence following a pitch that hadn’t gone as planned. 

The ads on the taxi tops of every second or third of the yellow cabs we were letting go by were for the same B2B product. I remember being impressed enough to test the silence with my boss by pointing it out. 

A quiet grunt of acknowledgement was all I got in response. But I was impressed by how audacious it felt; such a confident move. I remember  looking around and saying out loud - as much to myself as anything - that we weren’t even in a particularly businessy part of town. It just felt really ballsy. 

It’s still a rare occurrence though - seeing B2B outdoors - so I notice. 


Again, I’ll recommend Dan Walker Smith’s Linkedin post referenced above if you want to read some cool analysis of why the Vanta ad works but also how it could have been improved.

I take three main lessons away from seeing these ads among others on The Tube every morning. 


  1. These advertisers are reaping the benefits of the rest of us being way too slow in deploying out of home as a serious B2B channel. The rarity value of their efforts mean they take a ‘double whammy’ gain. They profit once from being seen and read by their target commuters in some natural and controlled downtime; and then they benefit again from enjoying solus media placing in their markets simply because their competitors likely still consider out of home to be too much wastage. 


  1. As counter-intuitive as it will feel to most B2B marketing bosses (and certainly their CFOs), this is a pure go-to-market win. “Advertising is one of the fastest ways to build your brand’s fame,” Dan writes, “and the commercial benefits that come with that.” You know this already. The 95:5 ‘out of market:in market’ ratio; the imperative to achieve ‘mental availability’; the ‘Long And Short’; it’s all the stuff we’ve learned from the likes of System1, the IPA and Binet and Field in recent years. It’s the best practice we all showboat celebrate on Linkedin but way too many of us are still reluctant to put into practice. 


  1. If you’re brand new to the notion of outdoor ads, I’d assume one of the big fears is that it’s going to rinse your budget. Some simple experimentation with a relatively small chunk of your cash however, will soon reveal it’s really not as expensive as you might expect. I live in north London and travel into the city maybe twice a week. Even before speaking to a media specialist I reckon I could name at least half a dozen ‘dead-cert’ sites in which I could successfully target my ICP during the working week.

If asked for prime B2B outdoor locations in London right now I’d probably cite Canary Wharf or The City for the finance giants or corporate audiences; Old Street roundabout for the startups; the A4 Corridor between Heathrow Airport and London for business travel types and of course the London Underground network.

Roadside 48-sheet billboards go for somewhere between £1,000 and £3,000. Digital billboards can cost up to £5,000. 

At the moment I’m helping a small charity based in London find £6,000 to repeat its most successful ever campaign from a couple of years ago - some well placed billboards and the back of a couple of buses on a couple of targeted routes, all for a campaign that would run for a couple of weeks.The last time the charity ran the same campaign, those two weeks of spend delivered their biggest year in terms of income - sustained success over many more months than any sponsorship, events or digital activity since.  

I think about how I consume outdoor ads. I see them. I read them. I consciously consider them. I absolutely judge them: I properly look out for the ones that leave me annoyed or perplexed, just to get annoyed with them all over again. 


If you never considered the outdoor advertising opportunity for your brand because it’s simply not ‘a B2B thing’ - go and explore it. Think about how you might use it to target your own prospects; where, how, with what? Your future customers are far more likely to re-read a big idea on the arse-end of the bus they’re stuck behind in traffic, or on the wall halfway up an elevator, than they are a digital banner. 

Get your product or service out into the real world. The change of scenery will do them good. 



5 min read

Author: Mark Choueke

The B2Beatles

Content and Communications

B2Beatles: Why John, Paul, George and Ringo are perfect B2B role models

One of the themes most commonly cited by the marketers I’ve interviewed for both Boring2Brave and OrbitalX’s Do More With Less podcast is a lack of inspiring role models within B2B marketing.

Matthew Robinson, former VP Marketing at Contentsquare and now founder at B2B Three, told me: ‘For role models I often find myself looking outside of B2B marketing. Maybe that says something quite worrying about us as a discipline.’

Maybe. Or perhaps we needn’t regret needing to look elsewhere for genius to motivate us. 

Creativity and inspiration aren’t battery farmed. They’re entirely free range.

Our brains are not so regimented that we can only be inspired by role models who mirror the jobs we do or the fields we work in. Anything that makes you feel energised or stirs your thinking is surely legitimate.

I have a lifetime obsession with The Beatles. I’ll assume you’re familiar with them, though not for their B2B marketing chops. My mother grew up with them in Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s. I inherited her passion. 

John, Paul, George and Ringo would have made for brilliant B2B marketers if they hadn’t been so busy. Here are 14 reasons why.

1. They perfectly combined the latest tech with talent

The Beatles constantly set the template for innovation in the recording studio; not just in songwriting and performance but in pushing their producers and engineers to get more out of the studio tech than previously thought possible. They loved technology. As recently as November 2023, the Beatles’ unique use of AI enabled their last ever single, Now and Then. The song, which was finalized using AI technology to enhance John Lennon's voice from an old demo, was hailed as a historic, record-breaking return and became their 18th UK chart-topper. 

Learning: Race to the bleeding edge of tech and push it further; but you’ll still need talent.

2. They were dogged about creating original content

The band made an early decision to write their own songs at a time when it just wasn’t the done thing for recording artists.

Learning: Deciding from the outset to make originality your benchmark reaps you disproportionate benefits. It forces you to become an ideas factory.

3. If you do steal, make it count

When The Beatles did steal other people’s content, they didn’t just pay tribute to what were often obscure rhythm & blues tracks. They added youth, energy, speed and urgency to turn them into iconic Beatles standards. Twist and Shout wasn’t a Beatles original. They made it theirs.

Learning: How you transform old ideas with a fresh take will tell your market everything it needs to know about your sense of conviction, purpose and energy.

4. They worked to be that good

The Beatles made themselves qualified. They practised hard; we’re talking Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘ten thousand hours’ and more. In an era when apprenticeship was a common route into work, The Beatles made five trips to Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, playing for up to eight hours a night, seven days a week. 

Learning: There’s really only one way to become as good as you want them to think you are. Work for it.

5. They overcame obstacles

Two of the band turned their own self-perceived shortcomings into a competitive advantage.

George and Paul were instinctively and conventionally gifted on their instruments. John, though, had an innate rhythm all his own and was often questioned about the quality of his guitar playing. He didn’t even consider himself that good. He knew his strengths and played to them. 

‘I’m OK,’ John told Rolling Stone about his guitar playing in 1971. ‘I’m not technically good, but I can make the guitar  fucking howl and move. If you sat me with B. B. King, I’d feel silly. I’m embarrassed about my playing in one way because it’s very poor, but I can make a guitar speak. I can make a band drive.’

Similarly, Ringo’s drumming was unique. Being a left-handed drummer on a right-handed kit gave his playing a rare quality because he led with his ‘wrong hand’. But he also innovated ‘underneath’ the more vaunted work of his colleagues with drum parts all of his own. Fans commonly cite the song Rain as an example of his uncommon talent. A listen to any one of She Said She Said on the Revolver album, Come Together from Abbey Road, Ticket to Ride from Help, A Day in the Life from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or, Strawberry Fields Forever, would also highlight why Ringo was the other Beatles’ only choice as drummer. 

Learning: You possess a trait that others will define as a weakness. It’s not a weakness; it’s a distinction. Turn it to your advantage.

6. They knew their competitors

When you have to beat the Stones and the Beach Boys to be the best, it pushes you to insane heights. In 1966, The Stones recorded Paint It Black and the album Aftermath, which included Under My Thumb, Out of Time and Mother’s Little Helper. The same year, the Beach Boys released Wouldn’t It Be Nice and Sloop John B on the album Pet Sounds. The Beatles released Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby and (in the US) Nowhere Man as singles and produced the Revolver album. All this dazzling output was partly driven by these bands trying to outdo one another. By contrast, in 1966 Manchester group The Hollies – inconceivably part of the same scene in the same era –  released singles Bus Stop and Stop, Stop, Stop; a tedious pair of e-book equivalents.

Learning: Find yourself a worthy competitor. Recognise and celebrate its quality internally with your team. It will spur you on.

7. They understood ‘multi-channel’

The Beatles created content of the highest possible standard. Some 50 years later, young children know and sing their songs. Word for word. Imagine anything you write being quoted, cited or performed five decades from now.

And they were multi-channel marketers. They recorded songs, wrote books, produced feature-length films, performed live panto on theatre stages, drew sketches and experimented with photography.

They could make any format their own – as compelling a band in a cramped, sweaty basement in Liverpool as they were in front of a 55,000-strong audience at the home of Major League Baseball team the Mets in New York City.

Learning: B2B marketing needn’t  be restricted to the same boring channels and formats with which we’re all so familiar. Here’s a brief: what combination of message and media would have people citing your work in 50 years’ time?

8. They were storytellers

For four young men with a level of status and wealth that separated them from most, The Beatles retained an instinctive attachment to the humdrum lives of ‘normal’ people. Headlines in the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail respectively inspired the colourful poignancy of She’s Leaving Home and A Day in the Life.

Elsewhere, a diverse set of characters – sometimes hilarious, other times violent or lonely – contained in the likes of Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, Lovely Rita, Polythene Pam and I Am the Walrus are now laced permanently throughout the British psyche and culture.

Learning: Use stories to create a world outside of your products and promotions. People attach to stories in ways they don’t to a sales pitch.

9. The Beatles innovated wildly but their brand remained constant

The Beatles are the most ‘branded’ musical artist ever. Thousands of bands and artists have a widely recognised, unmistakable sound, look and feel but The Beatles were brand masters. In their short time as a group, they changed everything possible about their product and their image: from leather-clad teens, to suited and booted national treasure; to drug- experimenting mid-sixties popstars; to Yellow Submarine movie cartoon characters; to long-haired rock aristocracy and an often madcap beyond, including John and wife Yoko conducting interviews with the world’s press from inside a bag. The Beatles were constantly on the move.

But you’d recognise every one of their looks. If I say ‘Beatle haircut’, ‘Beatle boots’ or ‘Beatle collarless jackets’, you likely have the same image in your head as I have. You can identify the band just from their silhouette on a fridge magnet.

The Beatles’ brand was multi-layered and complex; there is a branded universe of mythology and music – broad enough for Beatles lovers of all ages and tastes to find something to feast upon.

Learning: Your brand is more than your ‘look and feel’; your logo and colour palette for example. It’s far more about what you represent to your customers. As long as it holds true to the brand values or distinct positioning you offer to your community, you can experiment as much as you want with formats, colours and channel strategy.

10. Their authenticity connected them more strongly to their fans

The Beatles dug deep inside themselves and their own experiences for their inspiration. The music and lyrics of Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever, Help, In My Life and I’m a Loser (with its refrain of ‘I’m not what I appear to be’) were among their most personal and self- aware tracks.

Learning: Often, the deeper you look inside yourself and your experience to find ‘real’ stimulus for your content, the more it’s likely to connect with your audience.

11. The Beatles were brave

The Beatles were unafraid to be themselves. Though courted by the establishment, they were unconcerned by supposed social hierarchies or authority and refused to adhere to other people’s ‘nonsense’ rules.

At various times they spoke openly (and often controversially) on their drug use, on religion and on the nonsense hype of celebrity where, if they were playing the ‘PR game’ right, they may have remained silent.

They refused to play to racially segregated audiences in the US in towns like Jacksonville, Florida, even though they knew their decision would confuse or anger many Americans.

Untrained in the media, they stared down or made fun of stupid questions at press conferences. Old TV footage shows that when one of them gave an answer that could be deemed controversial, none of the bandmates flinched or even, at times, looked up. They trusted and backed each other to be honest and straight-talking. When you’ve got that kind of support from colleagues, it breeds the strength to be you, without unnecessary PR gloss.

Learning: Your audience is sophisticated and can smell glitzy PR polish on you a mile off. PR is useful to a point but not when it gets in the way of you being real, honest and interesting.

12. They continued to invent; even after failing

As recording artists, The Beatles stretched the possible. They featured backwards guitar on I’m Only Sleeping and recorded a George Martin electric piano solo at half-speed before playing the tape back at double speed to create an entirely different sound on In My Life.

Importantly, they weren’t deterred when risks didn’t come off. The surreal Magical Mystery Tour movie in 1967 was a critical flop but it didn’t stop them stretching their imaginations again two years later, to create the Yellow Submarine film.

Learning: Exploring and taking risks appeal to our human need for advancement. If nothing else, taking a risk to try something new gets you remembered.

13. They were great at both briefing and selling in ideas

The Beatles pushed through the barriers of a four-piece rock band and, hence, needed outsiders to help them create their records. That meant harnessing the skills of strangers. Paul said of the big orchestra crescendo on A Day in the Life:

“We told the orchestra – ‘you’ve got fifteen bars, all you’ve gotta do is start on whatever is the lowest note on your instrument and by the time the end of those 15 bars has arrived, you’ve got to be on the top note on your instrument – we don’t mind how you get there.’”

 “I had to keep going around explaining it to everyone, ‘it’s a silly idea I know, but bear with us, it will work out, don’t worry’...”

Learning: Selling in a vision or idea’ is not a ‘one-time’ job. Don’t stop telling everyone how it’s going to work and what the result will look like. People have doubts and fears. They can be cynical. If it’s your idea, you’ve got to be the leader.

14. They got results

The Beatles didn’t just sell records by the million. They changed the world. They scared the establishment. They influenced culture. They created teenagers. They triggered mania. Their fans and stories will outlast all of them, as will their product.

Learning: Your role is to do great marketing. Your job is to help grow the company and sell product. Your ‘results’? What you’ll be known and remembered for by ‘the end’? Well, that’s up to you. 


11 min read

Author: Mark Choueke

WIll you lose your marketing job or is it just generative hype?

AI

Will you lose your marketing job?

Most of the conversation about AI and marketing jobs is useless. Not because the question does not matter. Of course it does. But because the two loudest voices in the room are both wrong.

On one side: the doomsayers who want you to believe your entire profession is about to be automated out of existence. On the other: the conference-circuit executives and ‘Champagne CMOs’ telling rooms full of people about their extraordinary AI transformations, their 35% productivity gains, their fully embedded workflows. The ones who have not logged into HubSpot in three years and genuinely believe Nano Banana is a small Japanese snack.

Both camps are doing you a disservice. And the second one is actively making things worse, because when the CFO hears those claims and asks why your team has not matched them, nobody wants to be the person explaining that the number was invented on a pay to play stage in London.

What the evidence actually shows

A Stanford study updated in December 2025 tracked early-career sales and marketing professionals aged 22 to 25. The findings were stark. AI has caused a net loss of around 20% of headcount in that cohort since early 2022.

And it’s not getting better.

We’ve all seen the headlines of a thousand jobs disappearing here, ten thousand jobs cut there. Even accounting for AI being used as an excuse for companies to eliminate roles, we can all feel it happening.

But the nuance that matters is that AI is not eating marketing from the top down. It is eating it from the bottom up. The displacement effect decreases with seniority. And a meaningful proportion of what is being called AI displacement is not about AI capability at all. It is organisations using a powerful narrative as cover for decisions they wanted to make anyway.

The real question is not whether you will lose your job

It is whether the version of your job you are doing right now will still exist in three years.

If your value comes from producing a defined volume of content, managing campaign execution, running standard reports, or coordinating assets and schedules: it is very likely that AI will do most of that job within two to three years. Some of it is already happening.

If your value comes from strategic judgment, creative vision, cross-functional influence, genuine customer relationships, or the ability to govern complex AI-assisted workflows: you are not going to be replaced. You are going to be more valuable. But only if you develop the fluency to operate in an AI-native environment.

The marketers who should actually be worried are not the ones whose roles are at risk. They are the ones who have already replaced themselves. The ones who use AI to avoid having opinions rather than to sharpen them.

There is a phrase in the report that I think is on point:

If you are using AI to avoid thinking, you have not adopted a powerful tool. You have just outsourced the part of your job that made you valuable.

What the report covers

We also get into the buyer side of this story.

94% of B2B buyers are now using large language models during their purchasing process. 83% define their requirements before they ever speak to sales. And 85% of the time, they ultimately purchase from a vendor on their Day One shortlist. A shortlist that was assembled with AI assistance, before you knew they were looking.

If you are not visible, credible, and clearly positioned in the places where AI-assisted research happens, you may never get a seat at the table at all. That is not a scare story. It is a description of what is already in motion.

The report also covers where AI genuinely earns its place in a B2B marketing workflow. The blank page problem. The draft versus the finished work distinction. The agentic shift and what narrative orchestration actually means. And a practical action sequence structured by timeframe, not vague advice.

We have not pulled punches with our opinions and we have not catastrophized either. We have tried to be straight with you about a situation that deserves clear thinking.

The best B2B marketers I know are not panicking. They are curious. They are retooling. They are paying attention.

That is all this report is asking you to do.

[DOWNLOAD: Will You Lose Your Marketing Job, or Is It Just Generative Hype? → Here]



4 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

Mark Chueoke

Demand Generation

Do More With Less: 12 lessons from 12 months

The 12 most consistent learnings from the first year of Do More With Less.

Twelve months ago I started a podcast for OrbitalX.com called Do More With Less.

Between myself and my colleague Stuart Dale, we’ve since interviewed more than 50 founders, CMOs, and revenue leaders all of whom have had to solve the same problem: how to keep delivering growth with ever-tighter resources and budget.

No guest pretended it was easy and no two guests had exactly the same approach to achieving their improbable success. But when you speak to enough smart people fighting against the same constraints, patterns appear.

Conversations spanned different types of companies and different industries. From the newest AI start-ups to multibillion-dollar enterprise businesses. But we’ve noticed enough of similar behaviours in response to budget shrinkage to draw some broad conclusions.  

Here are the 12 most consistent lessons from the first year of Do More With Less.

1. Focus beats activity. Every time

The most repeated piece of advice from guests was brutally simple: stop doing so many things.

When budgets tighten, most teams instinctively try to maintain the same number of channels and campaigns with fewer resources, which rarely works.

Instead, Stan Garber, co-founder of Levelpath, argued teams should look to cover less surface area but with more depth; identify the two or three activities genuinely driving pipeline and double down on them.

Scattered activity only dilutes results and makes reporting harder and less convincing. 

Practical takeaway:

  • Identify your three channels responsible for most pipeline

  • Pause or reduce everything else for one quarter - politely reject the inevitable requests for ‘more’ from the rest of your colleagues during this experiment

  • Reinvest all your time and energy in optimising the chosen three to the max

2. Imperfect marketing is an advantage

Greg Landon, VP of Marketing at SALESmanago, had one of my favourite takes when he said “perfect marketing is mostly a fantasy”.

Waiting for the perfect message, the perfect campaign or perfect creative usually means you end up shipping nothing at all. 

And even when you do, you’ve been internally talking up your perfect campaign for so long, your colleagues and leadership have likely lost interest and mentally ‘moved on’. So by the time the creative is released, nobody else cares enough to support it. 

Landon argued that teams working with tight resources have a huge advantage: “they can’t afford perfectionism”. I loved that. 

Instead, they use speed as a growth lever; they test quickly, launch earlier and learn faster.

Practical takeaway:

  • Cut approval layers

  • Launch campaigns earlier

  • Optimise based on real market feedback

3. Constraints actually improve your thinking

Elena Pinakatt, former Global VP of Marketing & Transformation at Coca-Cola, made a fascinating observation.

Because constraints force better questions, even inside huge organisations like Coke, amazing ideas often emerge when budgets tighten or teams shrink.

When things get tight and you’ve less room in which to operate, you’re forced to examine assumptions; something you’ve rarely got time for but that is always a healthy exercise. I’m not saying a large budget always hides mediocre thinking, but if mediocre thinking exists, there’s nothing like scarcity to shine a light on it.

4. Relationships outperform tactics

One of the clearest and most emphatic assertions across our interviews is that relationships are a pretty infallible growth engine.

Several guests emphasised new efforts to be useful to partnerships, valuable to communities and known within trusted networks often produce better commercial results than traditional campaigns.

Michelle Meehan, CMO of Vetty, pointed out that B2B growth rarely comes from one brand acting alone, but through ecosystems. Relationships scale faster than advertising budgets.

It’s fairly obvious too that if your marketing idea comes with endorsement or participation from customers, partners or other industry voices, its credibility goes through the roof.

Practical takeaway:

  • Try mapping the five partners or creators who already influence your buyers

  • Figure out an approach that articulates the value for them of build content with you

  • Share audiences rather than trying to build everything yourself

5. Storytelling is still wildly underused in B2B

Meehan also championed another point that came up repeatedly: most B2B marketing is STILL painfully forgettable. Too many companies still believe that B2B buyers want purely rational communication - a bullet point list of features and packages. 

They don’t. I’m not sure how many times I’ll have to say this again before I die but the moment you tell a significantly different story from your competitors; something bigger and bolder; maybe more visionary or even just more entertaining, your sales efforts will see 5X rewards almost immediately.  

Elena Pinakatt echoed this from her Coca-Cola experience: emotion and narrative still drive attention like little else. Those of us willing to tell braver stories will see opportunities to outperform competitors with bigger budgets.

6. Systems beat heroic effort

Another theme that guests continuously hammered home throughout the year: doing more with less can’t rely on individual heroics; it needs systems.

Stan Garber talked about ‘repeatable processes that compound’ over time rather than launching endless one-off campaigns.

What could these repeatable processes look like in your real-life business week? That’s up to you. Look at what you’re doing and how it can be turned into a reliable system. Think ‘simple’ and think ‘leverage’...so good examples might be:

  • Figure out building a content engine rather than focusing on individual posts

  • What would it take to create repeatable webinars rather than one-off events?

  • How would partnerships become structured rather than ad-hoc collaborations?

7. Please…make your content work harder

The majority of our pod guests on Do More With Less mentioned - often in passing - that their marketing teams still produce content that only gets used once.

How mad is that? With restrictions and constraints everywhere, we’re busting our collective butts to produce brilliant stories and sales materials that we use once before consigning them to the dustbin. 

As a marketer and storyteller, this drives me absolutely potty. If every great piece of marketing content you create is based on a fierce insight or compelling story, then consider it ‘elastic’. It can be stretched and moulded across countless different executions that can hit your different segments repeatedly without becoming ‘old’.

One interview becomes a podcast. The podcast becomes video clips. The video clips make for great social posts which are ripe for Linkedin but also serve as ammunition for outbound sales emails and pitch decks. They might also lead the agenda in an easily put together newsletter that then features a blog ‘written by’ your podcast host about their personal reflections of the interview. That blog could be pitched to the online trade publication read most often by your target ICP. 

Or maybe the interviewer gathers the three most newsworthy examples or stories from the interview and repackages them into your next webinar; a webinar that should be promoted both before and after its broadcast - offered up to three times in the next 12 months as an on-demand asset in emails and on social. If it gets notable traction during that time then hire a venue, invite the original guest back to an in-person event and buy a crate of wine for 20-50 guests. 

Every hour of good-enough content creation should feed your marketing machine for months

8. Proximity to customers matters more than dashboards

Data matters; every guest agreed as much. But several also warned about becoming overly dependent on dashboards. Leaders doing more with less told our community the best insights still come from customer calls, sales conversations and community discussions.

Elena Pinakatt described it as “detective work”. She said the closer marketers stay to real customer problems and the more questions they can personally ask face to face, sharper their insight and messaging becomes. 

Haley Chute, chief product and marketing officer at Octagos, went further. “If you're not meeting your customers, you're probably not doing your job,” she said. “I could easily expect to personally meet a quarter per month.” 

Where AI is dominating every conversation for good reason, Haley says ‘people are seeking what’s real’.  

“We'll create real community spaces where we can have a conversation with them. We build trust - our strategy is ‘trust first and everything else second’. By doing that we’re able to use them to bounce ideas off or engage in product reviews or tell us how our message resonates.”

9. Small experiments make you go faster

Several of our guests on the pod described the freedom they felt in moving away from large, expensive campaigns and instead running smaller, faster experiments.

Even large organisations, they said, are benefiting from testing messaging through LinkedIn posts, launching small pilot events or trialling new content formats quickly with no expectations except to learn something. Such an approach often doesn’t need to be reported at the highest levels unless you derive something good from it - the risk you run remains small while you and the team increase the speed of learning in a new and tough trading environment. 

10. Doing more with less needs clarity

Doing more with less is rarely about working harder but about clarity.

If there is even slightly blurred thinking regarding who your audience really is, what problem you solve for your clients, which channels actually work or which activities can stop without slowing momentum, you’re skirting on the edge of trouble. 

Have answers to the big questions locked down, fully front of mind and communicated across all adjacent functions and you’re in a good place. It reduces risk and workload if everyone across the business is playing to win the same game. 

11. Think beyond marketing 

Jennifer Shaw-Sweet, the global practice lead for the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, urged our listeners to double down on earning a reputation as truly commercial operators. Regardless of your seniority, make sure you’re 100% fluent in the factors that win and lose your business deals; how the business makes money, what drives pipeline and which of your activities actually influence revenue.
It sounds obvious but it’s still surprisingly rare for marketers to talk in terms of revenue and pipeline as opposed to marketing outputs. We earn influence when we demonstrate impact over outcomes. 

12. Lean in to leadership

After recording dozens of Do More With Less episodes, I can honestly say the one thing I think is most clear is this. Whatever age you are and again, regardless of your level of experience, start thinking of yourself as a leader. 

If you only see, think about and talk about tactics, you’ll make yourself irrelevant. The past year’s collection of Do More With Less podcast episodes has, in effect, been one extended discussion on how marketing leadership itself is changing. 

The marketers thriving right now share several characteristics: they think commercially, they challenge all assumptions including their own, they prioritise ruthlessly, they stay close to customers and they think relentlessly about value and impact. 

And most of all, they accept that doing more with less is not a temporary phase to ‘get through’.

It’s a correction; the new and permanent operating environment.

9 min read

Author: Mark Choueke

OOO gravestone

AI

Letters page: IT keep blocking our AI adoption and I am running out of patience

“Dear Rich,

I work for a traditional business, partnership-led, conservative by culture, and very slow to change. I have made my peace with that for the most part because the work is interesting and I have reasonable autonomy within marketing.

My current frustration is all thanks to AI. Over the past twelve months I have watched peers in other companies claim they are trialling it all over the place. I know that a lot of the stuff we hear from people on stage is hot air, but I do want to get my team at least playing with the tools that make their lives easier.

My team wants to move. I want to move. But every tool we try to adopt hits a wall with IT. The procurement process alone takes four to five months. We are yet to have a tool actually signed off. Two tools have been rejected outright on data security grounds with no real explanation beyond a blanket policy about third party data processing. There are zero IT tools available in the company.

I have tried going through the proper channels. I have tried building a business case. I have tried getting IT to come to the table early. Nothing moves at any speed.

I do not think IT are bad people. But I do think they are applying yesterday’s risk framework to tomorrow’s tools, and the cost to marketing is real and growing.

Any advice?”

Sarah, London


Rich’s reply

Sarah, I have certainly had my run-ins with IT over the years but, to be fair, they are not wrong to be cautious.

That is not the same as saying their current approach is right, or that the pace of their review process is acceptable, or that a blanket rejection with no explanation is a reasonable response to a well-constructed business case. None of those things are right. But the underlying instinct, that AI tools carry data risks that need to be properly understood before they touch client information, is a legitimate one. Especially in professional services, where client confidentiality is not a compliance checkbox but the foundation of the entire commercial relationship.

How you frame this internally matters enormously. If you go into the next conversation with IT treating them as obstructionists or laggards, they will become more entrenched. If you go in treating their concerns as real and worth solving together, you have a much better chance of finding a path through.

Understand what IT are actually afraid of

Most IT departments blocking AI adoption are not doing so because they dislike progress. They are geeks at heart. They love new toys. But they are probably blocking it because they have been burned before, or because they are accountable for something going wrong in a way that marketing is not. A data breach caused by an unvetted third party tool will land on the CISO, not on you.

Before your next conversation, try to understand specifically what the objection is. “Third party data processing” is a category of concern, not an explanation. Press for the detail. Is it about client data being ingested by the tool? Is it about data residency? Is it about the tool’s terms of service and what the vendor does with inputs? Is it about SOC 2 compliance or ISO 27001 certification? Is it a fear they will be lumbered with the cost? Or is it simply that they are overworked, with every country and every function making new requests and no bandwidth left to give?

Each of these is a different problem with a different solution. If you do not know which one you are actually solving, you cannot solve it.

The IT department that says no to everything is usually the one that has never been asked to help design a yes.

Take someone from IT out for a coffee

Before you send another formal request or build another business case, grab someone from IT and get a coffee somewhere away from the office.

Ask them their views on AI adoption and how ready the company is. Ask how other companies have solved it and what good governance looks like in practice. Let them educate you on the context you do not have. Whether that is genuine concerns about integration challenges, the fact that the CIO is retiring soon, or simply that the team is at capacity with current priorities. Until you know that context, it is hard to work around it.

Share what you have been reading about how the market has matured. Enterprise-grade tools now operate inside existing data boundaries rather than outside them. Several leading AI platforms offer SOC 2 Type II certification, data processing agreements, and explicit contractual commitments about how inputs are handled. Some of the most data-sensitive professional services firms in the world, large accountancy practices and major law firms, are adopting AI at scale. If the risk were truly unmanageable, those businesses would not be moving.

The goal of the coffee is not to win an argument. It is to understand what you are actually dealing with, and to give IT the experience of being consulted rather than pressured.

Use internal tools to warm the function up

If IT are blocking external AI tools on data security grounds, the most pragmatic starting point is a tool they have almost certainly already cleared. Microsoft Copilot operates within your existing Microsoft 365 tenant boundary. Your data does not leave your environment. It does not use your inputs to train external models. Microsoft’s own documentation confirms this, and it has been independently verified by enterprise security analysts. Copilot is an extension of an environment IT already governs, not a new risk surface.

Starting there serves two purposes. It gets your team using AI in a structured, governed way immediately. And it gives IT direct, observable experience of an enterprise-grade AI tool behaving exactly as their security policies require. That experience does more to reduce institutional fear than any amount of documentation or business case writing.

Once IT have seen Copilot work safely inside your environment, the conversation about additional tools changes. You are no longer asking them to trust a category they are unfamiliar with. You are asking them to evaluate specific tools against a framework they have now seen in practice. That is a much smaller ask.

The goal in the short term is not to win the argument about AI. It is to give IT a safe, observable experience of it that makes the next conversation easier. Let's help them 'break the seal'.

Request a dedicated IT business partner

This is one of the most effective structural moves available to you, and it tends to get overlooked because it does not feel like a tactical fix.

Request that IT assign a dedicated business partner aligned to marketing. Not a helpdesk contact. A named person whose remit includes understanding what marketing is trying to do, helping to navigate procurement and security processes, and acting as an internal advocate within IT for the tools you need.

IT get visibility into everything marketing is exploring before it becomes a formal request, which reduces the feeling of being ambushed. Marketing gets someone who understands the policies and philosophies IT operates within, which means fewer wasted applications. And over time, you build genuine rapport with someone inside the function who can argue for you in rooms you are not in.

The business partner becomes your insider. That is not manipulation. It is how large organisations are supposed to work, and most IT functions respond positively to being asked for partnership rather than permission.

Propose a sandboxed pilot rather than full adoption

If the procurement and security review process is the bottleneck, propose something smaller. A sandboxed pilot, run on non-sensitive internal data only, with no client information involved, is a much easier thing for IT to approve than a full enterprise rollout.

Define the scope tightly. One tool. One use case. Three months. Agree upfront what data the tool will and will not touch. Offer to have IT involved in the setup so they can see exactly how it works rather than reviewing it from a distance.

A pilot does two things. It gets you moving. And it gives IT direct, controlled experience of the tool, which tends to reduce fear far more effectively than any amount of documentation.

The cost of doing nothing is not zero

There is one more argument worth having ready, not to use aggressively, but to deploy if the conversation stalls on risk. IT’s caution is framed around the risk of adopting AI tools. But there is an equally real risk on the other side that rarely gets named.

The Larridin State of Enterprise AI 2025 report found that 67 percent of organisations admit they do not have full visibility into which AI tools their employees are already using. When businesses block sanctioned adoption, people do not stop using AI. They use personal accounts, free tools, and consumer-grade applications that carry none of the enterprise data protections IT are trying to enforce. The risk IT is trying to prevent does not go away when they say no. It goes underground.

A controlled, IT-approved pilot with proper data governance is categorically safer than the alternative. That reframe, from ‘AI adoption is risky’ to ‘uncontrolled shadow AI is the real risk’, tends to land well with security-minded leaders because it speaks their language. You are not asking IT to lower their guard. You are asking them to channel it more effectively.

Build the coalition before the escalation

A business case presented by marketing to IT is a marketing document. A business case co-authored by marketing, finance, and a senior business leader or two carries significantly more weight.

Spend two weeks quietly building internal support. Find people who are already frustrated by the pace of change and get them to say so in the room. Find out whether your CFO has a view on the competitive cost of inaction. A finance voice saying “we are losing ground and that has a number attached to it” changes the dynamic in a way that marketing saying “our content is slower than competitors” simply does not.

This is not politics for its own sake. It is making sure that the conversation IT is having reflects the full weight of the business need, not just the enthusiasm of one department.

If none of this moves things, escalate deliberately

Some IT functions in traditional businesses are structurally risk-averse in a way that no amount of coalition building will fully overcome. If you have genuinely tried the collaborative approach, brought the market evidence, proposed a sandboxed pilot, and built cross-functional support, and the answer is still no with no credible path to yes, then escalation to the CEO is not a failure of diplomacy. It is the appropriate next step.

But escalate with a solution, not a complaint. Do not go to the CEO and say IT are blocking us. Go with a fully formed proposal: here is the tool, here is the use case, here is how comparable firms have handled the security question, here is the pilot structure, here is what it costs, here is what we stand to gain, and here is what we are currently losing by waiting. Link the solution to a positive gain and inaction to a negative effect, on pipeline, on win rates, on team productivity.

At that point you are not asking the CEO to override IT. You are asking them to make a business decision with full information. That is a very different ask, and a much easier one for a senior leader to act on.

Going to the CEO empty-handed is a complaint. Going with a fully costed, de-risked proposal is a recommendation. Know the difference before you walk in.

The short answer

Take someone from IT for a coffee and find out what you are actually dealing with. Start with tools already inside your approved environment, Copilot being the obvious first step, to give IT a safe, observable experience of enterprise-grade AI. Request a dedicated IT business partner who can become your internal advocate. Propose a sandboxed pilot that keeps the risk surface small. Use the shadow AI argument to reframe inaction as the greater risk. Build a cross-functional coalition so your business case carries more than marketing’s voice.

And if the collaborative route has been genuinely exhausted, escalate to the CEO with a fully formed proposal rather than a grievance. You are not asking for permission to do something reckless. You are asking for support to do something your competitors are already doing.

The relationship with IT is worth preserving. But not at the cost of your team standing still while the market moves.

And if your CEO still says no, well, come send me a note! 

Onwards,

Rich

Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com

11 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

Elasticity

Career

‘Elasticity’ is the business skill hirers should look to before ‘cultural fit’

I’ve had a weird career. 

I’ve swapped in and out of industries: newspaper and magazine journalism, working in adland for one of the big agencies, and then switching to B2B SaaS as a marketer. I’ve been the media, the agency and the brand.

I’ve been in-house; freelance; I’ve co-founded and run a business, and I’ve also been very, very unemployed. At various times I’ve volunteered for causes or organisations about which I feel strongly and on three separate occasions I’ve formalised this by becoming a trustee or director for charities.

I always needed variety. I don’t like to feel pigeon-holed. The only thing I always knew about what I wanted career-wise was that I didn’t want to do the same day, repeated over and over. 

My sassy 10-year-old daughter enjoys asking me what I do for a living because I find it so hard to articulate who and what I am in a single line; she enjoys seeing my face contort as I try to explain myself. 

My brother-in-law has not had a weird career. He’s been incredibly successful in the City and had two jobs in his whole life. He’s been in his current role for 20 years. 

He has a much easier answer to the “so what are you doing with yourself these days?” question, casually asked by distant relatives during the small talk stage of family events.

Basically, I’m a storyteller. I didn’t become one. I was a storyteller when I was a kid, right through school, throughout my teens and then as I jumped into journalism. 

There’s an episode coming up of Do More With Less - the podcast I host for OrbitalX - with Joe Lazer, author of brand new bestseller Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age. I can’t wait to meet Joe and I also can’t wait to read the book - it’s been a smash in the US but doesn’t come out here in the UK for another month. 

