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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

Mar 14, 2026

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

Mar 10, 2026

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.

Mar 8, 2026

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.

Mar 2, 2026

6 min read

Author: John Coe

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.

Feb 9, 2026

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.’  

 

###

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

Mar 2, 2026

5 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

Jan 24, 2026

2 min read

Author: Lindsay Robertson

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.



Mar 2, 2026

5 min read

Author: Mark Choueke

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

Jan 31, 2026

3 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

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.

Feb 9, 2026

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.


Feb 7, 2026

4 min read

Author: Steve Kemish

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.

Jan 2, 2026

7 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

Most of us have met him. Or her. Or some version of them.

The leader who talks about culture, loyalty, and togetherness while displaying the most toxic of traits: narcissism and controlling behaviour.

The song I wrote 'Family (or else)' exaggerates it for effect, and I've pulled quite a few personal experiences together, from one guy in particular, but the pattern is very real and well documented.

Toxic leadership rarely announces itself as toxic. It dresses up as confidence, certainty, discipline, and “high standards”. It often hides behind language like:

  • We’re a family here

  • We’re all in this together

  • We need to reward loyalty

  • Now is not the time for dissent

On the surface it sounds warm. Underneath, it is a control mechanism.

Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard on psychological safety shows that teams only learn and improve when people feel safe to challenge, question, and admit problems. Google’s Project Aristotle found the same thing. Psychological safety was the single strongest predictor of high performing teams. Not talent. Not experience. Not seniority. Safety to speak.

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

The “Duchess of Doom” in the song is not just a cartoon villain. She represents a familiar leadership failure pattern.

First, insecurity masked as authority.
Leaders who surround themselves with yes people are not building high performing teams. They are building insulation. Research from McKinsey and others shows that teams with low cognitive diversity make weaker strategic decisions and miss market shifts more often. Agreement feels good. It just does not make you right.

You see it in commercial reviews where the forecast is clearly off but no one challenges it.
In meetings where bad news, or poor updates, are softened with forced enthusiasm so it does not upset the boss.
In everyday calls where people stay quiet for fear of being labelled “not on the bus”.

Second, 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. The number of webinars delivered. Anything except their own decisions. Blame becomes a shield.

Third, 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”. Edmondson’s work shows that when people believe honesty will be punished, they stop giving it. What remains is performative positivity and quiet disengagement.

Fourth, outdated thinking protected by power.
Leaders who cannot adapt often suppress challenge rather than update their worldview. Instead of learning, they double down. Instead of experimenting, they enforce obedience. The organisation freezes while the market moves, doing more of the same while telling itself it is being “productive”.

The most dangerous phrase in all of this is often said warmly:

“We’re a family.”

Real families argue. They challenge. They tell uncomfortable truths. What these workplaces often mean by “family” is something else entirely. Loyalty without reciprocity. Submission without safety. Gratitude instead of growth.

Gallup’s long running research is blunt. People do not leave companies. They leave managers. More specifically, they leave environments where they feel unheard, unsafe, and undervalued. The cost is not just emotional. It shows up in productivity, innovation, retention, and ultimately, revenue.

The commercial damage follows a familiar pattern:

  • The smartest people leave first

  • The most honest voices go quiet

  • Decisions get slower and worse

  • Strategy becomes theatre rather than reality

Toxic leaders rarely prepare successors, let alone ones who think differently. They promote people who look and sound like them. The behaviour and the blind spots replicate.

From the outside everything can look stable, especially if there is still some growth. From the inside, it is brittle.

There is a clear difference between strong leadership and fear based management.

Fear based leaders want agreement. Strong leaders want truth.
Fear based cultures reward loyalty. Healthy cultures reward contribution.
Fear based teams perform for optics. Healthy teams perform for outcomes.

The song captures the theatre of it. The bravado. The forced cheer. The nervous laughter when the leader asks, “We’re a family, right?”

The real lesson for anyone building or leading a team is simple and uncomfortable.

If you only put people around you who will not challenge you, you are protecting your blind spots.
If you punish bad news, you will only receive good lies.
If loyalty matters more than truth, performance will always be compromised.

Healthy organisations are not built on fear, flattery, or forced positivity. They are built on:

  • Psychological safety, where people can speak without risking their livelihood

  • Constructive conflict, where ideas are challenged but people are respected

  • Accountability, where leaders own results rather than explain them away

  • Adaptability, where being wrong is treated as data, not as treason

The real opposite of the Duchess in the song is not a softer leader. It is a braver one.

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

If everyone around you is nodding, ask yourself whether they agree or whether they are afraid.

Because the moment a leader needs constant obedience to feel safe, the team stops thinking and starts complying. People perform for approval rather than speak the truth. And when that happens, progress slows to a crawl.

