B2B marketing · ICP, demand generation, pipeline measurement
B2B marketing is judged on a timescale it cannot control. A deal that closes this quarter was influenced eighteen months ago by something no report will ever attribute correctly.
The work is building a marketing function that can show its contribution honestly, generate demand rather than only harvest it, and hand sales something worth their time.
Experience includes
The symptoms look like a marketing performance problem. Most of them are an alignment or measurement problem.
Which accounts are worth pursuing, derived from won, lost and churned deals rather than from aspiration.
What you claim against the alternatives buyers actually consider — including doing nothing, which is the most common competitor.
Programmes that create demand as well as capture it, with each held to the metric appropriate to its job.
Agreed definitions of MQL and SQL, and a handoff both sides have signed off.
Why it matters: this single ambiguity causes more friction than any campaign decision.
Source-to-closed-deal reporting, with the limits of attribution stated rather than hidden.
A feedback loop where lead quality is discussed with evidence instead of in a monthly complaint.
Marketing can defend its budget with pipeline rather than with impressions.
Lead quality becomes improvable, because it is finally defined.
Long-cycle activity stops being cancelled for failing a short-cycle metric.
Directional. Cycle length and deal value are properties of your market, not outcomes I can promise to change.
01
Input: CRM history for won, lost and churned deals.
Output: an ICP grounded in outcomes.
02
Action: get marketing and sales to agree what a qualified lead is, in writing.
Output: a shared target.
03
Action: programmes matched to buying stage across paid, content and outbound support.
Output: demand that is created, not only captured.
04
Action: tracking from source through to closed revenue.
Output: a contribution story that survives scrutiny.
05
Action: a standing review of lead quality with evidence.
Output: quality that improves rather than gets argued about.
Almost every B2B engagement I join has an unresolved argument about lead quality, and almost none of them have a written definition of a qualified lead that both teams accept.
Until that exists, marketing optimises toward volume because volume is what it is measured on, and sales discounts everything marketing sends. Fixing the definition changes more than changing the targeting does.
Yes. The measurement work is mostly configuration and definition rather than replacement.
I work on how marketing supports outbound — targeting, messaging and data — rather than running an SDR function.
With leading indicators that have been validated against closed revenue, and by being honest that in-period attribution cannot carry the full story.
That disagreement is the engagement. It gets resolved with pipeline evidence rather than by picking a side.
If the marketing budget is defended with activity metrics every quarter, the problem is measurement before it is performance.