In a recent post on Linkedin, Joe noted that Netflix and OpenAI are offering salaries of up to $775,000 per year for storytelling roles. Anthropic, he added, has hired 80+ storytelling and comms roles in recent months, many of which pay $500K+ in total compensation.

Two years ago, nobody was interested in storytelling as a skill. I’m certain I won’t have been the only one advised to stop using the word in recruitment processes altogether and to ensure it was nowhere to be seen on my resume.

While it’s lovely that we storytellers are back in fashion, I’ve seen enough turnover of feast and famine to suspect our latest golden age will be short-lived. I’d also argue there isn’t a boardroom in the world committed enough to a storytelling strategy to believe any candidate can sustain or justify these salaries past ‘year 1’. I’ll ask Joe how he sees it but for me, that gravy train will break down as soon as the trend-pendulum swings back to the harder, more tangible, measurable stuff.  

What I do know though is that storytelling isn’t and never has been my most valuable skill.

The element of my professional ‘self’ that I’d price above anything storytelling - although maybe it comes more naturally to storytellers - is that I’m kind of ‘elastic’.

That’s the best word I could think of for it; (agile is loaded with all sorts of tech-bro context and flexible sounds like I lack agency). 

What I mean by elastic, was well articulated last week by a marketing recruiter I’ve started following on Linkedin named Sinead Willis.  

“The strongest marketers I know have the “messiest” careers,” Willis wrote. “They’ve worked inhouse, freelanced, taken breaks, been laid off,⁣ jumped into startups that blew up and startups that blew apart.⁣⁣

“Every one of those moves built perspective.⁣They’ve learned to do more with less, build from zero, and fix what’s broken.⁣ But too many job descriptions still cling to linear career logic⁣, as if the only valuable experience is uninterrupted, upward, and corporate.⁣

“The next decade belongs to marketers who’ve done the messy stuff because they’re the ones who know what to do when the playbook stops working.” 

I hope Willis is right. Not just because I agree those of us with what Sunday Times Bestseller stars Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper call ‘Squiggly Careers’, are genuinely better set up to navigate uncertainty than execs with more simple or linear paths. 

But also because playbooks have and will continue to stop working. And by focusing so heavily on channels and tactics - traditionally prioritised by B2B marketing ahead of story or mission - so much marketing is as forgettable for the recipient as it is joyless for the marketer to create. 

It’s work that leaves our frustrated bosses wondering why they pay for marketing that leaves their business offer and brand virtually invisible; why we literally invite our customers to disregard us.

And at that point - well, internal interest in marketing disappears. Ambition and perspective shrink; marketing strategies start being built around costs rather than outcomes. Investment is cut to a point where marketing programmes feel relatively risk-free.

Unfortunately, that’s often the point at which a marketing plan stops achieving anything even vaguely useful. Risk-free marketing is the most expensive marketing there is. You’re investing time, money and work for literally nothing to happen. Any ‘message’ simply drifts over the heads of your audience without touching them. And the worst part? Nobody cares. Sure, there are regular complaints or snide remarks from the sales team but that’s often restricted to a low-level and harmless hum. Things get done badly; with zero love or craft and nobody gets held to account. 

So instead of proper campaign planning according to strategic business ambitions and targets,  marketing becomes the act of ticking off busy activities on stagnant spreadsheets.

The marketing goal is no longer business transformation or growth as it once was; it’s now merely a watered-down case study or the moving deadline for ‘that blog’.

This marketing death-spiral has been a clear risk in every team I’ve ever been a part of. Even in a high-functioning set-up, it’s never more than a broken relationship or a few bad pieces of work away from being triggered.

Being elastic is what prevents it. Being elastic is the opposite of being a ‘good culture fit’ - of over compliance; of following direction from non-marketers without question.  

Diversity and inclusion conversations have quite rightly focused on women, people of colour and LGBTQ employees. That shouldn’t stop - we’re far from done in that regard. But the conversations should also include people who see the world differently - the neurodiverse and the creatives. People who abhor a status quo and can barely hold themselves together if they can’t comfortably raise opposing views or ask thorny questions. 

And as a leader or even just a colleague, it’s difficult being difficult. Any fool in marketing can prance about on conference stages winning applause from listeners with speeches about creativity.

Actually doing it behind closed office doors amid the stress of trying to keep a business afloat is, more often than not, painful. Hell, it’s not as if you’re telling your colleagues something they don’t know. Your leadership already understands that not all B2B marketing plans should look the same; that homogeneity stalls careers and is crushing and counter-productive to hopes of growth. But the alternative is hard. It requires stretch, empathy, big listening ears and active imagination. And the bravery to sound and look different; to take a risk. 

This - this is the real job of your storyteller; your elastic colleague. They stretch and lengthen their worldviews, way past the boundaries of a functional marketing programme. They imagine and incorporate the needs of customers, partners - all the different stakeholders - and then move it all beyond commonplace business or sales patter. They’ll tie it all together and wrap it into an actual story - something memorable, powerful.

My partners at OrbitalX refer to this as a superpower of mine. It’s a relief and a blessing to find smart business people that see the value. If you’ve felt at work like I have in various jobs, you’ll know what I mean. Sometimes we’re seen as interesting misfits; ‘loved-but-not-always-understood’ ideas machines.

Other times we can, I guess, come across quite annoying. A CEO might keep you around because your constructive discontent is regularly useful but elsewhere, colleagues just see you as the person that never stops asking bloody questions.

If you’re lucky you’ll have had more than your fair share of jobs, businesses or bosses who knew your value and were determined to hold on to you at all costs. Most people in life can never say this but work is a legitimate pleasure for as long as there’s someone who needs you to keep that ideas motor turning; that understands there’s nobody else on the team with your perspective, skill-set or ability to create ‘something out of nothing’; right?

Sure, you might not always fit comfortably into how organisations have to work but it’s possible to find the right blend of compliance and defiance.

‘Compliance’ because most good changes are built on compromise, incremental steps and bringing people with you (but also ‘compliance’ because you need to keep your job, right?). And ‘defiance’ because without people like you, teams and businesses rarely improve and adapt. At OrbitalX, I’m surrounded by people like me. They’re in every function and cover every department. It should be chaos but somehow it works. 

Marketing is changing and we need new thinking to address it - not new marketing skills; we should all expose ourselves to serious training and understanding of the discipline - but new approaches to meeting and exceeding expectations and sustaining growth. Competition is now greater, pressures are heavier and implosions occur much quicker. 

Reduced headcount and increased investment into technology aren’t the drivers - they’re the results. The driver is an open debate about what marketing is, what it needs to be, how it gets done and what kind of people and skills are required to make it succeed.

Inflated salaries for storytelling roles won’t last; the bubble will surely burst soon enough. But for the first time in my career I don’t feel like a lone, wide-eyed ‘crazy’. Everything is on the table and up for grabs; there’s a massive opportunity for the elastic, the resilient and the versatile.  

Check out Mark's Boring2Brave course on the Academy

9 min read

Author: Mark Choueke

cover of Let me just stop you there

Content and Communications

On International Women's Day, marketing needs to grow a spine.

Every IWD, HR asks marketing to post something. Marketing obliges. Nobody asks the obvious question.

A wave of branded graphics rolls across LinkedIn. Purple. Polished. Pointless.

A logo. A slogan. Maybe a stock photo of women laughing in a meeting room that looks nothing like any meeting room any of us have ever actually sat in.

And then, on the 9th of March, it's over. Back to normal.

I find this quietly infuriating. Not because I think the companies doing it are evil. But because it's so easy.

Posting today doesn't celebrate women. It celebrates your marketing team's ability to follow a content calendar.

And easy is exactly the wrong response to a problem that, in 2026, still doesn't have a solution.

So, if you're a business leader who actually wants to do something, here is where I'd start.

Look at your numbers honestly

Pay gap reporting exists. Promotion rates by gender are trackable. The ratio of men to women in your senior leadership team is not a mystery. Most companies know exactly what their numbers look like. They just hope nobody forces them to publish them.

And here is the thing. Publishing them is not the solution. But it is the start. Because the moment numbers are visible, the conversation changes. Stop hiding behind the fact that nobody has made it mandatory yet. Pull up the spreadsheet. Share it with your leadership team. Then decide what you are actually going to do about it.

Understand the difference between mentorship and sponsorship

Here is a question worth sitting with. When did you last put your own reputation on the line for someone who didn't look or sound like you?

Mentorship is telling someone what they could do better. Sponsorship is walking into a room and saying "this person should be here" when they are not in the room to advocate for themselves. One costs you nothing. The other costs you something. That difference is exactly why sponsorship is rare and exactly why it matters.

That, incidentally, is what Give to Gain actually means. Not a slogan. A transaction with real stakes.

Fix your meeting culture

This one is personal to me. I wrote a song about it (its really not that bad but you be the judge).

It's called "Let Me Just Stop You There" and it came out of years of coaching marketers who had experienced exactly this dynamic. The interrupted pitch. The stolen idea. The meeting where someone repeated what you said, louder, two minutes later, and got the credit.

Give it a listen in the Marketing Mixtape section of our site and tell me how strongly you feel I shouldn't give up my day job.

'Let me just stop you there' a song Rich Fitzmaurice wrote for IWD. B2B Marketing United @ b2bmarketing.com

In the song there's a guy called Jonas. Jonas pulls up a chair and spreads his legs like he owns the whole room. Before you've even started, he's decided he's the main character and will walk you all through your area of expertise.

Jonas is not one person. Jonas is a pattern.

Watch who gets interrupted in your next meeting. Watch whose idea comes back around wearing someone else's name. Watch who fills every silence and who has quietly learned it's safer to say nothing at all.

This is where workplace culture actually lives. Not in the values on the wall. Not in the IWD graphic. In the room. In the meeting. In the moment where someone decides whether to speak or not.

Audit how you hire and promote

"Culture fit" is one of the most reliable ways to keep hiring people who look, sound and think like the people already there. And it is women, disproportionately, who get filtered out by that particular phrase.

The leaders who rely on it most are usually the ones with the most to lose from a genuinely diverse room. They do not ask "is this person excellent?" They ask "will this person fit?" And fitting, too often, means not challenging, not disrupting and not threatening the existing order.

Structured interviews, blind CV screening and explicit promotion criteria are not radical ideas. They are just uncomfortable ones for the people who benefit most from the current system. Which is probably why most companies haven't bothered.

Think about who gets the stretch assignments

The high-visibility projects. The big pitches. The roles that build careers and reputations. Who gets nominated? And who gets quietly assumed to not want the travel, the pressure or the step up, without ever being asked?

That assumption has ended more careers than any deliberate act of discrimination.

And if you work in marketing, this one is aimed directly at you

You are the first line of defence.

You control the brief. You control the content calendar. You decide what goes out under your company's name. Which means when a hollow branded graphic gets posted on International Women's Day with nothing behind it, that is partly on you.

I know how it goes. HR sends a message. "Make sure we post something for IWD." The path of least resistance is a purple graphic and a caption. Job done. Box ticked.

But here is the thing about HR. They are often the same people sitting on the pay gap data, the promotion ratios and the gender breakdown of your senior leadership team. They know exactly what the numbers look like. And they will insist that data cannot be shared publicly.

So they want the post. They just don't want the substance.

That is not celebrating women. That is reputation management dressed up as progress.

Next time HR asks you to post for IWD, ask them one question before you open Canva.

"If we're proud of our commitment to women, what are the numbers we can share to prove it?"

If they can't answer that, you have your answer. And so does everyone watching.

If you must post today, here are the only things worth posting

Your actual numbers. Pay gap, promotion ratio, percentage of women in senior leadership. No spin, no context dressing it up. Just the number and one sentence on what you are doing about it.

A specific commitment. Not "we celebrate women." Something measurable, on the record, that you will report back on in twelve months. One thing. Concrete. Signed off.

Specific people. Not "we're so proud of our amazing female colleagues." Named individuals, specific achievements, genuine reasons why people should pay attention to their great work. Use your platform to expand theirs.

Or say nothing. If you have nothing real to offer today, silence is more respectful than a hollow graphic.

And if you see a branded graphic today with nothing behind it, ask them a question publicly

"What is your current gender pay gap?"

"What percentage of your senior leadership team are women?"

"What specific commitment are you making today that we can hold you to next year?"

Not aggressively. Just genuinely. Because sunlight is the best disinfectant and companies that post without substance should be gently, publicly, reminded of that.

Do something. Or say nothing.

6 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

Data Decay

Marketing Operations

Data Decay: The Problem B2B Marketers like to ignore

The very term business-to-business implies that companies buy from other companies. Well, not exactly. What actually happens is that people make purchasing decisions to buy from other people at companies who are selling products, services or software.

Companies don't buy anything. People do. And they generally buy from people based on some level of relationship. This becomes more important as the complexity of the sale moves from commodity to complex solutions. None of this is news to anyone. But the way most B2B marketers behave suggests they have forgotten it entirely.

If people buy from people, then finding the right people and knowing how to reach them is the single most important thing a marketer can do. Yet most of the budget, effort and attention goes elsewhere. That is the problem this piece is about. And the scale of it is worse than most marketers realise.

Contact data decays at 70.8 percent a year. Yes, really.

We conducted a research study on the accuracy of contact information and gathered 1,025 data inputs. The method was straightforward. When giving seminars, I asked the audience to pull out their business card and check any element on it that had changed in the last 12 months. All cards, with or without changes, were collected in exchange for a copy of the research.

The result: 70.8 percent of the business cards had one or more changes in the previous 12 months.

The breakdown tells you a lot about why your CRM is quietly rotting. Title or job function changes accounted for 65.8 percent. Address changes hit 41.9 percent. Phone number changes reached 42.9 percent. Email address changes came in at 37.3 percent, slightly lower thanks to the rise of personal Gmail accounts. Company name changes affected 34.2 percent, mostly driven by people moving to new employers. Even name changes showed up at 3.8 percent, as people still change their name upon marriage or divorce.

Digging deeper, 29.6 percent of individuals changed companies entirely. 4.6 percent of companies changed their name through mergers or acquisitions. 12.3 percent of companies moved locations. And 41.2 percent of individuals stayed at the same company but something else changed, a new title, a restructured department, a relocated office.

This is not just an American problem

Several years ago I was giving a seminar in London to about 100 people. Before running the same exercise, I told the audience I expected the change rate to be much lower in England, because "you are all much more stable than us Americans."

Well, the hands went up, and to everyone's surprise it was exactly 70 percent. The same as the US. So much for stability.

On the other hand, a seminar in Shanghai three years later with 50 people produced a change rate of only 45 percent. And several years ago, the Computer Intelligence division of Harte-Hanks (now Aberdeen) reported a change rate of just over 60 percent in the US technology market.

No matter what the exact percentage, whether it is 60 percent or 70 percent, it is high. And the trend is going in the wrong direction.

It is getting worse, not better

We ran a similar study more than ten years earlier, and 62 percent of individuals had one or more changes in their business card. That compares with 70.8 percent a decade later. The decay rate for B2B contact data is increasing.

The proportion of people changing companies held roughly steady, dropping slightly from 31 percent to 29.6 percent. The biggest shift was a 10 percent increase in movement within companies. 41.2 percent reported data changes without changing employer, compared to 31 percent in the earlier study. People are being restructured, promoted, reassigned and relocated more frequently than ever.

There are newer methods and firms compiling B2B data now, and these lists are an improvement over traditional approaches. But they still contain inaccurate data at some level. It is worth checking out any data provider before assuming their promoted accuracy rates hold up in practice.

Outside lists are less accurate than you think

This usually leads marketers towards external lists, particularly for acquisition campaigns. So how accurate is the compiled information in those lists?

We conducted a snap survey as a data check. We called 50 records from each of three different list sources to verify key contact name, title, company name, address, email and phone number. A record was scored inaccurate if one or more of those data elements were found to be incorrect.

The results were sobering. A B2B trade association membership list came back 20 percent inaccurate. A large B2B data compiler was 35 percent inaccurate. And an industrial directory was 60 percent inaccurate.

Your own data is probably worse

Here is the part that surprises people. Internal customer and prospect data can be even less accurate than external lists. Most companies do not have a rigorous data hygiene process in place. Internal data, once entered, is rarely revisited to update contact and company information, even with widespread usage of CRM and marketing automation platforms.

"There is an old axiom widely accepted in B2B, and it is this: a great campaign sent to a lousy list will not do as well as a lousy campaign sent to a great list."

John Coe

So why does this matter more than everything else?

There are four elements that affect the success of a B2B database or direct marketing campaign. Each has a weighted impact on results:

Targeting and list data that matches the audience accounts for 50 to 70 percent of campaign performance. The offer drives 20 to 30 percent. Sequence, frequency and cadence of contact media contributes another 20 to 30 percent. And creative, which is typically copy-led, accounts for 10 to 20 percent.

The most important element by a significant margin is the targeting and matching data. Yet most of the money gets spent on the other three. There is an old axiom widely accepted in B2B, and it is this: a great campaign sent to a lousy list will not do as well as a lousy campaign sent to a great list.

Most marketers know this instinctively. Very few act on it.

So what should you actually do about it?

Spend time and money on developing and obtaining the best lists and data possible. The payback will be significant. This is particularly true when you consider the investment most companies are making in their marketing technology stack. None of those technologies work to their full potential without good data feeding them.

Your data governance process needs a fixed set of input rules, double checks and procedures for updating accuracy. Ideally, you have merged your data silos into a customer data platform and instituted sound data input rules. But the hardest part remains: verifying, correcting and updating contact-level information on an ongoing basis.

That is a tough job. But given that targeting accounts for up to 70 percent of your campaign performance, it is the job that matters most.

6 min read

Author: John Coe

Ted lasso

Content and Communications

Bill and Brett: the writers to follow if you really wanna sound ‘human’

There’s an awful cringe moment to endure on B2B marketing Linkedin most days. It happens when some B2B visionary will tell us he (normally a ‘he’) thinks we all ought to “sound more human.” 

If it’s a really shitty day, he’ll add that ‘we are, after all, marketing to other humans’, “Right?” 

If a ‘B2B is actually H2H’ (™2009) post has been copied and pasted directly from ChatGPT, it’ll sound all: “Here’s the quiet but uncomfortable truth: the strongest brands aren’t the ones that arrive with the biggest fanfare. They’re the ones that manage brand deliberately. Consistently. Relentlessly.” 

And while it makes you wince, you know you have to be the bigger person and forgive. Because behind it, is good intent. The bigger problem is that while B2B marketers are ace at saying it, most seem incapable of just doing it. 


“In today’s competitive B2B landscape, value-driven lead generation is not about aggressive selling but about offering meaningful insights, solutions, and resources that help buyers make better decisions with valuable industry expertise, and personalized experiences, you can position yourself as ‘a trusted advisor’ rather than just a vendor.” 

“Solutions. Insights. Outcomes.”

(Real LinkedIn post from an Enterprise business in February 2026).


Blah. Blah. And blah.

Emails are shit. Landing pages are shit. Whitepapers are shit. 

Linkedin posts? Unspeakably shit.

So what’s new?

Well, a long time ago I started experimenting with writing marketing copy in my own tone of voice - regardless of the ‘style’ or ‘tone of voice’ guide to which I was supposedly faithfully working.

You know what? The stuff I produced got read, commented on, shared and downloaded to the tune of about 10X. 

And that all happened pretty much immediately. My sales colleagues felt the impact. Nobody quibbles about style internally if the numbers start racking up. 

Doug Kessler, founder of crack B2B creative agency Velocity Partners once told me tone of voice is ‘the only multi-million dollar weapon B2B marketers wield’. 

If that’s true (and it probably is), would you entrust something so valuable to the person in your business who once wrote a corporate style-guide, now hidden deep on the company drive and which nobody chooses to read?

Instead, I began studying and stealing from the authors, columnists, bloggers and screenwriters that made me laugh out loud, inspired me or simply shot jolts of wake-up energy through me whenever I read or heard their words. 

I learned from the best; I injected my marketing emails with what I hoped was as close to the rhythmic sing-song of Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue as I could manage.

I looked to Caitlin Moran and Ian Dunt for permission to be 100% authentic, ‘unprofessional’ and real. 

For grown-up storytelling, Malcolm Gladwell and Carole Cadwalladr. 

For the sharpest ‘can I get away-with-it?’ humour, Marina Hyde, Armando Ianucci and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

For joined-up ‘systems thinking’, David Simon, Jonathan Freedland, Anne Applebaum and Ken Robinson. 

You get the picture. 

I nicked ideas and inspiration for content as well as looking at the way they all wrote or spoke. Still do.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to why I’m writing this column. There’s some incredible writing happening in TV right now - some of it British and European but predominantly in the US. 

One Brit who has excelled now for several years is actor and comedian Brett Goldstein. Embedded in LA writers’ rooms with American producer, director and screenwriter Bill Lawrence and other top brains, they’re responsible for Apple TV shows Ted Lasso and Shrinking.

If you care about writing that actually sounds like how people speak in 2026; the speed of it, the rhythm, the compound blend of sarcasm and sincerity, those two shows should be your syllabus.

Go read the scripts. Not the clips on TikTok or YouTube; the actual scripts, all available online. The dialogue is as tight; the language and diction bang up to date so that you’re made to feel culturally ‘in the know’. 

And while the comedy comes frequently in rich, ‘laugh-out-loud’ punches, it’s heartfelt and much kinder than that which we’re known for in the UK.  

There’s such amazing depth and understanding invested in character that when Derek from Shrinking, tells racist neighbour Pam to “eat a dick” in his best ‘good morning’ voice, it's somehow far less vicious than anything Blackadder ever threw at Baldrick.   

The care writers on both shows take in crafting even the most throwaway lines and exchanges laced within each episode, does more brand work for their audience’s ‘heart-love’ than the totality of copy posted on Linkedin today. 

"You can be a reindeer. Not the fancy one... but one of the randos... like Fluffer," joyously grouchy Harrison Ford’s Paul tells Jimmy in Shrinking.

"Do you believe in ghosts, Ted?" AFC Richmond chairwoman Rebecca Welton asks Ted Lasso.

 "I do, but more importantly I think they need to believe in themselves."

Gorgeous. So readable. If you’re a fan of either show you’ll have read those lines in Paul’s precise growl or Ted’s Kansas drawl. You’ll have smiled when you read them and if you're at work, you may have fought off the urge to reach for your phone to dive into some clips on YouTube. 

Bet you never felt that same warmth while choking over the laminated language on most B2B landing pages. All that “driving digital acceleration.” and “unlocking transformative growth.”

What’s the point I’m making? You obviously can’t swear like Goldstein's Roy Kent in your business writing, or smile as you tell your more annoying clients to ‘go eat a dick’.  

You can, however, note how real and current the writing is on these shows and others. 

The characters interrupt. They deflect. They say something too honest and then undercut it with a joke. Like how people actually protect themselves after over-sharing in mid-conversation.

When you recognise something you’ve written in your company’s style or vocab sounds hilariously weighty or pompous, try puncturing it with levity - maybe something lightly self-aware in brackets - to show you recognise how twatty we all have to sound sometimes. 

Study these writers to understand how to be authoritative and credible but also trusted and warm in the same breath.

Your audience will love you for it. They’ll feel relieved, refreshed and included and they’ll come back to you again and again. And that, after all, is exactly what we’re all being paid for.



5 min read

Author: Mark Choueke

picture of rich, john and Mark

Leadership

The Pioneer of B2B Marketing Passes the Torch

Man Who Coined 'B2B Marketing' Sells Legendary Domain to Global CMO to Build the Practitioner-Led Home Ground of B2B marketing.

London, UK – 2nd March 2026

Today, Paartner Limited announces the acquisition of b2bmarketing.com and the appointment of John Coe as President Emeritus of B2B Marketing United. Founded by Rich Fitzmaurice, an experienced global Chief Marketing Officer, and in partnership with Mark Choueke, Partner and Chief Creative Officer at OrbitalX, former editor of Marketing Week, author of ‘Boring2Brave', the company is building the practitioner-led ecosystem and home ground for B2B marketers worldwide; B2B Marketing United.

A Legendary Partnership

John Coe is recognised as a pioneer of B2B marketing and the figure who first coined the term now accepted the world over as the name of our distinct discipline. Working in New York in 1997, Coe championed the designation 'B2B marketing' as practical shorthand for business-to-business marketing or industrial marketing. John founded B2BMarketing LLC and registered the domain b2bmarketing.com, firmly establishing a label that quickly resonated as a clearer way to describe the scale, complexity, and commercial importance of marketing between businesses.

In 2004, Coe authored Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales and Marketing, published by McGraw Hill, further formalising B2B marketing as a discipline. The book reinforced the importance of aligning marketing with real sales dynamics, buying committees, and trust-based decision-making. Now, three decades after creating the term, Coe has decided to pass the torch and allowed B2B Marketing United to leverage the domain.

Joining Coe on the B2B Marketing United team is Mark Choueke, Partner and Chief Creative Officer at OrbitalX, the former editor of Marketing Week and a recognized voice of the industry. Choueke brings 20+ years of editorial leadership and practical experience. He's also the bestselling author of the ‘Boring2Brave’ along with a course of the same name.

Choueke will serve on the advisory board.

What They're Building

B2B Marketing United is a holistic ecosystem for B2B marketers, including fractionals, consultants, and agency professionals.

‘We're bringing together everything B2B marketers need to have successful careers and lives into one home ground for the profession,' said Rich Fitzmaurice, Founder of B2B Marketing United.

‘I first studied B2B marketing at University in 2002, buying John’s book, and in my later senior marketing role, I read Mark’s work to keep up to speed. It is an honour to join forces with such influences to give back to a profession that has given us all so much. With their help, we will build a place where honesty beats hype, where humour and substance coexist, and where real marketers are heard. A place where you leave smarter, not sold to. Where real questions get real answers from people who’ve actually done the job. B2B Marketing United will be where our profession grows up together.’

Strategic Backing from Industry Leaders

B2B Marketing United has raised significant funds from C-level executives in some of the world’s largest companies. 'These investors bring more than capital, they bring formidable knowledge, experience and counsel' added Fitzmaurice.

In Their Own Words

John Coe, President Emeritus:

'When B2B marketing first emerged as a discipline in the late nineties, many people underestimated both the size and importance of the market. That has changed dramatically over the last thirty years, but the fundamentals have not. Trust, relevance, and understanding real buying dynamics still matter. I am very happy to pass the torch on to Rich and the team. I have been made to feel very welcome, and I look forward to working closely with them moving forward.'

Mark Choueke, Member of the advisory board:

'I’ve spent 20 years in B2B marketing and, if you like, editorial leadership. I wrote ‘Boring2Brave’ because I saw a gap in the way B2B marketing executes its remit, fulfils its potential and ultimately, accounts for itself. The gap is one where confidence, autonomy, strategic influence, managed risk-taking and recognition should all exist. I’m delighted to be an advisor to B2B Marketing United and to support its content because it’s time we B2B marketers develop and learn from one another rather than theory, academics or conference organisers that don’t actually operate in the role. When John personally selected Rich to take on B2Bmarketing.com, and when I saw Rich’s vision, I knew I wanted to be involved.’  

 

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About Paartner Limited

The company was founded in 2024 and is headquartered in London. Paartner was the UK's first referral platform built by B2B marketers, for B2B marketers and now also operates B2B Marketing United. www.paartner.com

About John Coe

John Coe pioneered the term 'B2B marketing' in 1997 and is widely recognized as the earliest professional advocate of B2B marketing as a distinct discipline. He is the author of Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales and Marketing (McGraw Hill, 2004) and was the founding owner of b2bmarketing.com. John held senior sales and marketing roles in the chemical and plastics sectors, including national sales leadership at Quaker Oats Chemical and marketing leadership at West Agro Chemical and Samuel Bingham. In 1980 he founded Integrated Target Marketing, a Chicago direct marketing agency that became one of the top 50 in the US. He later led campaigns at IBM and served as senior vice president at Rapp Collins Worldwide. To date, John has presented on B2B marketing topics around the world and is currently working on his new book ‘The New fundamentals of B2B Sales & Marketing’ with Rich Fitzmaurice as a co-author.

About Mark Choueke

Mark Choueke is the former editor of Marketing Week and a recognized voice in UK B2B marketing with 20+ years of editorial and practical experience. He is the author of bestseller Boring2Brave and creator of the course by the same name. He is also partner and Chief Creative Officer at OrbitalX.

About Rich Fitzmaurice

Rich Fitzmaurice is the founder of B2B Marketing United and Paartner Limited. A former Chief Marketing Officer at multiple global B2B firms, he is now Editor-in-chief of B2B Marketing United, a practicing fractional CMO and the creator of the course 'How to Become a High-Performing, High-Earning Fractional CMO'.

Media Contact:

editor@b2bmarketing.com

www.b2bmarketing.com

5 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

Picture of Nigel

Leadership

A CEO’s Guide to What Really Matters in B2B Marketing

As a CEO, many CMOs are effectively chasing your attention. When they invest heavily in ultimate guides and thought leadership content, what do they need to do differently to get you to engage?

It’s got to be relevant and it’s got to be accessible. I do download content fairly often, but I don’t tend to download massive documents - I just don’t have the time. Time is critical.

I prefer what I’d describe as snackable content. I think a lot of people are overwhelmed by the volume of information out there and we’re all short on time. Most PDFs end up in my “to read” folder and then never actually get read.

The issue isn’t necessarily the insight, it’s the format it’s delivered in. I prefer fast, accessible content: videos, podcasts, short pieces that I can consume easily.

There are exceptions. There are a couple of documents I read every year because they’re directly relevant to the business challenges I’m facing. But fundamentally there’s just a lot out there, so content needs to be targeted, relevant, and consumable.

Many B2B marketing teams would say they already tick those boxes. Is that enough?

There is a lot of repetitive content out there. You only have to look at how many articles are being published on AI, they’re often saying the same things and delivered in the same way.

If content tackled issues in a slightly different way, or was delivered in a more engaging or distinctive format, that would definitely get my attention. Right now, a lot of it looks and sounds the same.

Is content consumption always “on” for you, or are there moments when you actively seek things out?

Personally, I like reading and taking on content. If I’m dealing with a specific business challenge, I’ll actively go out and find solutions to that problem. I’ll ignore a lot of content that feels generic or irrelevant, but when I need to dig into something, I’ll seek it out.

You’ve held senior GTM roles across major organisations. When you look at a marketing dashboard, what’s the metric you care most about and which ones do you have no time for?

The metric I care about most is marketing-sourced pipeline, but it needs to be real pipeline. Opportunities that are actionable and can turn into revenue.

Marketing-attributed revenue is another key one. A single number that shows whether marketing is genuinely helping grow the business.

Those metrics aren’t always available straight away because they rely on good data, systems, and workflows. That data might come from the website, events, inbound enquiries — wherever. But that’s what I want to see.

Vanity metrics, on the other hand, things that look good on dashboards but don’t translate into revenue,  are less helpful. Page impressions, generic page views, follower counts: they matter, but they don’t tell me whether we’re generating qualified demand or revenue.

You’re also a practicing artist. Has creativity influenced your approach to marketing?

I’ve been painting pretty much all my life. I wanted to go to art college originally, but my dad encouraged me to get what he called a “proper degree”.

A few years ago I had some downtime and got back into my artwork. We have a place in Cornwall, and I started creating sea-life-inspired pieces in a pop-art style. A gallery there picked them up and began exhibiting them.

So yes, creativity has always been part of who I am.

How does that creative side show up in your marketing philosophy, particularly around brand versus performance?

Brand awareness is vitally important. It doesn’t always translate immediately into revenue metrics, but being known for something,  what you’re good at, what you stand for,  really matters.

That said, particularly in tougher times, you have to stay focused on growth and revenue. Some marketing metrics simply don’t add value when you’re trying to understand how the business is actually performing.

So it’s about balance. Brand supports long-term growth, but it has to sit alongside clear commercial outcomes.

If a downturn hits and budgets need to be cut quickly, where do you start?

I wouldn’t start by cutting marketing. It’s counterintuitive. You can’t cut your way out of trouble, you have to grow your way out.

Marketing is a lever for growth, not a discretionary cost. I’d look elsewhere first: vendor consolidation, travel, back-office duplication, non-core projects.

In one organisation I worked in, we had around 800 internal projects running at once, many solving the same problems in different ways across regions. We shut most of them down and replaced them with a smaller number of consistent initiatives. The cost savings were significant.

If marketing cuts are unavoidable, it should be about reallocation, not elimination. Dial back experimental activity, but protect channels that reliably generate demand; account-based marketing, targeted industry events, proven performance channels.

You’ve written about the productivity paradox. Are marketers over-tooled?

Yes, I think there are too many tools in most organisations, and that adds complexity. Individually the tools are fine, but collectively - especially in global organisations - they create friction, and friction reduces productivity.

I’ve worked in businesses operating across 30 countries, each with its own CRM system, analytics tools, and implementations. That fragmentation adds cost and slows everything down.

There are huge savings and productivity gains to be made through consolidation. There are dozens of platforms- HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, Mailchimp, Hootsuite and many more - all doing similar things.

Reducing the number of tools and standardising how they’re used is absolutely key.


Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.

5 min read

Author: Mark Choueke

Image of john Coe

Leadership

The Godfather of B2B Marketing on Sales, Trust and Why Fundamentals Still Win

Often described as the Godfather and one of the true forefathers of B2B marketing, it’s an honour to speak with you today. You’ve famously talked about speaking from “both sides of your mouth” - can you explain what that means for B2B marketers, and why having both perspectives really matters?

Well, I started my career in sales and spent quite a bit of time in sales and sales management. Then, according to my friends in sales, I went to the dark side and moved into marketing, primarily because of lead generation. That’s a long story.

But the fact of the matter is, I think any marketer in B2B needs to either have been in sales or really understand sales. The old phrase “walk a mile in my shoes” really applies here - it equips marketers to do a better job.

For B2B marketers who haven’t had the opportunity to work in sales - do you have any advice on how marketers can at least empathise with and understand that world?

That’s a good question. When I get a new client, one of the first things I ask is whether I can travel with their salespeople for a day or two - and not just one salesperson. I like to spend time with two or three.

What I find is that within the first half-day, they’re suspicious of me. But once they realise I understand sales, they open up. And when they do, the gems that come out of their mouths are incredible and hugely valuable for future marketing efforts.

You’ve got to get that trust right, and that empathy means they see you as a friend, not a foe.

And John, taking that thought further, your book The Fundamentals of B2B Sales and Marketing - there’s a clue in the title. You’ve developed a new sales coverage model. Is that a useful framework for marketers looking to build empathy and understanding with sales?

First, I should say not all situations are the same. Selling office furniture is very different from selling a machine tool that has to be designed. You need to define what you’re selling before you can design a coverage model that makes sense.

Do you use distributors or not? Does your coverage model rely on face-to-face interaction as a primary channel? Coverage models vary based on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to.

For example, in manufacturing, you’re often selling to engineers, not purchasing agents. These two factors drive very different coverage models.

That’s a great point. We talk a lot today about group marketing, where marketers need to engage multiple roles within large organisations, each with different interests in the product or service, and adapt messaging accordingly.

That’s what’s now called account-based marketing, and I completely agree with it. Even when I was in sales years ago, I did things people didn’t expect. I’d talk to purchasing, but I’d also go to the plant and speak with production scheduling. As a result, we often exceeded what the contract originally allowed.

If you’re selling to enterprise accounts, there can be five, ten, or more people involved in the decision. Marketers need to understand who they’re communicating with and that communication isn’t one-size-fits-all.

Exactly. And John, am I right in thinking that there was a version of ABM in 1980 -  it just wasn’t called ABM back then.

Yes, back then it was called Strategic Account Management.

Today, B2B marketing is one of the fastest-growing industries in the developed world. What did you see all those years ago that made you register b2bmarketing.com? What told you this was coming?

It wasn’t so much what I saw, it was what I experienced. At the time, people were underestimating the size of the B2B market. 

Think about a car. You buy one consumer product, but behind that car are 100 to 200 B2B suppliers. People focused on the consumer product and ignored the massive B2B ecosystem behind it.

I saw that because I came from sales. When I moved into marketing, many people had never worked in sales and underestimated both the size and potential of the market. Eventually, that changed and that’s why B2B has grown the way it has.

What has surprised you most about the rapid growth of B2B marketing?

One major surprise over the last five to ten years has been the explosion of technology. I’m an old face-to-face guy, and now there are nearly 14,000 software packages in sales and marketing.

The issue is that people adopt technology and forget the fundamentals. They hope technology will fix their problems, generate leads, build relationships, but without fundamentals, that’s a mistake.