It is the job of CEOs and CHROs to spot this and act. Far too often, though, they enable it via inaction or denial instead.

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

Jan 24, 2026

5 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

Reply All Apocalypse cd cover on lava

Career

The Most Dangerous Button in Your Inbox

We have all lived through some version of this:

  • A harmless email.

  • A global distribution list.

  • One accidental click.

And then the sound that haunts us all.
The PING that means it is already too late and the replies are on their way.

It is really quite funny to watch it unfold in real time. That is, unless you are the poor unfortunate who clicked send.

I wrote the song “Reply All Apocalypse” after hearing about someone accidentally emailing fifty thousand people about a lasagna left in the office kitchen. It is ridiculous. But it is also a perfect illustration of how one small, human mistake can expose just how fragile our communication systems and habits really are.

We have built incredibly powerful, frictionless tools and then handed them to humans who are distracted, rushed, emotional, and perfectly capable of clicking the wrong thing at the worst possible moment.

Because everything now moves at digital speed and digital scale, small errors no longer stay small.

They cascade.

  • One misplaced message becomes fifty thousand.

  • One well meaning correction becomes a storm.

  • One attempt to fix it makes it worse.

The Reply All Apocalypse is a perfect example of how scale amplifies behaviour.

It is not that people are stupid. It is that the systems we have woven into every part of working life are unforgiving.

Email was designed for one to one or small group communication. We now use it as a broadcast channel, a filing system, a task manager, a knowledge base, and a cultural backchannel. We have loaded it with responsibilities it was never designed to carry, and then we act surprised when it buckles.

There is also something deeply human in the way these storms unfold.

First comes confusion:

  • Why am I seeing this?

  • Who is this?

  • Is this meant for me?

Then irritation:

  • Please remove me.

  • Stop replying all.

Then the hero complex:

  • The person who thinks they will save everyone by telling everyone to stop.
    By replying all.

And finally, resignation:

  • Outlook freezing.

  • Servers groaning.

  • The slow realisation that the only way out is for everyone to stop at once, which of course never happens.

From a leadership and organisational point of view, these moments are small but revealing. They show how easily noise can drown out signal.

The original message, about a lasagna or anything else, becomes irrelevant within seconds. The system is now talking to itself. The thread becomes the story, not the substance.

There is a parallel here with much bigger moments in modern B2B.

  • One badly thought through internal announcement.

  • One campaign email sent before it is ready.

  • One vague change message that sparks a hundred anxious replies.

Suddenly people are no longer discussing the decision. They are discussing the confusion. The reaction loop becomes the event.

Reply All storms are a reminder that communication at scale has dynamics of its own. Momentum. Feedback loops. Unintended consequences.

Good marketing organisations design for that.

The real skill in a Reply All apocalypse is not typing faster. It is knowing when to do nothing.

  • To resist the urge to correct.

  • To resist the urge to be seen fixing it.

  • To resist the urge to add one more voice to the noise.

Sometimes the most professional thing you can do is close the thread and let the system calm itself down. To pause. To not let emotion and ego make a situation worse.

The song ends, as these stories usually do, with the quietest and most human moment.

Someone finally takes responsibility and puts their hand up.
The simple truth emerges from the rubble.

It is absurd. It is familiar. And it is a small, operatic reminder that in a world of instant, infinite distribution, the biggest disruptions are often caused by the tiniest clicks.

Listen to Reply All Apocalypse on Marketing Mixtape

Jan 24, 2026

3 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

table for ten album cover

Demand Generation

Table for Ten and the Truth About Marketing Awards

There is a moment every B2B marketer recognises.

The email arrives.
“Congratulations, you have been shortlisted…”

You have not submitted anything yet.
You have not paid the entry fee.
But somehow, you are already excellent.

I have even worked for organisations that were shortlisted and won awards for services we did not even provide. I blocked them.

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

Over the last twenty years, the number of business and marketing awards has exploded. Industry bodies, publishers, agencies, consultancies, and “communities” all run them. Categories multiply and get sillier every year. Entry fees rise. Sponsorship packages appear. Tables are sold. Shortlists get longer. Winners become more plentiful.

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

Excellence has become scalable.

The commercial model is not complicated.

  • Charge for entries.

  • Charge for sponsorship.

  • Don’t pay judges.

  • Sell tables.

  • Publish a press release for every winner.

  • Upsell webinars or publications to winners.

  • Encourage social sharing.

  • Offer early bird discounts for next year.

  • Repeat annually.

It has been a long time since awards were mainly about recognition. They are a revenue engine.

They are not designed around truth. They are designed around throughput.

More categories means more finalists.
More finalists means more tables.
More tables means more revenue.

Excellence has become a unit of sale.

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 collapsed. We all see it.

