You spend real money on marketing. No one can tell you what it returns.
In a business with technical products and long sales cycles, that gap is normal. It does not mean your marketing people are bad at their jobs. It usually means nobody built the system that connects what marketing does to your sales results.
That is the work I've spent most of my career doing.
What this usually looks like
You approve a marketing budget every year. It funds trade shows, a website, an agency, some advertising in the trade press. The reports you get back are activity. Impressions, clicks, visits, badge scans. None of it connects back to revenue.
Ask where it all went and the honest answer is that nobody knows. Not because your team is weak, but because marketing runs as a service desk, producing what sales asks for, and no one has built the connection between what it does and what the company sells. Until you build that connection, you are mostly guessing.
Marketing isn't about activity. It's about communicating who you are, what you do, and why your addressable market should care.
How it works
$8,000 a month for twelve months, first month up front. If the first 30 days don't convince you, you get that month back and keep the audit.
Month one
I do three things before anyone produces anything.
I go through where your marketing money went over the last year. I work with whatever records you have, and what shape they're in usually tells me something on its own.
I also look at how your company shows up when someone asks ChatGPT, Google or another AI tool about the problems you solve. In most industrial companies, nobody has looked closely at this yet. The results tend to be pretty revealing.
Before we build anything, we agree on what you sell, who actually buys it, and why they choose you. It sounds obvious. It usually isn't.
At the end of the month, you will know what you're spending, where it's going, what is working, what I think should stop, and what I would do next.
After that
I run the function.
Your agency, vendors and budget start working against a plan instead of whatever request showed up most recently. I deal with the machinery. You get reporting you can actually use to make decisions.
Why the first month is refundable
Marketing is a long play, and it's probabilistic. Anyone who promises you a set number of leads by a set date is selling something other than marketing. I won't.
What I can stand behind is the work. Thirty days is enough for both of us to know whether I'm useful. If you don't feel like you're getting value, I don't want your money. You get the month back and keep everything I produced.
What you end up with
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.
At the precision automation company where I currently lead global marketing, we built an attribution model that connected marketing activity to $15.4 million in closed-won revenue in one year. More important, sales and marketing agreed on how it was measured.
I did similar work for a global industrial consumables manufacturer more than a decade ago. The system we built there is still running today.
Who this fits
This works best for industrial and technical B2B companies that are already spending meaningful money on marketing but don't have senior marketing leadership in-house.
If you're still trying to prove that somebody will buy the product, I'm probably the wrong person. You have a sales problem before you have a marketing problem.
About me
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.
I've led global marketing as a VP for a manufacturer operating in six countries, and I currently lead global marketing for a Pittsburgh precision automation company.
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 actually manage.
I live in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. I'm a member of Vistage and the American Marketing Association.
Start with the first 30 days
One month, $8,000. If we stop there, you keep the audit and the plan, and you'll know where your money goes and what to ask of whoever runs it next.