Young marketers love tech. Older ones like me worry about fundamentals being lost.

That balance is fascinating. Technology has brought choice, but also choice paralysis. With AI now dominating the conversation, have the fundamentals of B2B marketing actually changed?

One thing that hasn’t changed is the emotional side of B2B buying. I’m writing a report on this now. We make emotional decisions first,  trust,  before we justify them with facts.

B2B marketing has historically ignored this emotional element, even though purchase decisions often involve significant personal and career risk.

Exactly. Buying a cheap personal item is one thing. Buying something expensive at work means spending someone else’s money,  and that’s emotional.

Take a CRM system. Choosing or changing one can be career-ending if it goes wrong. Yet most marketing ignores that risk and emotional trust requirement.

And we’re back to buying groups again - different roles, different concerns, same product.

Correct. Purchasing, finance, users, sales managers - each has different needs and trust factors. Messaging must be relevant to each.

Do you remember the first time you heard the phrase “B2B marketing”?

It came from a creative director at an agency I worked with in New York. In 1997, she shortened “business to business” to B2B, and it stuck. When I registered b2bmarketing.com, that’s where it came from.

Last century! 

It was. And it resonated.

Before you go, one final question on AI and data decay. Is there a risk that AI compounds bad data?

Absolutely. AI can help,  even with updating CRMs, but data changes rapidly. In a room of 100 managers, around 70% will have had at least one change to their role or company in the past year. If you don’t stay on top of that, you’re communicating with people who aren’t there anymore.

Zombie communication?

Exactly. Great output requires great input.

John, thank you so much for joining us and for decades of contribution to B2B marketing as the Godfather.

Thank you -  and remember, the Godfather always has an offer you can’t refuse.

Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.

6 min read

Author: Steve Kemish

Jake bird mural

AI

Busting the Myths Around AI in Marketing: An interview with Jake Bird

You’ve been working in AI for around three years now, and a lot seems to have changed in that time. We’ve gone from marketers trying to understand what AI even is, to claims that it’s now “embedded” everywhere. What’s the reality - myth or maturity?

I don’t think it’s embedded at all. The stat I saw recently was that fewer than 5% of organisations have embedded AI effectively. There’s so much misinformation online and a lot of hype. There are a lot of vibes around what AI can do.

The reality is you can’t just give people these tools and expect good work back. They don’t work like that. The people who get the most value have spent a lot of time understanding how the technology works and testing it.

Where we are now is the proper implementation phase. That means technology, infrastructure, and change management. It takes time for people to get used to using these tools. It’s a new way of working and it signals a new wave of marketing.

Many organisations feel pressure to “get AI” without knowing where to start. What tools would you actually recommend for marketers beginning this journey?

The tools I personally get the most value from are Claude, as a strategic partner and for content creation. Perplexity, which is excellent for research - that’s what it’s built for. Gemini, where Google has really stepped up in the last six months with 2.5 Pro and their broader suite. Those three are a strong starting point.

And what should marketers avoid?

This might be a hot take, but I’m cautious about anything labelled as an agent in marketing.

An agent is essentially another layer of software sitting on top of a large language model. A true agent makes decisions autonomously, without a human in the loop. In marketing, that strips out innovation and nuance.

Because these models are predictive they guess what comes next - agentic AI risks accelerating more of the same ideas instead of creating new ones. In other disciplines, agents can work well. But in marketing, creativity matters.

Do you think marketers are ready to use multiple LLMs for different purposes?

It took me about four years of curiosity to get to the point where I can confidently move between tools. Each one has different quirks and behaviours.

GPT is more subservient, it does what you tell it. Claude is more inquisitive and asks better questions. But getting comfortable takes time and curiosity. Most marketers aren’t there yet.

There’s also a tendency to focus purely on content. Should AI be doing more than that?

Absolutely. Content shouldn’t be the sole purpose of AI. It should be workflows and processes.

From a business perspective, the first question shouldn’t be “what tools should we use?” but “what value are we trying to create?” Every business is different. AI should support an objective, not exist for its own sake.

Are organizations actually seeing ROI when AI is implemented properly?

Yes, when it’s done well. Businesses using AI effectively are cutting acquisition costs by around 50% and improving revenue by 10–15%. That can mean a 20–30% increase in ROI.

But that only happens when AI is used as an extension of the team, not a replacement. Too many companies took the “cheap” route last year: giving everyone ChatGPT and hoping for the best. That’s not actually cheap when you factor in wasted time and poor outputs.

There’s also confusion between individual AI use and enterprise-level AI. How big a problem is that?

It’s huge. AI has been treated as a catch-all. There’s personal AI, helping individuals with ideation, decks, analysis and then there’s technical AI, the actual builds and systems. They’ve been lumped together as if AI can magically solve everything.

That oversimplification causes a lot of frustration.

Looking ahead, where should marketers actually be experimenting next?

My advice is simple: try every task with AI first and assess the output. Even when it doesn’t work, you learn something.

I’m sceptical about AI-generated video and voice. They often feel dishonest and are easy to spot. I don’t mind people being transparent about using AI as long as there’s human oversight.

What excites me more is predictive AI: spotting where markets are heading, identifying emerging interests, and shaping messaging or even products proactively rather than reactively.

Many teams are already “bringing their own AI” into organisations. What should CMOs do about governance?

If you block AI entirely, people will just use it anyway  and that’s riskier. Without training and governance, you lose control completely.

I know plenty of people who pay for their own AI subscriptions because their company won’t allow it. They work faster and get better results but without oversight.

The better approach is enablement with guardrails.

Final question: will roles like “prompt engineer” or “Head of AI” still exist in a year?

I think we’ll still see Heads of AI, but not prompt engineers. Prompting will become business as usual.

Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.


4 min read

Author: Steve Kemish

we're a family here spray painted on a black brick wall

Career

How to build high performance marketing in a toxic “work family” culture

I have long believed that if we could run a root cause analysis on every failed campaign or stalled rebrand, we would find that most failures are not caused by a lack of creative talent or budget, but by a lack of openness.

Some still behave as if high performance is built on “good vibes,” late night pizza, and forced loyalty. But anyone who has ever run a demand engine under pressure knows the real culture is revealed in different moments. In the silence after a budget cut. In the pause before telling the CEO their copy edits make no sense. In the quiet calculation when a marketer thinks, “If I push back on this, will it cost me politically or personally?”

Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard shows that the highest performing teams are defined by psychological safety. In marketing, this is not a “nice to have.” It is a commercial necessity. You cannot innovate, challenge assumptions, or kill bad ideas early if people are afraid. And bad ideas that survive early always become expensive later.

Creative teams are rarely asking, “Do we like each other?”. They are asking, “Is it safe to have a bad idea here in order to find a good one?”

When loyalty is valued over candor, marketing does not become stronger. It becomes polite, beige, and commercially fragile.

The fallacy of the “we’re a family” culture.

Toxic leaders often describe their teams as “family.” It sounds warm. It sounds caring. In practice, it often becomes a verbal shield used to demand obedience while offering conditional safety.

In B2B marketing, the “we are a family” label quietly teaches people that:

  • Critiquing the leader’s idea is disloyal

  • Working weekends proves commitment, not burnout

  • Questioning strategy means you are “not a team player”

  • Asking for budget means you are “not scrappy enough”

It confuses belonging with agreement.

I once coached a highly capable Head of Demand Gen who admitted that she had stayed silent during a roadmap review for a product launch she knew had no product market fit. Later she said, “The CCO keeps saying we’re a family on a mission and that this was her baby. If I raised objections, I knew I would be isolated.”

The launch produced zero qualified pipeline. The warning was never voiced. The cost was real. The silence was cultural.

Safety versus comfort

Most toxic marketing cultures optimize for comfort. High performance cultures optimize for safety.

Comfort is the absence of conflict.
Safety is the presence of truth.

Comfort keeps meetings smooth.
Safety prevents wasted spend.

In those environments, marketers do not need more after work drinks or fancy dress days. They need to know that insight matters more than hierarchy and evidence matters more than ego.

This is why the best marketing leaders do not demand alignment. They demand thinking.

Cognitive diversity and the “vanilla trap”

Research from McKinsey shows that diverse teams make better decisions. In marketing, lack of cognitive diversity creates what I call the Vanilla Trap. Activity that voice no opinion, takes no risks and influences no-one.

Fear drives this. When people feel unsafe, they mimic competitors, defer to the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinon), and copy whatever feels politically safe. That is how entire categories end up sounding identical.

High performance teams build mechanisms that force constructive dissent

  • Pre mortems where the team writes the future failure story before launch

  • Red teams whose job is to challenge the value proposition

  • “Kill your darlings” rituals that reward abandoning weak ideas

  • Customer voice as the final arbiter, not senior opinion

Reality check

If your values slide says “innovation” but you punish the social media manager for a post that missed while ignoring the VP who has not refreshed strategy in five years, you are not building culture. You are building learned silence.

Map safety to real marketing roles

Different marketers carry different personal risks:

  • The content lead fears being publicly torn apart for tone

  • The demand leader fears being blamed for missed revenue they do not control

  • The brand lead fears being seen as obstructive

  • The events lead fears one operational miss becoming a character judgement

Safety means making it clear that the cost of silence is higher than the cost of speaking.

Proxies for safety

When you are not in the room, your systems speak:

  • Creative reviews that critique the work, not the person

  • Dashboards that show red numbers without witch hunts

  • Leaders who say “I was wrong” publicly

  • Briefs that are firm on outcomes but flexible on how to get there

These are leadership signals, not process details.

The psychology underneath

Several behavioral forces quietly distort marketing decisions

  • The HiPPO effect where senior opinion overrides evidence

  • Sunk cost fallacy where bad ideas live on because money was already spent

  • Groupthink where tired teams convince themselves mediocrity is excellence

High performance leadership designs systems that counter these biases, not reinforce them with “family” language.

How to deliberately build safety

Practical actions that work:

  • Replace “family” with “high performance team”

  • Separate brainstorming from decision meetings

  • Reward the person who brings the uncomfortable data

  • Protect your team from political bullying from Sales or Product

  • Define failure as learning and then actually behave that way

This is leadership work. And it is commercial work. Unsafe teams waste budget quietly and repeatedly.

How to tell if you are building a team, not a cult

You will see signals:

  • “This isn’t working” is said as often as “This is great”

  • Junior marketers challenge senior leaders

  • Failed tests are shared openly

  • Sales and Marketing debate without posturing

  • You hire for culture add, not culture clone

The simple rule to remember

In complex B2B markets, advantage rarely comes from harmony.
It comes from honesty.

The teams that win are not the politest.
They are the ones that surface the truth earliest and act on it fastest.

Call to action

In your next campaign review, ask one question and then stay quiet.

“If you knew you would not get in trouble, what would you change about this plan right now?”

Listen without defending.
Do not explain.
Do not justify.

Map where silence lives. Decide whether you want to be comfortable or effective.

If you want help building a marketing culture that produces truth, not compliance, and performance, not politeness, contact me and the team at B2B Marketing United and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.

 

5 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

table for ten album cover

Demand Generation

Is it time for B2B marketers to rebel against awards programs?

Over the last twenty years, the number of business and marketing awards has exploded into its own little cottage industry. Publishers, agencies, consultancies, industry bodies and "communities" all run their own cash cows.

The number of categories multiply and get sillier every year. Entry fees rise. Sponsorship rate cards infiltrate your inbox. The shortlists get longer and the winners more plentiful, each of whom have conveniently bought a table for ten at £4k+ a pop.

And the running time of these events now seems close to breaching human rights.

B2B marketers see the game more than most.

In our profession, it often seems that every awards program a service line or country rep receives gets forwarded to marketing. "How fantastic, we have been shortlisted for this (self-proclaimed) prestigious award, let's enter!" Or "We have won this award for five years in a row, we must win again!" Or the even better "If we don't enter this award, the market may think we're not taking the service seriously."

It never ceases to amaze me how often the "Congratulations, you have been shortlisted…" emails get through, or forwarded, to marketing. We haven't submitted anything yet, not even paid the entry fee, but somehow, we have already been excellent according to people with absolutely zero practitioner experience. I have even worked for organisations that were shortlisted and 'won' awards for services we did not even provide.

 Here’s a tip for you, ask IT to block the email domain.

 The song I wrote, Table for Ten, exaggerates it for effect, but the system it is mocking is very, very real.

Excellence, at scale

It has been a long time since awards were mainly about recognition. The vast majority are a revenue engine, designed around throughput. More categories mean more finalists. More finalists mean more tables. More tables mean more revenue. Excellence, it seems, is scalable.

The commercial model is not complicated. Charge for entries. Charge for category sponsorship. Don't pay judges (position it as an honour to be chosen). Sell tables. Publish a press release for every winner (sometimes for an additional fee). Upsell webinars or winner publications (“the agency should speak at our event for a fee”). Encourage social sharing. Offer early bird discounts for next year. Repeat annually.

The structural problems everyone ignores

None of this means every award is meaningless. There are still programmes with real judging rigour, respected panels, and genuine peer recognition. But the signal to noise ratio has completely collapsed and we all see it.

Research into award credibility across professional services shows the same structural weaknesses again and again.

Self-reported performance. Most entries are graphically designed narratives, not audits. Impact is described by the entrant and unverifiable. Entries can effectively write what they want. No questions asked. 

Category inflation. As events grow, so do the labels. Not because the discipline has become that granular, but because more categories mean more revenue. "Best Use of X in Y for Z Segment in This Very Specific Geography" is not taxonomy. It's a very obvious way of creating new inventory.

Pay to play dynamics. Entry fees, sponsorship, and table purchases do not always explicitly buy trophies, but they do buy probability. Volume of entries, visibility on the night, and commercial proximity all increase the odds of walking away with something shiny.

Broken judging. Judges never have access to raw data and almost never have the time to challenge claims in depth. I agreed to judge one particular awards programme for B2B marketers and my conscience could only do so once. We were constantly rushed to decide (because they had expanded to far too many categories) without the time required to properly interrogate any of the claims or arrive at the most deserved winner.

I will never forget one email chain I was unfortunately CC'd on. It was an awards programme in the USA that was decided by, wait for it, a show of hands, claps, whoops and hollers in the room on the night. And this manager was emailing the whole C-suite to celebrate their 'win'.

The vast majority of panels are unpaid, time poor, and asked to assess a number of submissions in compressed windows. Even with the best intentions, scrutiny becomes surface level. It's somewhat crazy that people so readily agree to be judges and give up days of their time for free, when the organisers are raking in the money for the very same activity. That's not giving back to your profession. If anything, you are dumbing it down by playing into the charade and agreeing that you should do so for free, for 'exposure'.

The theatre of credibility

Then come the awards nights themselves. The black tie, drum rolls, comedian hosts (they are being paid BTW), the lighting, the band and the word 'prestigious' doing some major heavy lifting.

Awards borrow the visual grammar of credibility. But credibility does not come from staging. It comes from consequence.

Which leads to the question. Do customers care?

Every serious study of B2B buying behaviour says broadly the same thing. Buyers trust peers, proof, outcomes, and experience. Analyst validation and references matter. Case studies matter (especially via verbal referees). Demonstrable results matter.

Award logos barely register. Procurement might glance at them when shortlisting suppliers on large tenders to complement the providers already in mind, but experienced B2B buyers know the game.

Journalists know this too, which is why award press releases die as soon as the send button is pressed. They are not news. They are hollow advertisements, picked up only by automated newswires.

What awards are actually for

The value award programmes do add, however, is internal.

They validate effort and pad out a CV. They provide an excuse to get glammed up and have a night out (and are so much easier to sign off than a team building away day). They give managers some good news to share. They offer a morale moment in hard times.

They can also give younger team members something to celebrate which is always something I’d advocate for, especially relating to individual achievements. That moment in the spotlight can make the most talented of us work even harder and strive to hit even higher heights.

There is nothing wrong with recognition. My issue with them is when the symbol replaces the substance.

You see it in agency credentials that lead with trophies before outcomes, which is deeply off putting to competent CMOs. You see it in board slides where "industry recognition" fills space when pipeline is thin.

When applause becomes easier to earn than results, people start optimising for the applause.

In many award circuits, the fastest way to feel like a winner is not to build something genuinely brilliant. It is to pay for a beautifully written entry, buy a table, submit in multiple categories (sometimes over multiple years), and increase your statistical odds. If you also sponsor a category as well as enter? Well, guess what…

Rent or build

The perspex trophy is not the problem. The confusion of what it represents is.

Awards can be a byproduct of excellence, but they are a terrible substitute for it.

We should enjoy the night. Celebrate your team. Clap for the winners. Take the photo. But be honest.

If our proudest slide is the awards slide, we should be worried.

The market does not care how many times we have been shortlisted. It only cares whether what you do actually works.

If our marketing success depends on trophies, we are not building a brand. We are renting applause.

How can we fix it? If we can bang our collective heads together, B2B Marketing United will make it happen.

Or is it all ok as-is? A fun night out being reason enough to just ignore its flaws?


 

—

Listen to Table for Ten on Marketing Mixtape

7 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

man on his knees begging for money froma. cfo

Demand Generation

What “Six Months to an Exit” Really Means for Your Marketing Team

Everybody knows the phrase, "do more with less."

Especially if you follow the B2B Marketing United legend that is Mark Choueke, who has spent years unpacking what it really means and how marketers can navigate it.

It sometimes gets framed as a motivational challenge or a test of creativity, and although it's definitely not a challenge any marketer craves, it is a rite of passage.

The song I wrote, "Six Months to an Exit", dramatizes (and sends up) a familiar scene. A CMO with a growth plan, a grand vision, and dreams of building a brand-new category. And a board that listens, notes the spreadsheets, nods enthusiastically, and a few weeks later asks: can you just do the same as last year again? But with a flat budget. And still achieve our growth targets?

Private Equity firms are not buying companies to run them forever. Their model is very clear and very simple. They invest in companies to sell them for a profit. Ideally after a three-to-five-year cycle. Ideally sooner. Their job is to improve the valuation, and the cleanest lever for that is EBITDA to drive the exit multiple.

Revenue growth matters but not as much as margin. And predictability matters more than hope, leaving the next cycle of ambition to the next guys who own it.

None of this is irrational. It's the way it is. And the best marketing leaders mould what their team does and how they do it around these realities. Like all functions, marketing must always serve the company's strategy first.

Some marketers really struggle with this, as it's human nature to want to do more each year, and better than the last. Marketing evolves so fast that there is always more that we want to do. New tools we want to experiment with. New competitors we want to outdo.

And we struggle with the paradox often presented to us.

The CFO needs a growth story for the exit deck but is unable to put any more money in. They want that hockey stick but, at best, the spend needs to be flat.

This is where internal friction often begins. P&L owners are under immense pressure to deliver quarter by quarter. So, they protect their local budgets, resist central programs, and block spend that doesn't show immediate ROI.

It hurts those who don't quite understand the bigger picture. To some, it can feel like punishment, or torture.

Some functions become defensive. And sometimes, when incentives are misaligned or communication is poor, collaboration drops and political behaviour rises.

Things can get even harder if there's a bad quarter and a number is missed, as the CFO may need to claw more budget back whilst the pipeline still needs filling.

And the Head of Sales probably gets a bit nervous.

The selling firm wants a smooth story, a nicely trending prospectus, and an attractive multiple.

Sometimes management just want to survive the process to realize their Long-Term Incentive Plans.

Marketing, which lives in the long game, can sometimes feel a little squeezed in the middle, and as a profession, we have to adapt to the fact that any brand investment, new product launches, or modernization of infrastructure will probably have to wait until it's all over.

We have to work harder and smarter. Sometimes with delayed hires and less budget. And under more pressure. Rather than get depressed about it, the best marketing teams are pragmatic. They get it. There's something bigger going on and we need to play our role and help as much as possible.

We need to ensure the business keeps delivering. We need to step up and support from a PR & Comms perspective. I've supported multiple PE exits and been involved in IPO processes, including high pressure analyst presentations.

No matter how hard it gets for marketing, try being the CFO in this scenario.

In those situations where we are asked to deliver a hockey stick on a flat budget, the only response is communication and clarity.

  • Here is what we can deliver.

  • Here is what will stall.

  • Here is what we will be trading off.

  • Here is the risk we are taking.

  • The business can count on marketing to do whatever it can.

One thing we can also do is relish that next ownership cycle. New ownership is a fantastic opportunity to present an exciting investment case into the marketing function. Why? Because they want to drive sales growth and sell to someone else at an even higher valuation.

It's the way the world works.

Listen to Six Months to an Exit on Marketing Mixtape

4 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

a picture of a cruella de ville type character on a cd cover

Career

If Your Boss Says “We’re a Family”, It’s a Red Flag

I need to tell you about the Duchess of Doom.

She is not a real person. She is a character built from a pattern. A pattern I have watched play out across multiple organisations, multiple sectors, and multiple decades of working in and around B2B. If you think you recognise her, you probably do. Because she is not one person. She is a type. And the type is everywhere.

She talks about culture constantly. She uses the word "family" as a full stop to every conversation she does not want to have. She rewards loyalty and punishes honesty. She surrounds herself with people who agree with her, and then wonders why the strategy keeps missing.

She is the subject of the new Marketing Mixtape track, "Family (or Else)".

The song is played for effect, but the leadership failure pattern it describes is real, well documented, and expensive.

Amy Edmondson at Harvard spent years researching why some teams outperform others. The answer was not talent, experience, or seniority. It was psychological safety. The ability to challenge, question, and admit problems without fearing the consequences. Google ran the same experiment internally through Project Aristotle and arrived at exactly the same conclusion. Psychological safety was the single strongest predictor of high performing teams.

When leaders punish dissent, even subtly, they do not eliminate problems. They eliminate visibility of problems.

I have watched this play out in commercial reviews where the strategy is clearly wrong but nobody says so. In strategy sessions where every challenging idea gets filtered out before it reaches the room. In quarterly updates delivered with forced enthusiasm because the alternative is being labelled "not on the bus".

The pattern typically has four parts.

The first is insecurity masked as authority. Leaders who surround themselves with yes people are not building high performing teams but insulation. Research from McKinsey and others shows that teams with low cognitive diversity make weaker strategic decisions and miss market shifts more often.

The second is fear replacing accountability. When performance drops, healthy leaders look at systems, strategy, and capability. Fear-based leaders look for excuses. The economy. The market. The competition. Activity levels. The number of calls being made. Anything except their own decisions. Blame becomes a shield.

The third is loyalty tests disguised as culture. Employee surveys, engagement scores, and values statements are meant to surface truth. In toxic cultures they become compliance tests. Say the right thing or be labelled "not a team player". When people believe honesty will be punished, they stop giving it. What remains is performative positivity and quiet disengagement.

The fourth is outdated thinking protected by power. Leaders who cannot adapt often suppress challenge rather than update their worldview. Instead of learning, they do more of what they have always done. Instead of experimenting, they enforce obedience. The organisation freezes while the market moves.

There is a familiar sequence to how the whole thing unfolds.

The smartest people leave first, either by choice or by being managed out. The most honest voices go quiet. Decisions get slower and worse. Strategy becomes last year’s plan with a new date. And throughout all of it, the leader interprets the absence of challenge as evidence that they are right.

In my experience, toxic leaders rarely develop successors, let alone ones who think differently. They promote people who look and sound like them, or who can be shaped to do so. The behaviour replicates. The blind spots replicate with it.

From the outside the organisation can look stable, especially if the company is still hitting its numbers. From the inside, it is brittle.

Gallup has been tracking this for decades. People do not leave companies. They leave managers. More specifically, they leave environments where they feel unheard, unsafe, and undervalued. The commercial consequences follow reliably: retention cost, productivity loss, strategic drift, innovation debt. It rarely shows up cleanly on a spreadsheet, which is partly why it persists so long unchallenged.

There is a meaningful difference between confident leadership and fear-based management. Confident leaders want to know what is not working. Fear-based leaders want to know who to blame for it. Confident leaders reward contribution. Fear-based cultures reward loyalty. Healthy teams perform for outcomes. Fear-based teams perform for optics.

The most dangerous phrase in any of this is usually delivered warmly, often at a team offsite, always with a slightly too long pause before the question mark:

"We're a family, right?"

Real families argue. They challenge. They tell each other things they would rather not hear. What these environments usually mean by "family" is something different. Loyalty without reciprocity. Submission without safety. Compliance dressed as belonging.

So, what does the opposite actually look like?

Brave enough to be challenged. Brave enough to hear what is not working. Brave enough to let people smarter than them make them uncomfortable.

Healthy organisations are built on psychological safety, where people can speak without risking their livelihood. On constructive conflict, where ideas are challenged but people are respected. On real accountability, where leaders own results rather than explain them away.

It is also the job of CEOs and CHROs to spot toxic patterns and act on it. But, unfortunately, far too often they enable it through inaction or denial instead.

The moment a leader needs constant agreement to feel secure, the team stops thinking and starts performing for approval. And when that happens, you are not running an organisation anymore. You are running a production.

The Duchess of Doom is a fictional character. But the pattern she represents is one of the most well-documented failure modes in organisational leadership. If she feels familiar, that says something about how common this is. Not about any one person.

Listen to "Family (or Else)" on Marketing Mixtape.

5 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

Reply All Apocalypse cd cover on lava

Graduate

That time a lasagne crippled a global network

I look back on my first few years as a B2B marketer with genuine fondness.

Within nine months of joining BT Global Services I had a double promotion, responsibility for the professional services sector (nobody else wanted it), and a front row seat to one of the funniest things my then 22-year-old self had ever witnessed.

It centred around a cold lasagne.

We had a kitchen that was, let's say, in need of some discipline. The usual crimes. Cups nowhere near the dishwasher. Mystery spillages. Buffet sandwiches quietly composting on the table. And fridge items of deeply suspicious vintage.

Someone decided enough was enough. Every Friday, like clockwork, she audited the A2 kitchen fridge. Any food left over a weekend would meet its fate.

Then came a particular Friday. Around 4:59.

She found contraband Tupperware. Red mist descended. And in her haste to deliver justice she typed, in what I imagine was white-hot fury:

WHOSE LASAGNE IS THIS?

She did not check the To field.

She sent it to the global distribution list. Fifty thousand people.

What followed was magnificent. Ping. Ping. Ping. Colleagues across the building, across the country, across the world, receiving the same urgent lasagne inquiry. And then, helpfully, replying all to say it wasn't theirs. Or to ask to be removed from the chain.

By replying all.

The exchange server buckled. But we could still hear pings in the distance. Those of us left in the office had the energy of a trading floor at peak hours. We just sat back and watched the digital tsunami roll.

About an hour in, one of the sales guys came back from a client meeting he'd been in all afternoon. Completely missed it. We got him up to speed.

He sat down, started shutting his laptop, and muttered very quietly:

"Hey guys. I think that lasagne is mine."

I was so tempted to reply all with his name.

I didn't. Probably my finest act of professional restraint to date.

But I did write the song below about it all:

Listen to Reply All Apocalypse in our Marketing Mixtape section here.

2 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

MarTech

Why Calling Anything Dead Is a Red Flag in B2B Marketing

Last year I sat in a conference on B2B marketing and watched the opening keynote speaker declare cold calling dead.

You could feel the room shift. A few marketers rolled their eyes and audibly tutted. One CEO of an outbound SDR agency in the audience looked like they wanted to storm the stage. The speaker, who wasn't a marketer, had clearly hoped it was an easy remark to make. Or had been misadvised by ChatGPT when writing his speech.

That moment is how I wrote the song "Dead Men Dialling". My first attempt at gangster rap which is ambitious for someone who grew up in Essex and wears half zips. Listen below.

Because every time someone in B2B marketing declares a tactic dead, what they usually mean is that they have jumped on so many marketing bandwagons to curry favour, they are not thinking rationally or commercially. Direct mail is dead. Cold calling is dead. TV is dead. Events are dead. The funeral marches just keep coming, and they almost always arrive with a product pitch or agenda attached.

It is a cheap thing for anyone in our profession to claim. And it misses something fundamental about how attention actually works.

Three things that happened in the last few weeks

A sales rep I spoke to last week finally got a meeting after sending something physical to a prospect who had ignored every email for months.

A CMO of a large manufacturer told me their best lead of the quarter came from a chance conversation at a trade show and that they were doubling down on F2F events.

A SaaS founder said the deal that mattered most started with a mutual friend making a phone call to advocate for them and set up a dinner.

None of these tactics are coming back because they were misunderstood. They are resurfacing because the environment changed around them and they cut through the bullshit.

The economics of contrast

When something becomes easy, abundant and cheap for marketers, and non-marketers, it loses impact because the market is flooded and prospects become numb to it. When something becomes rarer and requires real effort, it starts to stand out. That is the whole game.

Look at what we are seeing right now. LinkedIn is an echo chamber of recycled thinking. Programmatic ads chase each other down the page. AI has turned "good enough" into a factory setting.

Volume is no longer an edge. And doing what everyone else does means being indistinguishable. Or average at best.

In that environment, anything that feels physical, human or effortful has a better chance at cutting through. Not because it is romantic or retro. Because effort is still the clearest signal of intent we have, and people notice when another human has actually bothered.

Numbers worth sitting with

A direct mail piece holds 132 seconds of attention. A TV ad holds around 14. An email, if you are lucky, holds whatever fraction of a second it takes to hit delete.

That is the whole argument in three numbers. The channels everyone keeps burying are the ones that earn the most time from the people on the other end of it. The 2025 ANA/DMA report puts direct mail response rates at 4.4% against email's 0.12%. Still incredibly poor in absolute terms, but the gap tells you everything you need to know about where attention is actually flowing.

Les Binet calls performance marketing on its own "underperformance marketing", because if it is the only thing you do, that is what it eventually becomes.

I think about that line a lot. Performance has not stopped working. It has just become a tax rather than an advantage. Costs rise, click-through rates barely move, and the pipes everyone is using start to look identical. Meanwhile, brand, memory, physical presence and human contact are quietly becoming the real sources of advantage again.

The SDR CEO who wanted to storm the stage already knew what the rest of the room is only starting to figure out. The tactics being pronounced dead are the ones quietly outperforming the ones being sold as their replacement.

The mistake was thinking technological progress meant replacement. It doesn't, it means rebalancing. Good marketers consider every tactic available to them and ignore what is, or is not, in fashion.

The best marketing plans I see are the ones that understand that we need to use everything in our arsenal to reinforce the same messages, across the same target audience, more often over a prolonged period of time. Not just the latest toys.

So, the next time someone tells you a channel is dead, ask yourself who benefits from the obituary. Then ask whether the thing they are burying might be exactly what helps you stand out. If your competitors are all doing A ,B, and C, give yourself the hypothesis that X, Y, Z might be the better direction.

It doesn't matter whether we like the tactics we use. It doesn't matter if they are cool or involve the latest AI tools.

It only matters if it works.

Now go and listen to an Essex boy attempt gangster rap.

Dead Men Dialling is the latest track from my Marketing Mixtape series at www.b2bmarketing.com

4 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

Let me just stop you there cd cover

Career

Wait, let me just stop you there.

Ever sat in a meeting where one person talks so much you start questioning every life decision that brought you there?

You know the scene. You walk in prepared. Slides ready, numbers checked, plan thought through. Then someone - confident, loud and absolutely convinced they’re the smartest person in the room - jumps in.

They interrupt before people finish their point. Repeat things nobody asked for. Fill every bit of silence like it’s dangerous.

The confidence is obvious. And somehow that confidence gets treated as competence.

After twenty years working in marketing across different industries, I’ve seen this play out more times than I care to count. And while I try to avoid sweeping statements, one pattern shows up again and again:

The loudest voice in the room is rarely the clearest thinker.

Volume often crowds out judgement and certainty can disguise a lack of depth.

This dynamic feels particularly visible in marketing. It’s a discipline where opinions are easy to form and hard to disprove in the moment. A skimmed article, a trending buzzword, a strong hunch; suddenly everyone has a view. Some of those views are useful. Plenty aren’t.

But the ideas that dominate meetings are usually the ones delivered with the most confidence or the most seniority. Not the ones backed by data, experience or a realistic understanding of what’s actually going to work.

That has real consequences. Teams waste time chasing ideas that fall apart the moment they meet reality. More importantly, opportunities are missed. Thoughtful insights, less theatrically delivered, are often sidelined or never voiced at all.

This isn’t about blaming individuals. But when interruptions and dismissive reactions become normal, they slowly change how decisions get made. People learn it’s safer to stay quiet.

When a handful of voices take over, everyone else pulls back. The room doesn’t get smarter, it just gets louder. You lose the range of perspectives that actually leads to better answers.

And the irony is that the quieter voices are often the ones doing the real thinking. They’re the people questioning assumptions, connecting the dots and spotting problems before they cost time or money.

Without space for those voices, meetings stop being places where problems get solved and start becoming stages where confidence performs.

Rich’s song "Let me just stop you there" nails this dynamic perfectly. The interruptions. The overconfidence. The casual dismissals. It’s funny because it’s painfully familiar.

But the point behind it matters. Work shouldn’t be a contest to see who can dominate the conversation. We all play a part in shaping that culture. Notice when someone is taking over. Question confidence that isn’t backed up by substance. And make space for the people who haven’t been heard yet.

Looking back, there are plenty of meetings where I wish I’d done that more.

Because if we don’t, the loudest voice keeps winning. And the smartest ideas stay unsaid.

Listen to "Let me just stop you there" on Marketing Mixtape

2 min read

Author: Lindsay Robertson

champagne CMO CD

Career

How to Spot a Champagne CMO in the Wild

There is a particular character many of us have met in our careers.

They arrive with a fanfare. A big title. A big salary. And a reputation that somehow always seems to survive the wreckage they leave behind.

The ink is barely dry on the contract and already they are restless.

They have not met the team.
They do not yet understand the product.
They could not explain the customer problem if you gave them a whiteboard and an hour.

But they know one thing with absolute certainty.

Everything needs to change.

  • New website.

  • New brand.

  • New message.

  • New colours.

  • New fonts.

  • New positioning.

  • New strategy.

Tear it down. Start again. Make it visible. Make it loud. Make it look like momentum.

That is what the song Champagne CMO is about. And I have met so many…!

Not bad people. Not even always untalented. But leaders who mistake vanity for progress and optics for impact. Who reach for the biggest, shiniest levers first because they are the most visible, the most award friendly, and the easiest way to signal importance.

The song pokes fun at a familiar pattern.

The rebrand before the revenue problem is understood.
The AI strategy before the go to market is fixed.
The keynote before the pipeline.
The awards table before the sales forecast.

Every year, a new buzzword. A new bandwagon. A new silver bullet.

  • Big Data.

  • The Cloud.

  • Web3.

  • Blockchain.

  • The Metaverse.

  • Artificial Intelligence.

Not as tools in service of a clear commercial problem, but as costumes to be worn. Language to be paraded. Saying the things they think their bosses and the masses want to hear.

Right now, it is Artificial Intelligence. Crowbarred into every conversation. Setting off red flags with every soundbite.

Do not get me wrong. Real AI is coming and it will continue to get better and better. But the Champagne CMOs claiming they have increased productivity by 35 percent or that every new product they launch is now AI led are not people you should be listening to, let alone hiring.

If you put a computer in front of them and said show me, they would not know where to start. But that does not stop them climbing on stages and pretending they are leading the way.

Underneath the veneer is a simple truth. Real B2B marketing is hard. And leadership is harder still.

  • It means doing your best with messy data.

  • It means listening to customers.

  • It means aligning with sales.

  • It means being accountable when the numbers do not move. Yet.

That work is slow. Unsexy. And rarely comes with a trophy or a pedestal.

So instead, some leaders reach for theatre.

  • They polish the brand while the engine misfires.

  • They talk transformation while sales squirm.

  • They chase awards while the team quietly burns out.

And when the cracks start to show, they do what they have always done.

  • Move on.

  • New role. New title. New narrative.

  • Eighteen months later, a golden goodbye and a fresh stage to perform on.

Champagne CMO is not really about one person. It is about a system that rewards confidence over competence, presentation over substance, and short term optics over long term value creation.

It is about how easy it is to look like a leader and how hard it is to actually be one.

The irony is that the best CMOs I have ever worked with look nothing like this:

  • They do not arrive with a rebrand. They arrive with a desire for context.

  • They do not lead with slogans. They lead with listening.

  • They do not chase every new trend. They make sure the boring foundations are in place.

They do not need champagne moments to feel important. They care far more about whether the business is healthier, the team is stronger, and the customer is better served than it was a year ago.

That is the quiet punchline of the song.

Real leadership does not need performance, a parade of buzzwords, or the most expensive bottle in the room.