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

First, self reported performance.
Most entries are narratives, not audits. Impact is described, not verified. Judges rarely have access to raw data and almost never have the time to challenge it in depth. I agreed to judge one awards programme for B2B marketers and only did it once. We were constantly rushed to decide without properly interrogating any of the claims.

Second, 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 is inventory creation.

Third, pay to play dynamics.
Entry fees, sponsorship, and table purchases do not 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.

The song’s line about judges working for free is also worth highlighting. Most panels are unpaid, time poor, and asked to assess hundreds of submissions in compressed windows. Even with the best intentions, scrutiny becomes surface level.

Then comes the theatre.

  • The black tie.

  • The drum roll.

  • The host.

  • The lighting.

  • The word “prestigious” doing heroic work in every sentence.

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

Which leads to the uncomfortable 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. Demonstrable results matter.

Award logos barely register. Procurement might glance at them when comparing suppliers on large tenders, but experienced B2B buyers know the game.

Journalists know this too. Which is why most award press releases die quietly and quickly. They are not news. They are advertisements in narrative form, picked up only by automated newswires.

Internally, however, awards serve a different function.

  • They validate effort and pad out a CV.

  • They give younger team members something to celebrate.

  • They provide an excuse to get glammed up and have a night out.

  • They give leaders some “good news” to share.

  • They offer a morale moment in hard quarters.

There is nothing wrong with recognition. The problem starts when the symbol replaces the substance.

You see it in the Monday morning Slack message.
“Great job team, I’ll add it to the website and pitch deck.”

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.

That is why the Table for Ten lyric lands.

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, and increase your statistical odds.

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

Awards can be a byproduct of excellence.
They are a terrible substitute for it.

  • Enjoy the night.

  • Celebrate your team.

  • Clap for the winners.

  • Take the photo.

But be honest.

If your proudest slide is the awards slide, you should be worried.

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

And if your marketing success depends on trophies rather than customers, you are not building a brand.

You are renting applause.

Listen to Table for Ten on Marketing Mixtape

Jan 24, 2026

4 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

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

Jan 24, 2026

3 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

Every marketer knows the phrase.

Do more with less.

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

It gets framed as a motivational challenge. A test of creativity. A badge of honour.

In many Private Equity owned businesses, it is something else entirely.

It is a contradiction.

The song I wrote, “Six Months to an Exit”, dramatises a familiar scene. A CMO with a growth plan, a launch vision, a category story to build. And a board that listens, nods, studies the spreadsheet, and then says:

Can you just do the same as last year again.

But faster.

And cheaper.

And with a hockey stick on the end.

This tension is not personal. It is structural.

Private Equity firms are not buying companies to run them forever. They are buying them to sell them. Usually in three to five years. Often sooner. Their job is to improve valuation, and the cleanest lever for that is EBITDA to drive the exit multiple.

Revenue growth matters. But margin matters more.

Predictability matters more than experimentation.

Certainty beats ambition.

None of this is irrational. It is simply misaligned with how marketing actually works.

Marketing is an investment function, not a cost function. Brand, demand, trust, and reputation compound over time. They do not obey quarterly cycles. Yet PE time horizons are often shorter than the payback period of the very activities that create sustainable growth.

Hence the paradox.

  • We want a growth story for the exit deck.

  • But we do not want to fund the growth story.

  • We want a hockey stick.

  • But we want flat spend.

And when this logic meets reality, the internal battles begin.

  • Global marketing needs scale, consistency, and long term bets.

  • Regional leaders own P&L and are measured on this quarter’s number.

  • So they protect local budgets, resist central programmes, and block spend that does not show immediate regional ROI.

Everyone is acting rationally.
Collectively, the system becomes irrational.

Research on matrix organisations and PE backed structures shows that when incentives are misaligned, collaboration drops and political behaviour rises. Marketing stops being a growth engine and becomes a cost to defend or cut.

Then Q4 arrives.

  • The number is missed.

  • The CFO claws back budget.

  • The pipeline still needs filling.

  • Leads are still demanded.

  • But the fuel is removed.

The Head of Sales is probably polishing the CV, because they are often the first fall guy.

This is the purest form of the do more with less fantasy.

  • Can you protect the brand while cutting the voice.

  • Can you grow demand while freezing headcount.

  • Can you hit targets while stripping out the very activities that create them.

Short term, you can make it look like it works.

  • You can window dress.

  • You can push promotions.

  • You can burn the database.

  • You can overwork the team.

  • You can borrow from future quarters to save this one.

For a while, the numbers hold, helped by momentum from past investment. The story stays intact. The exit deck looks clean.

This is why the song talks about smoke and mirrors. It is not incompetence. It is incentives.

  • The buyer wants a smooth story.

  • The seller wants a clean multiple.

  • Management wants to survive the process.

Marketing, which lives in the long game, gets squeezed in the middle.

The tragedy is that the things that create real enterprise value are the first to be questioned.

