I sat across from a CEO last year who told me, with real frustration in his voice, that he’d spent over $200,000 on marketing in the previous eighteen months and had almost nothing to show for it.

He’d hired an agency. They built a website. They ran campaigns. They posted on social. His sales team said the leads were weak. His marketing people said they were doing exactly what was asked. And he was ready to conclude that marketing simply didn’t work for his type of business.

I hear some version of this story almost every time I sit down with a new client. The details change — different industry, different spend, different agency — but the frustration is always the same. And in almost every case, the conclusion is wrong.

The problem is rarely marketing. It’s what happens, or doesn’t happen, before marketing begins.

The Assumption No One Realises They’re Making

CEOs, sales leaders, and engineers are exceptional at what they do. They operate in environments where cause and effect are clear. Engineering decisions can be tested. Sales pipelines can be reviewed. Operational issues can be traced and corrected.

So when it comes to marketing, there’s a natural assumption: we understand our business, our product is strong, our people are smart, marketing should be able to figure it out from there.

It sounds reasonable. But it’s the exact point where things start to go sideways.

When I ask leadership teams how their website is actually supposed to generate qualified leads, not traffic, not clicks, but real opportunities for the sales team, I regularly hear some version of: “I don’t really understand how that works.” And these are sharp, accomplished people. This isn’t a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of clarity about what marketing has actually been asked to do.

What Has to Be Decided Before Marketing Can Perform

For marketing to contribute meaningfully to growth, leadership has to make a small number of foundational decisions first. Not marketing decisions. Business decisions.

Which markets and buyer types matter right now, and which ones don’t. What the company wants to be known for before it expects to be chosen. What proof already exists to support that positioning. And how sales is meant to engage once interest is created.

These sound straightforward. In practice, they’re the decisions that get skipped, deferred, or assumed to be obvious when they’re not.

I worked with a technical services company a few years ago that had grown to about $8 million on the strength of their CEO’s relationships and their engineering team’s reputation. Exceptional people. When we sat down to build their marketing strategy, I asked who their ideal client was. The CEO said “anyone who needs what we do.” The VP of Sales said “mid-market industrial.” The lead engineer said “the people who appreciate the complexity of our work.” Three leaders, three completely different answers. And they’d been running marketing for two years without ever reconciling that.

That’s not a marketing problem. That’s a leadership alignment problem. And no amount of campaigns, content, or spend will fix it.

Why Doing More Marketing Usually Makes It Worse

Here’s where it gets painful.

When results are underwhelming, the instinct is to do more. More web pages. More posts. More campaigns. More activity, more frequently, across more channels. The thinking is that volume will eventually create clarity.

It almost never does.

A website cannot convert visitors into leads if it’s unclear who it’s actually for. Content cannot support sales if the sales team itself lacks a consistent story. Campaigns cannot perform if the value proposition shifts depending on who in the company you ask.

In these conditions, increasing marketing effort increases frustration. Leadership sees motion but not progress. Spend goes up without a clear line to outcomes. And marketing starts to look ineffective when, in reality, it was never given a coherent job to do.

This is the trap I see company after company fall into. They change the agency. They change the tools. They change the tactics. They never address the upstream decisions that are actually governing whether any of it can work.

The Real Diagnosis

When growth stalls, organisations almost always conclude they need better marketing. What they actually need is clearer decision-making.

Growth doesn’t stall because teams lack effort or creativity. It stalls because too much responsibility has been placed on execution before direction was fully established. Marketing teams are asked to generate demand before anyone has agreed on what the demand should be for, or who it should come from, or what a qualified opportunity even looks like.

I’ll say it plainly: marketing does not create focus. It reflects it. If the focus isn’t there, marketing will reflect that too, in scattered messaging, in weak leads, in the feeling that nothing quite connects.

How This Gets Fixed

This is exactly why we start every engagement by sitting down with the leadership team, not the marketing department.

Before we ever discuss tactics, channels, or campaigns, we need to understand what the business is actually trying to accomplish. What does growth look like in the next twelve to eighteen months? Which clients are the most valuable and why? Where are the real opportunities and where are the distractions? What do your clients and partners say they actually value about working with you, not what you assume they value, but what they tell us when we ask them directly?

Sometimes the answers surprise people. I’ve had clients discover through our customer insight interviews that what they thought was their biggest differentiator barely registered with their clients, while something they considered table stakes was the primary reason people chose them and stayed.

Once those decisions are made and leadership is aligned on what matters now and what doesn’t, everything downstream changes. Marketing and sales can finally work together instead of operating in parallel. Execution becomes simpler. Measurement becomes clearer. Growth stops feeling accidental.

A Final Thought

If marketing feels confusing, unreliable, or disconnected from revenue in your organisation, that’s not a sign of failure. It’s usually a signal that too much has been left implicit,  too many foundational decisions assumed rather than made.

In complex B2B environments, growth accelerates when leadership decides what matters and allows everything else to align behind those decisions.

The marketing will follow. But the clarity has to come first.