It just needs to do the work.

How many Champagne CMOs could you name over a drink?

Listen to Champagne CMO on Marketing Mixtape

3 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

Rich Fitzmaurice in a surgical mask

Content and Communications

Social Influenza Is Real and Your Feed Has the Symptoms

Just when you were starting to forget what we all went through with Covid, there is a new perilous affliction going around.

It is not airborne. It is not seasonal. And sadly, it is not mild.

It spreads through feeds, comments, and connection requests. It presents itself as wisdom, vulnerability, and leadership. But once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it.

I call it Social Influenza. Listen to Social Influenza on the Marketing Mixtape

Mike Winnet identified the original strain with 'LinkedIn Influenza'. Consider this the musical remix. Same symptoms. Same behaviours. Same slightly embarrassing rash. Just with a bassline and an orchestral hit.

I wrote this song as a love letter to all the tiny, familiar behaviours we have somehow normalised on LinkedIn and in B2B marketing culture.

  • The humblebrag that starts with “People always ask me how…” when nobody has asked.

  • The 4am gym routine bros who seem to think we are impressed by their lack of sleep.

  • The stock sunrise. The fake struggle. The faux inspirational anecdote about a candidate on hard times who turns out to be the “best hire ever”, despite never existing.

  • The “Thrilled to announce” conference selfie where the only thing announced is a purchased ticket.

  • The one line. At. A. Time. Formatting that turns a basic thought into a scrolling hostage situation.

  • The all caps UNPOPULAR OPINION that is actually the safest opinion in the room.

  • The PDF gated behind 'Comment SEND IT' like it contains state secrets, rather than fifty slides of recycled frameworks

  • The instant DM pitch that arrives before the connection acceptance has even cooled.

  • The stolen viral posts, reheated and served again like yesterday’s chips.

None of this is new. None of it is evil. But all of it is mind numbing theatre masquerading as content and influence.

It is karaoke dressed up as the Grammys. Powered by a desperate need to be liked.

The joke is that most of us have probably done at least one of these things at some point. I certainly have. The line between sharing and showing off is thin. The line between useful and self indulgent is thinner still.

What worries me is not the behaviour itself. It is how easily we start to confuse noise with value.

  • One liners become thought leadership.

  • Engagement becomes evidence of impact.

  • Formatting becomes a strategy.

  • Virality becomes a proxy for truth.

And slowly, without meaning to, we train ourselves to perform rather than to think. To provoke reactions rather than to help people make better decisions. To optimise for the algorithm rather than for the human on the other side of the screen.

That is what the song is really poking at.

Not individuals. Not platforms. But a culture that rewards surface over substance and volume over depth. A culture where being seen can start to matter more than being useful.

Social Influenza resonates because it is recognisable. But it is also a small warning sign.

If everything is a personal brand moment, nothing is a real conversation.
If every post is a performance, nobody is listening.

Should you really be able to call yourself a thought leader if no one is actually being led.

I would love to be part of a wave that calls time on all of this.

Less performance. More real.
Less posing. More candour.
Less 'professionalism'. More human.
Less “Agree?” More you.

We are all hit with so much noise in our working lives. We should probably show a bit more respect for each other’s attention. We do not need to pretend to be anything other than ourselves.

And if you ever catch yourself typing “People always ask me how…”, maybe pause, smile, and check yourself before you wreck yourself. Don't let the influenza win.

Listen to Social Influenza on the Marketing Mixtape

3 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

A grafitti image of Rich Fitamzurice on a wall

ABM

How ABM helped me become a global CMO at 27

In 2008, around 80 percent of BT Global Services’ £8bn revenue came from just 20 percent of its accounts. Pareto’s law in full effect and a board that demanded evidence that marketing had a focus on it.

Neil Blakesley, the CMO, was under serious pressure. He needed something up and running quickly that would protect and grow share of wallet in those top accounts and, just as importantly, prove that marketing was delivering real commercial value.

Around that time, I started getting phone calls and voicemails from Nina Lees (nee Walker) asking whether I would leave my role leading marketing for the professional services sector and join her on an exciting, as yet unnamed, special project for Neil. At first, I hesitated. I was still early in my career and it felt like a big decision.

But Nina kept calling. Eventually she called in the big guns. I started getting calls from Neil himself and the Head of Sales too, plus a few BBMs for good measure (WhatsApp did not exist back then). I was not so much backed into a corner as firmly told this was a good move for me and an opportunity to shine.

They were right.

What I did not know at the time was that this decision would eventually lead to me keynoting an ITSMA event on ABM in Boston, meeting my wife there and eventually being named a global CMO at the age of 27. Serendipity.

I cannot promise ABM will be that life changing for you. Not everyone will be starting an ABM program inside a massive corporate like BT GS. But I do have plenty of scars, grey hairs and lessons that might help you.

Executive buy in matters more than anything
The biggest advantage I had was simple. ABM had a mandate from the very top. Most b2b marketers are not that lucky. Without senior backing, ABM becomes an uphill battle very quickly.

Budget follows belief
Because ABM was the CMO’s baby, budget was made available. It was not abundant. Headcount was being cut and everyone was under pressure. But whatever unallocated activity budget existed was pointed firmly in our direction. This is why executive buy in is not a nice to have. It is the difference between an idea and a programme.

Start as small as you can
BT GS had something called the T-400, the top 400 accounts globally. Far too many. We started ABM with the top 20 on a one to one basis. In hindsight, that was still too many and we probably should have tested a one to many approach first.

No amount of reading or conferences prepares you for reality. You will be building the plane whilst flying it. The fewer accounts you start with, the more you can do with limited budget and the faster you will learn what actually works in your organisation.

Account selection can make or break you
This one is critical. Pick the wrong accounts with the wrong account teams and your programme will stall immediately. Pick the right accounts with the right sales leadership and a willingness to work with marketing and you at least have a fighting chance.

In the early months, work with the people who want to work with you and want the program to succeed. Momentum matters more than perfection.

Selling ABM to sales should not be hard
Once you know which accounts you want to work on, ABM should sell itself. You are offering focused marketing support to help sales hit their targets and get paid. Most sales people will say yes instantly.

Some will not. If it feels like a hassle to them, move on. ABM does not work when it is forced.

Agencies can help you move faster
There is no shortage of agencies that specialise in ABM and they love it. The right partner brings pattern recognition, ideas from other companies and speed. They help marketing deliver visible things that sales teams and clients can actually see and feel.

From a resourcing point of view, they also let you scale quickly, often far quicker than you could internally. I benefited greatly from two agencies - one in the UK to help us design and manage the program and its platform and one in India to provide us the resources to execute it. It is far easier, and faster, to build teams using agencies than building an internal team, especially during a pilot.

Give sales real reasons to call
One of the biggest breakthroughs for us was uncovering genuine reasons to call our top accounts. My favourite example came from a conference in Brazil where a member of a client’s IT team casually mentioned, in Portuguese, on stage that he had decided to outsource part of his team.

Our ABM programme captured the session, transcribed it, translated it and triggered an alert to the sales team. That alert included supporting marketing materials, contact details and an offer to personalise further if needed.

Sales acted on it, gained traction, created an opportunity in CRM and told everyone about it. Suddenly, sales teams were proactively asking when they would be included in ABM. A perfect problem to communicate upwards.

Prove it works
For every ABM initiated or supported conversation, sales tagged the ABM campaign code. That discipline mattered. It allowed us to show that ABM accounts were creating more pipeline than non-ABM accounts and that velocity had increased.

Sales cycles were long, so revenue took time to land, but when it did, the correlation was undeniable.

Market ABM internally
In large organisations, momentum dies quickly if you do not actively promote what you are doing. Explain what ABM is, why it matters and how other teams can support it. As often as you can.

Data, insight, content, events and PR already exist around you. Use them. It makes your programme stronger and much harder to kill.

Align outside marketing
For me, alignment came through sales operations and their Account Development Plans. These were single truth documents covering where an account was today, where it wanted to go and how it would get there.

We embedded ABM into those plans, into the workshops and into the assessment criteria. Once ABM lives there, it becomes part of how the business plans growth.

Take creative risks
ABM gives you permission to be creative. You are influencing specific accounts, not anonymous audiences. With sales leadership on side, you can take risks.

We sent personalised video brochures to new clients. At the time, that felt futuristic. On the morning of a major pitch, we advertised BT GS along the client CIO’s commute, in the tube station, at the bus stop outside his office, on a billboard opposite and even in their internal magazine.

Did it directly win us the deal? No idea. But she noticed and we did win. On the biggest deals, marginal gains are worth chasing.

Use your clients to help you sell
If you have happy clients, involve them. In one case, we wanted to win a cyber security contract with company X. We introduced them to an existing cyber security client and arranged for the two CIOs to have dinner together without us in the room.

When our advocate debriefed us, he was honest. He did not tell the prospect that we were perfect. He talked about what we did well, where we could improve and, crucially, told them that when things went wrong, the BT GS team genuinely cared and went all in to fix it.

That mattered more than any slide deck or white paper.

After a year, ABM was materially contributing to pipeline; over $3bn of sales qualified pipeline with 32 percent converting, and sales were openly praising it, so budget stopped being a problem. We eventually rolled ABM out across the full Top 400 via developing different flavours across categories of accounts.

Then I got a call asking if I would be interested in becoming a global CMO.

At 27.

Shit.

I owe a huge amount to BT GS and to ABM. And these are just some of the lessons I learned along the way. I will share more in future, but if there is anything specific you would like me to go deeper on, just get in touch. If you would like an intro to the agencies that I would recommend you talk to today, just drop me a line.

7 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

CMO sitting at desk assessing briefs

Career

How to avoid common mistakes when writing a marketing brief?

Over the last few decades in numerous CMO roles, I have written, received, rewritten and quietly apologised for more marketing briefs than I care to remember. I have also been on the other side of the fence, receiving briefs so poor they make me wonder if the sender should be issuing a brief to help them write a brief.

A good brief is about clarity. It exists to remove ambiguity, so the people you want to pay to solve your problems are on the same page as you and set up to succeed, in a way that you and your team actually benefit from.

In b2b marketing, most briefs start with a decision that has already been made. A campaign is needed to launch a new product. The team has decided it is finally time for marketing automation. It is time to refresh the brand identity. Somebody wants to jump on the account based marketing train. Completely normal.

The brief is not there to pretend you are starting from scratch. It is there to explain the thinking behind the decision, what you need and why, what resources you have to play with, and how you will know an agency is the right one for you. If a brief is too bad, the perfect agency might even decline to pitch in the first place, so shooting yourself in the foot.

Most bad marketing briefs are not written by bad marketers. They are written by busy people trying to move things along.

The problem is that small mistakes at the briefing stage snowball. What starts as vagueness turns into guesswork. Guesswork turns into key people being on different pages. This could lead to shoddy work. And that turns into frustration on all sides.

Like all things, everyone has their own opinion. But here are the most common mistakes I see in b2b marketing briefs.

Mistake 1. Treating the brief like admin

This is the big one. When a brief is treated as something you have to get done, rather than something that helps you think, it shows. The language is vague. The logic is loose. Key decisions are missing.

Sometimes I get the impression people think the brief is just admin that will be put right in the face to face briefing. It is not. The brief is the one truth. It is the moment you decide what you actually want and explain it clearly enough for someone else to help. If you rush it, you will pay for that later in time, money and goodwill.

Mistake 2. Pretending some decisions have not been made

Many briefs dance around reality. The business already wants a campaign. Or a new brand identity. Or outside help. Or a new direction. But the brief is written as if everything is still up for debate.

This creates confusion immediately. Agencies do not know whether they are being asked to diagnose a problem or execute a solution. Be honest. If a decision has been made, state it clearly. You have 100% decided to use Sitecore over WordPress? Say so.

Clarity is not limiting. It is invaluable.

Mistake 3. Being vague about the problem

Briefs often describe what needs to be done without explaining why. We need more awareness. We need better leads. We need to stand out. None of this helps.

What is actually not working as it should. Where are things breaking down. What prompted this brief now. Without that context, people are forced to guess at the real problem and the work will drift.

Why not help agencies by giving them valuable context upfront. Do not rely on them asking the right questions. Give them the lowdown. Give them the inside track. Proactively.

Mistake 4. Asking the work to do too many things

If your brief has ten objectives, it has none. One brief should have one main job. You can include secondary goals, but you need to be clear about what matters most and what trumps everything else if time or resources get tight.

When everything is a priority, nothing is. This is how work ends up watered down and compromised. Focus is not a nice to have. It is what makes work effective.

Mistake 5. Defining success with buzzwords

Success is often described in language that sounds impressive but means very little. And as b2b marketing people, we can be the worst offenders. Best in class. Cutting edge. Market leading. These phrases do not give anyone something to aim for.

Describe success in plain English. What needs to happen for you to know this project has been successful. What about from your stakeholders’ perspective.

Ideally the metrics are quantifiable. At a minimum, they should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. If you cannot explain success clearly, you will struggle to recognise it when it happens, praise those who delivered it, or hold people and agencies accountable if it did not.

Mistake 6. Rubbish personas

Everyone is not a target audience. And neither is a rubbish persona.

I am generally alarmed at how bad b2b marketing people are at personas. I have seen personas cross my desk with entirely useless traits, like they have three kids, like skiing, reading books and eating Mars bars. That is a real example. It serves no purpose. It fools nobody. More importantly, it adds nothing to the brief or the outcome.

An agency will never know your customers as well as you do. Good personas help them make better decisions on your behalf. Focus on what matters. What job titles buy your services. What pressures are they under. What does success look like for them. What do they fear. What do they need to believe to choose you. What tools and processes do they live in. That is the sort of thing I want to see, not where they go on holiday.

Mistake 7. Listing features instead of benefits

Much like personas, b2b marketers people also struggle with value propositions.

Listing features, locations, or how many employees you have is not a value proposition. The best briefs articulate why prospective clients would be interested in your service and why. How will you help them be more successful. What challenges do you solve and how. What does that mean for them as a business and as an individual. Why should they choose you rather than a competitor.

Mistake 8. Hiding constraints until later

Budget, timelines, legal requirements, internal politics, technical limits. These things exist whether you write them down or not. Leaving them out of the brief does not make the work more creative. It just pushes the problem down the road.

Hiding the budget is often framed as being savvy. It rarely is. It just forces people to guess, then compromise decent ideas later when the budget inevitably comes out. That helps no one.

If you cannot share an exact budget, give a range. If you cannot talk about the politics, at least describe the internal perception you will need to overcome. If legal is normally extremely risk averse, flag it early. Give agencies a chance of charting a course through the maze.

Agencies can work within constraints. What they cannot do is plan around information they do not have. Put the reality on the table early. And yes, there are always ways to say the sensitive stuff without spelling it out. Come on. You are marketers. Be creative.

Mistake 9. Being unclear about what is fixed and what is flexible

Many briefs leave agencies guessing about where they can challenge you and where they cannot. Is the message locked. Is the channel fixed. Is the timeline immovable.

If everything feels fixed, you will get safe work. If nothing feels fixed, you will get confusion. A good brief separates non negotiables from areas where thinking is welcome.

Mistake 10. Forgetting to say how you will choose

If this is a pitch, one of the biggest mistakes is not explaining how decisions will be made. What matters most. Thinking or polish. Experience or fresh perspective. Chemistry or credentials. Who is involved.

When you do not say this, agencies pitch to whatever they think you secretly want. That rarely ends well. Being clear about how you will choose is basic fairness and improves the quality of responses dramatically.

Mistake 11. Not giving all agencies the same information

I have been a stakeholder in pitches where some agencies were given more information than others. I always call it out. It is not fair and it skews the outcome.

I once had a head of procurement ask me to answer a question from one agency during an RFP process. I was happy to do it, but only if the question and answer were shared with all bidding agencies. They pushed back and said the other agencies should ask better questions if they wanted the extra context.

I reject that thinking. The agency asking good questions is great but my team want the best outcome and we do not have time to play games. Share the information and get to a better result faster.

Mistake 12. Sending the brief and hoping for the best

A brief is not finished when you send the document. Writing it and briefing it are not the same thing. If you do not talk it through, answer questions and confirm shared understanding, you are leaving too much to chance.

Send the brief. Talk them through it. Be prepared to refine it. If you just email a brief, it is a waste of time. You will not get anyone’s best people or best thinking aligned to the brief. And from an agency point of view, I would not want to bid on anything for someone I have not had a conversation with. The best agencies will push back on this. That is one of the ways you spot them.

Mistake 13. Not considering compensating bidders for their time

This may be controversial and not every budget allows it, but I have compensated losing bidders for their time, even if it is a small but meaningful gesture.

Agencies spend real time and expertise responding to your brief. Creative agencies incur real costs. If your budget allows, recognise that. Even if you went in a different direction, you valued their thinking and it helped you get to the right decision. A simple gesture can leave the door open to work together in future, and it is the decent thing to do.

The simple rule that avoids most mistakes

If there is one rule I stick to, it is this. A good marketing brief should make it obvious what is being bought, why it exists, who it is for, what success looks like and how the work will be judged. If any of those are unclear, the brief is not ready yet.

Most briefing mistakes come from rushing, avoiding decisions, and treating the whole thing like an administrative task. Slow down. Decide properly. Write it clearly. It is one of the highest ROI things you can do in b2b marketing.

 

9 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

woman holding a large jigsaw piece

Fractional Marketing

Prove It Fast: The Fractional CMO Reality

They arrive mid-stream, often mid-problem, sometimes mid-crisis. The brief is rarely clean. The data is rarely complete. And the expectations, while often unspoken, are immediate. In fractional leadership, time is compressed and credibility is perishable.

This is the reality of modern fractional marketing, and it is reshaping what senior marketing leadership looks like.

Unlike their full-time counterparts, fractional CMOs don’t inherit the benefit of long-term belief. They are not afforded quarters to “get their feet under the desk” or months to build internal alliances. Instead, they are expected to demonstrate clarity, confidence and commercial impact almost on arrival. The implicit question hovering over every early meeting is simple: did we make the right call?

What clients are really buying when they engage a fractional CMO is not execution, nor even strategy in the traditional sense. They are buying certainty. They want someone who can look at a complex, often dysfunctional marketing engine and say, with conviction, what actually matters and what does not. Speed, in this context, is not about activity. It is about judgement.

This is where many fractional engagements falter. The temptation to prove value through motion is strong. Campaigns are launched. Frameworks are presented. Decks grow longer. But activity without direction rarely builds trust. In fact, it often does the opposite. Experienced leadership teams recognise noise when they see it.

What builds confidence early is pattern recognition. The ability to spot familiar failure modes quickly and articulate them clearly. Whether it is misaligned positioning, a bloated channel mix, or a conversion problem masquerading as a demand issue, the best fractional CMOs name the real problem before they attempt to solve it. That moment of recognition, when stakeholders feel seen and understood, is often the true starting point of influence.

Reframing is a particularly powerful tool in the fractional arsenal. When a new leader can restate a company’s challenge more accurately than it has been able to itself, credibility accelerates. It signals not just intelligence, but experience. It says: I’ve seen this before, and I know where it leads if left unchecked.

Early impact, however, is not about fixing everything. Fractional CMOs succeed when they create visible momentum in one meaningful area. A single commercial win, a clarified decision, a simplified process. Something tangible enough to be felt in the business, not just discussed in meetings. One clear improvement buys time, trust and space to tackle deeper structural issues.

Decision velocity is another underappreciated marker of fractional success. Organisations often engage fractional CMOs because they are stuck. Too many opinions, too much legacy thinking, too little conviction. When decisions start being made faster and with more confidence after a fractional leader arrives, value is being proven, even if the numbers have not yet fully caught up.

Communication plays an equally critical role. Fractional CMOs are constantly performing a balancing act: calm without complacency, urgency without panic. Overpromising erodes trust. Overexplaining does the same. What leadership teams respond to is clarity; what matters now, what can wait, and what simply should not be done at all.

Ultimately, the real measure of a successful fractional engagement emerges quietly. It is not found in dashboards or reports, but in absence. When leaders begin to wonder what would break if the fractional CMO were no longer there, the role has shifted from optional to essential.

Fractional marketing leadership is not about being helpful. It is about being decisive, credible and commercially sharp, quickly. It demands strong points of view, comfort with ambiguity and the confidence to lead without formal authority. Those who thrive in this model understand that proving it fast does not mean doing more. 

It means seeing more clearly, sooner.

3 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

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Luan Wise www.b2bmarketing.com

Content and Communications

Reach is down. Engagement is shifting. And we’re probably measuring the wrong thing

Reach is down. Engagement is shifting. And we’re probably measuring the wrong thing.

Every few months, the same topic reappears. Reach on social media is down. Algorithms are suppressing organic content. Nobody's seeing anything anymore. The feeds are broken.

And sometimes, the data agrees. Sometimes, it doesn't. What it almost never does is tell a simple story -  because marketing measurement has never been simple!

Two new studies put some useful numbers behind the social media measurement challenge. Buffer analysed over 52 million posts across 10 platforms. Metricool looked into 673,658 LinkedIn posts from more than 63,000 accounts. Together, they complicate the narrative in the most useful way possible.

What ‘success looks like’ has changed

Yes, some platforms are showing declining engagement rates. Instagram's median engagement rate fell from around 7.4% in 2024 to around 5.5% in 2025 - a 26% decline.

But here's what that number doesn't tell you: Instagram has increasingly steered users toward views as its primary success metric, which means the traditional engagement rate formula may simply be measuring less of what Instagram is actually optimising for – it was designed for a feed of static images. It doesn't capture saves ("I want to come back to this") or sends ("I want someone else to see this"), neither of which shows up in a public count. The metric didn't break. The platform moved on, and the formula didn't follow.

Meanwhile, Facebook's median engagement rate rose to around 5.6% in 2025 (up from around 5.0% in 2024), Pinterest climbed 23%, and X, despite remaining at the bottom of the engagement-rate rankings, saw a 44% relative gain.

So, is social media performance dying? Not across the board. What's really happening is that each platform is evolving its own definition of what success looks like - and the core metrics we've been using for years aren't keeping pace.

"Engagement" isn't one thing

This is the part most reporting gets wrong. When we talk about engagement rates across platforms as if they're comparable, we're mixing up fundamentally different measurements.

LinkedIn, for example, includes clicks in its engagement rate, while most other platforms don't. The Metricool LinkedIn data highlights this issue; look at the year-over-year numbers for LinkedIn Company Pages: impressions down 10%, likes down 13%, comments down 17%, shares down 11%. On the surface, it looks like a platform losing steam. And if those were your only metrics, you'd probably be worried.

But clicks, the interactions that don't show up publicly on your posts, rose by 5%. Every time someone swipes through a carousel, watches a video, or follows a link, LinkedIn tracks it. When you include those invisible interactions, overall engagement rate went up, from 12.21% to 13.90%.

LinkedIn now surfaces impression metrics for comments, meaning the conversation itself is being measured for reach. And posts don't just generate engagement; they drive profile views and follower conversions that don't register as "engagement" in most reporting dashboards, but are often the actual business outcome the post was trying to achieve.

A post that gets 200 likes and converts 40 profile visitors into followers is doing more useful work than a post that gets 500 likes and sends nobody anywhere. Most analytics tools report the first number. Virtually none report the second.

People are interacting with LinkedIn content more than ever. Just not in ways anyone else can see. And that's not just a LinkedIn story.

Instagram’s most valuable engagement signals — saves and sends — are invisible to everyone except the creator and the algorithm. A save tells Instagram that this content has enough value that someone wants to return to it. A send tells Instagram that this content is worth someone's social capital to share privately.

These are higher-intent signals than a like, and they're exactly the ones the traditional engagement rate formula was never built to capture.

And then there’s the role of comments; not just as engagement, but as content in their own right. The original post is often only the starting point; the real narrative, social proof, and persuasion increasingly unfold in the comment thread.

Across nearly two million posts from 220,000+ accounts on Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Bluesky, posts where creators reply to comments consistently outperformed those where they don't — on every platform studied.

The estimated engagement lift: Threads +42%, LinkedIn +30%, Instagram +21%, Facebook +9%, X +8%, Bluesky +5%.

The Like button: a great 2009 answer. Just not a 2026 one.

The Like button turned 17 this year. When it launched in 2009, there were no carousels, no Reels, no Stories. The feed was a chronological stream of status updates and photos. Engagement meant just one of two things: you pressed a button, or you left a comment.

Now, swiping through a carousel is engagement. Saving a post to return to later is engagement. Sending something to a colleague with a note is engagement. Clicking through to someone's profile after reading their post is engagement. None of these behaviours fit into the original model, and yet they're now among the highest-intent signals a platform receives about whether content is actually working.

The platforms have been quietly reweighting their algorithms around these user behaviours for years. What's changed is that the gap between what the algorithms are measuring and what most social media managers are reporting. The conversation has not moved on from asking about followers and likes.

The format gap

Both studies independently arrived at the same finding: the formats that dominate in posting volume are almost never the formats that perform best.

On LinkedIn, images account for around 49% of all Company Page posts, and video another 25% — so nearly 75% of all content. Yet carousels, which make up just 7.6% of posts, earn a 49.52% engagement rate. Images earn 5.77%. Video earns 6.91%. Metricool's headline finding: carousels get 11x more interactions than images, yet images are posted 6x more than carousels.

Metricool also found that LinkedIn posts including a direct question see 77% more comments than average, and posts with a specific call to action to comment see an 80% increase. That's not a hack, it's simply designing content to invite a response rather than passive consumption, and measuring whether the conversation happened, not just whether the post was seen.

There’s a similar story on Instagram — and it’s really a reach story. Reels get 36% more reach than carousels, putting your content in front of people who’ve never heard of you. But carousels earn 109% more engagement per person reached, meaning the people who do see them are going much further in. These aren’t competing findings; they’re pointing to two different strategies for two different goals. Reels are for reach — discovery, new audiences, the top of the funnel. Carousels are for depth — getting the people who already follow you to go further in. The mistake is treating “best format” as a single answer when the platform is really asking: best for what?

And top tip, add music to your carousel and Instagram will treat it as a Reel.

And it's worth mentioning polls on LinkedIn, which reach nearly three times more people per post than any other format and are simultaneously the least-used format of all.

Part of the tension here is operational: we're often not creating content that aligns with the engagement outcomes we're actually worried about. Instead, we're defaulting to what is easiest, familiar, or historically “standard” within teams.

Reach: the right question

So is reach actually collapsing? The honest answer is: it depends what you’re posting, and why. Organic reach has undeniably become harder on some platforms — LinkedIn impressions for Company Pages fell 10% year-on-year, and algorithm-driven feeds mean fewer posts surface to non-followers by default. That’s real.

But reach is not evenly distributed — it’s format-dependent. LinkedIn polls reach nearly three times more people per post than any other format on the platform, yet they’re the least-used format of all. On Instagram, Reels consistently outperform carousels on raw reach. The platforms aren’t suppressing content uniformly; they’re rewarding formats they want to promote. Knowing which formats those are is the more useful question than asking whether reach is “up or down” overall.

And here’s the more fundamental point: reach was never the destination. It was always a proxy — a way of estimating whether the right people might have seen something. If your content is generating the outcomes you actually care about (pipeline, profile growth, inbound enquiries, qualified conversations), then lower headline reach numbers are almost irrelevant. A post seen by 500 of exactly the right people that drives three meaningful conversations is doing more useful work than a post seen by 50,000 people who scroll straight past. The question worth asking isn’t “how do I get more reach?” — it’s “is my reach reaching the right people, and are they doing anything as a result?”

The boring truth about consistency

In the analysis of 4.8 million observations across approximately 161,000 profiles on Facebook, Instagram, and X, Buffer found that accounts that went quiet for a week consistently underperformed their own baseline growth rates. They called it the "no-post penalty."

The headline isn't that you need to post more. It's that going quiet has a penalty.

What engagement is really becoming

The shift from public to behind-the-scenes engagement isn't a temporary algorithm quirk. It reflects something real about how people use these platforms now — more intentional, more private, more likely to save something for later or send it to one specific person than to perform a public reaction to it.

For individuals and organisations, the metrics worth building dashboards around are increasingly the ones that don't show up in the public domain.

And underneath all of it, the findings from both studies point to the same foundational behaviours: show up consistently, use the formats that generate intentional engagement, and be social on social.

And when someone asks whether your reach or engagement is down — ask them what happened next. Because if the right people saw it, engaged with it in ways that mattered, and something moved as a result, those are not metrics problems. That's the whole point.

 

 

Sources: Buffer, State of Social Media Engagement 2026; Metricool, LinkedIn Study 2026

 

Mark Choueke b2bmarketing.com

Career

Mark Ritson called me unqualified, so I did something about it

I hated being called out by Ritson as ‘unqualified’ so I trained; now I share my experience with students at B2B marketing’s best Academy 

I fell into marketing. I trained as a journalist. 

When it came to the point at which we had to make career decisions, journalism was the nearest thing I could think of to all the things I was good at or considered fun: meeting and chatting to people; building relationships and winning their trust; writing, telling stories; finding stuff out that someone somewhere was trying to keep secret and - on regular occasions - genuinely holding powerful figures to account. 

A few weeks ago, Professor Ritson caused some trademark havoc on Linkedin with a quiz he designed for some Ipsos research; a test whose results he says proves two thirds of us marketers in the UK and US are unqualified and unfit for purpose. 

Like most of us in our teens, I lacked self-awareness. However, one thing I knew for sure even then - and still do - is that feeling ‘tied’ to a desk and repeating the same tasks every day was not an option. Journalism - a profession that does require training if you’re to reach a decent level - fitted. For about a decade I did well, travelled extensively, learned a great deal and laughed a lot. Right up to my last job in journalism as editor of Marketing Week magazine. 

One of my most successful manoeuvres in that role was poaching Ritson from my direct competitor and persuading him to join me as Marketing Week’s top columnist and good friend. He resisted at first because he’s an honorable guy who felt some loyalty to his team and editor but we kept talking and eventually, he was persuaded. 

We formed a good working partnership and he was a key part of any success I had as editor of a big business weekly. 

Some years later, when I’d swapped editorial for commercial (a typical ‘me’ move: the beginning of year four in the highest profile and best job I’d ever had at the time - to get itchy feet and quit to find new adventure); Ritson launched his MiniMBA training programme. 

So successful was his entrepreneurial idea that it became a monster. A decade on,  Ritson has ceased the formal teaching and brand consultancy on which he built his name. 

Drawing on decades of experience both advising global brands and teaching MBA students at the world’s top business schools, Ritson has built the digital, affordable and hence accessible, MBA equivalent training programme for marketers. The MiniMBA trains around 8,000 marketers every year across 40 different countries and boasts a Net Promoter Score of +84. 

By comparison, in the year ending June 2025, the UK’s century-old Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) trained 5,100 marketers and achieved an NPS of +50.5. 

Perhaps one edge that Ritson has over professional trainers is that he didn’t make his career exclusively about educating others. Yes he’s an academic but he;s been in the thick of the jungle too - consultant in the boardrooms of the world’s most famous businesses: Louis Vuitton, Dom Pérignon, Hennessy, Sephora, WD-40, Ericsson, News Corp and countless others. 

That’s why the MiniMBA is trusted to train marketers from the likes of American Express, McDonald’s, Nestle, Red Bull and Tesco.

It was during this huge growth period for the MiniMBA that I found myself on the wrong side of what had become Ritson’s loudest and most repeated attack on the industry. 

Year after year, Ritson would use his platform to call us out - the lot of us, the whole marketing industry - for our lack of formal training and qualifications. 

He told us that if we’re running marketing for our organisations based on what we’ve learned on the job and our ‘natural’ business or people skills, then we were probably doing it wrong. 

I fucking hated it - seeing my mate rant and curse about something so important and - to my mind correct - and knowing I was one of those he was pointing to. 

I felt embarrassed to be herded in with the masses of mediocre marketers around me and told I lacked the required skills to properly deliver in an industry in which I was building some profile. 

Needing to rid myself of Ritson-induced anxiety, I insisted to a new boss that I wanted to make my leadership position ‘real’ and that I’d be putting myself and my marketing team through the MiniMBA as my first big deliverable. 

Sure enough, when I embarked on the MiniMBA I realised just how much I didn't know; just how much there is to know; how small a slice of good marketing practice we B2B marketers actually involve ourselves in, and how much of an advantage trained marketers enjoy.

Ritson and I speak about the training gap and his continuing (and curse-littered) fury at the arrogance of untrained marketers in this week’s episode of the Do More With Less podcast.

Now, I’d advise anyone to do some marketing training. I’m not close to the courses offered by the CIM or the IPA, but I do know the market lacks really good training aimed at B2B marketers specifically. 

There’s really not much guidance or proper career development around for us. That’s why B2B Marketing United has taken its training offer so seriously so early on in its existence. 

While the internet is groaning with free and paid-for courses teaching isolated skills and tactics: digital advertising, email marketing, content writing and so on; our Academy serves a different (and arguably more pressing) need. 

I remember getting into tech scale-ups and startups around 2014, where young, new starters were more than capable of hacking together tactical campaign skills from YouTube self-training videos. I watched it happen. Anything they wanted to know, new tools they wanted to integrate and optimise - they’d watch a tutorial, practise it, train one another and ‘class’ would be over within 10 minutes. 

Nobody cared about CPD points. They just wanted to get better at their jobs. Fast 

With such an abundance of free opportunities to learn tactics, two half days learning ‘B2B copywriting’ for £800 isn’t really what many B2B marketers need right now.

The evolution of AI and how we use it continues to rapidly thin out marketing functions. Many of my clients at OrbitalX are $50m+ revenue businesses served by marketing functions of just one or two ‘generalists’ plus partner vendors and tech. 

Huge swathes of middle management are being ripped out - often along with expensive senior executives. Young marketers are finding themselves over-promoted too quickly into senior positions with little or no support infrastructure.

Hiring managers have switched their attention to what recruiter Rowan Fisk describes as 'the ability to walk into any conversation, challenge the strategy, and have it received as contribution rather than threat'.

Bosses want "systems thinking over channel depth," writes Fisk, "orchestration over execution; [they want] critical thinking and judgment. The ability to see the whole board and make decisions that hold up across time."

The stuff marketers (young and old) most need to know has changed almost instantly. It’s not ‘digital marketing’ skills. Sure, running a YouTube account, creating videos for Linkedin campaigns, managing paid media and better email marketing are all table stakes. 

But you don’t need to pay to learn them. 

The valuable lessons - tools and behaviours we senior marketers learned over twenty years that the next generation needs to pick up in mere months - include how to 'win' budget discussions with CFOs; how to talk about, plan and deliver pipeline and revenue impact (rather than arguing over the definition of an 'MQL)'; how to say 'no' and make it sound like a 'yes'; how to smash Q1's numbers while building the brand marketing play to prepare the ground for Q4 and beyond.

That's why the three courses you’ll find at the Academy are about marketing leadership as opposed to tactical bits and bobs. The courses aren’t taught by professional trainers but real marketers. Lessons are based on experience; real-life scenarios; the wins; the fuck-ups; and all the lessons and other stuff we wish we’d learned much sooner. The stuff I share when mentoring and coaching. 

If we're to avoid losing the current middle generation of B2B marketers being ousted out of previously secure jobs and a new generation of kids - tech-savvy but short on business smarts - they need a short-cut access to leadership and go-to-market thinking. 

As the business environment changes, so does the way we train and prepare for it. 

We should celebrate it. School’s getting more fun. 

Fiona Mckenzie www.b2bmarketing.com

Leadership

Real Talk: Fiona Mckenzie, President of Marketbridge Europe. Some CMOs have lost their mojo

Most people who sell their agency spend the first year of the earnout looking over their shoulder. Fiona McKenzie proactively focused on quickly tearing down the walls between two businesses and building something new. Seven months on from the acquisition of her agency Revere by Marketbridge, she is out of earnout, off the legacy systems, and running a near-100-person European operation as its President. She is also, in the same breath, thinking about the CMOs who quietly ask her how to stay in their jobs for another two years.

Rich: What have your new American overlords actually put you on the hook for?

Fiona: Europe is a really strategic part of the overarching plan. Expanding beyond the US was a key strategic initiative and part of their growth strategy. My remit in the immediate term was to take the two businesses that are now together and form part of our European base. Revere has only just finished a very fast integration. We are out of earnout already. We are fully integrated. We are working as one team on the same P&L, everyone aligned, working towards common goals.

In the long term it is continued expansion in Europe across geographies, building out service capabilities aligned to the wider group model. But most importantly, every agency is evolving regardless of whether you are part of an acquisition or not. Clients are layering in AI, layering in technology. They have their own challenges. Agencies have to be evolving constantly to meet those needs.