  • Brand investment.

  • Category creation.

  • New product launches.

  • Modern infrastructure.

  • Senior talent.

They all make the P&L look worse before they make it better. Which makes them politically vulnerable in an environment obsessed with short term optics.

So what does “do more with less” usually mean in these contexts.

  • Not smarter.

  • Just harder.

  • Same expectations.

  • Fewer people.

  • Less budget.

  • More pressure.

And a growing gap between what the business says it wants and what it is willing to fund.

For CMOs operating in PE backed businesses, the job is not just marketing. It is translation.

  • Translating long term value into short term language.

  • Translating investment into risk mitigation.

  • Translating brand into future multiple.

And when you are asked to deliver a hockey stick on a flat budget, the only honest response is not blind compliance. It is clarity.

  • Here is what we can grow.

  • Here is what will stall.

  • Here is what we will be trading off.

  • Here is the risk we are taking, even if we would rather not say it out loud.

Because growth without investment is not strategy.

It is hope.

And hope does not show up in EBITDA.

Listen to Six Months to an Exit on Marketing Mixtape

Jan 24, 2026

4 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

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.

 

Jan 25, 2026

5 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

MarTech

Why Calling Anything Dead Is a Red Flag in B2B Marketing

Sometimes it feels like those in the b2b marketing sector have been in a hurry to write obituaries.

  • Cold calling is dead.

  • Direct mail is dead.

  • TV is dead.

  • Events are dead.

  • Physical is dead.

  • Human interruption is dead.

Digital only. Algorithm first. Everything else is noise.

I have even heard opening keynotes at conferences say it. Much to the chagrin of a couple of outbound calling agencies I know.

It was exactly this funeral march for “old” marketing that pushed me to write a song about it, 'Dead Men Dialling'. Because every time someone declares something dead in this industry, it usually means they have stopped looking closely enough to notice it still working.

It is a cheap and myopic thing for anyone in our profession to claim. The logic behind declaring everything that is not fashionable obsolete is flawed. We confused what is modern with what actually works. And we forgot a basic truth about how markets behave.

When something becomes easy, abundant, and cheap to produce, it loses impact. When something becomes rarer and requires real effort, it starts to stand out.

Marketing is not a software problem, it is an attention problem. And people notice what feels different, not what is easiest to generate.

Look at the environment we have created.

  • Inbox zero is a fantasy.

  • LinkedIn is an echo chamber of recycled thinking and recycled language.

  • Programmatic ads chase each other down the page.

  • AI has turned “good enough” into a factory setting.

Scale is no longer the edge. Being indistinguishable is the risk.

And in a market full of identical digital output, anything that feels physical, human, or effortful suddenly cuts through. And that’s what all b2b marketers should be aiming for. To cut through.

That is why the so-called dead tactics are not dead at all. They are being used by the people who refuse to run their entire go to market through the same pipes as everyone else.

  • A physical letter on a desk now gets more attention than another unread email.

  • A real phone call lands differently in a world of automation.

  • A proper conversation at an event carries more weight than another video meeting.

  • A TV ad that builds memory does more than a million forgettable impressions.

Not because these things are nostalgic. Because they are now unusual.

I’ve seen proof of this in real life:

  • A Sales Development Rep who finally got a meeting because they sent something physical to get the attention of a prospect that had long ignored their other outreach attempts.

  • A CMO who admitted their best lead of the quarter came from a chance conversation at a trade show.

  • A founder who said the deal that mattered most started with a phone call and then dinner, not an email campaign.  

For years we were told that efficiency was everything. That friction was the enemy. That faster and cheaper automatically meant better.

But meaning does not come from speed, credibility does not come from automation and trust does not come from convenience.

Digital did not kill the old channels. But digital has made itself ordinary.

  • Performance marketing has become a tax, not an advantage. It often feels like selling pounds for pennies.

  • Reach is everywhere. Distinctiveness is not.

  • Click through rates barely move the needle.

  • Algorithms change. Costs rise. Margins get squeezed.

Meanwhile, brand, memory, physical presence, and human contact are quietly becoming the real sources of advantage again.

Not because they are new but because they are harder to implement without effort.

  • Hard to automate.

  • Hard to scale without care.

  • Hard to do badly without being noticed.

What is really happening is simple.

Everything is now fast, cheap, and easy to ignore. So the things that stand out are the ones that feel like someone actually bothered.

A real voice on the phone feels different because most contact is templated. A physical object feels different because everything else lives on a screen. Being in the same room feels different because so much interaction has become weightless.

Not because these things are romantic or retro. Because they require effort. And effort is still the clearest signal of intent we have.

The mistake was thinking progress meant replacement.

It does not. It means rebalancing. Markets are human systems, not just data systems. And humans do not respond to abundance. They respond to contrast.

