How Marketing Hijacked New Business Development — And Why Sales Leaders Need to Reclaim It

Marketing Has Hijacked New Business Development. Here Is Why That Is a Problem.

Most B2B businesses believe marketing is the engine of new business growth. Hand the BDRs to marketing, build a tech stack, run some demand generation, set call KPIs, and watch the pipeline fill. That is the accepted model. And it is failing almost every business that follows it.

I spent thirty years figuring out why. I did the cold calling at eighteen. I employed the BDRs. I ran the pay-per-click. I paid for the marketing automation. And at some point I stopped taking the results at face value and started asking the question nobody in the room wants to ask: if all of this is working, where are the results?

What follows is not a theoretical critique. It is a breakdown of what is actually happening inside B2B businesses right now, what the real numbers say, and what you can do instead. Read through all of it. Then decide.

You will discover:

• Why handing new business development to marketing causes more damage than it solves.
• How to realign sales and marketing around actual revenue outcomes.
• Why marketing automation, ABM, and demand generation were never built for B2B markets.
• What an open-access, live-streaming, digital selling model looks like in practice — and why it outperforms everything else on the list above.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Adobe and Demandbase Encourage Collaboration with Sales
3. The Problem with B2B Marketing
4. Marketing Automation Was Designed for B2C, Not B2B
5. Gifting: A New Term for Bribing
6. Caution with New Technology Adoption
7. Repeated Mistakes and Accountability
8. Marketing Is an Administrative Function
9. Are B2Bs Resistant to Change?
10. Shift to a Profit-Based Model
11. Promote Your Content Effectively
12. Closing Comment
13. Takeaways
14. FAQs

1. Introduction

Marketing departments have taken over new business development. That is not an opinion — it is now the standard structure inside most B2B companies. Marketing owns the BDRs. Marketing sets the prospecting KPIs. Marketing manages the demand generation, the automation platforms, the ABM tiers, the content calendars. Sales, meanwhile, is told to wait for the leads.

The trouble is, this is completely back to front. Historically, salespeople were the ones who built relationships and drove new business through genuine human contact. The career path was clear: start as a BDR, prove yourself, move into account executive or field sales. That progression had logic. You earned the right to carry bigger deals because you understood the prospect and the process from the ground up.

What has replaced that model is a system where BDRs are measured on calls made rather than conversations had. Where KPIs reward volume over quality. Where the progression from BDR into sales is blocked — because marketing needs the headcount. And where, when the pipeline is thin, the blame always lands on sales.

That is the tension I want to pull apart. And to do it properly, we have to start at the diagnosis, not the symptoms. If you want to understand the full picture of why B2B sales challenges keep repeating themselves across different businesses, different sectors, and different market conditions, read on.

2. Adobe and Demandbase Encourage Collaboration with Sales

Even the biggest players in the marketing automation space have started to acknowledge the problem. Both Adobe (through Marketo) and Demandbase have publicly pushed for better alignment between marketing and sales. Their position is that marketing should be more open to sales input, that the two functions should share decisions rather than operate as separate fiefdoms.

That sounds reasonable. The problem is that saying it and doing it are very different things. Inside many marketing departments, the default response to a poor quarter is still to blame the sales team for not closing. Not to question the quality of what marketing generated. Not to examine whether the leads were real opportunities at all. Sales gets the blame, even when marketing handed over contacts who were never remotely interested in buying.

This conflict is not accidental. It was built into the structure the moment marketing was given ownership of new business development without being held accountable for revenue outcomes. Until that changes, the push for collaboration is just words.

3. The Problem with B2B Marketing

B2B businesses are still pouring money into demand generation, pay-per-click, and account-based marketing despite years of underwhelming returns. The focus is relentlessly on BDR activity metrics — calls per day, emails sent, MQLs generated — rather than on the one thing that actually matters: profitable new business.

Meanwhile, the way buyers actually behave is being almost entirely ignored. Our research shows that 83% of B2B buyers will self-educate before they engage with a salesperson. A further 6Sense study from 2025 found that buyers still mostly or fully define their purchase requirements 83% of the time before they speak to anyone in sales. They are not waiting to be found. They are already researching you, forming a view, and making a shortlist — all before your BDR picks up the phone.

What marketers consistently fail to acknowledge is this:

• 83% of businesses self-educate before they engage with a salesperson — they do not want to be interrupted mid-research by a cold caller.
• Marketing automation forms hide content from Google, making your website invisible to the very people trying to find you.
• Businesses want to remain anonymous — their growth plans are private, and they have no intention of announcing themselves via a gated form.
• Businesses do not want to fill out online forms and scatter their contact details across the internet.
• Businesses have never wanted to receive cold calls. Not in 2015, not now, not ever.