“The real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader.”

 

Rich: How on earth did you achieve so much so quickly? I would expect a typical earnout to be at least 12 months.

Fiona: A big part of the success was the fact that I spent a lot of time with Fiona Shepherd, who was leading Europe at the time, even ahead of the announcement. We had very transparent conversations, not just with her but with the rest of the leadership team. When you go into these discussions and you have decided that a particular brand is right for your agency’s next stage of growth, you have to go into the diligence phase and trust the process. Keep it human.

I spoke to any agency leader that would let me buy them lunch ahead of going through that process. I asked them for their war stories, understood the journey through the sales process, asked them what they would do differently. So, I felt I went in with my eyes open. I was almost overly human. I wanted to have conversations outside of all the spreadsheets and finance.

The advice I always give now is: if you are about to go out to market to sell your business, have a holiday before you go out, not after. Because the real hard work happens the day you sell your agency. You have to be more present than ever as a leader, not just to the team you have led but to the team you are going to be working with. And everyone has had their own journey of how they got there.

I practised what I preached on that one. We got to the point where we had a number of LOIs (Letter of Intents) and then we went on a two-week holiday and signed the LOI when we came back. So, we could go into diligence full throttle. I always do my best thinking on holiday. Your mind slows down, you think about the big picture, and you come back with real clarity on what comes next.

Bob Ray, our CEO, says something to people when he talks to them in smaller groups that has always stuck with me. He says: “no one here chose to work for Marketbridge”. So, you have to be really respectful. People chose to work for Revere. They ended up in here. I tried to over-communicate during the process to explain to people why it was the right move.

It was also a real divide and conquer effort on the integration itself. I cannot lead everything, nor can a few of us. You have to empower people in the right roles and trust them to get on with it. Seven months on and we are all on the same systems, working to the same goals. That allows you to move at pace. And that is what you need to do in this market.

Rich: It sounds like you went into a marriage wanting to build foundations and settle down, rather than going in thinking about what happens when you get divorced.

Fiona: Exactly. And as someone who has been through divorce, it can be a very complicated and traumatic experience. You can only make the right decision in the moment. My experience before Revere was a few other agency brands. I had had a little experience of acquisitions and mergers with other agencies, and sometimes you can have a happy divorce and sometimes it can be a really bad divorce.

In this instance, I was joining under Fiona Shepherd as the leader of Europe. I do not think at the time she necessarily had plans to step out so quickly. But I think she always had a vision for what Europe could look like. She really saw that our team would be the next step for that vision. And the success of the integration meant she felt she could step back and hand over the reins. She has been in this industry a long time and it is a big decision.

Now, funnily enough, everyone wants to buy me lunch. Which is quite good fun. You just do not have enough hours in the day.

Rich: I’ve heard you say that a lot of CMOs have lost their marketing mojo. Why?

Fiona: There are a large number of restructures that continue to take place. That creates fear in role. And there is a constant need to prove ROI. Essentially, they are in defence mode. There are very few businesses or marketing leaders that are able to step out into that proactive mode as much as they try, because they are exhausted. They constantly feel like they are fighting a battle and justifying their existence.

I very much see agencies as a comfort blanket for those CMOs, but also as their superpower. How can we be here to protect you? How can we help you? A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to wider stakeholders. So, my team and I become that outlet.


“A lot of CMOs cannot open up to their teams. They cannot open up to the wider stakeholders. So, we become that outlet.”

 

Rich: I see a lot of CMOs in a form of paralysis out of fear. Like the housing market. Sitting still, nervous to move, nervous to remodel.

Fiona: Yes. And I can tell you, having hosted my own event for people out of seat, people put on a brave face but underneath it there is real struggle. You get a real sense of what brands are expecting from CMOs when you speak to people trying to go into those roles. A lot of people are not even wanting the CMO role anymore, for that reason.

I went into a meeting with a CMO at a global enterprise organisation, someone I had seen online, clearly very capable from everything I had heard. My objective going in was to position our agency well. We had worked with her previous employer for over seven years, so I wanted to get in front of her early. As you build trust through the meeting, slowly people break down and expose how they really feel. At the end of the conversation, she flipped it entirely and turned to me and said: “what advice would you give me, so I am still in my role in two years?” I walked out and thought, God, what a turn of events. I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.

What CMOs need is to show that marketing is connected to revenue. They need to show that marketing is part of a revenue system. It needs to be process driven. And a lot of CMOs and marketing leaders did not come into marketing to do the role they are actually being asked to do today.


“I walked in thinking about how to impress her. I left thinking about how to help her survive.”

 

Rich: I see a lot of synergies with what happened 10 years ago when marketing automation came in. There was a misguided belief that it would make marketing cheaper. That same conversation has gone up a level again with AI.

Fiona: Exactly that. We are firmly adopting a very proactive and aggressive AI strategy. We did that at Revere and won a couple of awards for the work we did with that adoption. But it is not really about AI. It is about going back to what the client actually has a challenge on.

The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI and into what is it your business is trying to do, what are the goals you are trying to achieve, how can we work together to get you to those outcomes as effectively as possible. If that is using AI as a growth catalyst, great. If it is redefining your workflows, okay, let us look at that.

And for all the hype, we have to remember there are brands in very different situations. I was speaking to a CMO recently who has moved into a global role and is trying to redefine the central regional model. In reality, his team is barely doing digital marketing properly, let alone automated workflow. We have to meet people where they are.

One area where we have moved fast and seen real pickup is generative engine optimisation. We were pretty quick out of the blocks on the GEO story and have been running a lot of client projects in that space. But even there, you cannot look at it in isolation. It ties into a bigger story about how buyer behaviour is changing and how brands need to show up in a world where AI is increasingly part of the buying committee.


“The conversation starts with AI. It very quickly moves away from AI.”

 

Rich: How do you actually help CMOs get their mojo back then?

Fiona: Show them a roadmap to creating a growth system. There are so many directions of travel that people get pulled in, and CMOs just need to know they are on a roadmap. We cannot all change everything overnight. No leader can.

It is always about the roadmap and the process. You cannot ignore the business realities and the needs that have to be met in the short term, but ultimately you have to be visionary and make the right investments for the long term as well. Our job is to help them prioritise. Get some quick wins in. Do not overcomplicate it. But also help them prove investment to grow the roadmap toward long-term growth.

Ultimately that is where people get their mojo. They want to be doing stuff that is meaningful. We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. Everything is about creating a connection. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.

When people lose their mojo, things have got a bit messy. How do we strip it back? They need to be able to say no. They need to be able to prioritise. And it just seems to be, for the myriad of reasons we have discussed, increasingly hard for marketing leaders to do that.


“We all got into marketing because we wanted to connect with the customer. To get your mojo back is about having those human connections and feeling like you are making progress.”

 

Rich: What does success look like for you in 12 months’ time?

Fiona: Being recognised as a category creator and disruptor. Not a typical agency services model. A blend of consultancy services and agency services, bringing in new expertise, creating a new category as a leading growth and go-to-market business. Expanding beyond the CMO buyer, working into the C-suite.

I have this vision of being at your CMO roundtables and people saying: oh, you guys are a different kind of business, they would not consider themselves an agency, they consider themselves a company to support growth. That is what I want to hear. And I am going to be doing everything I can over the next 12 months to make sure we are seen that way.

I will be straight with you. I feel like I have gone from, and I probably would not normally describe it this way, but I will now, from a Championship club to the Premier League. We always felt like a Premier League brand. We just did not have the squad depth.

 

B2B Marketing United publishes practitioner-led content for senior B2B marketers. All editorial is independent.

football crowd image www.b2bmarketing.com

Demand Generation

Loyalty among the ‘traditional’ marketing channels showing vibrancy and youth in the age of AI

The AI opportunity in ‘go-to-market strategy’ is moving so fast that ‘keeping up’ is currently a daily focus. 

Some of the smartest bosses and businesses around however, still pay attention to marketing channels seemingly long forgotten by the gossip around the LinkedIn watercooler.

Watch any Rory Sutherland interview clips and note how quickly he finds a moment to advocate for direct mail. 

Similarly, UK industry body for commercial TV, Thinkbox now talks about ‘Total TV’ to include the proliferation of advertising opportunities for marketers across a host of new video channels. And while you’d expect Thinkbox to present evidence whenever possible to prove TV remains consumers’ most trusted marketing channel, independent and credible voices like Professor Mark Ritson follow suit whenever asked. 

Still - some revelations still have it in them to surprise me. In marketing channel terms, ‘loyalty programmes’ feel like old news. 

Until recently, I assumed loyalty was a marketing channel every brand across every sector had already explored, tested, and deployed in their own way. Like email, paid media, or events, it felt fully established and maybe even taken for granted.

Then I met a really cool business called White Label Loyalty. They’re doing amazing things for whole swathes of the B2B marketing community that are yet to properly investigate or even understand loyalty as a viable marketing channel.

This isn’t a case of B2B marketing teams having lacked ambition or neglecting to value their customers. Rather, in sectors like B2B manufacturing, the traditional model makes loyalty feel an unlikely marketing play.

When your products are sold through retailers and distributors, you rarely own your customer data. And if you don’t see the end buyer, it’s a tough job to truly understand how to excite them. 

Without customers’ first-party data, you’ve got zero information on what influences their buying decisions. You can guess that price rules every customer choice, but beyond that rather base assumption and the damaging discounts it encourages, a decent loyalty scheme feels like a non-starter.

This leaves marketing directors under the cosh - being asked to deliver growth while effectively flying blind. They run campaigns without any customer insight, behavioural data, and therefore without a direct relationship with the people who drive their revenue.

Enter White Label Loyalty founder Achille Traore, a soft-spoken, humble yet ridiculously smart visionary. As an ex-professional footballer playing in the Swedish first division and later signed to Barnsley FC - Achille has an amazing story.

After his football career was cut short by injury, he turned his head to business. Achille’s now a celebrated innovator in the tech industry, acknowledged as one of the top 100 Retail Technology Entrepreneurs in UK in Fresh Business Thinking's Shift100 list, associated with KPMG. 

As well as the B2B manufacturing sector, White Label Loyalty powers huge loyalty programmes for the likes of Burger King and PepsiCo. 

I met Achille late last year and he’s fast become one of my favourite B2B marketing leaders. He’s since worked with OrbitalX on a piece of research, revealing that while many B2B manufacturers believe they actually do have access to customer data, most struggle to activate, understand, or use it to drive repeat business.

So when presented with a loyalty solution that’s dead easy to implement and capable of delivering first-party data and a first real connection with the end customer, his clients jump at the chance. With no disrespect intended, it’s their first opportunity to behave like ‘real’ marketers - generating growth based on real insight rather than price promotions and guesswork.

AI-powered insights, predictive analytics, scaled personalisation and speedy routes to demonstrable ROI take loyalty from a tactic or campaign to a key strategic pillar for growth.  

In other words, Achille is bringing loyalty into industries where it’s long been considered out of reach; a marketing channel that seemed to be just for others.

To have found whole sectors - B2B manufacturing and beyond - where old school marketing channels feel like a wide-open frontier and then watching the outlandish success that follows; it’s been a heartwarming experience.

For this 50-year-old, it’s a joyous moment whenever something perceived as old-fashioned makes itself cool again by bringing its phenomenal power and expertise to bear. 



Luan Wise

AI

LinkedIn's Algorithm Update Is Good News for B2B

If you're playing the long game, because B2B buyers make decisions based on familiarity and trust, this is good news. But you'd be forgiven for missing that, given the volume of hot takes that followed. New hacks. New fears. And, as ever, a rush to share the latest ‘quick wins’ while declaring the old playbook obsolete!

LinkedIn published a full technical breakdown of the update on their Engineering blog. It’s worth reading before anyone else's commentary shapes your thinking.

Here’s the update in their own words:

“While the Feed has long been AI-powered, recent LLM advances gave us the opportunity to rethink what's possible. That's why we're rolling out a new advanced ranking system, powered by LLMs and GPUs, that better understands what a post is actually about and how it relates to a member's evolving interests and career goals."

The algorithm doesn't define success. Your content does.

So what does LinkedIn actually value? The algorithm filters for relevance, evaluating what your post is about, who it's likely to matter to, and whether you're the kind of voice that shows up consistently on that topic. What the new LLM-powered system changes is the precision of that matching, not the underlying logic.

LinkedIn's algorithm update is designed to be more adaptive to evolving user interests, rather than being guided purely by historical engagement data. In practical terms, the old system rewarded familiarity. If someone had engaged with your posts before, they were more likely to see them again.

In my training, I always emphasised engagement as the key to building future visibility. That principle still holds, but this new system now broadens the opportunity, matching content to current interests means your posts can reach relevant audiences beyond those who already know you.

There's also a clear signal on what's being deprioritised. Engagement bait, posts that prompt users to "Comment 'Yes' if you agree”, or posts that feature a video with no relation to the accompanying text, is being actively filtered out. Recycled thought leadership posts that add little in terms of substance or insight will also be downranked. A welcome shift (and long overdue).

If your activity has been built around gaming engagement rather than earning it, this update is a genuine problem. For everyone else, it's an improvement.

The update is good news for anyone producing quality content: when industry news breaks and relevant posts gain traction, the updated system surfaces them within minutes, not hours or days.

But here's what most people are missing

The feed algorithm is one piece of a much larger picture of change. According to Semrush, LinkedIn is now the second most cited domain across AI search tools, sitting ahead of Wikipedia, major news publishers, and other social platforms (Reddit is currently occupying first place).

Semrush analysed 325,000 prompts across three AI tools, ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity, identifying 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited in responses. On average, 11% of AI responses reference LinkedIn content.

Why does this matter? AI responses tend to mirror the meaning of original LinkedIn content closely, your framing, your positioning, your expertise can surface directly inside an AI-generated answer that a potential buyer is reading right now. That's a different kind of visibility than feed reach, and it's one most B2B marketers haven't yet accounted for.

So what earns that kind of citation? Educational, original content published consistently, long-form articles and substantive posts that share practical knowledge rather than promotional messaging.

The research also found that roughly 75% of cited authors post frequently, and about half have over 2,000 followers, so follower count matters less than you might expect. Authoritative content from smaller accounts still breaks through.

One nuance worth flagging for those managing both a brand presence and a personal profile: not all AI tools draw from the same sources. Perplexity tends to cite Company Pages most often, while ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode more frequently surface content from individual creators. That's a compelling data point to have in your back pocket when making the internal case for investing in both, it's not either/or, it's both/and.

What this means for you

The latest algorithm update and the AI visibility data are pointing in the same direction. Stop optimising for the feed. Start optimising for building and maintaining trust.

That means posting consistently on the topics where you have genuine expertise. It means writing with clarity of thought, not volume of words. It means publishing original insight rather than recycled takes. And it means treating LinkedIn less like a broadcast channel and more like a body of work. one that both human readers and AI platforms are actively drawing from.

A word on consistency. Playbooks might tell you to post three times a week, always on Tuesday mornings, and between 8 and 10am. That guidance has its place, but it misses the point. Consistency that matters is consistency of topic and perspective, not frequency for its own sake. Showing up once or twice a week with genuine insight on the things you actually know will always outperform daily posting that says nothing in particular. The algorithm, and your audience, will notice the difference.

Start by auditing your last 90 days of LinkedIn activity against a simple test: does each post reflect genuine expertise, answer a question your audience is actually asking, and come from a consistent point of view? If the answer is mostly yes, this update works in your favour. If not, that's where your energy is better spent.

And don't overlook your profile. The system uses everything LinkedIn knows about you, your headline, summary, skills, and experience, to understand who you are and what you should be associated with. If your profile still reflects where you were three years ago rather than where you are now, the algorithm is working with outdated information. A profile that clearly signals your expertise and focus area makes everything else work harder.

out of home advertising b2b marketing

Demand Generation

Time to let your B2B product enjoy some fresh air

My friend and brilliant brand communications consultant Dan Walker Smith recently published a photograph of a B2B ad placed on London Transport. I’d taken exactly the same photograph on my phone some weeks before.

As a keen follower of Dan, I can tell you that his post on B2B ads ‘out in the wild’ is well worth a read. His analysis on the Vanta ad is brief enough to be a convenient bitesize addition to your media diet today but smart enough to leave you things to think about after. 

It shouldn’t really be newsworthy when a B2B product or service buys and places outdoor ads but it is. Still.

First time I saw B2B advertisers behaving like their B2C cousins was in 2015, waiting for an Uber on a street corner in a part of NYC I didn’t know well. I was with my boss. We were locked in that very particular silence following a pitch that hadn’t gone as planned. 

The ads on the taxi tops of every second or third of the yellow cabs we were letting go by were for the same B2B product. I remember being impressed enough to test the silence with my boss by pointing it out. 

A quiet grunt of acknowledgement was all I got in response. But I was impressed by how audacious it felt; such a confident move. I remember  looking around and saying out loud - as much to myself as anything - that we weren’t even in a particularly businessy part of town. It just felt really ballsy. 

It’s still a rare occurrence though - seeing B2B outdoors - so I notice. 


Again, I’ll recommend Dan Walker Smith’s Linkedin post referenced above if you want to read some cool analysis of why the Vanta ad works but also how it could have been improved.

I take three main lessons away from seeing these ads among others on The Tube every morning. 


  1. These advertisers are reaping the benefits of the rest of us being way too slow in deploying out of home as a serious B2B channel. The rarity value of their efforts mean they take a ‘double whammy’ gain. They profit once from being seen and read by their target commuters in some natural and controlled downtime; and then they benefit again from enjoying solus media placing in their markets simply because their competitors likely still consider out of home to be too much wastage. 


  1. As counter-intuitive as it will feel to most B2B marketing bosses (and certainly their CFOs), this is a pure go-to-market win. “Advertising is one of the fastest ways to build your brand’s fame,” Dan writes, “and the commercial benefits that come with that.” You know this already. The 95:5 ‘out of market:in market’ ratio; the imperative to achieve ‘mental availability’; the ‘Long And Short’; it’s all the stuff we’ve learned from the likes of System1, the IPA and Binet and Field in recent years. It’s the best practice we all showboat celebrate on Linkedin but way too many of us are still reluctant to put into practice. 


  1. If you’re brand new to the notion of outdoor ads, I’d assume one of the big fears is that it’s going to rinse your budget. Some simple experimentation with a relatively small chunk of your cash however, will soon reveal it’s really not as expensive as you might expect. I live in north London and travel into the city maybe twice a week. Even before speaking to a media specialist I reckon I could name at least half a dozen ‘dead-cert’ sites in which I could successfully target my ICP during the working week.

If asked for prime B2B outdoor locations in London right now I’d probably cite Canary Wharf or The City for the finance giants or corporate audiences; Old Street roundabout for the startups; the A4 Corridor between Heathrow Airport and London for business travel types and of course the London Underground network.

Roadside 48-sheet billboards go for somewhere between £1,000 and £3,000. Digital billboards can cost up to £5,000. 

At the moment I’m helping a small charity based in London find £6,000 to repeat its most successful ever campaign from a couple of years ago - some well placed billboards and the back of a couple of buses on a couple of targeted routes, all for a campaign that would run for a couple of weeks.The last time the charity ran the same campaign, those two weeks of spend delivered their biggest year in terms of income - sustained success over many more months than any sponsorship, events or digital activity since.  

I think about how I consume outdoor ads. I see them. I read them. I consciously consider them. I absolutely judge them: I properly look out for the ones that leave me annoyed or perplexed, just to get annoyed with them all over again. 


If you never considered the outdoor advertising opportunity for your brand because it’s simply not ‘a B2B thing’ - go and explore it. Think about how you might use it to target your own prospects; where, how, with what? Your future customers are far more likely to re-read a big idea on the arse-end of the bus they’re stuck behind in traffic, or on the wall halfway up an elevator, than they are a digital banner. 

Get your product or service out into the real world. The change of scenery will do them good. 



The B2Beatles

Content and Communications

B2Beatles: Why John, Paul, George and Ringo are perfect B2B role models

One of the themes most commonly cited by the marketers I’ve interviewed for both Boring2Brave and OrbitalX’s Do More With Less podcast is a lack of inspiring role models within B2B marketing.

Matthew Robinson, former VP Marketing at Contentsquare and now founder at B2B Three, told me: ‘For role models I often find myself looking outside of B2B marketing. Maybe that says something quite worrying about us as a discipline.’

Maybe. Or perhaps we needn’t regret needing to look elsewhere for genius to motivate us. 

Creativity and inspiration aren’t battery farmed. They’re entirely free range.

Our brains are not so regimented that we can only be inspired by role models who mirror the jobs we do or the fields we work in. Anything that makes you feel energised or stirs your thinking is surely legitimate.

I have a lifetime obsession with The Beatles. I’ll assume you’re familiar with them, though not for their B2B marketing chops. My mother grew up with them in Liverpool in the 1950s and 60s. I inherited her passion. 

John, Paul, George and Ringo would have made for brilliant B2B marketers if they hadn’t been so busy. Here are 14 reasons why.

1. They perfectly combined the latest tech with talent

The Beatles constantly set the template for innovation in the recording studio; not just in songwriting and performance but in pushing their producers and engineers to get more out of the studio tech than previously thought possible. They loved technology. As recently as November 2023, the Beatles’ unique use of AI enabled their last ever single, Now and Then. The song, which was finalized using AI technology to enhance John Lennon's voice from an old demo, was hailed as a historic, record-breaking return and became their 18th UK chart-topper. 

Learning: Race to the bleeding edge of tech and push it further; but you’ll still need talent.

2. They were dogged about creating original content

The band made an early decision to write their own songs at a time when it just wasn’t the done thing for recording artists.

Learning: Deciding from the outset to make originality your benchmark reaps you disproportionate benefits. It forces you to become an ideas factory.

3. If you do steal, make it count

When The Beatles did steal other people’s content, they didn’t just pay tribute to what were often obscure rhythm & blues tracks. They added youth, energy, speed and urgency to turn them into iconic Beatles standards. Twist and Shout wasn’t a Beatles original. They made it theirs.

Learning: How you transform old ideas with a fresh take will tell your market everything it needs to know about your sense of conviction, purpose and energy.

4. They worked to be that good

The Beatles made themselves qualified. They practised hard; we’re talking Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘ten thousand hours’ and more. In an era when apprenticeship was a common route into work, The Beatles made five trips to Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, playing for up to eight hours a night, seven days a week. 

Learning: There’s really only one way to become as good as you want them to think you are. Work for it.

5. They overcame obstacles

Two of the band turned their own self-perceived shortcomings into a competitive advantage.

George and Paul were instinctively and conventionally gifted on their instruments. John, though, had an innate rhythm all his own and was often questioned about the quality of his guitar playing. He didn’t even consider himself that good. He knew his strengths and played to them. 

‘I’m OK,’ John told Rolling Stone about his guitar playing in 1971. ‘I’m not technically good, but I can make the guitar  fucking howl and move. If you sat me with B. B. King, I’d feel silly. I’m embarrassed about my playing in one way because it’s very poor, but I can make a guitar speak. I can make a band drive.’

Similarly, Ringo’s drumming was unique. Being a left-handed drummer on a right-handed kit gave his playing a rare quality because he led with his ‘wrong hand’. But he also innovated ‘underneath’ the more vaunted work of his colleagues with drum parts all of his own. Fans commonly cite the song Rain as an example of his uncommon talent. A listen to any one of She Said She Said on the Revolver album, Come Together from Abbey Road, Ticket to Ride from Help, A Day in the Life from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band or, Strawberry Fields Forever, would also highlight why Ringo was the other Beatles’ only choice as drummer. 

Learning: You possess a trait that others will define as a weakness. It’s not a weakness; it’s a distinction. Turn it to your advantage.

6. They knew their competitors

When you have to beat the Stones and the Beach Boys to be the best, it pushes you to insane heights. In 1966, The Stones recorded Paint It Black and the album Aftermath, which included Under My Thumb, Out of Time and Mother’s Little Helper. The same year, the Beach Boys released Wouldn’t It Be Nice and Sloop John B on the album Pet Sounds. The Beatles released Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby and (in the US) Nowhere Man as singles and produced the Revolver album. All this dazzling output was partly driven by these bands trying to outdo one another. By contrast, in 1966 Manchester group The Hollies – inconceivably part of the same scene in the same era –  released singles Bus Stop and Stop, Stop, Stop; a tedious pair of e-book equivalents.

Learning: Find yourself a worthy competitor. Recognise and celebrate its quality internally with your team. It will spur you on.

7. They understood ‘multi-channel’

The Beatles created content of the highest possible standard. Some 50 years later, young children know and sing their songs. Word for word. Imagine anything you write being quoted, cited or performed five decades from now.

And they were multi-channel marketers. They recorded songs, wrote books, produced feature-length films, performed live panto on theatre stages, drew sketches and experimented with photography.

They could make any format their own – as compelling a band in a cramped, sweaty basement in Liverpool as they were in front of a 55,000-strong audience at the home of Major League Baseball team the Mets in New York City.

Learning: B2B marketing needn’t  be restricted to the same boring channels and formats with which we’re all so familiar. Here’s a brief: what combination of message and media would have people citing your work in 50 years’ time?

8. They were storytellers

For four young men with a level of status and wealth that separated them from most, The Beatles retained an instinctive attachment to the humdrum lives of ‘normal’ people. Headlines in the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail respectively inspired the colourful poignancy of She’s Leaving Home and A Day in the Life.

Elsewhere, a diverse set of characters – sometimes hilarious, other times violent or lonely – contained in the likes of Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), Ob-la-di Ob-la-da, Lovely Rita, Polythene Pam and I Am the Walrus are now laced permanently throughout the British psyche and culture.

Learning: Use stories to create a world outside of your products and promotions. People attach to stories in ways they don’t to a sales pitch.

9. The Beatles innovated wildly but their brand remained constant

The Beatles are the most ‘branded’ musical artist ever. Thousands of bands and artists have a widely recognised, unmistakable sound, look and feel but The Beatles were brand masters. In their short time as a group, they changed everything possible about their product and their image: from leather-clad teens, to suited and booted national treasure; to drug- experimenting mid-sixties popstars; to Yellow Submarine movie cartoon characters; to long-haired rock aristocracy and an often madcap beyond, including John and wife Yoko conducting interviews with the world’s press from inside a bag. The Beatles were constantly on the move.

But you’d recognise every one of their looks. If I say ‘Beatle haircut’, ‘Beatle boots’ or ‘Beatle collarless jackets’, you likely have the same image in your head as I have. You can identify the band just from their silhouette on a fridge magnet.

The Beatles’ brand was multi-layered and complex; there is a branded universe of mythology and music – broad enough for Beatles lovers of all ages and tastes to find something to feast upon.

Learning: Your brand is more than your ‘look and feel’; your logo and colour palette for example. It’s far more about what you represent to your customers. As long as it holds true to the brand values or distinct positioning you offer to your community, you can experiment as much as you want with formats, colours and channel strategy.

10. Their authenticity connected them more strongly to their fans

The Beatles dug deep inside themselves and their own experiences for their inspiration. The music and lyrics of Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever, Help, In My Life and I’m a Loser (with its refrain of ‘I’m not what I appear to be’) were among their most personal and self- aware tracks.

Learning: Often, the deeper you look inside yourself and your experience to find ‘real’ stimulus for your content, the more it’s likely to connect with your audience.

11. The Beatles were brave

The Beatles were unafraid to be themselves. Though courted by the establishment, they were unconcerned by supposed social hierarchies or authority and refused to adhere to other people’s ‘nonsense’ rules.

At various times they spoke openly (and often controversially) on their drug use, on religion and on the nonsense hype of celebrity where, if they were playing the ‘PR game’ right, they may have remained silent.

They refused to play to racially segregated audiences in the US in towns like Jacksonville, Florida, even though they knew their decision would confuse or anger many Americans.

Untrained in the media, they stared down or made fun of stupid questions at press conferences. Old TV footage shows that when one of them gave an answer that could be deemed controversial, none of the bandmates flinched or even, at times, looked up. They trusted and backed each other to be honest and straight-talking. When you’ve got that kind of support from colleagues, it breeds the strength to be you, without unnecessary PR gloss.

Learning: Your audience is sophisticated and can smell glitzy PR polish on you a mile off. PR is useful to a point but not when it gets in the way of you being real, honest and interesting.

12. They continued to invent; even after failing

As recording artists, The Beatles stretched the possible. They featured backwards guitar on I’m Only Sleeping and recorded a George Martin electric piano solo at half-speed before playing the tape back at double speed to create an entirely different sound on In My Life.

Importantly, they weren’t deterred when risks didn’t come off. The surreal Magical Mystery Tour movie in 1967 was a critical flop but it didn’t stop them stretching their imaginations again two years later, to create the Yellow Submarine film.

Learning: Exploring and taking risks appeal to our human need for advancement. If nothing else, taking a risk to try something new gets you remembered.

13. They were great at both briefing and selling in ideas

The Beatles pushed through the barriers of a four-piece rock band and, hence, needed outsiders to help them create their records. That meant harnessing the skills of strangers. Paul said of the big orchestra crescendo on A Day in the Life:

“We told the orchestra – ‘you’ve got fifteen bars, all you’ve gotta do is start on whatever is the lowest note on your instrument and by the time the end of those 15 bars has arrived, you’ve got to be on the top note on your instrument – we don’t mind how you get there.’”

 “I had to keep going around explaining it to everyone, ‘it’s a silly idea I know, but bear with us, it will work out, don’t worry’...”

Learning: Selling in a vision or idea’ is not a ‘one-time’ job. Don’t stop telling everyone how it’s going to work and what the result will look like. People have doubts and fears. They can be cynical. If it’s your idea, you’ve got to be the leader.

14. They got results

The Beatles didn’t just sell records by the million. They changed the world. They scared the establishment. They influenced culture. They created teenagers. They triggered mania. Their fans and stories will outlast all of them, as will their product.

Learning: Your role is to do great marketing. Your job is to help grow the company and sell product. Your ‘results’? What you’ll be known and remembered for by ‘the end’? Well, that’s up to you. 


WIll you lose your marketing job or is it just generative hype?

AI

Will you lose your marketing job?

Most of the conversation about AI and marketing jobs is useless. Not because the question does not matter. Of course it does. But because the two loudest voices in the room are both wrong.

On one side: the doomsayers who want you to believe your entire profession is about to be automated out of existence. On the other: the conference-circuit executives and ‘Champagne CMOs’ telling rooms full of people about their extraordinary AI transformations, their 35% productivity gains, their fully embedded workflows. The ones who have not logged into HubSpot in three years and genuinely believe Nano Banana is a small Japanese snack.

Both camps are doing you a disservice. And the second one is actively making things worse, because when the CFO hears those claims and asks why your team has not matched them, nobody wants to be the person explaining that the number was invented on a pay to play stage in London.

What the evidence actually shows

A Stanford study updated in December 2025 tracked early-career sales and marketing professionals aged 22 to 25. The findings were stark. AI has caused a net loss of around 20% of headcount in that cohort since early 2022.

And it’s not getting better.

We’ve all seen the headlines of a thousand jobs disappearing here, ten thousand jobs cut there. Even accounting for AI being used as an excuse for companies to eliminate roles, we can all feel it happening.

But the nuance that matters is that AI is not eating marketing from the top down. It is eating it from the bottom up. The displacement effect decreases with seniority. And a meaningful proportion of what is being called AI displacement is not about AI capability at all. It is organisations using a powerful narrative as cover for decisions they wanted to make anyway.

The real question is not whether you will lose your job

It is whether the version of your job you are doing right now will still exist in three years.

If your value comes from producing a defined volume of content, managing campaign execution, running standard reports, or coordinating assets and schedules: it is very likely that AI will do most of that job within two to three years. Some of it is already happening.

If your value comes from strategic judgment, creative vision, cross-functional influence, genuine customer relationships, or the ability to govern complex AI-assisted workflows: you are not going to be replaced. You are going to be more valuable. But only if you develop the fluency to operate in an AI-native environment.

The marketers who should actually be worried are not the ones whose roles are at risk. They are the ones who have already replaced themselves. The ones who use AI to avoid having opinions rather than to sharpen them.

There is a phrase in the report that I think is on point:

If you are using AI to avoid thinking, you have not adopted a powerful tool. You have just outsourced the part of your job that made you valuable.

What the report covers

We also get into the buyer side of this story.

94% of B2B buyers are now using large language models during their purchasing process. 83% define their requirements before they ever speak to sales. And 85% of the time, they ultimately purchase from a vendor on their Day One shortlist. A shortlist that was assembled with AI assistance, before you knew they were looking.

If you are not visible, credible, and clearly positioned in the places where AI-assisted research happens, you may never get a seat at the table at all. That is not a scare story. It is a description of what is already in motion.

The report also covers where AI genuinely earns its place in a B2B marketing workflow. The blank page problem. The draft versus the finished work distinction. The agentic shift and what narrative orchestration actually means. And a practical action sequence structured by timeframe, not vague advice.

We have not pulled punches with our opinions and we have not catastrophized either. We have tried to be straight with you about a situation that deserves clear thinking.

The best B2B marketers I know are not panicking. They are curious. They are retooling. They are paying attention.

That is all this report is asking you to do.

[DOWNLOAD: Will You Lose Your Marketing Job, or Is It Just Generative Hype? → Here]



Mark Chueoke

Demand Generation

Do More With Less: 12 lessons from 12 months

The 12 most consistent learnings from the first year of Do More With Less.

Twelve months ago I started a podcast for OrbitalX.com called Do More With Less.

Between myself and my colleague Stuart Dale, we’ve since interviewed more than 50 founders, CMOs, and revenue leaders all of whom have had to solve the same problem: how to keep delivering growth with ever-tighter resources and budget.

No guest pretended it was easy and no two guests had exactly the same approach to achieving their improbable success. But when you speak to enough smart people fighting against the same constraints, patterns appear.

Conversations spanned different types of companies and different industries. From the newest AI start-ups to multibillion-dollar enterprise businesses. But we’ve noticed enough of similar behaviours in response to budget shrinkage to draw some broad conclusions.  

Here are the 12 most consistent lessons from the first year of Do More With Less.

1. Focus beats activity. Every time

The most repeated piece of advice from guests was brutally simple: stop doing so many things.

When budgets tighten, most teams instinctively try to maintain the same number of channels and campaigns with fewer resources, which rarely works.

Instead, Stan Garber, co-founder of Levelpath, argued teams should look to cover less surface area but with more depth; identify the two or three activities genuinely driving pipeline and double down on them.

Scattered activity only dilutes results and makes reporting harder and less convincing. 

Practical takeaway:

  • Identify your three channels responsible for most pipeline

  • Pause or reduce everything else for one quarter - politely reject the inevitable requests for ‘more’ from the rest of your colleagues during this experiment

  • Reinvest all your time and energy in optimising the chosen three to the max

2. Imperfect marketing is an advantage

Greg Landon, VP of Marketing at SALESmanago, had one of my favourite takes when he said “perfect marketing is mostly a fantasy”.

Waiting for the perfect message, the perfect campaign or perfect creative usually means you end up shipping nothing at all. 

And even when you do, you’ve been internally talking up your perfect campaign for so long, your colleagues and leadership have likely lost interest and mentally ‘moved on’. So by the time the creative is released, nobody else cares enough to support it. 

Landon argued that teams working with tight resources have a huge advantage: “they can’t afford perfectionism”. I loved that. 

Instead, they use speed as a growth lever; they test quickly, launch earlier and learn faster.

Practical takeaway:

  • Cut approval layers

  • Launch campaigns earlier

  • Optimise based on real market feedback

3. Constraints actually improve your thinking

Elena Pinakatt, former Global VP of Marketing & Transformation at Coca-Cola, made a fascinating observation.

Because constraints force better questions, even inside huge organisations like Coke, amazing ideas often emerge when budgets tighten or teams shrink.

When things get tight and you’ve less room in which to operate, you’re forced to examine assumptions; something you’ve rarely got time for but that is always a healthy exercise. I’m not saying a large budget always hides mediocre thinking, but if mediocre thinking exists, there’s nothing like scarcity to shine a light on it.

4. Relationships outperform tactics

One of the clearest and most emphatic assertions across our interviews is that relationships are a pretty infallible growth engine.

Several guests emphasised new efforts to be useful to partnerships, valuable to communities and known within trusted networks often produce better commercial results than traditional campaigns.

Michelle Meehan, CMO of Vetty, pointed out that B2B growth rarely comes from one brand acting alone, but through ecosystems. Relationships scale faster than advertising budgets.