So the so-called dead tactics are not coming back because they were misunderstood.

They are resurfacing because the environment has changed.

They called it a graveyard. What it really was, was a misdiagnosis.

The old guard did not die.

They were waiting for the moment when being human became the competitive advantage again.

 

Jan 24, 2026

4 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.

Jan 1, 2026

3 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.

 

Dec 30, 2025

9 min read

Author: Rich Fitzmaurice

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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.

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.

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.’  

 

###

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

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

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.



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

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.


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.

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

Most of us have met him. Or her. Or some version of them.

The leader who talks about culture, loyalty, and togetherness while displaying the most toxic of traits: narcissism and controlling behaviour.

The song I wrote 'Family (or else)' exaggerates it for effect, and I've pulled quite a few personal experiences together, from one guy in particular, but the pattern is very real and well documented.

Toxic leadership rarely announces itself as toxic. It dresses up as confidence, certainty, discipline, and “high standards”. It often hides behind language like:

  • We’re a family here

  • We’re all in this together

  • We need to reward loyalty

  • Now is not the time for dissent

On the surface it sounds warm. Underneath, it is a control mechanism.

Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard on psychological safety shows that teams only learn and improve when people feel safe to challenge, question, and admit problems. Google’s Project Aristotle found the same thing. Psychological safety was the single strongest predictor of high performing teams. Not talent. Not experience. Not seniority. Safety to speak.

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

The “Duchess of Doom” in the song is not just a cartoon villain. She represents a familiar leadership failure pattern.

First, insecurity masked as authority.
Leaders who surround themselves with yes people are not building high performing teams. They are building insulation. Research from McKinsey and others shows that teams with low cognitive diversity make weaker strategic decisions and miss market shifts more often. Agreement feels good. It just does not make you right.

You see it in commercial reviews where the forecast is clearly off but no one challenges it.
In meetings where bad news, or poor updates, are softened with forced enthusiasm so it does not upset the boss.
In everyday calls where people stay quiet for fear of being labelled “not on the bus”.

Second, 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. The number of webinars delivered. Anything except their own decisions. Blame becomes a shield.

Third, 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”. Edmondson’s work shows that when people believe honesty will be punished, they stop giving it. What remains is performative positivity and quiet disengagement.

Fourth, outdated thinking protected by power.
Leaders who cannot adapt often suppress challenge rather than update their worldview. Instead of learning, they double down. Instead of experimenting, they enforce obedience. The organisation freezes while the market moves, doing more of the same while telling itself it is being “productive”.

The most dangerous phrase in all of this is often said warmly:

“We’re a family.”

Real families argue. They challenge. They tell uncomfortable truths. What these workplaces often mean by “family” is something else entirely. Loyalty without reciprocity. Submission without safety. Gratitude instead of growth.

Gallup’s long running research is blunt. People do not leave companies. They leave managers. More specifically, they leave environments where they feel unheard, unsafe, and undervalued. The cost is not just emotional. It shows up in productivity, innovation, retention, and ultimately, revenue.

The commercial damage follows a familiar pattern:

  • The smartest people leave first

  • The most honest voices go quiet

  • Decisions get slower and worse

  • Strategy becomes theatre rather than reality

Toxic leaders rarely prepare successors, let alone ones who think differently. They promote people who look and sound like them. The behaviour and the blind spots replicate.

From the outside everything can look stable, especially if there is still some growth. From the inside, it is brittle.

There is a clear difference between strong leadership and fear based management.

Fear based leaders want agreement. Strong leaders want truth.
Fear based cultures reward loyalty. Healthy cultures reward contribution.
Fear based teams perform for optics. Healthy teams perform for outcomes.

The song captures the theatre of it. The bravado. The forced cheer. The nervous laughter when the leader asks, “We’re a family, right?”

The real lesson for anyone building or leading a team is simple and uncomfortable.

If you only put people around you who will not challenge you, you are protecting your blind spots.
If you punish bad news, you will only receive good lies.
If loyalty matters more than truth, performance will always be compromised.

Healthy organisations are not built on fear, flattery, or forced positivity. They are built on:

  • Psychological safety, where people can speak without risking their livelihood

  • Constructive conflict, where ideas are challenged but people are respected

  • Accountability, where leaders own results rather than explain them away

  • Adaptability, where being wrong is treated as data, not as treason

The real opposite of the Duchess in the song is not a softer leader. It is a braver one.

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

If everyone around you is nodding, ask yourself whether they agree or whether they are afraid.

Because the moment a leader needs constant obedience to feel safe, the team stops thinking and starts complying. People perform for approval rather than speak the truth. And when that happens, progress slows to a crawl.

It is the job of CEOs and CHROs to spot this and act. Far too often, though, they enable it via inaction or denial instead.