B2B Marketing — the London-based publisher now rebranded as Propolis — released a report some years back suggesting that CMOs would earn their seat on the board by 2030. I had to read that twice. After five decades of marketing departments operating inside B2B businesses, the best case they can make is: give us a few more years. I genuinely could not make that up.

To understand how digital activity has changed and what a better approach looks like, take a look at our section on Digital Selling — it is a very different model to what most businesses are currently running.

4. Marketing Automation Was Designed for B2C, Not B2B

Here is something that should have been stated plainly at the outset of the marketing automation boom, but never was: these platforms were built for consumer brands. They work for Audi, Adidas, and Amazon because consumers willingly hand over their data to brands they like, welcome email campaigns, and make purchases based on emotional responses to repeated exposure. That is how B2C works.

B2B is completely different. A business considering a new software platform or professional service is not going to sign up to a nurture sequence and convert six weeks later. They are evaluating whether the product will generate a return. They involve multiple decision-makers. They do not respond to the same triggers. Treating B2B buyers the same way as B2C consumers is not a minor strategic error — it is a fundamental category mistake.

And yet the platforms were sold to B2B businesses using B2C case studies. Insurance companies, travel brands, car manufacturers — the statistics were dazzling. B2B buyers were misled into thinking those results would transfer. They do not. The legal complexity alone — managing unsubscribes, consent, data compliance — makes the B2C playbook unworkable in a B2B context, let alone the difference in buyer psychology.

I was told directly by the CEO of a startup that one of the largest SME marketing automation platforms had a call centre of over 200 people whose sole job was to follow up on leads and try to close business. Think about what that tells you. If marketing automation genuinely produced the results it promised, that call centre would not exist. Not even the companies selling the software believe their own pitch.

5. Gifting: A New Term for Bribing

There is a trend that has been growing inside ABM strategies called gifting. Prospects are sent gifts — often triggered automatically through CRM integrations with platforms like Salesforce — as a way of warming them up or re-engaging a stalled deal. The ABM tier the prospect sits in determines what gift they receive.

Let us be honest about what this is. It used to be called a bribe. The only thing that has changed is the automation. When a business resorts to sending prospects gifts to get them to take a meeting, it is not a sign of a sophisticated strategy — it is a sign that the underlying approach has run out of credibility. And once you normalise gifting, you create a dynamic where prospects start to expect it, and where larger deals attract requests for more substantial incentives. That is not selling. That is a procurement negotiation dressed up as marketing.

6. Caution with New Technology Adoption

Big Tech and MarTech vendors have done an extraordinary job of convincing marketing departments that the answer to underperformance is more software. Another platform. Another integration. Another dashboard. The result is that many B2B businesses now run marketing technology stacks comprising dozens of tools, most of which are used at a fraction of their capability.

Daniel Kahneman's work on decision-making is worth referencing here. His research shows that repetition breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds confidence — even when the underlying logic is flawed. Marketing departments have been exposed to the same vendor messaging, the same conference talks, the same case studies, and the same job descriptions for so long that the approach has become instinctive rather than reasoned. Nobody stops to ask whether it is working. They just hire to the job description and execute the standard playbook.

Job descriptions for marketing roles are a perfect illustration. They are nearly identical across companies and industries. They specify the same tools, the same KPIs, the same activities — with almost no reference to the financial outcomes the business actually needs. New hires arrive and do what the job description says, not what the revenue situation demands.

I want to be clear about where I am coming from. I would love to be wrong about this. I would happily engage with every mainstream B2B marketing strategy if the numbers supported it. But I spent years doing the cold calling, employing the BDRs, running the pay-per-click, and paying for the marketing automation. And I made it my business to understand why none of it was delivering what the big-name marketers promised. It took time, but I did work it out. And the reason I am saying all of this is not to complain — it is because there is a solution, and it has been built and tested.

7. Repeated Mistakes and Accountability

Getting something wrong is understandable. Recommending the same failing strategies over and over again, to multiple businesses, while continuing to collect a senior salary — that is a different matter entirely.

CMO tenure tells the story clearly. According to Spencer Stuart's 2025 study, the average CMO at an S&P 500 company stays for 4.1 years — the shortest of any C-suite role. I have always argued the working reality in B2B is sharper than that: roughly three months to plan, twelve months to execute, and three months to manage the exit. That cycle means the person who recommended the strategy is rarely still in the building when the results fail to materialise. The next CMO inherits the damage, starts a new plan, and the cycle repeats.

Nobody is being held accountable for the outcomes. When new business fails to appear, marketing blames sales for not closing. When sales pushes back on lead quality, marketing points to MQL numbers. Meanwhile, the CEO watches the pipeline stagnate and wonders who to believe. That question — how often is a CMO genuinely scrutinised against the financial requirements of the business, as opposed to their own departmental KPIs — rarely gets a satisfying answer. Read more on this dynamic in our Leaders articles.

