That's how marketing ends up as a service desk, measured on whichever closed deals it can claim. I've spent twenty years in B2B marketing. This is how I think it should work, and what I build to make it work.
Marketing exists so the companies that could buy from you know who you are, and believe you understand their problems well enough to solve them. That's an awareness problem. It takes time.
Supporting sales is one result of that work. When marketing spends its week producing whatever sales asks for, the rest of the market never hears from you.
So marketing should own its strategy and share commercial leadership with sales. That can mean two equal seats, or one commercial leader who weighs them equally. Most companies don't set it up that way, and I think it's because nobody has shown them what marketing would do with the seat.
Marketing should carry a pipeline target, meaning the opportunities it puts in front of sales. That number sits inside marketing's control, and it tells you what to do next.
Closed revenue is the wrong test when the sales cycle is long. Too many things decide whether a deal closes, and a number marketing can't act on doesn't direct anything.
Awareness needs a denominator. Most companies can't say how many companies could buy from them, so there's nothing to measure reach against, and attribution fills the gap. Counting that market is the first thing I'd do. Here's how I'd count it in the first 90 days.
I get hired when something has to change. I write the business rules a company runs on, then build the systems that keep them in place after I stop watching.
At Apex International, a global printing consumables manufacturer, sales and marketing had no agreed definition of a lead, a qualified lead or an owned account. We settled those first and signed them. Then I brought in HubSpot, connected it to Salesforce and the ERP, and hired the agency that still does the work. Sales-qualified leads rose 280 percent. Six years after I left, the systems and the agency are still there.
I lock onto a problem and work it until it's most of the way solved. AI lets me put a working version in front of people before an approval cycle would finish, so the idea shows up with evidence attached.
The one I can show you publicly is my own. I built an audit that checks what ChatGPT and Perplexity tell a buyer about a business. It crawls the site, asks the questions a customer would ask, tests what comes back, and writes a plain-language report with the fixes. It's for sale to small businesses at Hey, I Know a Guy.
Most private companies can't say how many companies could buy from them. Here's how I'd produce that number in one quarter, with an error band.
Twenty years in B2B marketing, most of it inside companies that make complicated things for people who know more about those things than I do. I lead global marketing for a precision motion control and automation manufacturer in Pittsburgh. Before that, Apex International, WESCO Distribution and Office Depot.
I live in Sewickley, outside Pittsburgh. I'm a member of Vistage and the American Marketing Association.
If this is how you want marketing to work where you are, I'd like to talk.
Doug Jones