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

Reply All Apocalypse cd cover on lava

Career

The Most Dangerous Button in Your Inbox

We have all lived through some version of this:

  • A harmless email.

  • A global distribution list.

  • One accidental click.

And then the sound that haunts us all.
The PING that means it is already too late and the replies are on their way.

It is really quite funny to watch it unfold in real time. That is, unless you are the poor unfortunate who clicked send.

I wrote the song “Reply All Apocalypse” after hearing about someone accidentally emailing fifty thousand people about a lasagna left in the office kitchen. It is ridiculous. But it is also a perfect illustration of how one small, human mistake can expose just how fragile our communication systems and habits really are.

We have built incredibly powerful, frictionless tools and then handed them to humans who are distracted, rushed, emotional, and perfectly capable of clicking the wrong thing at the worst possible moment.

Because everything now moves at digital speed and digital scale, small errors no longer stay small.

They cascade.

  • One misplaced message becomes fifty thousand.

  • One well meaning correction becomes a storm.

  • One attempt to fix it makes it worse.

The Reply All Apocalypse is a perfect example of how scale amplifies behaviour.

It is not that people are stupid. It is that the systems we have woven into every part of working life are unforgiving.

Email was designed for one to one or small group communication. We now use it as a broadcast channel, a filing system, a task manager, a knowledge base, and a cultural backchannel. We have loaded it with responsibilities it was never designed to carry, and then we act surprised when it buckles.

There is also something deeply human in the way these storms unfold.

First comes confusion:

  • Why am I seeing this?

  • Who is this?

  • Is this meant for me?

Then irritation:

  • Please remove me.

  • Stop replying all.

Then the hero complex:

  • The person who thinks they will save everyone by telling everyone to stop.
    By replying all.

And finally, resignation:

  • Outlook freezing.

  • Servers groaning.

  • The slow realisation that the only way out is for everyone to stop at once, which of course never happens.

From a leadership and organisational point of view, these moments are small but revealing. They show how easily noise can drown out signal.

The original message, about a lasagna or anything else, becomes irrelevant within seconds. The system is now talking to itself. The thread becomes the story, not the substance.

There is a parallel here with much bigger moments in modern B2B.

  • One badly thought through internal announcement.

  • One campaign email sent before it is ready.

  • One vague change message that sparks a hundred anxious replies.

Suddenly people are no longer discussing the decision. They are discussing the confusion. The reaction loop becomes the event.

Reply All storms are a reminder that communication at scale has dynamics of its own. Momentum. Feedback loops. Unintended consequences.

Good marketing organisations design for that.

The real skill in a Reply All apocalypse is not typing faster. It is knowing when to do nothing.

  • To resist the urge to correct.

  • To resist the urge to be seen fixing it.

  • To resist the urge to add one more voice to the noise.

Sometimes the most professional thing you can do is close the thread and let the system calm itself down. To pause. To not let emotion and ego make a situation worse.

The song ends, as these stories usually do, with the quietest and most human moment.

Someone finally takes responsibility and puts their hand up.
The simple truth emerges from the rubble.

It is absurd. It is familiar. And it is a small, operatic reminder that in a world of instant, infinite distribution, the biggest disruptions are often caused by the tiniest clicks.

Listen to Reply All Apocalypse on Marketing Mixtape

table for ten album cover

Demand Generation

Table for Ten and the Truth About Marketing Awards

There is a moment every B2B marketer recognises.

The email arrives.
“Congratulations, you have been shortlisted…”

You have not submitted anything yet.
You have not paid the entry fee.
But somehow, you are already excellent.

I have even worked for organisations that were shortlisted and won awards for services we did not even provide. I blocked them.

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

Over the last twenty years, the number of business and marketing awards has exploded. Industry bodies, publishers, agencies, consultancies, and “communities” all run them. Categories multiply and get sillier every year. Entry fees rise. Sponsorship packages appear. Tables are sold. Shortlists get longer. Winners become more plentiful.

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

Excellence has become scalable.

The commercial model is not complicated.

  • Charge for entries.

  • Charge for sponsorship.

  • Don’t pay judges.

  • Sell tables.

  • Publish a press release for every winner.

  • Upsell webinars or publications to winners.

  • Encourage social sharing.

  • Offer early bird discounts for next year.

  • Repeat annually.

It has been a long time since awards were mainly about recognition. They are a revenue engine.

They are not designed around truth. They are designed around throughput.

More categories means more finalists.
More finalists means more tables.
More tables means more revenue.

Excellence has become a unit of sale.

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 collapsed. We all see it.

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

First, self reported performance.
Most entries are narratives, not audits. Impact is described, not verified. Judges rarely have access to raw data and almost never have the time to challenge it in depth. I agreed to judge one awards programme for B2B marketers and only did it once. We were constantly rushed to decide without properly interrogating any of the claims.