It’s fairly obvious too that if your marketing idea comes with endorsement or participation from customers, partners or other industry voices, its credibility goes through the roof.

Practical takeaway:

  • Try mapping the five partners or creators who already influence your buyers

  • Figure out an approach that articulates the value for them of build content with you

  • Share audiences rather than trying to build everything yourself

5. Storytelling is still wildly underused in B2B

Meehan also championed another point that came up repeatedly: most B2B marketing is STILL painfully forgettable. Too many companies still believe that B2B buyers want purely rational communication - a bullet point list of features and packages. 

They don’t. I’m not sure how many times I’ll have to say this again before I die but the moment you tell a significantly different story from your competitors; something bigger and bolder; maybe more visionary or even just more entertaining, your sales efforts will see 5X rewards almost immediately.  

Elena Pinakatt echoed this from her Coca-Cola experience: emotion and narrative still drive attention like little else. Those of us willing to tell braver stories will see opportunities to outperform competitors with bigger budgets.

6. Systems beat heroic effort

Another theme that guests continuously hammered home throughout the year: doing more with less can’t rely on individual heroics; it needs systems.

Stan Garber talked about ‘repeatable processes that compound’ over time rather than launching endless one-off campaigns.

What could these repeatable processes look like in your real-life business week? That’s up to you. Look at what you’re doing and how it can be turned into a reliable system. Think ‘simple’ and think ‘leverage’...so good examples might be:

  • Figure out building a content engine rather than focusing on individual posts

  • What would it take to create repeatable webinars rather than one-off events?

  • How would partnerships become structured rather than ad-hoc collaborations?

7. Please…make your content work harder

The majority of our pod guests on Do More With Less mentioned - often in passing - that their marketing teams still produce content that only gets used once.

How mad is that? With restrictions and constraints everywhere, we’re busting our collective butts to produce brilliant stories and sales materials that we use once before consigning them to the dustbin. 

As a marketer and storyteller, this drives me absolutely potty. If every great piece of marketing content you create is based on a fierce insight or compelling story, then consider it ‘elastic’. It can be stretched and moulded across countless different executions that can hit your different segments repeatedly without becoming ‘old’.

One interview becomes a podcast. The podcast becomes video clips. The video clips make for great social posts which are ripe for Linkedin but also serve as ammunition for outbound sales emails and pitch decks. They might also lead the agenda in an easily put together newsletter that then features a blog ‘written by’ your podcast host about their personal reflections of the interview. That blog could be pitched to the online trade publication read most often by your target ICP. 

Or maybe the interviewer gathers the three most newsworthy examples or stories from the interview and repackages them into your next webinar; a webinar that should be promoted both before and after its broadcast - offered up to three times in the next 12 months as an on-demand asset in emails and on social. If it gets notable traction during that time then hire a venue, invite the original guest back to an in-person event and buy a crate of wine for 20-50 guests. 

Every hour of good-enough content creation should feed your marketing machine for months

8. Proximity to customers matters more than dashboards

Data matters; every guest agreed as much. But several also warned about becoming overly dependent on dashboards. Leaders doing more with less told our community the best insights still come from customer calls, sales conversations and community discussions.

Elena Pinakatt described it as “detective work”. She said the closer marketers stay to real customer problems and the more questions they can personally ask face to face, sharper their insight and messaging becomes. 

Haley Chute, chief product and marketing officer at Octagos, went further. “If you're not meeting your customers, you're probably not doing your job,” she said. “I could easily expect to personally meet a quarter per month.” 

Where AI is dominating every conversation for good reason, Haley says ‘people are seeking what’s real’.  

“We'll create real community spaces where we can have a conversation with them. We build trust - our strategy is ‘trust first and everything else second’. By doing that we’re able to use them to bounce ideas off or engage in product reviews or tell us how our message resonates.”

9. Small experiments make you go faster

Several of our guests on the pod described the freedom they felt in moving away from large, expensive campaigns and instead running smaller, faster experiments.

Even large organisations, they said, are benefiting from testing messaging through LinkedIn posts, launching small pilot events or trialling new content formats quickly with no expectations except to learn something. Such an approach often doesn’t need to be reported at the highest levels unless you derive something good from it - the risk you run remains small while you and the team increase the speed of learning in a new and tough trading environment. 

10. Doing more with less needs clarity

Doing more with less is rarely about working harder but about clarity.

If there is even slightly blurred thinking regarding who your audience really is, what problem you solve for your clients, which channels actually work or which activities can stop without slowing momentum, you’re skirting on the edge of trouble. 

Have answers to the big questions locked down, fully front of mind and communicated across all adjacent functions and you’re in a good place. It reduces risk and workload if everyone across the business is playing to win the same game. 

11. Think beyond marketing 

Jennifer Shaw-Sweet, the global practice lead for the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, urged our listeners to double down on earning a reputation as truly commercial operators. Regardless of your seniority, make sure you’re 100% fluent in the factors that win and lose your business deals; how the business makes money, what drives pipeline and which of your activities actually influence revenue.
It sounds obvious but it’s still surprisingly rare for marketers to talk in terms of revenue and pipeline as opposed to marketing outputs. We earn influence when we demonstrate impact over outcomes. 

12. Lean in to leadership

After recording dozens of Do More With Less episodes, I can honestly say the one thing I think is most clear is this. Whatever age you are and again, regardless of your level of experience, start thinking of yourself as a leader. 

If you only see, think about and talk about tactics, you’ll make yourself irrelevant. The past year’s collection of Do More With Less podcast episodes has, in effect, been one extended discussion on how marketing leadership itself is changing. 

The marketers thriving right now share several characteristics: they think commercially, they challenge all assumptions including their own, they prioritise ruthlessly, they stay close to customers and they think relentlessly about value and impact. 

And most of all, they accept that doing more with less is not a temporary phase to ‘get through’.

It’s a correction; the new and permanent operating environment.

OOO gravestone

AI

Letters page: IT keep blocking our AI adoption and I am running out of patience

“Dear Rich,

I work for a traditional business, partnership-led, conservative by culture, and very slow to change. I have made my peace with that for the most part because the work is interesting and I have reasonable autonomy within marketing.

My current frustration is all thanks to AI. Over the past twelve months I have watched peers in other companies claim they are trialling it all over the place. I know that a lot of the stuff we hear from people on stage is hot air, but I do want to get my team at least playing with the tools that make their lives easier.

My team wants to move. I want to move. But every tool we try to adopt hits a wall with IT. The procurement process alone takes four to five months. We are yet to have a tool actually signed off. Two tools have been rejected outright on data security grounds with no real explanation beyond a blanket policy about third party data processing. There are zero IT tools available in the company.

I have tried going through the proper channels. I have tried building a business case. I have tried getting IT to come to the table early. Nothing moves at any speed.

I do not think IT are bad people. But I do think they are applying yesterday’s risk framework to tomorrow’s tools, and the cost to marketing is real and growing.

Any advice?”

Sarah, London


Rich’s reply

Sarah, I have certainly had my run-ins with IT over the years but, to be fair, they are not wrong to be cautious.

That is not the same as saying their current approach is right, or that the pace of their review process is acceptable, or that a blanket rejection with no explanation is a reasonable response to a well-constructed business case. None of those things are right. But the underlying instinct, that AI tools carry data risks that need to be properly understood before they touch client information, is a legitimate one. Especially in professional services, where client confidentiality is not a compliance checkbox but the foundation of the entire commercial relationship.

How you frame this internally matters enormously. If you go into the next conversation with IT treating them as obstructionists or laggards, they will become more entrenched. If you go in treating their concerns as real and worth solving together, you have a much better chance of finding a path through.

Understand what IT are actually afraid of

Most IT departments blocking AI adoption are not doing so because they dislike progress. They are geeks at heart. They love new toys. But they are probably blocking it because they have been burned before, or because they are accountable for something going wrong in a way that marketing is not. A data breach caused by an unvetted third party tool will land on the CISO, not on you.

Before your next conversation, try to understand specifically what the objection is. “Third party data processing” is a category of concern, not an explanation. Press for the detail. Is it about client data being ingested by the tool? Is it about data residency? Is it about the tool’s terms of service and what the vendor does with inputs? Is it about SOC 2 compliance or ISO 27001 certification? Is it a fear they will be lumbered with the cost? Or is it simply that they are overworked, with every country and every function making new requests and no bandwidth left to give?

Each of these is a different problem with a different solution. If you do not know which one you are actually solving, you cannot solve it.

The IT department that says no to everything is usually the one that has never been asked to help design a yes.

Take someone from IT out for a coffee

Before you send another formal request or build another business case, grab someone from IT and get a coffee somewhere away from the office.

Ask them their views on AI adoption and how ready the company is. Ask how other companies have solved it and what good governance looks like in practice. Let them educate you on the context you do not have. Whether that is genuine concerns about integration challenges, the fact that the CIO is retiring soon, or simply that the team is at capacity with current priorities. Until you know that context, it is hard to work around it.

Share what you have been reading about how the market has matured. Enterprise-grade tools now operate inside existing data boundaries rather than outside them. Several leading AI platforms offer SOC 2 Type II certification, data processing agreements, and explicit contractual commitments about how inputs are handled. Some of the most data-sensitive professional services firms in the world, large accountancy practices and major law firms, are adopting AI at scale. If the risk were truly unmanageable, those businesses would not be moving.

The goal of the coffee is not to win an argument. It is to understand what you are actually dealing with, and to give IT the experience of being consulted rather than pressured.

Use internal tools to warm the function up

If IT are blocking external AI tools on data security grounds, the most pragmatic starting point is a tool they have almost certainly already cleared. Microsoft Copilot operates within your existing Microsoft 365 tenant boundary. Your data does not leave your environment. It does not use your inputs to train external models. Microsoft’s own documentation confirms this, and it has been independently verified by enterprise security analysts. Copilot is an extension of an environment IT already governs, not a new risk surface.

Starting there serves two purposes. It gets your team using AI in a structured, governed way immediately. And it gives IT direct, observable experience of an enterprise-grade AI tool behaving exactly as their security policies require. That experience does more to reduce institutional fear than any amount of documentation or business case writing.

Once IT have seen Copilot work safely inside your environment, the conversation about additional tools changes. You are no longer asking them to trust a category they are unfamiliar with. You are asking them to evaluate specific tools against a framework they have now seen in practice. That is a much smaller ask.

The goal in the short term is not to win the argument about AI. It is to give IT a safe, observable experience of it that makes the next conversation easier. Let's help them 'break the seal'.

Request a dedicated IT business partner

This is one of the most effective structural moves available to you, and it tends to get overlooked because it does not feel like a tactical fix.

Request that IT assign a dedicated business partner aligned to marketing. Not a helpdesk contact. A named person whose remit includes understanding what marketing is trying to do, helping to navigate procurement and security processes, and acting as an internal advocate within IT for the tools you need.

IT get visibility into everything marketing is exploring before it becomes a formal request, which reduces the feeling of being ambushed. Marketing gets someone who understands the policies and philosophies IT operates within, which means fewer wasted applications. And over time, you build genuine rapport with someone inside the function who can argue for you in rooms you are not in.

The business partner becomes your insider. That is not manipulation. It is how large organisations are supposed to work, and most IT functions respond positively to being asked for partnership rather than permission.

Propose a sandboxed pilot rather than full adoption

If the procurement and security review process is the bottleneck, propose something smaller. A sandboxed pilot, run on non-sensitive internal data only, with no client information involved, is a much easier thing for IT to approve than a full enterprise rollout.

Define the scope tightly. One tool. One use case. Three months. Agree upfront what data the tool will and will not touch. Offer to have IT involved in the setup so they can see exactly how it works rather than reviewing it from a distance.

A pilot does two things. It gets you moving. And it gives IT direct, controlled experience of the tool, which tends to reduce fear far more effectively than any amount of documentation.

The cost of doing nothing is not zero

There is one more argument worth having ready, not to use aggressively, but to deploy if the conversation stalls on risk. IT’s caution is framed around the risk of adopting AI tools. But there is an equally real risk on the other side that rarely gets named.

The Larridin State of Enterprise AI 2025 report found that 67 percent of organisations admit they do not have full visibility into which AI tools their employees are already using. When businesses block sanctioned adoption, people do not stop using AI. They use personal accounts, free tools, and consumer-grade applications that carry none of the enterprise data protections IT are trying to enforce. The risk IT is trying to prevent does not go away when they say no. It goes underground.

A controlled, IT-approved pilot with proper data governance is categorically safer than the alternative. That reframe, from ‘AI adoption is risky’ to ‘uncontrolled shadow AI is the real risk’, tends to land well with security-minded leaders because it speaks their language. You are not asking IT to lower their guard. You are asking them to channel it more effectively.

Build the coalition before the escalation

A business case presented by marketing to IT is a marketing document. A business case co-authored by marketing, finance, and a senior business leader or two carries significantly more weight.

Spend two weeks quietly building internal support. Find people who are already frustrated by the pace of change and get them to say so in the room. Find out whether your CFO has a view on the competitive cost of inaction. A finance voice saying “we are losing ground and that has a number attached to it” changes the dynamic in a way that marketing saying “our content is slower than competitors” simply does not.

This is not politics for its own sake. It is making sure that the conversation IT is having reflects the full weight of the business need, not just the enthusiasm of one department.

If none of this moves things, escalate deliberately

Some IT functions in traditional businesses are structurally risk-averse in a way that no amount of coalition building will fully overcome. If you have genuinely tried the collaborative approach, brought the market evidence, proposed a sandboxed pilot, and built cross-functional support, and the answer is still no with no credible path to yes, then escalation to the CEO is not a failure of diplomacy. It is the appropriate next step.

But escalate with a solution, not a complaint. Do not go to the CEO and say IT are blocking us. Go with a fully formed proposal: here is the tool, here is the use case, here is how comparable firms have handled the security question, here is the pilot structure, here is what it costs, here is what we stand to gain, and here is what we are currently losing by waiting. Link the solution to a positive gain and inaction to a negative effect, on pipeline, on win rates, on team productivity.

At that point you are not asking the CEO to override IT. You are asking them to make a business decision with full information. That is a very different ask, and a much easier one for a senior leader to act on.

Going to the CEO empty-handed is a complaint. Going with a fully costed, de-risked proposal is a recommendation. Know the difference before you walk in.

The short answer

Take someone from IT for a coffee and find out what you are actually dealing with. Start with tools already inside your approved environment, Copilot being the obvious first step, to give IT a safe, observable experience of enterprise-grade AI. Request a dedicated IT business partner who can become your internal advocate. Propose a sandboxed pilot that keeps the risk surface small. Use the shadow AI argument to reframe inaction as the greater risk. Build a cross-functional coalition so your business case carries more than marketing’s voice.

And if the collaborative route has been genuinely exhausted, escalate to the CEO with a fully formed proposal rather than a grievance. You are not asking for permission to do something reckless. You are asking for support to do something your competitors are already doing.

The relationship with IT is worth preserving. But not at the cost of your team standing still while the market moves.

And if your CEO still says no, well, come send me a note! 

Onwards,

Rich

Got a question for Rich? Email it to editor@b2bmarketing.com

Elasticity

Career

‘Elasticity’ is the business skill hirers should look to before ‘cultural fit’

I’ve had a weird career. 

I’ve swapped in and out of industries: newspaper and magazine journalism, working in adland for one of the big agencies, and then switching to B2B SaaS as a marketer. I’ve been the media, the agency and the brand.

I’ve been in-house; freelance; I’ve co-founded and run a business, and I’ve also been very, very unemployed. At various times I’ve volunteered for causes or organisations about which I feel strongly and on three separate occasions I’ve formalised this by becoming a trustee or director for charities.

I always needed variety. I don’t like to feel pigeon-holed. The only thing I always knew about what I wanted career-wise was that I didn’t want to do the same day, repeated over and over. 

My sassy 10-year-old daughter enjoys asking me what I do for a living because I find it so hard to articulate who and what I am in a single line; she enjoys seeing my face contort as I try to explain myself. 

My brother-in-law has not had a weird career. He’s been incredibly successful in the City and had two jobs in his whole life. He’s been in his current role for 20 years. 

He has a much easier answer to the “so what are you doing with yourself these days?” question, casually asked by distant relatives during the small talk stage of family events.

Basically, I’m a storyteller. I didn’t become one. I was a storyteller when I was a kid, right through school, throughout my teens and then as I jumped into journalism. 

There’s an episode coming up of Do More With Less - the podcast I host for OrbitalX - with Joe Lazer, author of brand new bestseller Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age. I can’t wait to meet Joe and I also can’t wait to read the book - it’s been a smash in the US but doesn’t come out here in the UK for another month. 

In a recent post on Linkedin, Joe noted that Netflix and OpenAI are offering salaries of up to $775,000 per year for storytelling roles. Anthropic, he added, has hired 80+ storytelling and comms roles in recent months, many of which pay $500K+ in total compensation.

Two years ago, nobody was interested in storytelling as a skill. I’m certain I won’t have been the only one advised to stop using the word in recruitment processes altogether and to ensure it was nowhere to be seen on my resume.

While it’s lovely that we storytellers are back in fashion, I’ve seen enough turnover of feast and famine to suspect our latest golden age will be short-lived. I’d also argue there isn’t a boardroom in the world committed enough to a storytelling strategy to believe any candidate can sustain or justify these salaries past ‘year 1’. I’ll ask Joe how he sees it but for me, that gravy train will break down as soon as the trend-pendulum swings back to the harder, more tangible, measurable stuff.  

What I do know though is that storytelling isn’t and never has been my most valuable skill.

The element of my professional ‘self’ that I’d price above anything storytelling - although maybe it comes more naturally to storytellers - is that I’m kind of ‘elastic’.

That’s the best word I could think of for it; (agile is loaded with all sorts of tech-bro context and flexible sounds like I lack agency). 

What I mean by elastic, was well articulated last week by a marketing recruiter I’ve started following on Linkedin named Sinead Willis.  

“The strongest marketers I know have the “messiest” careers,” Willis wrote. “They’ve worked inhouse, freelanced, taken breaks, been laid off,⁣ jumped into startups that blew up and startups that blew apart.⁣⁣

“Every one of those moves built perspective.⁣They’ve learned to do more with less, build from zero, and fix what’s broken.⁣ But too many job descriptions still cling to linear career logic⁣, as if the only valuable experience is uninterrupted, upward, and corporate.⁣

“The next decade belongs to marketers who’ve done the messy stuff because they’re the ones who know what to do when the playbook stops working.” 

I hope Willis is right. Not just because I agree those of us with what Sunday Times Bestseller stars Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper call ‘Squiggly Careers’, are genuinely better set up to navigate uncertainty than execs with more simple or linear paths. 

But also because playbooks have and will continue to stop working. And by focusing so heavily on channels and tactics - traditionally prioritised by B2B marketing ahead of story or mission - so much marketing is as forgettable for the recipient as it is joyless for the marketer to create. 

It’s work that leaves our frustrated bosses wondering why they pay for marketing that leaves their business offer and brand virtually invisible; why we literally invite our customers to disregard us.

And at that point - well, internal interest in marketing disappears. Ambition and perspective shrink; marketing strategies start being built around costs rather than outcomes. Investment is cut to a point where marketing programmes feel relatively risk-free.

Unfortunately, that’s often the point at which a marketing plan stops achieving anything even vaguely useful. Risk-free marketing is the most expensive marketing there is. You’re investing time, money and work for literally nothing to happen. Any ‘message’ simply drifts over the heads of your audience without touching them. And the worst part? Nobody cares. Sure, there are regular complaints or snide remarks from the sales team but that’s often restricted to a low-level and harmless hum. Things get done badly; with zero love or craft and nobody gets held to account. 

So instead of proper campaign planning according to strategic business ambitions and targets,  marketing becomes the act of ticking off busy activities on stagnant spreadsheets.

The marketing goal is no longer business transformation or growth as it once was; it’s now merely a watered-down case study or the moving deadline for ‘that blog’.

This marketing death-spiral has been a clear risk in every team I’ve ever been a part of. Even in a high-functioning set-up, it’s never more than a broken relationship or a few bad pieces of work away from being triggered.

Being elastic is what prevents it. Being elastic is the opposite of being a ‘good culture fit’ - of over compliance; of following direction from non-marketers without question.  

Diversity and inclusion conversations have quite rightly focused on women, people of colour and LGBTQ employees. That shouldn’t stop - we’re far from done in that regard. But the conversations should also include people who see the world differently - the neurodiverse and the creatives. People who abhor a status quo and can barely hold themselves together if they can’t comfortably raise opposing views or ask thorny questions. 

And as a leader or even just a colleague, it’s difficult being difficult. Any fool in marketing can prance about on conference stages winning applause from listeners with speeches about creativity.

Actually doing it behind closed office doors amid the stress of trying to keep a business afloat is, more often than not, painful. Hell, it’s not as if you’re telling your colleagues something they don’t know. Your leadership already understands that not all B2B marketing plans should look the same; that homogeneity stalls careers and is crushing and counter-productive to hopes of growth. But the alternative is hard. It requires stretch, empathy, big listening ears and active imagination. And the bravery to sound and look different; to take a risk. 

This - this is the real job of your storyteller; your elastic colleague. They stretch and lengthen their worldviews, way past the boundaries of a functional marketing programme. They imagine and incorporate the needs of customers, partners - all the different stakeholders - and then move it all beyond commonplace business or sales patter. They’ll tie it all together and wrap it into an actual story - something memorable, powerful.

My partners at OrbitalX refer to this as a superpower of mine. It’s a relief and a blessing to find smart business people that see the value. If you’ve felt at work like I have in various jobs, you’ll know what I mean. Sometimes we’re seen as interesting misfits; ‘loved-but-not-always-understood’ ideas machines.

Other times we can, I guess, come across quite annoying. A CEO might keep you around because your constructive discontent is regularly useful but elsewhere, colleagues just see you as the person that never stops asking bloody questions.

If you’re lucky you’ll have had more than your fair share of jobs, businesses or bosses who knew your value and were determined to hold on to you at all costs. Most people in life can never say this but work is a legitimate pleasure for as long as there’s someone who needs you to keep that ideas motor turning; that understands there’s nobody else on the team with your perspective, skill-set or ability to create ‘something out of nothing’; right?

Sure, you might not always fit comfortably into how organisations have to work but it’s possible to find the right blend of compliance and defiance.

‘Compliance’ because most good changes are built on compromise, incremental steps and bringing people with you (but also ‘compliance’ because you need to keep your job, right?). And ‘defiance’ because without people like you, teams and businesses rarely improve and adapt. At OrbitalX, I’m surrounded by people like me. They’re in every function and cover every department. It should be chaos but somehow it works. 

Marketing is changing and we need new thinking to address it - not new marketing skills; we should all expose ourselves to serious training and understanding of the discipline - but new approaches to meeting and exceeding expectations and sustaining growth. Competition is now greater, pressures are heavier and implosions occur much quicker. 

Reduced headcount and increased investment into technology aren’t the drivers - they’re the results. The driver is an open debate about what marketing is, what it needs to be, how it gets done and what kind of people and skills are required to make it succeed.

Inflated salaries for storytelling roles won’t last; the bubble will surely burst soon enough. But for the first time in my career I don’t feel like a lone, wide-eyed ‘crazy’. Everything is on the table and up for grabs; there’s a massive opportunity for the elastic, the resilient and the versatile.  

Check out Mark's Boring2Brave course on the Academy

cover of Let me just stop you there

Content and Communications

On International Women's Day, marketing needs to grow a spine.

Every IWD, HR asks marketing to post something. Marketing obliges. Nobody asks the obvious question.

A wave of branded graphics rolls across LinkedIn. Purple. Polished. Pointless.

A logo. A slogan. Maybe a stock photo of women laughing in a meeting room that looks nothing like any meeting room any of us have ever actually sat in.

And then, on the 9th of March, it's over. Back to normal.

I find this quietly infuriating. Not because I think the companies doing it are evil. But because it's so easy.

Posting today doesn't celebrate women. It celebrates your marketing team's ability to follow a content calendar.

And easy is exactly the wrong response to a problem that, in 2026, still doesn't have a solution.

So, if you're a business leader who actually wants to do something, here is where I'd start.

Look at your numbers honestly

Pay gap reporting exists. Promotion rates by gender are trackable. The ratio of men to women in your senior leadership team is not a mystery. Most companies know exactly what their numbers look like. They just hope nobody forces them to publish them.

And here is the thing. Publishing them is not the solution. But it is the start. Because the moment numbers are visible, the conversation changes. Stop hiding behind the fact that nobody has made it mandatory yet. Pull up the spreadsheet. Share it with your leadership team. Then decide what you are actually going to do about it.

Understand the difference between mentorship and sponsorship

Here is a question worth sitting with. When did you last put your own reputation on the line for someone who didn't look or sound like you?

Mentorship is telling someone what they could do better. Sponsorship is walking into a room and saying "this person should be here" when they are not in the room to advocate for themselves. One costs you nothing. The other costs you something. That difference is exactly why sponsorship is rare and exactly why it matters.

That, incidentally, is what Give to Gain actually means. Not a slogan. A transaction with real stakes.

Fix your meeting culture

This one is personal to me. I wrote a song about it (its really not that bad but you be the judge).

It's called "Let Me Just Stop You There" and it came out of years of coaching marketers who had experienced exactly this dynamic. The interrupted pitch. The stolen idea. The meeting where someone repeated what you said, louder, two minutes later, and got the credit.

Give it a listen in the Marketing Mixtape section of our site and tell me how strongly you feel I shouldn't give up my day job.

'Let me just stop you there' a song Rich Fitzmaurice wrote for IWD. B2B Marketing United @ b2bmarketing.com

In the song there's a guy called Jonas. Jonas pulls up a chair and spreads his legs like he owns the whole room. Before you've even started, he's decided he's the main character and will walk you all through your area of expertise.

Jonas is not one person. Jonas is a pattern.

Watch who gets interrupted in your next meeting. Watch whose idea comes back around wearing someone else's name. Watch who fills every silence and who has quietly learned it's safer to say nothing at all.

This is where workplace culture actually lives. Not in the values on the wall. Not in the IWD graphic. In the room. In the meeting. In the moment where someone decides whether to speak or not.

Audit how you hire and promote

"Culture fit" is one of the most reliable ways to keep hiring people who look, sound and think like the people already there. And it is women, disproportionately, who get filtered out by that particular phrase.

The leaders who rely on it most are usually the ones with the most to lose from a genuinely diverse room. They do not ask "is this person excellent?" They ask "will this person fit?" And fitting, too often, means not challenging, not disrupting and not threatening the existing order.

Structured interviews, blind CV screening and explicit promotion criteria are not radical ideas. They are just uncomfortable ones for the people who benefit most from the current system. Which is probably why most companies haven't bothered.

Think about who gets the stretch assignments

The high-visibility projects. The big pitches. The roles that build careers and reputations. Who gets nominated? And who gets quietly assumed to not want the travel, the pressure or the step up, without ever being asked?

That assumption has ended more careers than any deliberate act of discrimination.

And if you work in marketing, this one is aimed directly at you

You are the first line of defence.

You control the brief. You control the content calendar. You decide what goes out under your company's name. Which means when a hollow branded graphic gets posted on International Women's Day with nothing behind it, that is partly on you.

I know how it goes. HR sends a message. "Make sure we post something for IWD." The path of least resistance is a purple graphic and a caption. Job done. Box ticked.

But here is the thing about HR. They are often the same people sitting on the pay gap data, the promotion ratios and the gender breakdown of your senior leadership team. They know exactly what the numbers look like. And they will insist that data cannot be shared publicly.

So they want the post. They just don't want the substance.

That is not celebrating women. That is reputation management dressed up as progress.

Next time HR asks you to post for IWD, ask them one question before you open Canva.

"If we're proud of our commitment to women, what are the numbers we can share to prove it?"

If they can't answer that, you have your answer. And so does everyone watching.

If you must post today, here are the only things worth posting

Your actual numbers. Pay gap, promotion ratio, percentage of women in senior leadership. No spin, no context dressing it up. Just the number and one sentence on what you are doing about it.

A specific commitment. Not "we celebrate women." Something measurable, on the record, that you will report back on in twelve months. One thing. Concrete. Signed off.

Specific people. Not "we're so proud of our amazing female colleagues." Named individuals, specific achievements, genuine reasons why people should pay attention to their great work. Use your platform to expand theirs.

Or say nothing. If you have nothing real to offer today, silence is more respectful than a hollow graphic.

And if you see a branded graphic today with nothing behind it, ask them a question publicly

"What is your current gender pay gap?"

"What percentage of your senior leadership team are women?"

"What specific commitment are you making today that we can hold you to next year?"

Not aggressively. Just genuinely. Because sunlight is the best disinfectant and companies that post without substance should be gently, publicly, reminded of that.

Do something. Or say nothing.

Data Decay

Marketing Operations

Data Decay: The Problem B2B Marketers like to ignore

The very term business-to-business implies that companies buy from other companies. Well, not exactly. What actually happens is that people make purchasing decisions to buy from other people at companies who are selling products, services or software.

Companies don't buy anything. People do. And they generally buy from people based on some level of relationship. This becomes more important as the complexity of the sale moves from commodity to complex solutions. None of this is news to anyone. But the way most B2B marketers behave suggests they have forgotten it entirely.

If people buy from people, then finding the right people and knowing how to reach them is the single most important thing a marketer can do. Yet most of the budget, effort and attention goes elsewhere. That is the problem this piece is about. And the scale of it is worse than most marketers realise.

Contact data decays at 70.8 percent a year. Yes, really.

We conducted a research study on the accuracy of contact information and gathered 1,025 data inputs. The method was straightforward. When giving seminars, I asked the audience to pull out their business card and check any element on it that had changed in the last 12 months. All cards, with or without changes, were collected in exchange for a copy of the research.

The result: 70.8 percent of the business cards had one or more changes in the previous 12 months.

The breakdown tells you a lot about why your CRM is quietly rotting. Title or job function changes accounted for 65.8 percent. Address changes hit 41.9 percent. Phone number changes reached 42.9 percent. Email address changes came in at 37.3 percent, slightly lower thanks to the rise of personal Gmail accounts. Company name changes affected 34.2 percent, mostly driven by people moving to new employers. Even name changes showed up at 3.8 percent, as people still change their name upon marriage or divorce.

Digging deeper, 29.6 percent of individuals changed companies entirely. 4.6 percent of companies changed their name through mergers or acquisitions. 12.3 percent of companies moved locations. And 41.2 percent of individuals stayed at the same company but something else changed, a new title, a restructured department, a relocated office.

This is not just an American problem

Several years ago I was giving a seminar in London to about 100 people. Before running the same exercise, I told the audience I expected the change rate to be much lower in England, because "you are all much more stable than us Americans."

Well, the hands went up, and to everyone's surprise it was exactly 70 percent. The same as the US. So much for stability.

On the other hand, a seminar in Shanghai three years later with 50 people produced a change rate of only 45 percent. And several years ago, the Computer Intelligence division of Harte-Hanks (now Aberdeen) reported a change rate of just over 60 percent in the US technology market.

No matter what the exact percentage, whether it is 60 percent or 70 percent, it is high. And the trend is going in the wrong direction.

It is getting worse, not better

We ran a similar study more than ten years earlier, and 62 percent of individuals had one or more changes in their business card. That compares with 70.8 percent a decade later. The decay rate for B2B contact data is increasing.

The proportion of people changing companies held roughly steady, dropping slightly from 31 percent to 29.6 percent. The biggest shift was a 10 percent increase in movement within companies. 41.2 percent reported data changes without changing employer, compared to 31 percent in the earlier study. People are being restructured, promoted, reassigned and relocated more frequently than ever.

There are newer methods and firms compiling B2B data now, and these lists are an improvement over traditional approaches. But they still contain inaccurate data at some level. It is worth checking out any data provider before assuming their promoted accuracy rates hold up in practice.

Outside lists are less accurate than you think

This usually leads marketers towards external lists, particularly for acquisition campaigns. So how accurate is the compiled information in those lists?

We conducted a snap survey as a data check. We called 50 records from each of three different list sources to verify key contact name, title, company name, address, email and phone number. A record was scored inaccurate if one or more of those data elements were found to be incorrect.

The results were sobering. A B2B trade association membership list came back 20 percent inaccurate. A large B2B data compiler was 35 percent inaccurate. And an industrial directory was 60 percent inaccurate.

Your own data is probably worse

Here is the part that surprises people. Internal customer and prospect data can be even less accurate than external lists. Most companies do not have a rigorous data hygiene process in place. Internal data, once entered, is rarely revisited to update contact and company information, even with widespread usage of CRM and marketing automation platforms.

"There is an old axiom widely accepted in B2B, and it is this: a great campaign sent to a lousy list will not do as well as a lousy campaign sent to a great list."

John Coe

So why does this matter more than everything else?

There are four elements that affect the success of a B2B database or direct marketing campaign. Each has a weighted impact on results:

Targeting and list data that matches the audience accounts for 50 to 70 percent of campaign performance. The offer drives 20 to 30 percent. Sequence, frequency and cadence of contact media contributes another 20 to 30 percent. And creative, which is typically copy-led, accounts for 10 to 20 percent.

The most important element by a significant margin is the targeting and matching data. Yet most of the money gets spent on the other three. There is an old axiom widely accepted in B2B, and it is this: a great campaign sent to a lousy list will not do as well as a lousy campaign sent to a great list.

Most marketers know this instinctively. Very few act on it.

So what should you actually do about it?

Spend time and money on developing and obtaining the best lists and data possible. The payback will be significant. This is particularly true when you consider the investment most companies are making in their marketing technology stack. None of those technologies work to their full potential without good data feeding them.

Your data governance process needs a fixed set of input rules, double checks and procedures for updating accuracy. Ideally, you have merged your data silos into a customer data platform and instituted sound data input rules. But the hardest part remains: verifying, correcting and updating contact-level information on an ongoing basis.

That is a tough job. But given that targeting accounts for up to 70 percent of your campaign performance, it is the job that matters most.

Ted lasso

Content and Communications

Bill and Brett: the writers to follow if you really wanna sound ‘human’

There’s an awful cringe moment to endure on B2B marketing Linkedin most days. It happens when some B2B visionary will tell us he (normally a ‘he’) thinks we all ought to “sound more human.” 

If it’s a really shitty day, he’ll add that ‘we are, after all, marketing to other humans’, “Right?” 

If a ‘B2B is actually H2H’ (™2009) post has been copied and pasted directly from ChatGPT, it’ll sound all: “Here’s the quiet but uncomfortable truth: the strongest brands aren’t the ones that arrive with the biggest fanfare. They’re the ones that manage brand deliberately. Consistently. Relentlessly.” 

And while it makes you wince, you know you have to be the bigger person and forgive. Because behind it, is good intent. The bigger problem is that while B2B marketers are ace at saying it, most seem incapable of just doing it. 


“In today’s competitive B2B landscape, value-driven lead generation is not about aggressive selling but about offering meaningful insights, solutions, and resources that help buyers make better decisions with valuable industry expertise, and personalized experiences, you can position yourself as ‘a trusted advisor’ rather than just a vendor.” 

“Solutions. Insights. Outcomes.”

(Real LinkedIn post from an Enterprise business in February 2026).


Blah. Blah. And blah.

Emails are shit. Landing pages are shit. Whitepapers are shit. 

Linkedin posts? Unspeakably shit.

So what’s new?

Well, a long time ago I started experimenting with writing marketing copy in my own tone of voice - regardless of the ‘style’ or ‘tone of voice’ guide to which I was supposedly faithfully working.

You know what? The stuff I produced got read, commented on, shared and downloaded to the tune of about 10X. 

And that all happened pretty much immediately. My sales colleagues felt the impact. Nobody quibbles about style internally if the numbers start racking up. 

Doug Kessler, founder of crack B2B creative agency Velocity Partners once told me tone of voice is ‘the only multi-million dollar weapon B2B marketers wield’. 

If that’s true (and it probably is), would you entrust something so valuable to the person in your business who once wrote a corporate style-guide, now hidden deep on the company drive and which nobody chooses to read?

Instead, I began studying and stealing from the authors, columnists, bloggers and screenwriters that made me laugh out loud, inspired me or simply shot jolts of wake-up energy through me whenever I read or heard their words. 

I learned from the best; I injected my marketing emails with what I hoped was as close to the rhythmic sing-song of Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue as I could manage.

I looked to Caitlin Moran and Ian Dunt for permission to be 100% authentic, ‘unprofessional’ and real. 

For grown-up storytelling, Malcolm Gladwell and Carole Cadwalladr. 