8. Marketing Is an Administrative Function

This is the statement that tends to provoke the strongest reaction. But stay with me, because the logic is straightforward.

Most marketing departments in B2B businesses perform administrative tasks: scheduling content, managing social media calendars, maintaining the CRM, producing slide decks, coordinating campaigns, reporting on metrics. These are not commercial activities. They are support functions dressed up in revenue language. That is not an attack on the individuals involved — many of them are skilled and diligent. But the function itself is not structured around generating new business.

There is a telling comparison here. You can get a degree in marketing. You can get a degree in accounting or HR. You cannot get a degree in B2B sales. Selling is not taught as a discipline in academia, which reflects how undervalued commercial skill has become relative to administrative competence. The businesses that reverse that balance — that put salespeople back at the centre of new business development, with marketing in genuine support — are the ones that tend to outperform.

My critique of marketing only has credibility if I have an alternative, and I do. The entry point to a new approach to the engagement process is what we call Social 444. It is built around the commercial realities of B2B selling, not the theoretical frameworks of marketing textbooks.

9. Are B2Bs Resistant to Change?

Some businesses genuinely believe they have found their formula. The marketing department says the strategy is working. The numbers say otherwise. And yet the marketing team continues to argue for more budget, more time, more tools. The CFO looks at the figures and says nothing has shifted. Marketing says that is because conditions were difficult.

The block to change is often institutional pride. Marketing departments that have spent years building out their tech stacks, their processes, and their team structures are not going to volunteer that the whole architecture is wrong. And so nothing changes. Live streaming, open-access video content, LinkedIn Live, YouTube — these are platforms where your prospects are already spending significant time every single day. But marketing departments often resist them because they do not fit the existing playbook, and because using them properly requires admitting that the current approach has not been working.

Despite CFOs questioning the return on marketing spend, the response from marketing tends to follow a predictable script:

• The best time to increase marketing activity is during a downturn.
• The best time to grow the business is during a recession.
• All the successful companies increase their marketing presence when it gets tough.

And the CFO says: "You have got to be joking."

10. Shift to a Profit-Based Model

Pull up your own numbers. Take the last three years of headcount and compare it against turnover. Now look at profitability. In most B2B businesses, pay-per-click, banner advertising, and events have not caused a sustained shift in either. There might be a blip in one quarter, but profitability rarely follows. You might even have a salesperson who has an exceptional year — circumstances aligned, the timing was right — but you are always at the mercy of Pareto's 80/20 Rule. A small number of people doing most of the revenue, and no repeatable system to change that ratio.

If I had not spent years researching and testing every significant B2B marketing approach, I would not be in a position to challenge any of this. But the research is done. The testing is done. And the only method I have found for establishing and communicating what makes a business genuinely different — its people, its expertise, its character — is through the individuals who work inside it.

The only way to communicate that authenticity at scale, to your entire total addressable market, simultaneously, is through live streaming. Not a recorded video. Not a podcast uploaded months later. A live show, broadcast regularly, where your prospects can see who you are, what you know, and whether they trust you — on their own terms, in their own time.

Live streaming communicates creativity, expertise, empathy, and professionalism in a way that no demand generation form, no banner ad, and no cold call ever will. Businesses do not want to be pestered. They want to self-educate and self-serve. Give them the content. Let them come to you when they are ready.

Three practical steps to make this work:

1. Use AI tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or similar — to refine your content for readability and search visibility. AI accelerates execution. But fix the model first; AI only amplifies what you give it.
2. Remove all gating from your website. Make every piece of content open access. Stop hiding your best thinking behind forms.
3. During your live show, direct prospects to your website to learn, engage, and make contact when they are ready to buy.

The viewer numbers are not trivial. YouTube has 122 million daily active users. LinkedIn has approximately 134.5 million daily active users. Broadcasting a weekly live show puts your business in front of the audience that is already there, already watching, already looking for the answer you can provide.

11. Promote Your Content Effectively

Creating the content is only half of it. Too many businesses produce reasonable content and then do almost nothing to get it seen. They post it once on LinkedIn, send it in a newsletter, and move on. That is not promotion. That is filing.

Think about how a book publisher promotes a new title. Multiple adverts. Multiple formats. Multiple angles on the same core message, each one designed to reach a different reader at a different moment. Your content deserves the same treatment. For each article, each video, each episode of your live show, you should be producing several pieces of promotional content — short-form video clips, social posts, paid social ads, targeted emails — each one giving the prospect a clear reason to click through. Not "read our new article." Tell them what is in it for them. Tell them what they will know after reading it that they do not know now.