Second, 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 is inventory creation.

Third, pay to play dynamics.
Entry fees, sponsorship, and table purchases do not 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.

The song’s line about judges working for free is also worth highlighting. Most panels are unpaid, time poor, and asked to assess hundreds of submissions in compressed windows. Even with the best intentions, scrutiny becomes surface level.

Then comes the theatre.

  • The black tie.

  • The drum roll.

  • The host.

  • The lighting.

  • The word “prestigious” doing heroic work in every sentence.

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

Which leads to the uncomfortable 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. Demonstrable results matter.

Award logos barely register. Procurement might glance at them when comparing suppliers on large tenders, but experienced B2B buyers know the game.

Journalists know this too. Which is why most award press releases die quietly and quickly. They are not news. They are advertisements in narrative form, picked up only by automated newswires.

Internally, however, awards serve a different function.

  • They validate effort and pad out a CV.

  • They give younger team members something to celebrate.

  • They provide an excuse to get glammed up and have a night out.

  • They give leaders some “good news” to share.

  • They offer a morale moment in hard quarters.

There is nothing wrong with recognition. The problem starts when the symbol replaces the substance.

You see it in the Monday morning Slack message.
“Great job team, I’ll add it to the website and pitch deck.”

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.

That is why the Table for Ten lyric lands.

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, and increase your statistical odds.

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

Awards can be a byproduct of excellence.
They are a terrible substitute for it.

  • Enjoy the night.

  • Celebrate your team.

  • Clap for the winners.

  • Take the photo.

But be honest.

If your proudest slide is the awards slide, you should be worried.

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

And if your marketing success depends on trophies rather than customers, you are not building a brand.

You are renting applause.

Listen to Table for Ten 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

man on his knees begging for money froma. cfo

Demand Generation

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

Every marketer knows the phrase.

Do more with less.

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

It gets framed as a motivational challenge. A test of creativity. A badge of honour.

In many Private Equity owned businesses, it is something else entirely.

It is a contradiction.

The song I wrote, “Six Months to an Exit”, dramatises a familiar scene. A CMO with a growth plan, a launch vision, a category story to build. And a board that listens, nods, studies the spreadsheet, and then says:

Can you just do the same as last year again.

But faster.

And cheaper.

And with a hockey stick on the end.

This tension is not personal. It is structural.

Private Equity firms are not buying companies to run them forever. They are buying them to sell them. Usually in three to five years. Often sooner. Their job is to improve valuation, and the cleanest lever for that is EBITDA to drive the exit multiple.

Revenue growth matters. But margin matters more.

Predictability matters more than experimentation.

Certainty beats ambition.

None of this is irrational. It is simply misaligned with how marketing actually works.

Marketing is an investment function, not a cost function. Brand, demand, trust, and reputation compound over time. They do not obey quarterly cycles. Yet PE time horizons are often shorter than the payback period of the very activities that create sustainable growth.

Hence the paradox.

  • We want a growth story for the exit deck.

  • But we do not want to fund the growth story.

  • We want a hockey stick.

  • But we want flat spend.

And when this logic meets reality, the internal battles begin.

  • Global marketing needs scale, consistency, and long term bets.

  • Regional leaders own P&L and are measured on this quarter’s number.

  • So they protect local budgets, resist central programmes, and block spend that does not show immediate regional ROI.

Everyone is acting rationally.
Collectively, the system becomes irrational.

Research on matrix organisations and PE backed structures shows that when incentives are misaligned, collaboration drops and political behaviour rises. Marketing stops being a growth engine and becomes a cost to defend or cut.

Then Q4 arrives.

  • The number is missed.

  • The CFO claws back budget.

  • The pipeline still needs filling.

  • Leads are still demanded.

  • But the fuel is removed.

The Head of Sales is probably polishing the CV, because they are often the first fall guy.

This is the purest form of the do more with less fantasy.

  • Can you protect the brand while cutting the voice.

  • Can you grow demand while freezing headcount.

  • Can you hit targets while stripping out the very activities that create them.

Short term, you can make it look like it works.

  • You can window dress.

  • You can push promotions.

  • You can burn the database.

  • You can overwork the team.

  • You can borrow from future quarters to save this one.

For a while, the numbers hold, helped by momentum from past investment. The story stays intact. The exit deck looks clean.

This is why the song talks about smoke and mirrors. It is not incompetence. It is incentives.

  • The buyer wants a smooth story.

  • The seller wants a clean multiple.

  • Management wants to survive the process.

Marketing, which lives in the long game, gets squeezed in the middle.

The tragedy is that the things that create real enterprise value are the first to be questioned.

  • Brand investment.

  • Category creation.

  • New product launches.

  • Modern infrastructure.

  • Senior talent.

They all make the P&L look worse before they make it better. Which makes them politically vulnerable in an environment obsessed with short term optics.

