Most B2B businesses are haemorrhaging money on marketing that does not work, run by people who are more interested in proving their own importance than generating revenue. That is not an opinion. It is what thirty years of watching businesses go round in circles tells you. And if you want to understand why your pipeline is not growing, you need to look at who has been running the strategy — and what they have actually been optimising for.
CMOs in the Spotlight
Something is shifting. Epic failures by senior marketers are being exposed more openly now. I think that is because the damage has become too large to hide. CMOs convinced boards to pour money into MarTech SaaS platforms on the basis that if the business wanted to compete, it had no choice but to buy in. Boards dutifully signed the cheques. Pipelines stayed flat. And then the CMO left.
The average CMO tenure is around eighteen months in practice — three months learning the business, twelve months executing their plan, three months polishing their CV. The fact that tenure at the largest Fortune 500 companies has recently crept up to around four years does not change what happens at mid-market B2Bs, where the churn is faster and the damage is proportionally worse. Technology companies in particular tend to cycle through CMOs every three to three-and-a-half years. Still the shortest tenure in the C-suite. Still a revolving door.
Businesses keep failing at the same rate they did ten years ago. The median ARR per employee for private SaaS companies now sits around £90,000 to £100,000, which tells you immediately why they are always looking for their next funding round. About half of that investment gets handed straight to MarTech on the assumption that demand gen, lead gen, ABM and PPC will somehow produce unicorn results. They do not. So more BDRs get hired to compensate. The black hole gets bigger. Nothing changes.
If you have been in business for any length of time, you already know that marketing is foundational. But foundational does not mean supreme. It does not mean marketing is more important than every other function. When it starts acting as though it is — when it starts telling sales the problem is the salespeople, not the leads — you have a structural problem that no amount of MarTech will fix. Take a look at our Marketing-Strategy articles if you want to see how consistently this pattern plays out.
Employing CMOs
Patrick Bet-David did a video that covers a series of problems surrounding CMOs and marketing leadership. Worth watching. He focuses primarily on B2C but the same logic applies to B2B — the ego, the spend, the lack of accountability.
Seth Godin said much the same thing in an interview with Brian Rose, and confirmed that eighteen months was the real operational tenure — not the sanitised headline figure. Here is that interview: https://londonreal.tv/seth-godin-this-is-marketing-how-to-find-your-viable-audience-win-trust-from-your-target-market/
Give a CMO an Inch
The Nike story is the clearest example I have seen of what happens when a board hands a CMO and CEO unchecked authority to pursue a data-driven digital strategy at the expense of everything that was actually working.
Read the full article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nike-epic-saga-value-destruction-massimo-giunco-llplf/
The headline figure most people cite is $25bn of market capitalisation lost in a single day in June 2024. The actual number, from when the DTC strategy launched in 2020, is $70bn wiped off Nike's value over nine months — hitting its lowest share price since 2018. That is what happens when a leadership team decides that measurable digital activity is a proxy for effective marketing. As former Nike senior brand director Massimo Giunco put it, they invested billions "into something that was less effective but easier to be measured." They chased dashboards instead of customers. The results speak for themselves.
The same thing is happening in B2B right now. When so much faith is placed in MarTech because it produces metrics — impressions, MQLs, attribution reports — the one question no one asks is whether any of it actually connects with the people you are trying to sell to. Do they know you exist? Do they trust you? Would they pick up the phone if you called? Usually, no.
It is not hard to understand why a CMO on a large salary wants to show the board impressive numbers. But impressive numbers and actual pipeline are not the same thing. Meanwhile, salespeople get blamed for not closing leads that were never real in the first place. I have watched that dynamic destroy teams. It is not the salespeople who need replacing.
As you can see, marketing leadership and the strategies it promotes are not delivering what they promise. The answer is not to hire a better CMO. The answer is to build a strategy that does not depend on one — and to check our B2B Marketing Strategy Examples to see what actually works. Read the rest of this article and decide for yourself what your next move looks like.
Zero Click Attribution
Before you spend another pound on any kind of digital marketing, you need to understand what zero click attribution actually means for your business — because it changes everything about how you measure results.
Every social platform is engineered to keep people on the platform. That is their business model, not yours. Cookie deprecation, privacy regulation, ad blockers, multi-device behaviour and native apps have all been dismantling click-through attribution for years. On top of that, search engines now answer questions directly — increasingly via AI — so people simply never click through to your site at all.
SparkToro's 2024 research, conducted with Datos across tens of millions of users, found that around 60% of Google searches in the US end without a single click. In the EU, the figure is just under 60%. Of the searches that do produce a click, nearly 30% go to Google-owned properties — YouTube, Maps, Images — not to independent websites. Out of every 1,000 US searches, only around 360 end up on the open web at all. With Google's AI Overviews now rolling out across search results, that number is heading lower. Searches that trigger an AI Overview now show a zero-click rate of around 83%.
