The 5 real-life scenarios that sabotage your marketing results

In a recent survey we conducted among 30 B2B marketers in Romania, most of them (44%) said their biggest marketing challenge is attracting good-fit leads and reaching busy buyers with relevant messages, followed by stakeholder buy-in for long-term marketing initiatives and proving marketing ROI. 

This comes as no surprise, as many B2B marketers struggle to meet their goals and demonstrate tangible results from their marketing campaigns.

On the other hand, talk to any business leader, and you’ll find quite often that their confidence in marketing is shaken (“We’re doing some marketing,” or “We’ve had marketing people do random marketing,” they’ll often say).

While you might wonder which side of the story is correct, the reality is that both situations hold truth and have common root causes.

Drawing on practical insights from our daily work, this article will focus on the underlying causes and provide strategies to address them effectively.

1. Unclear marketing goals and the absence of a defined, focused marketing strategy

The most critical issue that gets marketers in trouble is the lack of a proper foundation: a clear marketing strategy. Oftentimes, we discover that what marketers call strategy is a listing of tactics they will use.

However, the strategy does not include creating a content plan, scheduling events, running lead-generation campaigns, or maintaining a social calendar.

• knowing who you’ll target (so understanding which segment(s) of the market is/are the best to target)
• with what offering
• and how you position yourself in that space. 

Have you clearly defined and understood your target customer segment(s)?
Do your colleagues in sales, finance, or the leadership team have the same understanding as your marketing team?

We most often find this is not the case: either there is no clear focus or no alignment, as every function thinks it targets different customers.

A clear strategy entails having clear marketing goals (usually 3-5) that flow from the overall company’s goals.

One of our clients told us, at the outset of our collaboration, that they had a goal of attracting two new clients from inbound (high-ticket clients) in 12 months.

Sounds like a pretty SMART goal, right?

Increasing revenue is a company-level goal, but what the client didn’t articulate was what the target market was, how they wanted to be positioned, and what differentiated them/made their offering more attractive (in a given segment of the market).

We ramped up inbound lead generation for this client, but due to a lack of clarity and changing target markets and messaging, those leads remained just contacts in the CRM.

Instead, effective marketing should take no more than one page. What are your company’s overall goals, and which ones can marketing support? 
How does your funnel look?

In other words, do you have the most challenges with generating market awareness?

Or rather, a problem with converting that awareness into consideration and sales?

When you've identified where you have the most issues in your funnel, you can set objectives aligned with your overall business goals and, from there, draw the tactical mix to reach them.

2. Leadership buy-in and changing priorities

When marketers speak in tactical language, leadership tends to lose trust, which often leads to a lack of buy-in for marketing initiatives.

CEOs or managers don’t care much about website traffic, social reach, or even the number of leads generated.

What they care about is sales growth, market share growth, and profitability.

Getting management's support is a two-way street: it takes marketers who understand business goals and link those to marketing goals and tactical implementation.

It also takes constantly communicating to stakeholders how marketing campaigns will turn into results that impact the bottom line - some faster and with a more measurable impact, some in the longer run.

The other thing is for leadership to give clear business directions and trust their marketing team to do their jobs.

One of the IT services providers we worked with didn’t have real trust in their marketing team, which led to constantly changing priorities and questioning every move, ultimately resulting in scattered efforts that didn’t add up to a tangible result.

Although it may sound like a broken record, having clear objectives and a strategy that aligns the entire company can help solve the buy-in problem.

One of our most recent cybersecurity clients has defined clear targeting and a clear vision for the next three years in terms of results and how they will achieve them, and everyone, from sales to finance, is aware of this strategy.

With improved clarity comes alignment, buy-in, and focused implementation. 

3. Underdimensioned marketing budget and scarce resources 

High goals and poor budgets are always a bad fit.

Often marketers find themselves needing to do more with less. And while getting creative can go a long way, it’s simply not enough.

Some of the companies we talk to aim to expand to new markets or increase their market share. They have big goals and expectations, but in some cases, their marketing budgets don’t reflect such goals.

Aiming to generate 2 million EUR in new revenue while spending, say, 50,000 EUR on marketing is unrealistic. Doing more with less has a limit.

Budget is a key variable that influences marketing ROI. 

According to a study conducted by the Kantar agency and Paul Dyson, the budget is the 3rd most important factor affecting advertising profitability, after brand size and creativity. 

A survey of chief marketing officers found that, on average, 7.7% of company revenue was allocated to marketing in 2024. 

Is your marketing budget anywhere near this point? 

If you find yourself way below this range, it’s time to secure additional budget or negotiate what is possible and achievable.

Another thing to consider is your other resources: internal skills, manpower, and tools.

If you plan to ramp up content production and distribution but lack internal skills, or aim to create more leadership content but find leadership doesn’t prioritize content creation, it’s safe to either reconsider your approach and goals or ask for the resources needed to make things happen.

4. Unclear tracking to show how marketing influences the sales funnel

Lack of centralized tracking of relevant KPIs and lack of regular reporting are two weaknesses we often encounter.

Marketing teams either measure tactical KPIs such as leads, traffic, social engagement, or website conversions, but don’t look further down the funnel to opportunities and closed deals.

Alternatively, they do not track regularly and thus fail to connect with the bottom line: sales and closed deals.

Also, not all marketing activities have a short-term impact, and failing to set an appropriate time frame can lead to a perceived failure to deliver results.

For lead generation campaigns, you can measure results in the short term: as one of our cyberspace clients put it, "When we ran the campaign, leads came in; when we stopped, the leads dried up." Performance and marketing are directly linked and easy to track.

If it comes to branding campaigns and activities aimed at increasing awareness, measuring them through the lens of business deals over 3-6 months is not appropriate.

Measuring results also takes into account the length of your sales cycle: leads and awareness you generate today may result in a deal in 12-24 months.

As one of our clients in the AI space told us, “We’ve been targeting the same people for almost a year and a half, and now they show up in our pipeline.”

Data silos are common across organizations. The fix is an alignment and cooperation mindset between marketing and sales, and working together to pull the relevant KPIs across the customer journey (from awareness and consideration to conversation and advocacy) in one single dashboard.

5. Making decisions on assumptions rather than real market insights

We see this too often: B2B companies tend to base decisions on an internal understanding of the market rather than on actual market data or new developments.

Market research budgets in B2B are much smaller than in B2C, and, in our experience, it is very rare for small and medium companies in B2B to conduct qualitative or quantitative research regularly. As soon as they start interviewing recent or potential customers in target markets, clients discover insights they had not been aware of before.

One client wanted to understand how to increase its market share for one of their insurance products.

Through qualitative interviews with clients from two segments, we achieved several key outcomes:

• Mapped the customer journey for each segment.
• Identified opportunities for upsells and customer experience improvements.
• Determined the optimal segment for future focus.

All based on data, which gave the client the confidence to implement the proposed campaign strategy.

Marketers in the B2B space face many challenges, from short tenure in their roles to the rise of AI and pressure to become more efficient.

Exploring all of these challenges and their impact on outcomes is no easy feat; hence, we don’t consider this article to capture every possible reason why marketing teams fall short of their goals.

We understand from our experience that when marketers are not working on a strong foundation of a clear strategy and SMART goals and don’t have complete buy-in and the right budgets and insights, things most often drift off.

Managers and entrepreneurs eventually lose faith and patience in marketing.  

Are you having trouble connecting marketing efforts to results, or reaching them in the first place?

Are you unsure of where the problems come from?

Let’s have a quick discovery call and walk you through a series of questions to help put your current challenges in perspective and identify gaps.