I help owner-led industrial manufacturers find out, then build the system that keeps telling them. Twenty years of doing it from inside manufacturers. It starts with thirty days.
Two or three of those and you have a measurement problem worth addressing. Most of them and you are funding marketing on faith. That is a more common place to be than anyone admits at a conference, and it is fixable inside a year.
In most technical companies, marketing operates like a service desk, producing what sales asks for, while no one has built the connection between what marketing does and what the company sells. The reports describe activity. Almost none of it connects to revenue.
Most of that budget was committed before anyone wrote down what the money was supposed to accomplish. That's why the same spending survives from one year to the next. If nobody defines what the money is supposed to do, nobody can show that it failed. Nothing gets cut because nothing was ever required to prove that it worked.
Industrial and technical manufacturers with long sales cycles, between $15 million and $50 million in revenue, run by an owner, president or general manager, already spending real money on marketing, with no senior marketing leader in the building.
If you have a marketing director, you probably don't need me. That person should be doing this work. If you're still trying to prove that somebody will buy the product, I'm the wrong person. You have a sales problem before you have a marketing problem.
You have three other options, and each one costs something. Do nothing, and you approve the same budget next year without knowing what this one returned. Keep the agency and hope, and the agency keeps recommending campaigns, because campaigns are what agencies sell. Hire a marketing manager, and you get someone who can execute but cannot set direction, which is the gap you already have.
Four steps. The order does not change.
I audit the website for what search engines and AI assistants find when a buyer asks about the problems you solve, and for how the site is built underneath. Most industrial sites under-represent what the company can do. I audit the last year of marketing spend against what each dollar was supposed to produce. And I pull whatever performance data exists, the CRM, the analytics, the trade show leads, for anything that says what worked and what did not. You get a plain-language picture of where you stand, with the evidence attached.
Your current state next to twenty years of what works in technical B2B, and we pick the problems worth solving this year. Not all of them. The ones between you and revenue.
A working session with your leadership around one long-range goal, the kind that is uncomfortable to say out loud. We map what has to be true for that goal to hold, rate each piece as it stands today, and put a name next to every one. That map is the future state, and the rest of the year is measured against it.
Business rules first, so sales and marketing agree on what a lead is before a system encodes the definition. Then the CRM and marketing automation, configured to those rules instead of to vendor defaults. Then the workflows that carry a lead from first touch to a salesperson and back. Then a campaign structure, so every campaign is briefed, run and reported the same way.
More than a decade ago I ran global marketing for a commercial printing consumables manufacturer selling across six countries.
Where they were. A CRM every region used differently, and no way to say whether any of the marketing had produced an order.
What we fixed. Not the campaigns. There were no agreed definitions of a lead, a qualified lead, or an owned account, so every report answered a different question and none of them answered the one the CEO was asking.
What we built. Definitions first, signed by sales and marketing. The CRM rebuilt on those definitions and connected to marketing automation and the ERP, so activity, pipeline and lifecycle sat in one view. Campaigns last.
What it produced. Online lead generation up 120 percent. Sales-qualified leads up 280 percent. First-order ROI on marketing-sourced leads at 154 percent, which is the one to press on, because it is the only one measured in money. The systems are still running there today.
$8,000. The first two steps, done. A decision at the end that either of us can make.
You get the visibility audit with a correction file your web team, or an AI agent, can execute. You get the spend audit, every dollar classified against what it was supposed to produce. You get whatever the performance data says, in plain language.
You also get the one thing most companies have never written down. What you sell, who buys it, and why they choose you, agreed with your leadership and signed. Marketing is communicating who you are, what you do, and why your addressable market should care, and that document is where it starts.
And you get the list. The problems we agreed to solve, in the order we would solve them.
At day thirty we meet and decide, both of us, whether to continue. If either of us says no, you keep all of it and owe nothing further. Nobody has to call it a failure. If we go on, the year begins with the map. More on how that works.
$8,000 a month, months two through twelve. After month three, either of us can end it with thirty days' notice.
Month two is the map. Months three through twelve are the build, in the order above, with a monthly report drawn from the systems we configured and a monthly working session where you make the decisions the report raises.
By month ten you have next year's marketing plan and budget, built from the bottom up, with every line carrying a reason it exists. By month twelve it is documented and handed to named owners, and you decide whether a second year is worth paying for based on what the first one produced.
I execute what runs through systems. Configuring the CRM, building the workflows, correcting the website, producing content and reports through the stack we set up.
Work that needs hands, a camera, or a booth is not mine to execute. Trade shows, photography, video, print. I direct that inside the plan and the budget, and your team or your vendors perform it.
You should be able to explain where your marketing money goes and what you are getting for it.
You won't be able to trace every dollar of revenue back to a campaign. Marketing doesn't work that way. But you should know which programs influence pipeline, what leads are worth, where money is being wasted, and where another dollar is most likely to help.
I've spent twenty years in B2B manufacturing marketing, mostly inside companies that make complicated things for people who know considerably more about those things than I do. The consumables manufacturer above and the precision automation manufacturer where I lead global marketing now are where the last twelve of those years went.
I'm good at walking into a marketing function that has accumulated years of agencies, software, reports, habits and opinions, figuring out what matters, and turning it into something the business can manage.
I live in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. I'm a member of Vistage and the American Marketing Association.
$8,000, the first two steps done, and a decision at day thirty that either of us can make. If it's no, you keep the work.
Doug Jones