For the sharpest ‘can I get away-with-it?’ humour, Marina Hyde, Armando Ianucci and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

For joined-up ‘systems thinking’, David Simon, Jonathan Freedland, Anne Applebaum and Ken Robinson. 

You get the picture. 

I nicked ideas and inspiration for content as well as looking at the way they all wrote or spoke. Still do.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to why I’m writing this column. There’s some incredible writing happening in TV right now - some of it British and European but predominantly in the US. 

One Brit who has excelled now for several years is actor and comedian Brett Goldstein. Embedded in LA writers’ rooms with American producer, director and screenwriter Bill Lawrence and other top brains, they’re responsible for Apple TV shows Ted Lasso and Shrinking.

If you care about writing that actually sounds like how people speak in 2026; the speed of it, the rhythm, the compound blend of sarcasm and sincerity, those two shows should be your syllabus.

Go read the scripts. Not the clips on TikTok or YouTube; the actual scripts, all available online. The dialogue is as tight; the language and diction bang up to date so that you’re made to feel culturally ‘in the know’. 

And while the comedy comes frequently in rich, ‘laugh-out-loud’ punches, it’s heartfelt and much kinder than that which we’re known for in the UK.  

There’s such amazing depth and understanding invested in character that when Derek from Shrinking, tells racist neighbour Pam to “eat a dick” in his best ‘good morning’ voice, it's somehow far less vicious than anything Blackadder ever threw at Baldrick.   

The care writers on both shows take in crafting even the most throwaway lines and exchanges laced within each episode, does more brand work for their audience’s ‘heart-love’ than the totality of copy posted on Linkedin today. 

"You can be a reindeer. Not the fancy one... but one of the randos... like Fluffer," joyously grouchy Harrison Ford’s Paul tells Jimmy in Shrinking.

"Do you believe in ghosts, Ted?" AFC Richmond chairwoman Rebecca Welton asks Ted Lasso.

 "I do, but more importantly I think they need to believe in themselves."

Gorgeous. So readable. If you’re a fan of either show you’ll have read those lines in Paul’s precise growl or Ted’s Kansas drawl. You’ll have smiled when you read them and if you're at work, you may have fought off the urge to reach for your phone to dive into some clips on YouTube. 

Bet you never felt that same warmth while choking over the laminated language on most B2B landing pages. All that “driving digital acceleration.” and “unlocking transformative growth.”

What’s the point I’m making? You obviously can’t swear like Goldstein's Roy Kent in your business writing, or smile as you tell your more annoying clients to ‘go eat a dick’.  

You can, however, note how real and current the writing is on these shows and others. 

The characters interrupt. They deflect. They say something too honest and then undercut it with a joke. Like how people actually protect themselves after over-sharing in mid-conversation.

When you recognise something you’ve written in your company’s style or vocab sounds hilariously weighty or pompous, try puncturing it with levity - maybe something lightly self-aware in brackets - to show you recognise how twatty we all have to sound sometimes. 

Study these writers to understand how to be authoritative and credible but also trusted and warm in the same breath.

Your audience will love you for it. They’ll feel relieved, refreshed and included and they’ll come back to you again and again. And that, after all, is exactly what we’re all being paid for.



picture of rich, john and Mark

Leadership

The Pioneer of B2B Marketing Passes the Torch

Man Who Coined 'B2B Marketing' Sells Legendary Domain to Global CMO to Build the Practitioner-Led Home Ground of B2B marketing.

London, UK – 2nd March 2026

Today, Paartner Limited announces the acquisition of b2bmarketing.com and the appointment of John Coe as President Emeritus of B2B Marketing United. Founded by Rich Fitzmaurice, an experienced global Chief Marketing Officer, and in partnership with Mark Choueke, Partner and Chief Creative Officer at OrbitalX, former editor of Marketing Week, author of ‘Boring2Brave', the company is building the practitioner-led ecosystem and home ground for B2B marketers worldwide; B2B Marketing United.

A Legendary Partnership

John Coe is recognised as a pioneer of B2B marketing and the figure who first coined the term now accepted the world over as the name of our distinct discipline. Working in New York in 1997, Coe championed the designation 'B2B marketing' as practical shorthand for business-to-business marketing or industrial marketing. John founded B2BMarketing LLC and registered the domain b2bmarketing.com, firmly establishing a label that quickly resonated as a clearer way to describe the scale, complexity, and commercial importance of marketing between businesses.

In 2004, Coe authored Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales and Marketing, published by McGraw Hill, further formalising B2B marketing as a discipline. The book reinforced the importance of aligning marketing with real sales dynamics, buying committees, and trust-based decision-making. Now, three decades after creating the term, Coe has decided to pass the torch and allowed B2B Marketing United to leverage the domain.

Joining Coe on the B2B Marketing United team is Mark Choueke, Partner and Chief Creative Officer at OrbitalX, the former editor of Marketing Week and a recognized voice of the industry. Choueke brings 20+ years of editorial leadership and practical experience. He's also the bestselling author of the ‘Boring2Brave’ along with a course of the same name.

Choueke will serve on the advisory board.

What They're Building

B2B Marketing United is a holistic ecosystem for B2B marketers, including fractionals, consultants, and agency professionals.

‘We're bringing together everything B2B marketers need to have successful careers and lives into one home ground for the profession,' said Rich Fitzmaurice, Founder of B2B Marketing United.

‘I first studied B2B marketing at University in 2002, buying John’s book, and in my later senior marketing role, I read Mark’s work to keep up to speed. It is an honour to join forces with such influences to give back to a profession that has given us all so much. With their help, we will build a place where honesty beats hype, where humour and substance coexist, and where real marketers are heard. A place where you leave smarter, not sold to. Where real questions get real answers from people who’ve actually done the job. B2B Marketing United will be where our profession grows up together.’

Strategic Backing from Industry Leaders

B2B Marketing United has raised significant funds from C-level executives in some of the world’s largest companies. 'These investors bring more than capital, they bring formidable knowledge, experience and counsel' added Fitzmaurice.

In Their Own Words

John Coe, President Emeritus:

'When B2B marketing first emerged as a discipline in the late nineties, many people underestimated both the size and importance of the market. That has changed dramatically over the last thirty years, but the fundamentals have not. Trust, relevance, and understanding real buying dynamics still matter. I am very happy to pass the torch on to Rich and the team. I have been made to feel very welcome, and I look forward to working closely with them moving forward.'

Mark Choueke, Member of the advisory board:

'I’ve spent 20 years in B2B marketing and, if you like, editorial leadership. I wrote ‘Boring2Brave’ because I saw a gap in the way B2B marketing executes its remit, fulfils its potential and ultimately, accounts for itself. The gap is one where confidence, autonomy, strategic influence, managed risk-taking and recognition should all exist. I’m delighted to be an advisor to B2B Marketing United and to support its content because it’s time we B2B marketers develop and learn from one another rather than theory, academics or conference organisers that don’t actually operate in the role. When John personally selected Rich to take on B2Bmarketing.com, and when I saw Rich’s vision, I knew I wanted to be involved.’  

 

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About Paartner Limited

The company was founded in 2024 and is headquartered in London. Paartner was the UK's first referral platform built by B2B marketers, for B2B marketers and now also operates B2B Marketing United. www.paartner.com

About John Coe

John Coe pioneered the term 'B2B marketing' in 1997 and is widely recognized as the earliest professional advocate of B2B marketing as a distinct discipline. He is the author of Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Sales and Marketing (McGraw Hill, 2004) and was the founding owner of b2bmarketing.com. John held senior sales and marketing roles in the chemical and plastics sectors, including national sales leadership at Quaker Oats Chemical and marketing leadership at West Agro Chemical and Samuel Bingham. In 1980 he founded Integrated Target Marketing, a Chicago direct marketing agency that became one of the top 50 in the US. He later led campaigns at IBM and served as senior vice president at Rapp Collins Worldwide. To date, John has presented on B2B marketing topics around the world and is currently working on his new book ‘The New fundamentals of B2B Sales & Marketing’ with Rich Fitzmaurice as a co-author.

About Mark Choueke

Mark Choueke is the former editor of Marketing Week and a recognized voice in UK B2B marketing with 20+ years of editorial and practical experience. He is the author of bestseller Boring2Brave and creator of the course by the same name. He is also partner and Chief Creative Officer at OrbitalX.

About Rich Fitzmaurice

Rich Fitzmaurice is the founder of B2B Marketing United and Paartner Limited. A former Chief Marketing Officer at multiple global B2B firms, he is now Editor-in-chief of B2B Marketing United, a practicing fractional CMO and the creator of the course 'How to Become a High-Performing, High-Earning Fractional CMO'.

Media Contact:

editor@b2bmarketing.com

www.b2bmarketing.com

Picture of Nigel

Leadership

A CEO’s Guide to What Really Matters in B2B Marketing

As a CEO, many CMOs are effectively chasing your attention. When they invest heavily in ultimate guides and thought leadership content, what do they need to do differently to get you to engage?

It’s got to be relevant and it’s got to be accessible. I do download content fairly often, but I don’t tend to download massive documents - I just don’t have the time. Time is critical.

I prefer what I’d describe as snackable content. I think a lot of people are overwhelmed by the volume of information out there and we’re all short on time. Most PDFs end up in my “to read” folder and then never actually get read.

The issue isn’t necessarily the insight, it’s the format it’s delivered in. I prefer fast, accessible content: videos, podcasts, short pieces that I can consume easily.

There are exceptions. There are a couple of documents I read every year because they’re directly relevant to the business challenges I’m facing. But fundamentally there’s just a lot out there, so content needs to be targeted, relevant, and consumable.

Many B2B marketing teams would say they already tick those boxes. Is that enough?

There is a lot of repetitive content out there. You only have to look at how many articles are being published on AI, they’re often saying the same things and delivered in the same way.

If content tackled issues in a slightly different way, or was delivered in a more engaging or distinctive format, that would definitely get my attention. Right now, a lot of it looks and sounds the same.

Is content consumption always “on” for you, or are there moments when you actively seek things out?

Personally, I like reading and taking on content. If I’m dealing with a specific business challenge, I’ll actively go out and find solutions to that problem. I’ll ignore a lot of content that feels generic or irrelevant, but when I need to dig into something, I’ll seek it out.

You’ve held senior GTM roles across major organisations. When you look at a marketing dashboard, what’s the metric you care most about and which ones do you have no time for?

The metric I care about most is marketing-sourced pipeline, but it needs to be real pipeline. Opportunities that are actionable and can turn into revenue.

Marketing-attributed revenue is another key one. A single number that shows whether marketing is genuinely helping grow the business.

Those metrics aren’t always available straight away because they rely on good data, systems, and workflows. That data might come from the website, events, inbound enquiries — wherever. But that’s what I want to see.

Vanity metrics, on the other hand, things that look good on dashboards but don’t translate into revenue,  are less helpful. Page impressions, generic page views, follower counts: they matter, but they don’t tell me whether we’re generating qualified demand or revenue.

You’re also a practicing artist. Has creativity influenced your approach to marketing?

I’ve been painting pretty much all my life. I wanted to go to art college originally, but my dad encouraged me to get what he called a “proper degree”.

A few years ago I had some downtime and got back into my artwork. We have a place in Cornwall, and I started creating sea-life-inspired pieces in a pop-art style. A gallery there picked them up and began exhibiting them.

So yes, creativity has always been part of who I am.

How does that creative side show up in your marketing philosophy, particularly around brand versus performance?

Brand awareness is vitally important. It doesn’t always translate immediately into revenue metrics, but being known for something,  what you’re good at, what you stand for,  really matters.

That said, particularly in tougher times, you have to stay focused on growth and revenue. Some marketing metrics simply don’t add value when you’re trying to understand how the business is actually performing.

So it’s about balance. Brand supports long-term growth, but it has to sit alongside clear commercial outcomes.

If a downturn hits and budgets need to be cut quickly, where do you start?

I wouldn’t start by cutting marketing. It’s counterintuitive. You can’t cut your way out of trouble, you have to grow your way out.

Marketing is a lever for growth, not a discretionary cost. I’d look elsewhere first: vendor consolidation, travel, back-office duplication, non-core projects.

In one organisation I worked in, we had around 800 internal projects running at once, many solving the same problems in different ways across regions. We shut most of them down and replaced them with a smaller number of consistent initiatives. The cost savings were significant.

If marketing cuts are unavoidable, it should be about reallocation, not elimination. Dial back experimental activity, but protect channels that reliably generate demand; account-based marketing, targeted industry events, proven performance channels.

You’ve written about the productivity paradox. Are marketers over-tooled?

Yes, I think there are too many tools in most organisations, and that adds complexity. Individually the tools are fine, but collectively - especially in global organisations - they create friction, and friction reduces productivity.

I’ve worked in businesses operating across 30 countries, each with its own CRM system, analytics tools, and implementations. That fragmentation adds cost and slows everything down.

There are huge savings and productivity gains to be made through consolidation. There are dozens of platforms- HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, Mailchimp, Hootsuite and many more - all doing similar things.

Reducing the number of tools and standardising how they’re used is absolutely key.


Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.

Image of john Coe

Leadership

The Godfather of B2B Marketing on Sales, Trust and Why Fundamentals Still Win

Often described as the Godfather and one of the true forefathers of B2B marketing, it’s an honour to speak with you today. You’ve famously talked about speaking from “both sides of your mouth” - can you explain what that means for B2B marketers, and why having both perspectives really matters?

Well, I started my career in sales and spent quite a bit of time in sales and sales management. Then, according to my friends in sales, I went to the dark side and moved into marketing, primarily because of lead generation. That’s a long story.

But the fact of the matter is, I think any marketer in B2B needs to either have been in sales or really understand sales. The old phrase “walk a mile in my shoes” really applies here - it equips marketers to do a better job.

For B2B marketers who haven’t had the opportunity to work in sales - do you have any advice on how marketers can at least empathise with and understand that world?

That’s a good question. When I get a new client, one of the first things I ask is whether I can travel with their salespeople for a day or two - and not just one salesperson. I like to spend time with two or three.

What I find is that within the first half-day, they’re suspicious of me. But once they realise I understand sales, they open up. And when they do, the gems that come out of their mouths are incredible and hugely valuable for future marketing efforts.

You’ve got to get that trust right, and that empathy means they see you as a friend, not a foe.

And John, taking that thought further, your book The Fundamentals of B2B Sales and Marketing - there’s a clue in the title. You’ve developed a new sales coverage model. Is that a useful framework for marketers looking to build empathy and understanding with sales?

First, I should say not all situations are the same. Selling office furniture is very different from selling a machine tool that has to be designed. You need to define what you’re selling before you can design a coverage model that makes sense.

Do you use distributors or not? Does your coverage model rely on face-to-face interaction as a primary channel? Coverage models vary based on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to.

For example, in manufacturing, you’re often selling to engineers, not purchasing agents. These two factors drive very different coverage models.

That’s a great point. We talk a lot today about group marketing, where marketers need to engage multiple roles within large organisations, each with different interests in the product or service, and adapt messaging accordingly.

That’s what’s now called account-based marketing, and I completely agree with it. Even when I was in sales years ago, I did things people didn’t expect. I’d talk to purchasing, but I’d also go to the plant and speak with production scheduling. As a result, we often exceeded what the contract originally allowed.

If you’re selling to enterprise accounts, there can be five, ten, or more people involved in the decision. Marketers need to understand who they’re communicating with and that communication isn’t one-size-fits-all.

Exactly. And John, am I right in thinking that there was a version of ABM in 1980 -  it just wasn’t called ABM back then.

Yes, back then it was called Strategic Account Management.

Today, B2B marketing is one of the fastest-growing industries in the developed world. What did you see all those years ago that made you register b2bmarketing.com? What told you this was coming?

It wasn’t so much what I saw, it was what I experienced. At the time, people were underestimating the size of the B2B market. 

Think about a car. You buy one consumer product, but behind that car are 100 to 200 B2B suppliers. People focused on the consumer product and ignored the massive B2B ecosystem behind it.

I saw that because I came from sales. When I moved into marketing, many people had never worked in sales and underestimated both the size and potential of the market. Eventually, that changed and that’s why B2B has grown the way it has.

What has surprised you most about the rapid growth of B2B marketing?

One major surprise over the last five to ten years has been the explosion of technology. I’m an old face-to-face guy, and now there are nearly 14,000 software packages in sales and marketing.

The issue is that people adopt technology and forget the fundamentals. They hope technology will fix their problems, generate leads, build relationships, but without fundamentals, that’s a mistake.

Young marketers love tech. Older ones like me worry about fundamentals being lost.

That balance is fascinating. Technology has brought choice, but also choice paralysis. With AI now dominating the conversation, have the fundamentals of B2B marketing actually changed?

One thing that hasn’t changed is the emotional side of B2B buying. I’m writing a report on this now. We make emotional decisions first,  trust,  before we justify them with facts.

B2B marketing has historically ignored this emotional element, even though purchase decisions often involve significant personal and career risk.

Exactly. Buying a cheap personal item is one thing. Buying something expensive at work means spending someone else’s money,  and that’s emotional.

Take a CRM system. Choosing or changing one can be career-ending if it goes wrong. Yet most marketing ignores that risk and emotional trust requirement.

And we’re back to buying groups again - different roles, different concerns, same product.

Correct. Purchasing, finance, users, sales managers - each has different needs and trust factors. Messaging must be relevant to each.

Do you remember the first time you heard the phrase “B2B marketing”?

It came from a creative director at an agency I worked with in New York. In 1997, she shortened “business to business” to B2B, and it stuck. When I registered b2bmarketing.com, that’s where it came from.

Last century! 

It was. And it resonated.

Before you go, one final question on AI and data decay. Is there a risk that AI compounds bad data?

Absolutely. AI can help,  even with updating CRMs, but data changes rapidly. In a room of 100 managers, around 70% will have had at least one change to their role or company in the past year. If you don’t stay on top of that, you’re communicating with people who aren’t there anymore.

Zombie communication?

Exactly. Great output requires great input.

John, thank you so much for joining us and for decades of contribution to B2B marketing as the Godfather.

Thank you -  and remember, the Godfather always has an offer you can’t refuse.

Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.

Jake bird mural

AI

Busting the Myths Around AI in Marketing: An interview with Jake Bird

You’ve been working in AI for around three years now, and a lot seems to have changed in that time. We’ve gone from marketers trying to understand what AI even is, to claims that it’s now “embedded” everywhere. What’s the reality - myth or maturity?

I don’t think it’s embedded at all. The stat I saw recently was that fewer than 5% of organisations have embedded AI effectively. There’s so much misinformation online and a lot of hype. There are a lot of vibes around what AI can do.

The reality is you can’t just give people these tools and expect good work back. They don’t work like that. The people who get the most value have spent a lot of time understanding how the technology works and testing it.

Where we are now is the proper implementation phase. That means technology, infrastructure, and change management. It takes time for people to get used to using these tools. It’s a new way of working and it signals a new wave of marketing.

Many organisations feel pressure to “get AI” without knowing where to start. What tools would you actually recommend for marketers beginning this journey?

The tools I personally get the most value from are Claude, as a strategic partner and for content creation. Perplexity, which is excellent for research - that’s what it’s built for. Gemini, where Google has really stepped up in the last six months with 2.5 Pro and their broader suite. Those three are a strong starting point.

And what should marketers avoid?

This might be a hot take, but I’m cautious about anything labelled as an agent in marketing.

An agent is essentially another layer of software sitting on top of a large language model. A true agent makes decisions autonomously, without a human in the loop. In marketing, that strips out innovation and nuance.

Because these models are predictive they guess what comes next - agentic AI risks accelerating more of the same ideas instead of creating new ones. In other disciplines, agents can work well. But in marketing, creativity matters.

Do you think marketers are ready to use multiple LLMs for different purposes?

It took me about four years of curiosity to get to the point where I can confidently move between tools. Each one has different quirks and behaviours.

GPT is more subservient, it does what you tell it. Claude is more inquisitive and asks better questions. But getting comfortable takes time and curiosity. Most marketers aren’t there yet.

There’s also a tendency to focus purely on content. Should AI be doing more than that?

Absolutely. Content shouldn’t be the sole purpose of AI. It should be workflows and processes.

From a business perspective, the first question shouldn’t be “what tools should we use?” but “what value are we trying to create?” Every business is different. AI should support an objective, not exist for its own sake.

Are organizations actually seeing ROI when AI is implemented properly?

Yes, when it’s done well. Businesses using AI effectively are cutting acquisition costs by around 50% and improving revenue by 10–15%. That can mean a 20–30% increase in ROI.

But that only happens when AI is used as an extension of the team, not a replacement. Too many companies took the “cheap” route last year: giving everyone ChatGPT and hoping for the best. That’s not actually cheap when you factor in wasted time and poor outputs.

There’s also confusion between individual AI use and enterprise-level AI. How big a problem is that?

It’s huge. AI has been treated as a catch-all. There’s personal AI, helping individuals with ideation, decks, analysis and then there’s technical AI, the actual builds and systems. They’ve been lumped together as if AI can magically solve everything.

That oversimplification causes a lot of frustration.

Looking ahead, where should marketers actually be experimenting next?

My advice is simple: try every task with AI first and assess the output. Even when it doesn’t work, you learn something.

I’m sceptical about AI-generated video and voice. They often feel dishonest and are easy to spot. I don’t mind people being transparent about using AI as long as there’s human oversight.

What excites me more is predictive AI: spotting where markets are heading, identifying emerging interests, and shaping messaging or even products proactively rather than reactively.

Many teams are already “bringing their own AI” into organisations. What should CMOs do about governance?

If you block AI entirely, people will just use it anyway  and that’s riskier. Without training and governance, you lose control completely.

I know plenty of people who pay for their own AI subscriptions because their company won’t allow it. They work faster and get better results but without oversight.

The better approach is enablement with guardrails.

Final question: will roles like “prompt engineer” or “Head of AI” still exist in a year?

I think we’ll still see Heads of AI, but not prompt engineers. Prompting will become business as usual.

Watch the full interview on the B2B Marketing United YouTube channel.


we're a family here spray painted on a black brick wall

Career

How to build high performance marketing in a toxic “work family” culture

I have long believed that if we could run a root cause analysis on every failed campaign or stalled rebrand, we would find that most failures are not caused by a lack of creative talent or budget, but by a lack of openness.

Some still behave as if high performance is built on “good vibes,” late night pizza, and forced loyalty. But anyone who has ever run a demand engine under pressure knows the real culture is revealed in different moments. In the silence after a budget cut. In the pause before telling the CEO their copy edits make no sense. In the quiet calculation when a marketer thinks, “If I push back on this, will it cost me politically or personally?”

Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard shows that the highest performing teams are defined by psychological safety. In marketing, this is not a “nice to have.” It is a commercial necessity. You cannot innovate, challenge assumptions, or kill bad ideas early if people are afraid. And bad ideas that survive early always become expensive later.

Creative teams are rarely asking, “Do we like each other?”. They are asking, “Is it safe to have a bad idea here in order to find a good one?”

When loyalty is valued over candor, marketing does not become stronger. It becomes polite, beige, and commercially fragile.

The fallacy of the “we’re a family” culture.

Toxic leaders often describe their teams as “family.” It sounds warm. It sounds caring. In practice, it often becomes a verbal shield used to demand obedience while offering conditional safety.

In B2B marketing, the “we are a family” label quietly teaches people that:

  • Critiquing the leader’s idea is disloyal

  • Working weekends proves commitment, not burnout

  • Questioning strategy means you are “not a team player”

  • Asking for budget means you are “not scrappy enough”

It confuses belonging with agreement.

I once coached a highly capable Head of Demand Gen who admitted that she had stayed silent during a roadmap review for a product launch she knew had no product market fit. Later she said, “The CCO keeps saying we’re a family on a mission and that this was her baby. If I raised objections, I knew I would be isolated.”

The launch produced zero qualified pipeline. The warning was never voiced. The cost was real. The silence was cultural.

Safety versus comfort

Most toxic marketing cultures optimize for comfort. High performance cultures optimize for safety.

Comfort is the absence of conflict.
Safety is the presence of truth.

Comfort keeps meetings smooth.
Safety prevents wasted spend.

In those environments, marketers do not need more after work drinks or fancy dress days. They need to know that insight matters more than hierarchy and evidence matters more than ego.

This is why the best marketing leaders do not demand alignment. They demand thinking.

Cognitive diversity and the “vanilla trap”

Research from McKinsey shows that diverse teams make better decisions. In marketing, lack of cognitive diversity creates what I call the Vanilla Trap. Activity that voice no opinion, takes no risks and influences no-one.

Fear drives this. When people feel unsafe, they mimic competitors, defer to the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinon), and copy whatever feels politically safe. That is how entire categories end up sounding identical.

High performance teams build mechanisms that force constructive dissent

  • Pre mortems where the team writes the future failure story before launch

  • Red teams whose job is to challenge the value proposition

  • “Kill your darlings” rituals that reward abandoning weak ideas

  • Customer voice as the final arbiter, not senior opinion

Reality check

If your values slide says “innovation” but you punish the social media manager for a post that missed while ignoring the VP who has not refreshed strategy in five years, you are not building culture. You are building learned silence.

Map safety to real marketing roles

Different marketers carry different personal risks:

  • The content lead fears being publicly torn apart for tone

  • The demand leader fears being blamed for missed revenue they do not control

  • The brand lead fears being seen as obstructive

  • The events lead fears one operational miss becoming a character judgement

Safety means making it clear that the cost of silence is higher than the cost of speaking.

Proxies for safety

When you are not in the room, your systems speak:

  • Creative reviews that critique the work, not the person

  • Dashboards that show red numbers without witch hunts

  • Leaders who say “I was wrong” publicly

  • Briefs that are firm on outcomes but flexible on how to get there

These are leadership signals, not process details.

The psychology underneath

Several behavioral forces quietly distort marketing decisions

  • The HiPPO effect where senior opinion overrides evidence

  • Sunk cost fallacy where bad ideas live on because money was already spent

  • Groupthink where tired teams convince themselves mediocrity is excellence

High performance leadership designs systems that counter these biases, not reinforce them with “family” language.

How to deliberately build safety

Practical actions that work:

  • Replace “family” with “high performance team”

  • Separate brainstorming from decision meetings

  • Reward the person who brings the uncomfortable data

  • Protect your team from political bullying from Sales or Product

  • Define failure as learning and then actually behave that way

This is leadership work. And it is commercial work. Unsafe teams waste budget quietly and repeatedly.

How to tell if you are building a team, not a cult

You will see signals:

  • “This isn’t working” is said as often as “This is great”

  • Junior marketers challenge senior leaders

  • Failed tests are shared openly

  • Sales and Marketing debate without posturing

  • You hire for culture add, not culture clone

The simple rule to remember

In complex B2B markets, advantage rarely comes from harmony.
It comes from honesty.

The teams that win are not the politest.
They are the ones that surface the truth earliest and act on it fastest.

Call to action

In your next campaign review, ask one question and then stay quiet.

“If you knew you would not get in trouble, what would you change about this plan right now?”

Listen without defending.
Do not explain.
Do not justify.

Map where silence lives. Decide whether you want to be comfortable or effective.

If you want help building a marketing culture that produces truth, not compliance, and performance, not politeness, contact me and the team at B2B Marketing United and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.

 

table for ten album cover

Demand Generation

Is it time for B2B marketers to rebel against awards programs?

Over the last twenty years, the number of business and marketing awards has exploded into its own little cottage industry. Publishers, agencies, consultancies, industry bodies and "communities" all run their own cash cows.

The number of categories multiply and get sillier every year. Entry fees rise. Sponsorship rate cards infiltrate your inbox. The shortlists get longer and the winners more plentiful, each of whom have conveniently bought a table for ten at £4k+ a pop.

And the running time of these events now seems close to breaching human rights.

B2B marketers see the game more than most.

In our profession, it often seems that every awards program a service line or country rep receives gets forwarded to marketing. "How fantastic, we have been shortlisted for this (self-proclaimed) prestigious award, let's enter!" Or "We have won this award for five years in a row, we must win again!" Or the even better "If we don't enter this award, the market may think we're not taking the service seriously."

It never ceases to amaze me how often the "Congratulations, you have been shortlisted…" emails get through, or forwarded, to marketing. We haven't submitted anything yet, not even paid the entry fee, but somehow, we have already been excellent according to people with absolutely zero practitioner experience. I have even worked for organisations that were shortlisted and 'won' awards for services we did not even provide.

 Here’s a tip for you, ask IT to block the email domain.

 The song I wrote, Table for Ten, exaggerates it for effect, but the system it is mocking is very, very real.

Excellence, at scale

It has been a long time since awards were mainly about recognition. The vast majority are a revenue engine, designed around throughput. More categories mean more finalists. More finalists mean more tables. More tables mean more revenue. Excellence, it seems, is scalable.

The commercial model is not complicated. Charge for entries. Charge for category sponsorship. Don't pay judges (position it as an honour to be chosen). Sell tables. Publish a press release for every winner (sometimes for an additional fee). Upsell webinars or winner publications (“the agency should speak at our event for a fee”). Encourage social sharing. Offer early bird discounts for next year. Repeat annually.

The structural problems everyone ignores

None of this means every award is meaningless. There are still programmes with real judging rigour, respected panels, and genuine peer recognition. But the signal to noise ratio has completely collapsed and we all see it.

Research into award credibility across professional services shows the same structural weaknesses again and again.

Self-reported performance. Most entries are graphically designed narratives, not audits. Impact is described by the entrant and unverifiable. Entries can effectively write what they want. No questions asked. 

Category inflation. As events grow, so do the labels. Not because the discipline has become that granular, but because more categories mean more revenue. "Best Use of X in Y for Z Segment in This Very Specific Geography" is not taxonomy. It's a very obvious way of creating new inventory.

Pay to play dynamics. Entry fees, sponsorship, and table purchases do not always explicitly buy trophies, but they do buy probability. Volume of entries, visibility on the night, and commercial proximity all increase the odds of walking away with something shiny.

Broken judging. Judges never have access to raw data and almost never have the time to challenge claims in depth. I agreed to judge one particular awards programme for B2B marketers and my conscience could only do so once. We were constantly rushed to decide (because they had expanded to far too many categories) without the time required to properly interrogate any of the claims or arrive at the most deserved winner.

I will never forget one email chain I was unfortunately CC'd on. It was an awards programme in the USA that was decided by, wait for it, a show of hands, claps, whoops and hollers in the room on the night. And this manager was emailing the whole C-suite to celebrate their 'win'.

The vast majority of panels are unpaid, time poor, and asked to assess a number of submissions in compressed windows. Even with the best intentions, scrutiny becomes surface level. It's somewhat crazy that people so readily agree to be judges and give up days of their time for free, when the organisers are raking in the money for the very same activity. That's not giving back to your profession. If anything, you are dumbing it down by playing into the charade and agreeing that you should do so for free, for 'exposure'.

The theatre of credibility

Then come the awards nights themselves. The black tie, drum rolls, comedian hosts (they are being paid BTW), the lighting, the band and the word 'prestigious' doing some major heavy lifting.

Awards borrow the visual grammar of credibility. But credibility does not come from staging. It comes from consequence.

Which leads to the question. Do customers care?

Every serious study of B2B buying behaviour says broadly the same thing. Buyers trust peers, proof, outcomes, and experience. Analyst validation and references matter. Case studies matter (especially via verbal referees). Demonstrable results matter.

Award logos barely register. Procurement might glance at them when shortlisting suppliers on large tenders to complement the providers already in mind, but experienced B2B buyers know the game.

Journalists know this too, which is why award press releases die as soon as the send button is pressed. They are not news. They are hollow advertisements, picked up only by automated newswires.

What awards are actually for

The value award programmes do add, however, is internal.

They validate effort and pad out a CV. They provide an excuse to get glammed up and have a night out (and are so much easier to sign off than a team building away day). They give managers some good news to share. They offer a morale moment in hard times.

They can also give younger team members something to celebrate which is always something I’d advocate for, especially relating to individual achievements. That moment in the spotlight can make the most talented of us work even harder and strive to hit even higher heights.

There is nothing wrong with recognition. My issue with them is when the symbol replaces the substance.

You see it in agency credentials that lead with trophies before outcomes, which is deeply off putting to competent CMOs. You see it in board slides where "industry recognition" fills space when pipeline is thin.

When applause becomes easier to earn than results, people start optimising for the applause.

In many award circuits, the fastest way to feel like a winner is not to build something genuinely brilliant. It is to pay for a beautifully written entry, buy a table, submit in multiple categories (sometimes over multiple years), and increase your statistical odds. If you also sponsor a category as well as enter? Well, guess what…

Rent or build

The perspex trophy is not the problem. The confusion of what it represents is.

Awards can be a byproduct of excellence, but they are a terrible substitute for it.

We should enjoy the night. Celebrate your team. Clap for the winners. Take the photo. But be honest.

If our proudest slide is the awards slide, we should be worried.

The market does not care how many times we have been shortlisted. It only cares whether what you do actually works.

If our marketing success depends on trophies, we are not building a brand. We are renting applause.

How can we fix it? If we can bang our collective heads together, B2B Marketing United will make it happen.

Or is it all ok as-is? A fun night out being reason enough to just ignore its flaws?


 

—

Listen to Table for Ten on Marketing Mixtape

man on his knees begging for money froma. cfo

Demand Generation

What “Six Months to an Exit” Really Means for Your Marketing Team

Everybody knows the phrase, "do more with less."

Especially if you follow the B2B Marketing United legend that is Mark Choueke, who has spent years unpacking what it really means and how marketers can navigate it.

It sometimes gets framed as a motivational challenge or a test of creativity, and although it's definitely not a challenge any marketer craves, it is a rite of passage.

The song I wrote, "Six Months to an Exit", dramatizes (and sends up) a familiar scene. A CMO with a growth plan, a grand vision, and dreams of building a brand-new category. And a board that listens, notes the spreadsheets, nods enthusiastically, and a few weeks later asks: can you just do the same as last year again? But with a flat budget. And still achieve our growth targets?

Private Equity firms are not buying companies to run them forever. Their model is very clear and very simple. They invest in companies to sell them for a profit. Ideally after a three-to-five-year cycle. Ideally sooner. Their job is to improve the valuation, and the cleanest lever for that is EBITDA to drive the exit multiple.

Revenue growth matters but not as much as margin. And predictability matters more than hope, leaving the next cycle of ambition to the next guys who own it.

None of this is irrational. It's the way it is. And the best marketing leaders mould what their team does and how they do it around these realities. Like all functions, marketing must always serve the company's strategy first.

Some marketers really struggle with this, as it's human nature to want to do more each year, and better than the last. Marketing evolves so fast that there is always more that we want to do. New tools we want to experiment with. New competitors we want to outdo.

And we struggle with the paradox often presented to us.

The CFO needs a growth story for the exit deck but is unable to put any more money in. They want that hockey stick but, at best, the spend needs to be flat.

This is where internal friction often begins. P&L owners are under immense pressure to deliver quarter by quarter. So, they protect their local budgets, resist central programs, and block spend that doesn't show immediate ROI.

It hurts those who don't quite understand the bigger picture. To some, it can feel like punishment, or torture.

Some functions become defensive. And sometimes, when incentives are misaligned or communication is poor, collaboration drops and political behaviour rises.

Things can get even harder if there's a bad quarter and a number is missed, as the CFO may need to claw more budget back whilst the pipeline still needs filling.

And the Head of Sales probably gets a bit nervous.

The selling firm wants a smooth story, a nicely trending prospectus, and an attractive multiple.

Sometimes management just want to survive the process to realize their Long-Term Incentive Plans.

Marketing, which lives in the long game, can sometimes feel a little squeezed in the middle, and as a profession, we have to adapt to the fact that any brand investment, new product launches, or modernization of infrastructure will probably have to wait until it's all over.

We have to work harder and smarter. Sometimes with delayed hires and less budget. And under more pressure. Rather than get depressed about it, the best marketing teams are pragmatic. They get it. There's something bigger going on and we need to play our role and help as much as possible.

We need to ensure the business keeps delivering. We need to step up and support from a PR & Comms perspective. I've supported multiple PE exits and been involved in IPO processes, including high pressure analyst presentations.

No matter how hard it gets for marketing, try being the CFO in this scenario.

In those situations where we are asked to deliver a hockey stick on a flat budget, the only response is communication and clarity.

  • Here is what we can deliver.

  • Here is what will stall.

  • Here is what we will be trading off.

  • Here is the risk we are taking.

  • The business can count on marketing to do whatever it can.

One thing we can also do is relish that next ownership cycle. New ownership is a fantastic opportunity to present an exciting investment case into the marketing function. Why? Because they want to drive sales growth and sell to someone else at an even higher valuation.