So if you are trying to prove acquisition by tracking referral data from Google, you are measuring a fraction of actual activity. The attribution model is broken by design. Google has built a system where they capture the attention and you get the bill. That is a problem for anyone running B2B Performance Marketing campaigns based on click data.
And a quick note for those who manage their own server configuration: maintaining a well-structured HTACCESS file that filters bot traffic from your analytics is not optional — it is the baseline for having data you can actually trust.
For more on this, the SparkToro research is worth reading in full: https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/
What Will Make You Money or Cost You Money?
Starting with some familiar frameworks. First, Market Share and Market Growth. I am including these because you already know them — the point is to put the strategies that follow into proper context rather than introduce them in a vacuum.
Next is the Product Lifecycle. Any serious conversation about product marketing starts here.
Succeed at Product Marketing First
Product marketing has to come first. Not because of convention, but because everything else depends on it. The four pillars — product, price, place, promotion — are not optional extras. They define whether you have anything worth selling before you spend a penny on telling people about it.
Every product marketer knows that you need to conduct multiple interviews before you commit to manufacture, marketing plans or sales training. No serious CEO would allow a marketing team to take a product to market without first completing the research. The question is how many interviews are actually enough.
How Many Interviews Do You Need?
Type "how many interviews for qualitative research" into Google and the results will give you a range of figures from different studies: 5 to 25, with 12, 8, 9 to 17 and 23 all appearing as recommended numbers. By the time you reach twenty interviews, you will already have your answer — either stay with your current approach or move forward with confidence. The point is to interview as many people as possible, not to hit the minimum and stop. The more interviews, the more reliable the qualitative decision — whether that is about a new product, a new market, or a new message.
Technology Adoption
Once your product is validated, the next question is how your market will actually accept it — and in what order. Understanding the adoption curve determines when your organisation starts generating meaningful revenue, not just activity.
Prospect Marketing — Because People Buy People
If the interview-based approach is the most logical way to determine whether a product should go to market, the same principle applies to all marketing. You have to communicate to a real, defined, addressable market — or your effort is wasted regardless of how well it is executed.
The zero click reality feeds directly into this. If you cannot rely on organic search or social clicks to find you, the only viable strategy is to be present where your prospects already are. In B2B, that means identifying your Total Addressable Market, getting an accurate database and marketing directly to it. Not waiting to be discovered. Going to them.
If you are ever unsure whether a marketing message is landing, ask. Pick up the phone, send an email, or ask at a meeting. Get feedback from actual prospects on your imagery, copy, videos, and articles. If your pipeline is shrinking, something in the message has stopped working. Go back to basics. That is not a weakness — it is how you fix it before the problem compounds.
In simple terms: if a marketing message is aimed at a CIO who oversees logistics, say so explicitly. Do not assume they will find a relevant meaning buried in a generic headline. Tell them directly what you are offering and why it matters to them specifically.
Steve Krug wrote a book called Don't Make Me Think that had a real impact on the way I look at communication. The title says everything. In a world where everyone is competing to look clever, the businesses that win are the ones that make it easiest to say yes. That has not changed.
There is a clear way through all of this. But you have to read it, understand it and take ownership of it — you cannot delegate the strategy to the same marketing department whose current approach is responsible for a shrinking pipeline. They have not changed what they do. The results show it.
Everything at salesXchange is designed to work together as a single, structured approach to new business development. It does not require a CMO. It follows three clear stages.
Everything covered in this article — the CMO tenure problem, the MarTech overspend, the zero click reality, the breakdown between product marketing and prospect marketing — points to the same diagnosis: most B2B businesses are running a go-to-market model that was never designed for the way B2B buyers actually behave. The GTM Reset course exists to fix that, starting with the model itself.
The course is 20 modules, CPD certified, built on sales fact and not marketing theory. Most CEOs go through it with their VP of Sales, aligning on the diagnosis together before involving the rest of the GTM team and implementing the new strategy.
Review The Reset Today
Nigel Maine is the founder of salesXchange and the architect of the sX Operating System — a B2B commercial framework built from three decades of running technology sales, not from marketing theory.
His work is grounded in a single conviction: that most B2B growth models were designed for consumer buying behaviour and have never been corrected. salesXchange exists to fix that. Nigel works directly with CEOs and commercial leadership teams across Technology, SaaS and Professional Services to rebuild their GTM infrastructure from first principles.
He is a published author, public speaker and hosts a weekly B2B live show broadcast across LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. Contact: 0800 970 9751 or