So what does “do more with less” usually mean in these contexts.

  • Not smarter.

  • Just harder.

  • Same expectations.

  • Fewer people.

  • Less budget.

  • More pressure.

And a growing gap between what the business says it wants and what it is willing to fund.

For CMOs operating in PE backed businesses, the job is not just marketing. It is translation.

  • Translating long term value into short term language.

  • Translating investment into risk mitigation.

  • Translating brand into future multiple.

And when you are asked to deliver a hockey stick on a flat budget, the only honest response is not blind compliance. It is clarity.

  • Here is what we can grow.

  • Here is what will stall.

  • Here is what we will be trading off.

  • Here is the risk we are taking, even if we would rather not say it out loud.

Because growth without investment is not strategy.

It is hope.

And hope does not show up in EBITDA.

Listen to Six Months to an Exit on Marketing Mixtape

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.

 

MarTech

Why Calling Anything Dead Is a Red Flag in B2B Marketing

Sometimes it feels like those in the b2b marketing sector have been in a hurry to write obituaries.

  • Cold calling is dead.

  • Direct mail is dead.

  • TV is dead.

  • Events are dead.

  • Physical is dead.

  • Human interruption is dead.

Digital only. Algorithm first. Everything else is noise.

I have even heard opening keynotes at conferences say it. Much to the chagrin of a couple of outbound calling agencies I know.

It was exactly this funeral march for “old” marketing that pushed me to write a song about it, 'Dead Men Dialling'. Because every time someone declares something dead in this industry, it usually means they have stopped looking closely enough to notice it still working.

It is a cheap and myopic thing for anyone in our profession to claim. The logic behind declaring everything that is not fashionable obsolete is flawed. We confused what is modern with what actually works. And we forgot a basic truth about how markets behave.

When something becomes easy, abundant, and cheap to produce, it loses impact. When something becomes rarer and requires real effort, it starts to stand out.

Marketing is not a software problem, it is an attention problem. And people notice what feels different, not what is easiest to generate.

Look at the environment we have created.

  • Inbox zero is a fantasy.

  • LinkedIn is an echo chamber of recycled thinking and recycled language.

  • Programmatic ads chase each other down the page.

  • AI has turned “good enough” into a factory setting.

Scale is no longer the edge. Being indistinguishable is the risk.

And in a market full of identical digital output, anything that feels physical, human, or effortful suddenly cuts through. And that’s what all b2b marketers should be aiming for. To cut through.

That is why the so-called dead tactics are not dead at all. They are being used by the people who refuse to run their entire go to market through the same pipes as everyone else.

  • A physical letter on a desk now gets more attention than another unread email.

  • A real phone call lands differently in a world of automation.

  • A proper conversation at an event carries more weight than another video meeting.

  • A TV ad that builds memory does more than a million forgettable impressions.

Not because these things are nostalgic. Because they are now unusual.

I’ve seen proof of this in real life:

  • A Sales Development Rep who finally got a meeting because they sent something physical to get the attention of a prospect that had long ignored their other outreach attempts.

  • A CMO who admitted their best lead of the quarter came from a chance conversation at a trade show.

  • A founder who said the deal that mattered most started with a phone call and then dinner, not an email campaign.  

For years we were told that efficiency was everything. That friction was the enemy. That faster and cheaper automatically meant better.

But meaning does not come from speed, credibility does not come from automation and trust does not come from convenience.

Digital did not kill the old channels. But digital has made itself ordinary.

  • Performance marketing has become a tax, not an advantage. It often feels like selling pounds for pennies.

  • Reach is everywhere. Distinctiveness is not.

  • Click through rates barely move the needle.

  • Algorithms change. Costs rise. Margins get squeezed.

Meanwhile, brand, memory, physical presence, and human contact are quietly becoming the real sources of advantage again.

Not because they are new but because they are harder to implement without effort.

  • Hard to automate.

  • Hard to scale without care.

  • Hard to do badly without being noticed.

What is really happening is simple.

Everything is now fast, cheap, and easy to ignore. So the things that stand out are the ones that feel like someone actually bothered.

A real voice on the phone feels different because most contact is templated. A physical object feels different because everything else lives on a screen. Being in the same room feels different because so much interaction has become weightless.

Not because these things are romantic or retro. Because they require effort. And effort is still the clearest signal of intent we have.

The mistake was thinking progress meant replacement.

It does not. It means rebalancing. Markets are human systems, not just data systems. And humans do not respond to abundance. They respond to contrast.

So the so-called dead tactics are not coming back because they were misunderstood.

They are resurfacing because the environment has changed.

They called it a graveyard. What it really was, was a misdiagnosis.

The old guard did not die.

They were waiting for the moment when being human became the competitive advantage again.

 

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.

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.

 

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