It's the way the world works.

Listen to Six Months to an Exit on Marketing Mixtape

a picture of a cruella de ville type character on a cd cover

Career

If Your Boss Says “We’re a Family”, It’s a Red Flag

I need to tell you about the Duchess of Doom.

She is not a real person. She is a character built from a pattern. A pattern I have watched play out across multiple organisations, multiple sectors, and multiple decades of working in and around B2B. If you think you recognise her, you probably do. Because she is not one person. She is a type. And the type is everywhere.

She talks about culture constantly. She uses the word "family" as a full stop to every conversation she does not want to have. She rewards loyalty and punishes honesty. She surrounds herself with people who agree with her, and then wonders why the strategy keeps missing.

She is the subject of the new Marketing Mixtape track, "Family (or Else)".

The song is played for effect, but the leadership failure pattern it describes is real, well documented, and expensive.

Amy Edmondson at Harvard spent years researching why some teams outperform others. The answer was not talent, experience, or seniority. It was psychological safety. The ability to challenge, question, and admit problems without fearing the consequences. Google ran the same experiment internally through Project Aristotle and arrived at exactly the same conclusion. Psychological safety was the single strongest predictor of high performing teams.

When leaders punish dissent, even subtly, they do not eliminate problems. They eliminate visibility of problems.

I have watched this play out in commercial reviews where the strategy is clearly wrong but nobody says so. In strategy sessions where every challenging idea gets filtered out before it reaches the room. In quarterly updates delivered with forced enthusiasm because the alternative is being labelled "not on the bus".

The pattern typically has four parts.

The first is insecurity masked as authority. Leaders who surround themselves with yes people are not building high performing teams but insulation. Research from McKinsey and others shows that teams with low cognitive diversity make weaker strategic decisions and miss market shifts more often.

The second is fear replacing accountability. When performance drops, healthy leaders look at systems, strategy, and capability. Fear-based leaders look for excuses. The economy. The market. The competition. Activity levels. The number of calls being made. Anything except their own decisions. Blame becomes a shield.

The third is loyalty tests disguised as culture. Employee surveys, engagement scores, and values statements are meant to surface truth. In toxic cultures they become compliance tests. Say the right thing or be labelled "not a team player". When people believe honesty will be punished, they stop giving it. What remains is performative positivity and quiet disengagement.

The fourth is outdated thinking protected by power. Leaders who cannot adapt often suppress challenge rather than update their worldview. Instead of learning, they do more of what they have always done. Instead of experimenting, they enforce obedience. The organisation freezes while the market moves.

There is a familiar sequence to how the whole thing unfolds.

The smartest people leave first, either by choice or by being managed out. The most honest voices go quiet. Decisions get slower and worse. Strategy becomes last year’s plan with a new date. And throughout all of it, the leader interprets the absence of challenge as evidence that they are right.

In my experience, toxic leaders rarely develop successors, let alone ones who think differently. They promote people who look and sound like them, or who can be shaped to do so. The behaviour replicates. The blind spots replicate with it.

From the outside the organisation can look stable, especially if the company is still hitting its numbers. From the inside, it is brittle.

Gallup has been tracking this for decades. People do not leave companies. They leave managers. More specifically, they leave environments where they feel unheard, unsafe, and undervalued. The commercial consequences follow reliably: retention cost, productivity loss, strategic drift, innovation debt. It rarely shows up cleanly on a spreadsheet, which is partly why it persists so long unchallenged.

There is a meaningful difference between confident leadership and fear-based management. Confident leaders want to know what is not working. Fear-based leaders want to know who to blame for it. Confident leaders reward contribution. Fear-based cultures reward loyalty. Healthy teams perform for outcomes. Fear-based teams perform for optics.

The most dangerous phrase in any of this is usually delivered warmly, often at a team offsite, always with a slightly too long pause before the question mark:

"We're a family, right?"

Real families argue. They challenge. They tell each other things they would rather not hear. What these environments usually mean by "family" is something different. Loyalty without reciprocity. Submission without safety. Compliance dressed as belonging.

So, what does the opposite actually look like?

Brave enough to be challenged. Brave enough to hear what is not working. Brave enough to let people smarter than them make them uncomfortable.

Healthy organisations are built on psychological safety, where people can speak without risking their livelihood. On constructive conflict, where ideas are challenged but people are respected. On real accountability, where leaders own results rather than explain them away.

It is also the job of CEOs and CHROs to spot toxic patterns and act on it. But, unfortunately, far too often they enable it through inaction or denial instead.

The moment a leader needs constant agreement to feel secure, the team stops thinking and starts performing for approval. And when that happens, you are not running an organisation anymore. You are running a production.

The Duchess of Doom is a fictional character. But the pattern she represents is one of the most well-documented failure modes in organisational leadership. If she feels familiar, that says something about how common this is. Not about any one person.

Listen to "Family (or Else)" on Marketing Mixtape.

Reply All Apocalypse cd cover on lava

Graduate

That time a lasagne crippled a global network

I look back on my first few years as a B2B marketer with genuine fondness.

Within nine months of joining BT Global Services I had a double promotion, responsibility for the professional services sector (nobody else wanted it), and a front row seat to one of the funniest things my then 22-year-old self had ever witnessed.

It centred around a cold lasagne.

We had a kitchen that was, let's say, in need of some discipline. The usual crimes. Cups nowhere near the dishwasher. Mystery spillages. Buffet sandwiches quietly composting on the table. And fridge items of deeply suspicious vintage.

Someone decided enough was enough. Every Friday, like clockwork, she audited the A2 kitchen fridge. Any food left over a weekend would meet its fate.

Then came a particular Friday. Around 4:59.

She found contraband Tupperware. Red mist descended. And in her haste to deliver justice she typed, in what I imagine was white-hot fury:

WHOSE LASAGNE IS THIS?

She did not check the To field.

She sent it to the global distribution list. Fifty thousand people.

What followed was magnificent. Ping. Ping. Ping. Colleagues across the building, across the country, across the world, receiving the same urgent lasagne inquiry. And then, helpfully, replying all to say it wasn't theirs. Or to ask to be removed from the chain.

By replying all.

The exchange server buckled. But we could still hear pings in the distance. Those of us left in the office had the energy of a trading floor at peak hours. We just sat back and watched the digital tsunami roll.

About an hour in, one of the sales guys came back from a client meeting he'd been in all afternoon. Completely missed it. We got him up to speed.

He sat down, started shutting his laptop, and muttered very quietly:

"Hey guys. I think that lasagne is mine."

I was so tempted to reply all with his name.

I didn't. Probably my finest act of professional restraint to date.

But I did write the song below about it all:

Listen to Reply All Apocalypse in our Marketing Mixtape section here.

MarTech

Why Calling Anything Dead Is a Red Flag in B2B Marketing

Last year I sat in a conference on B2B marketing and watched the opening keynote speaker declare cold calling dead.

You could feel the room shift. A few marketers rolled their eyes and audibly tutted. One CEO of an outbound SDR agency in the audience looked like they wanted to storm the stage. The speaker, who wasn't a marketer, had clearly hoped it was an easy remark to make. Or had been misadvised by ChatGPT when writing his speech.

That moment is how I wrote the song "Dead Men Dialling". My first attempt at gangster rap which is ambitious for someone who grew up in Essex and wears half zips. Listen below.

Because every time someone in B2B marketing declares a tactic dead, what they usually mean is that they have jumped on so many marketing bandwagons to curry favour, they are not thinking rationally or commercially. Direct mail is dead. Cold calling is dead. TV is dead. Events are dead. The funeral marches just keep coming, and they almost always arrive with a product pitch or agenda attached.

It is a cheap thing for anyone in our profession to claim. And it misses something fundamental about how attention actually works.

Three things that happened in the last few weeks

A sales rep I spoke to last week finally got a meeting after sending something physical to a prospect who had ignored every email for months.

A CMO of a large manufacturer told me their best lead of the quarter came from a chance conversation at a trade show and that they were doubling down on F2F events.

A SaaS founder said the deal that mattered most started with a mutual friend making a phone call to advocate for them and set up a dinner.

None of these tactics are coming back because they were misunderstood. They are resurfacing because the environment changed around them and they cut through the bullshit.

The economics of contrast

When something becomes easy, abundant and cheap for marketers, and non-marketers, it loses impact because the market is flooded and prospects become numb to it. When something becomes rarer and requires real effort, it starts to stand out. That is the whole game.

Look at what we are seeing right now. LinkedIn is an echo chamber of recycled thinking. Programmatic ads chase each other down the page. AI has turned "good enough" into a factory setting.

Volume is no longer an edge. And doing what everyone else does means being indistinguishable. Or average at best.

In that environment, anything that feels physical, human or effortful has a better chance at cutting through. Not because it is romantic or retro. Because effort is still the clearest signal of intent we have, and people notice when another human has actually bothered.

Numbers worth sitting with

A direct mail piece holds 132 seconds of attention. A TV ad holds around 14. An email, if you are lucky, holds whatever fraction of a second it takes to hit delete.

That is the whole argument in three numbers. The channels everyone keeps burying are the ones that earn the most time from the people on the other end of it. The 2025 ANA/DMA report puts direct mail response rates at 4.4% against email's 0.12%. Still incredibly poor in absolute terms, but the gap tells you everything you need to know about where attention is actually flowing.

Les Binet calls performance marketing on its own "underperformance marketing", because if it is the only thing you do, that is what it eventually becomes.

I think about that line a lot. Performance has not stopped working. It has just become a tax rather than an advantage. Costs rise, click-through rates barely move, and the pipes everyone is using start to look identical. Meanwhile, brand, memory, physical presence and human contact are quietly becoming the real sources of advantage again.

The SDR CEO who wanted to storm the stage already knew what the rest of the room is only starting to figure out. The tactics being pronounced dead are the ones quietly outperforming the ones being sold as their replacement.

The mistake was thinking technological progress meant replacement. It doesn't, it means rebalancing. Good marketers consider every tactic available to them and ignore what is, or is not, in fashion.

The best marketing plans I see are the ones that understand that we need to use everything in our arsenal to reinforce the same messages, across the same target audience, more often over a prolonged period of time. Not just the latest toys.

So, the next time someone tells you a channel is dead, ask yourself who benefits from the obituary. Then ask whether the thing they are burying might be exactly what helps you stand out. If your competitors are all doing A ,B, and C, give yourself the hypothesis that X, Y, Z might be the better direction.

It doesn't matter whether we like the tactics we use. It doesn't matter if they are cool or involve the latest AI tools.

It only matters if it works.

Now go and listen to an Essex boy attempt gangster rap.

Dead Men Dialling is the latest track from my Marketing Mixtape series at www.b2bmarketing.com

Let me just stop you there cd cover

Career

Wait, let me just stop you there.

Ever sat in a meeting where one person talks so much you start questioning every life decision that brought you there?

You know the scene. You walk in prepared. Slides ready, numbers checked, plan thought through. Then someone - confident, loud and absolutely convinced they’re the smartest person in the room - jumps in.

They interrupt before people finish their point. Repeat things nobody asked for. Fill every bit of silence like it’s dangerous.

The confidence is obvious. And somehow that confidence gets treated as competence.

After twenty years working in marketing across different industries, I’ve seen this play out more times than I care to count. And while I try to avoid sweeping statements, one pattern shows up again and again:

The loudest voice in the room is rarely the clearest thinker.

Volume often crowds out judgement and certainty can disguise a lack of depth.

This dynamic feels particularly visible in marketing. It’s a discipline where opinions are easy to form and hard to disprove in the moment. A skimmed article, a trending buzzword, a strong hunch; suddenly everyone has a view. Some of those views are useful. Plenty aren’t.

But the ideas that dominate meetings are usually the ones delivered with the most confidence or the most seniority. Not the ones backed by data, experience or a realistic understanding of what’s actually going to work.

That has real consequences. Teams waste time chasing ideas that fall apart the moment they meet reality. More importantly, opportunities are missed. Thoughtful insights, less theatrically delivered, are often sidelined or never voiced at all.

This isn’t about blaming individuals. But when interruptions and dismissive reactions become normal, they slowly change how decisions get made. People learn it’s safer to stay quiet.

When a handful of voices take over, everyone else pulls back. The room doesn’t get smarter, it just gets louder. You lose the range of perspectives that actually leads to better answers.

And the irony is that the quieter voices are often the ones doing the real thinking. They’re the people questioning assumptions, connecting the dots and spotting problems before they cost time or money.

Without space for those voices, meetings stop being places where problems get solved and start becoming stages where confidence performs.

Rich’s song "Let me just stop you there" nails this dynamic perfectly. The interruptions. The overconfidence. The casual dismissals. It’s funny because it’s painfully familiar.

But the point behind it matters. Work shouldn’t be a contest to see who can dominate the conversation. We all play a part in shaping that culture. Notice when someone is taking over. Question confidence that isn’t backed up by substance. And make space for the people who haven’t been heard yet.

Looking back, there are plenty of meetings where I wish I’d done that more.

Because if we don’t, the loudest voice keeps winning. And the smartest ideas stay unsaid.

Listen to "Let me just stop you there" on Marketing Mixtape

champagne CMO CD

Career

How to Spot a Champagne CMO in the Wild

There is a particular character many of us have met in our careers.

They arrive with a fanfare. A big title. A big salary. And a reputation that somehow always seems to survive the wreckage they leave behind.

The ink is barely dry on the contract and already they are restless.

They have not met the team.
They do not yet understand the product.
They could not explain the customer problem if you gave them a whiteboard and an hour.

But they know one thing with absolute certainty.

Everything needs to change.

  • New website.

  • New brand.

  • New message.

  • New colours.

  • New fonts.

  • New positioning.

  • New strategy.

Tear it down. Start again. Make it visible. Make it loud. Make it look like momentum.

That is what the song Champagne CMO is about. And I have met so many…!

Not bad people. Not even always untalented. But leaders who mistake vanity for progress and optics for impact. Who reach for the biggest, shiniest levers first because they are the most visible, the most award friendly, and the easiest way to signal importance.

The song pokes fun at a familiar pattern.

The rebrand before the revenue problem is understood.
The AI strategy before the go to market is fixed.
The keynote before the pipeline.
The awards table before the sales forecast.

Every year, a new buzzword. A new bandwagon. A new silver bullet.

  • Big Data.

  • The Cloud.

  • Web3.

  • Blockchain.

  • The Metaverse.

  • Artificial Intelligence.

Not as tools in service of a clear commercial problem, but as costumes to be worn. Language to be paraded. Saying the things they think their bosses and the masses want to hear.

Right now, it is Artificial Intelligence. Crowbarred into every conversation. Setting off red flags with every soundbite.

Do not get me wrong. Real AI is coming and it will continue to get better and better. But the Champagne CMOs claiming they have increased productivity by 35 percent or that every new product they launch is now AI led are not people you should be listening to, let alone hiring.

If you put a computer in front of them and said show me, they would not know where to start. But that does not stop them climbing on stages and pretending they are leading the way.

Underneath the veneer is a simple truth. Real B2B marketing is hard. And leadership is harder still.

  • It means doing your best with messy data.

  • It means listening to customers.

  • It means aligning with sales.

  • It means being accountable when the numbers do not move. Yet.

That work is slow. Unsexy. And rarely comes with a trophy or a pedestal.

So instead, some leaders reach for theatre.

  • They polish the brand while the engine misfires.

  • They talk transformation while sales squirm.

  • They chase awards while the team quietly burns out.

And when the cracks start to show, they do what they have always done.

  • Move on.

  • New role. New title. New narrative.

  • Eighteen months later, a golden goodbye and a fresh stage to perform on.

Champagne CMO is not really about one person. It is about a system that rewards confidence over competence, presentation over substance, and short term optics over long term value creation.

It is about how easy it is to look like a leader and how hard it is to actually be one.

The irony is that the best CMOs I have ever worked with look nothing like this:

  • They do not arrive with a rebrand. They arrive with a desire for context.

  • They do not lead with slogans. They lead with listening.

  • They do not chase every new trend. They make sure the boring foundations are in place.

They do not need champagne moments to feel important. They care far more about whether the business is healthier, the team is stronger, and the customer is better served than it was a year ago.

That is the quiet punchline of the song.

Real leadership does not need performance, a parade of buzzwords, or the most expensive bottle in the room.

It just needs to do the work.

How many Champagne CMOs could you name over a drink?

Listen to Champagne CMO on Marketing Mixtape

Rich Fitzmaurice in a surgical mask

Content and Communications

Social Influenza Is Real and Your Feed Has the Symptoms

Just when you were starting to forget what we all went through with Covid, there is a new perilous affliction going around.

It is not airborne. It is not seasonal. And sadly, it is not mild.

It spreads through feeds, comments, and connection requests. It presents itself as wisdom, vulnerability, and leadership. But once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it.

I call it Social Influenza. Listen to Social Influenza on the Marketing Mixtape

Mike Winnet identified the original strain with 'LinkedIn Influenza'. Consider this the musical remix. Same symptoms. Same behaviours. Same slightly embarrassing rash. Just with a bassline and an orchestral hit.

I wrote this song as a love letter to all the tiny, familiar behaviours we have somehow normalised on LinkedIn and in B2B marketing culture.

  • The humblebrag that starts with “People always ask me how…” when nobody has asked.

  • The 4am gym routine bros who seem to think we are impressed by their lack of sleep.

  • The stock sunrise. The fake struggle. The faux inspirational anecdote about a candidate on hard times who turns out to be the “best hire ever”, despite never existing.

  • The “Thrilled to announce” conference selfie where the only thing announced is a purchased ticket.

  • The one line. At. A. Time. Formatting that turns a basic thought into a scrolling hostage situation.

  • The all caps UNPOPULAR OPINION that is actually the safest opinion in the room.

  • The PDF gated behind 'Comment SEND IT' like it contains state secrets, rather than fifty slides of recycled frameworks

  • The instant DM pitch that arrives before the connection acceptance has even cooled.

  • The stolen viral posts, reheated and served again like yesterday’s chips.

None of this is new. None of it is evil. But all of it is mind numbing theatre masquerading as content and influence.

It is karaoke dressed up as the Grammys. Powered by a desperate need to be liked.

The joke is that most of us have probably done at least one of these things at some point. I certainly have. The line between sharing and showing off is thin. The line between useful and self indulgent is thinner still.

What worries me is not the behaviour itself. It is how easily we start to confuse noise with value.

  • One liners become thought leadership.

  • Engagement becomes evidence of impact.

  • Formatting becomes a strategy.

  • Virality becomes a proxy for truth.

And slowly, without meaning to, we train ourselves to perform rather than to think. To provoke reactions rather than to help people make better decisions. To optimise for the algorithm rather than for the human on the other side of the screen.

That is what the song is really poking at.

Not individuals. Not platforms. But a culture that rewards surface over substance and volume over depth. A culture where being seen can start to matter more than being useful.

Social Influenza resonates because it is recognisable. But it is also a small warning sign.

If everything is a personal brand moment, nothing is a real conversation.
If every post is a performance, nobody is listening.

Should you really be able to call yourself a thought leader if no one is actually being led.

I would love to be part of a wave that calls time on all of this.

Less performance. More real.
Less posing. More candour.
Less 'professionalism'. More human.
Less “Agree?” More you.

We are all hit with so much noise in our working lives. We should probably show a bit more respect for each other’s attention. We do not need to pretend to be anything other than ourselves.

And if you ever catch yourself typing “People always ask me how…”, maybe pause, smile, and check yourself before you wreck yourself. Don't let the influenza win.

Listen to Social Influenza on the Marketing Mixtape

A grafitti image of Rich Fitamzurice on a wall

ABM

How ABM helped me become a global CMO at 27

In 2008, around 80 percent of BT Global Services’ £8bn revenue came from just 20 percent of its accounts. Pareto’s law in full effect and a board that demanded evidence that marketing had a focus on it.

Neil Blakesley, the CMO, was under serious pressure. He needed something up and running quickly that would protect and grow share of wallet in those top accounts and, just as importantly, prove that marketing was delivering real commercial value.

Around that time, I started getting phone calls and voicemails from Nina Lees (nee Walker) asking whether I would leave my role leading marketing for the professional services sector and join her on an exciting, as yet unnamed, special project for Neil. At first, I hesitated. I was still early in my career and it felt like a big decision.

But Nina kept calling. Eventually she called in the big guns. I started getting calls from Neil himself and the Head of Sales too, plus a few BBMs for good measure (WhatsApp did not exist back then). I was not so much backed into a corner as firmly told this was a good move for me and an opportunity to shine.

They were right.

What I did not know at the time was that this decision would eventually lead to me keynoting an ITSMA event on ABM in Boston, meeting my wife there and eventually being named a global CMO at the age of 27. Serendipity.

I cannot promise ABM will be that life changing for you. Not everyone will be starting an ABM program inside a massive corporate like BT GS. But I do have plenty of scars, grey hairs and lessons that might help you.

Executive buy in matters more than anything
The biggest advantage I had was simple. ABM had a mandate from the very top. Most b2b marketers are not that lucky. Without senior backing, ABM becomes an uphill battle very quickly.

Budget follows belief
Because ABM was the CMO’s baby, budget was made available. It was not abundant. Headcount was being cut and everyone was under pressure. But whatever unallocated activity budget existed was pointed firmly in our direction. This is why executive buy in is not a nice to have. It is the difference between an idea and a programme.

Start as small as you can
BT GS had something called the T-400, the top 400 accounts globally. Far too many. We started ABM with the top 20 on a one to one basis. In hindsight, that was still too many and we probably should have tested a one to many approach first.

No amount of reading or conferences prepares you for reality. You will be building the plane whilst flying it. The fewer accounts you start with, the more you can do with limited budget and the faster you will learn what actually works in your organisation.

Account selection can make or break you
This one is critical. Pick the wrong accounts with the wrong account teams and your programme will stall immediately. Pick the right accounts with the right sales leadership and a willingness to work with marketing and you at least have a fighting chance.

In the early months, work with the people who want to work with you and want the program to succeed. Momentum matters more than perfection.

Selling ABM to sales should not be hard
Once you know which accounts you want to work on, ABM should sell itself. You are offering focused marketing support to help sales hit their targets and get paid. Most sales people will say yes instantly.

Some will not. If it feels like a hassle to them, move on. ABM does not work when it is forced.

Agencies can help you move faster
There is no shortage of agencies that specialise in ABM and they love it. The right partner brings pattern recognition, ideas from other companies and speed. They help marketing deliver visible things that sales teams and clients can actually see and feel.

From a resourcing point of view, they also let you scale quickly, often far quicker than you could internally. I benefited greatly from two agencies - one in the UK to help us design and manage the program and its platform and one in India to provide us the resources to execute it. It is far easier, and faster, to build teams using agencies than building an internal team, especially during a pilot.

Give sales real reasons to call
One of the biggest breakthroughs for us was uncovering genuine reasons to call our top accounts. My favourite example came from a conference in Brazil where a member of a client’s IT team casually mentioned, in Portuguese, on stage that he had decided to outsource part of his team.

Our ABM programme captured the session, transcribed it, translated it and triggered an alert to the sales team. That alert included supporting marketing materials, contact details and an offer to personalise further if needed.

Sales acted on it, gained traction, created an opportunity in CRM and told everyone about it. Suddenly, sales teams were proactively asking when they would be included in ABM. A perfect problem to communicate upwards.

Prove it works
For every ABM initiated or supported conversation, sales tagged the ABM campaign code. That discipline mattered. It allowed us to show that ABM accounts were creating more pipeline than non-ABM accounts and that velocity had increased.

Sales cycles were long, so revenue took time to land, but when it did, the correlation was undeniable.

Market ABM internally
In large organisations, momentum dies quickly if you do not actively promote what you are doing. Explain what ABM is, why it matters and how other teams can support it. As often as you can.

Data, insight, content, events and PR already exist around you. Use them. It makes your programme stronger and much harder to kill.

Align outside marketing
For me, alignment came through sales operations and their Account Development Plans. These were single truth documents covering where an account was today, where it wanted to go and how it would get there.

We embedded ABM into those plans, into the workshops and into the assessment criteria. Once ABM lives there, it becomes part of how the business plans growth.

Take creative risks
ABM gives you permission to be creative. You are influencing specific accounts, not anonymous audiences. With sales leadership on side, you can take risks.

We sent personalised video brochures to new clients. At the time, that felt futuristic. On the morning of a major pitch, we advertised BT GS along the client CIO’s commute, in the tube station, at the bus stop outside his office, on a billboard opposite and even in their internal magazine.

Did it directly win us the deal? No idea. But she noticed and we did win. On the biggest deals, marginal gains are worth chasing.

Use your clients to help you sell
If you have happy clients, involve them. In one case, we wanted to win a cyber security contract with company X. We introduced them to an existing cyber security client and arranged for the two CIOs to have dinner together without us in the room.

When our advocate debriefed us, he was honest. He did not tell the prospect that we were perfect. He talked about what we did well, where we could improve and, crucially, told them that when things went wrong, the BT GS team genuinely cared and went all in to fix it.

That mattered more than any slide deck or white paper.

After a year, ABM was materially contributing to pipeline; over $3bn of sales qualified pipeline with 32 percent converting, and sales were openly praising it, so budget stopped being a problem. We eventually rolled ABM out across the full Top 400 via developing different flavours across categories of accounts.

Then I got a call asking if I would be interested in becoming a global CMO.

At 27.

Shit.

I owe a huge amount to BT GS and to ABM. And these are just some of the lessons I learned along the way. I will share more in future, but if there is anything specific you would like me to go deeper on, just get in touch. If you would like an intro to the agencies that I would recommend you talk to today, just drop me a line.

CMO sitting at desk assessing briefs

Career

How to avoid common mistakes when writing a marketing brief?

Over the last few decades in numerous CMO roles, I have written, received, rewritten and quietly apologised for more marketing briefs than I care to remember. I have also been on the other side of the fence, receiving briefs so poor they make me wonder if the sender should be issuing a brief to help them write a brief.

A good brief is about clarity. It exists to remove ambiguity, so the people you want to pay to solve your problems are on the same page as you and set up to succeed, in a way that you and your team actually benefit from.

In b2b marketing, most briefs start with a decision that has already been made. A campaign is needed to launch a new product. The team has decided it is finally time for marketing automation. It is time to refresh the brand identity. Somebody wants to jump on the account based marketing train. Completely normal.

The brief is not there to pretend you are starting from scratch. It is there to explain the thinking behind the decision, what you need and why, what resources you have to play with, and how you will know an agency is the right one for you. If a brief is too bad, the perfect agency might even decline to pitch in the first place, so shooting yourself in the foot.

Most bad marketing briefs are not written by bad marketers. They are written by busy people trying to move things along.

The problem is that small mistakes at the briefing stage snowball. What starts as vagueness turns into guesswork. Guesswork turns into key people being on different pages. This could lead to shoddy work. And that turns into frustration on all sides.

Like all things, everyone has their own opinion. But here are the most common mistakes I see in b2b marketing briefs.

Mistake 1. Treating the brief like admin

This is the big one. When a brief is treated as something you have to get done, rather than something that helps you think, it shows. The language is vague. The logic is loose. Key decisions are missing.

Sometimes I get the impression people think the brief is just admin that will be put right in the face to face briefing. It is not. The brief is the one truth. It is the moment you decide what you actually want and explain it clearly enough for someone else to help. If you rush it, you will pay for that later in time, money and goodwill.

Mistake 2. Pretending some decisions have not been made

Many briefs dance around reality. The business already wants a campaign. Or a new brand identity. Or outside help. Or a new direction. But the brief is written as if everything is still up for debate.

This creates confusion immediately. Agencies do not know whether they are being asked to diagnose a problem or execute a solution. Be honest. If a decision has been made, state it clearly. You have 100% decided to use Sitecore over WordPress? Say so.

Clarity is not limiting. It is invaluable.

Mistake 3. Being vague about the problem

Briefs often describe what needs to be done without explaining why. We need more awareness. We need better leads. We need to stand out. None of this helps.

What is actually not working as it should. Where are things breaking down. What prompted this brief now. Without that context, people are forced to guess at the real problem and the work will drift.

Why not help agencies by giving them valuable context upfront. Do not rely on them asking the right questions. Give them the lowdown. Give them the inside track. Proactively.

Mistake 4. Asking the work to do too many things

If your brief has ten objectives, it has none. One brief should have one main job. You can include secondary goals, but you need to be clear about what matters most and what trumps everything else if time or resources get tight.

When everything is a priority, nothing is. This is how work ends up watered down and compromised. Focus is not a nice to have. It is what makes work effective.

Mistake 5. Defining success with buzzwords

Success is often described in language that sounds impressive but means very little. And as b2b marketing people, we can be the worst offenders. Best in class. Cutting edge. Market leading. These phrases do not give anyone something to aim for.

Describe success in plain English. What needs to happen for you to know this project has been successful. What about from your stakeholders’ perspective.

Ideally the metrics are quantifiable. At a minimum, they should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. If you cannot explain success clearly, you will struggle to recognise it when it happens, praise those who delivered it, or hold people and agencies accountable if it did not.

Mistake 6. Rubbish personas

Everyone is not a target audience. And neither is a rubbish persona.

I am generally alarmed at how bad b2b marketing people are at personas. I have seen personas cross my desk with entirely useless traits, like they have three kids, like skiing, reading books and eating Mars bars. That is a real example. It serves no purpose. It fools nobody. More importantly, it adds nothing to the brief or the outcome.

An agency will never know your customers as well as you do. Good personas help them make better decisions on your behalf. Focus on what matters. What job titles buy your services. What pressures are they under. What does success look like for them. What do they fear. What do they need to believe to choose you. What tools and processes do they live in. That is the sort of thing I want to see, not where they go on holiday.

Mistake 7. Listing features instead of benefits

Much like personas, b2b marketers people also struggle with value propositions.

Listing features, locations, or how many employees you have is not a value proposition. The best briefs articulate why prospective clients would be interested in your service and why. How will you help them be more successful. What challenges do you solve and how. What does that mean for them as a business and as an individual. Why should they choose you rather than a competitor.

Mistake 8. Hiding constraints until later

Budget, timelines, legal requirements, internal politics, technical limits. These things exist whether you write them down or not. Leaving them out of the brief does not make the work more creative. It just pushes the problem down the road.

Hiding the budget is often framed as being savvy. It rarely is. It just forces people to guess, then compromise decent ideas later when the budget inevitably comes out. That helps no one.

If you cannot share an exact budget, give a range. If you cannot talk about the politics, at least describe the internal perception you will need to overcome. If legal is normally extremely risk averse, flag it early. Give agencies a chance of charting a course through the maze.

Agencies can work within constraints. What they cannot do is plan around information they do not have. Put the reality on the table early. And yes, there are always ways to say the sensitive stuff without spelling it out. Come on. You are marketers. Be creative.

Mistake 9. Being unclear about what is fixed and what is flexible

Many briefs leave agencies guessing about where they can challenge you and where they cannot. Is the message locked. Is the channel fixed. Is the timeline immovable.

If everything feels fixed, you will get safe work. If nothing feels fixed, you will get confusion. A good brief separates non negotiables from areas where thinking is welcome.

Mistake 10. Forgetting to say how you will choose

If this is a pitch, one of the biggest mistakes is not explaining how decisions will be made. What matters most. Thinking or polish. Experience or fresh perspective. Chemistry or credentials. Who is involved.

When you do not say this, agencies pitch to whatever they think you secretly want. That rarely ends well. Being clear about how you will choose is basic fairness and improves the quality of responses dramatically.

Mistake 11. Not giving all agencies the same information

I have been a stakeholder in pitches where some agencies were given more information than others. I always call it out. It is not fair and it skews the outcome.

I once had a head of procurement ask me to answer a question from one agency during an RFP process. I was happy to do it, but only if the question and answer were shared with all bidding agencies. They pushed back and said the other agencies should ask better questions if they wanted the extra context.

I reject that thinking. The agency asking good questions is great but my team want the best outcome and we do not have time to play games. Share the information and get to a better result faster.

Mistake 12. Sending the brief and hoping for the best

A brief is not finished when you send the document. Writing it and briefing it are not the same thing. If you do not talk it through, answer questions and confirm shared understanding, you are leaving too much to chance.

Send the brief. Talk them through it. Be prepared to refine it. If you just email a brief, it is a waste of time. You will not get anyone’s best people or best thinking aligned to the brief. And from an agency point of view, I would not want to bid on anything for someone I have not had a conversation with. The best agencies will push back on this. That is one of the ways you spot them.

Mistake 13. Not considering compensating bidders for their time

This may be controversial and not every budget allows it, but I have compensated losing bidders for their time, even if it is a small but meaningful gesture.

Agencies spend real time and expertise responding to your brief. Creative agencies incur real costs. If your budget allows, recognise that. Even if you went in a different direction, you valued their thinking and it helped you get to the right decision. A simple gesture can leave the door open to work together in future, and it is the decent thing to do.

The simple rule that avoids most mistakes

If there is one rule I stick to, it is this. A good marketing brief should make it obvious what is being bought, why it exists, who it is for, what success looks like and how the work will be judged. If any of those are unclear, the brief is not ready yet.

Most briefing mistakes come from rushing, avoiding decisions, and treating the whole thing like an administrative task. Slow down. Decide properly. Write it clearly. It is one of the highest ROI things you can do in b2b marketing.

 

woman holding a large jigsaw piece

Fractional Marketing

Prove It Fast: The Fractional CMO Reality

They arrive mid-stream, often mid-problem, sometimes mid-crisis. The brief is rarely clean. The data is rarely complete. And the expectations, while often unspoken, are immediate. In fractional leadership, time is compressed and credibility is perishable.

This is the reality of modern fractional marketing, and it is reshaping what senior marketing leadership looks like.

Unlike their full-time counterparts, fractional CMOs don’t inherit the benefit of long-term belief. They are not afforded quarters to “get their feet under the desk” or months to build internal alliances. Instead, they are expected to demonstrate clarity, confidence and commercial impact almost on arrival. The implicit question hovering over every early meeting is simple: did we make the right call?

What clients are really buying when they engage a fractional CMO is not execution, nor even strategy in the traditional sense. They are buying certainty. They want someone who can look at a complex, often dysfunctional marketing engine and say, with conviction, what actually matters and what does not. Speed, in this context, is not about activity. It is about judgement.

This is where many fractional engagements falter. The temptation to prove value through motion is strong. Campaigns are launched. Frameworks are presented. Decks grow longer. But activity without direction rarely builds trust. In fact, it often does the opposite. Experienced leadership teams recognise noise when they see it.

What builds confidence early is pattern recognition. The ability to spot familiar failure modes quickly and articulate them clearly. Whether it is misaligned positioning, a bloated channel mix, or a conversion problem masquerading as a demand issue, the best fractional CMOs name the real problem before they attempt to solve it. That moment of recognition, when stakeholders feel seen and understood, is often the true starting point of influence.

Reframing is a particularly powerful tool in the fractional arsenal. When a new leader can restate a company’s challenge more accurately than it has been able to itself, credibility accelerates. It signals not just intelligence, but experience. It says: I’ve seen this before, and I know where it leads if left unchecked.

Early impact, however, is not about fixing everything. Fractional CMOs succeed when they create visible momentum in one meaningful area. A single commercial win, a clarified decision, a simplified process. Something tangible enough to be felt in the business, not just discussed in meetings. One clear improvement buys time, trust and space to tackle deeper structural issues.

Decision velocity is another underappreciated marker of fractional success. Organisations often engage fractional CMOs because they are stuck. Too many opinions, too much legacy thinking, too little conviction. When decisions start being made faster and with more confidence after a fractional leader arrives, value is being proven, even if the numbers have not yet fully caught up.

Communication plays an equally critical role. Fractional CMOs are constantly performing a balancing act: calm without complacency, urgency without panic. Overpromising erodes trust. Overexplaining does the same. What leadership teams respond to is clarity; what matters now, what can wait, and what simply should not be done at all.

Ultimately, the real measure of a successful fractional engagement emerges quietly. It is not found in dashboards or reports, but in absence. When leaders begin to wonder what would break if the fractional CMO were no longer there, the role has shifted from optional to essential.

Fractional marketing leadership is not about being helpful. It is about being decisive, credible and commercially sharp, quickly. It demands strong points of view, comfort with ambiguity and the confidence to lead without formal authority. Those who thrive in this model understand that proving it fast does not mean doing more. 

It means seeing more clearly, sooner.

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B2B Marketing United is where serious B2B marketers sharpen their edge, raise their standards, and drive real revenue impact.

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