The engagement with content is the first step in the buying relationship. A prospect who watches your live show or reads your in-depth article is already warming to you without ever having spoken to anyone in your business. That is precisely how modern B2B buyers prefer to operate. Give them that experience, and when they are ready to buy, they will already know who they want to call.

Product marketers understand this instinctively — they research the market, talk to customers, and make sure every piece of output is fit for purpose. Apply that same discipline to your content and the results will follow.

12. Closing Comment

We practice what we preach. This website is entirely open access. No forms. No gating. Every article, download, infographic, video, podcast, and recorded live show is available to anyone who wants to learn. That is not an accident — it is the strategy. We want you to self-educate, form a view, and get in touch when you are ready. That is how we believe B2B should work, and it is how we run our own business.

Economic conditions remain uncertain. You are probably already thinking about where costs can be reduced. Marketing spend is usually near the top of that list, and I have no argument with cutting it — but only if you replace what you cut with something that actually works. That means understanding your total addressable market, reaching every business in it on a regular basis, and making it easy for them to find you when they are ready to buy.

If you know the size of your TAM, between one and fifteen percent of those businesses will begin a buying journey in any given week. A live show reaches all of them at the same time. Your open-access content helps them learn about you on their terms. Your website makes it easy for them to take the next step when they are ready. No cold calls. No demand generation forms. No wasted budget on pay-per-click that converts at fractions of a percent.

This approach requires fewer people than you are currently running, reaches more prospects than any outbound programme ever could, and costs less than the technology stack you are probably already paying for. The businesses that move on this first in their sector will own the relationship with their market. The ones that wait will find it much harder to catch up.

You now have a different model to measure your current activity against. Stay as you are and defend existing revenues, or be the first in your sector to do something that demonstrably works. As the saying goes — if you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got.

13. Takeaways

1. Traditional B2B sales and marketing approaches are producing diminishing returns. The model needs to change — not incrementally, but structurally. CEOs should be leading that change, not waiting for marketing to propose it.
2. Live streaming and open-access content are the most effective tools available for reaching your total addressable market at scale. They demonstrate authenticity, build trust, and let prospects self-educate without friction.
3. Rethink what marketing is actually for. In B2B, it is a support function — not the engine of new business development. New business is a commercial activity, and it needs commercial people running it.
4. Marketing automation and ABM were not designed for B2B markets. They were sold to B2B businesses using B2C results. Understand the difference before committing another budget cycle to platforms that were never built for your buyers.
5. Measure everything against revenue and profitability — not against internal marketing KPIs. If a strategy cannot demonstrate a direct contribution to new business and profit, it deserves scrutiny, not more budget.

14. FAQs

How can live streaming and open-access content improve B2B sales outcomes?

Live streaming lets your business reach its entire total addressable market simultaneously, on a regular basis, without the cost or friction of outbound prospecting. Open-access content removes the barriers that gating creates — both for human prospects and for search engines. Together they build trust at scale. When a prospect is ready to buy, they already know who you are, what you know, and whether they want to work with you. That means the sales conversation starts further along than a cold call ever could.

What are the main drawbacks of relying on marketing automation and ABM strategies in B2B?

Both were built on B2C assumptions and B2C case studies. In B2B, buyers are not making emotional impulse purchases — they are evaluating whether a product or service will generate a return. Marketing automation forms hide content from search engines and deter anonymous researchers. ABM tiers create artificial segmentation that ignores how buyers actually behave. And gifting — a feature of many ABM strategies — signals desperation rather than competence. None of these approaches address the fundamental reality that 83% of buyers define their requirements before speaking to anyone in sales.

How should businesses measure the real impact of marketing on profitability?

Start with the most straightforward test: plot headcount against turnover and profitability over three years. If marketing spend has increased without a corresponding and sustained improvement in profitable revenue, the spend is not working. Track new business won against the channel that introduced the prospect — not the last-touch attribution that most marketing platforms favour. If the honest answer is that most new business comes from referrals and existing relationships, your marketing activity is decorative, not commercial.

What does effective content promotion look like in a B2B context?

Treat each piece of content the way a publisher treats a new book. Create multiple adverts for it, each one leading with what the reader will gain — not what the content is called. Run paid social to targeted audiences using bought databases to reach businesses in your total addressable market. Clip your live show into short-form video. Send direct emails. Each touchpoint should give a specific reason to engage. The first interaction with your content is the beginning of the buying relationship, so make it count.

How can a B2B business adapt its approach without starting from scratch?

Begin by removing all gating from your website and making your content open access. That single change improves search visibility and removes a barrier that is actively deterring the buyers you want. Then build toward a regular live show — weekly is the target — that broadcasts to your total addressable market. Use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to improve your existing content. Each of these steps can run alongside your current activity while you build the evidence base for a fuller reset. The goal is not to rip everything up overnight, but to stop spending on what does not work and redirect that resource toward what does.