The problem is in marketing

When commercial performance softens, leadership often looks for the function sitting closest to the visible symptoms.

Useful content will bring demand already showed how a company can have enough assets, posts, and campaigns on paper while growth still disappoints. On blame, a similar habit arrives: the drag may sit elsewhere, but marketing is where the room looks first.

Pipeline is underwhelming. Content is not pulling hard enough. Paid channels are getting more expensive. Social is inconsistent. Conversion is soft. Sales says the quality is mixed. Eventually the founder looks around the room and does what most businesses do.

If marketing isn’t working, the problem is in marketing.

Marketing becomes the easiest place to locate a problem when the real constraint is distributed across the business. The B2B Institute’s 95-5 framing is part of why that happens: most buyers are not in-market when marketing is judged, so the function absorbs pressure that belongs to timing as much as tactics.

The convenient diagnosis

It sounds almost too obvious to question. Marketing is underperforming, so marketing must be where you intervene.

You swap the agency. You tighten the message. You add campaigns. You change the head of marketing.

You buy a better platform. You rebuild attribution. You ask for more accountability. You push harder.

Sometimes the problem is in marketing. Campaigns can be weak. Channels can be mismanaged. Strategy can be muddled. Teams can underperform. Marketing still deserves scrutiny.

The problem is that many businesses reach for marketing fixes when the real constraint sits elsewhere in the growth system.

Marketing is one of the few functions repeatedly asked to compensate for weaknesses it didn’t create.

A product with avoidable friction. A buying journey that asks too much. A sales process that’s slow, unclear, or inconsistent. A price the market struggles to justify.

A website that creates hesitation at the point of action. A communications flow that confuses people. A category frame that makes the offer harder to value. An onboarding experience that weakens word of mouth.

A customer journey that encourages workarounds and leakage into weaker channels.

When those things are present, marketing can still help. But it can’t rescue the business indefinitely.

At some point, the company starts blaming the messenger for the condition of the system.

Where the friction sits

One of the reasons the mistake is so common is that marketing is highly visible. It sits near traffic, lead flow, campaign reporting, content output, social presence, and top-of-funnel metrics.

When numbers soften, marketing produces some of the first obvious symptoms. That makes it a natural place for leadership anxiety to land.

The operating model usually makes this worse. In a 2024 survey, Gartner found that sales and marketing teams typically collaborated on only three out of 15 commercial activities, while 90% of marketing and sales executives said their functional priorities conflicted. The same research found that organisations sharing buyer-journey insight were more likely to report stronger conversion and revenue growth outcomes.

So when the two functions run in parallel lanes, blaming marketing is a poor diagnosis. It leaves the wider system untouched.

The symptom looks like a marketing symptom. The cause is often more distributed.

Imagine a business with a decent level of market interest. People are finding the site. Some campaigns are generating clicks. Organic search is not bad. Social is doing enough to suggest the company is not invisible. Sales conversations are happening.

Yet conversion remains weaker than leadership expects. The business keeps asking marketing for better leads, better content, better messaging, better nurture, and better campaign structure.

All plausible requests.

But the site may be hard to navigate once buyers arrive. The pricing model may create hesitation that sales has learned to work around. The buying journey may ask for too much too early, the demo may confuse, or outbound follow-up may stay patchy while the brand promise overshoots what the experience delivers. The easiest path for the buyer may not be the path the company is pushing them down.

In that situation, marketing may be doing enough to create attention and interest. The business is just losing too much value once that attention arrives.

That is a growth-friction problem being reported as a marketing problem, and many companies are much worse at seeing friction than they’re at seeing campaign output.

Friction is not glamorous. It rarely produces a dramatic line on a dashboard.

It shows up as hesitation, drop-off, confusion, delays, handoffs, duplicated effort, unread emails, poor completion, unclear pricing, abandoned forms, internal buyer uncertainty, or customers choosing a less defended route without drama. And it’s usually distributed across product, sales, operations, website UX, communications design, permissions, and service process.

Marketing then gets asked to generate more force at the top of the system to compensate.

That can work for a while. It often becomes very expensive.

Marketing receives the symptom

This is one reason leadership teams should be careful when they say marketing is not working. Often what they mean is that growth is not emerging from the business as easily as they hoped.

Saying “marketing is not working” can hide several different problems inside one convenient sentence. Growth is an outcome of many interacting conditions. Marketing influences some of them strongly. It doesn’t control all of them.

A good example is website performance.

Companies often speak as though the website is part of marketing in a purely communicative sense - messaging, content, conversion, SEO. All true.

But the website is also a product-like experience. It has usability, path clarity, structural logic, interaction cost, and trust cues.

If the site is hard to understand, asks for the wrong action, hides the right proof, buries the pricing logic, or creates uncertainty at the wrong moment, marketing can drive traffic there all day and still underperform commercially.

The problem will show up as disappointing marketing results. The deeper issue sits partly in experience design.

The same thing happens in communications journeys.

A company may produce impressive campaigns, persuasive messaging, and strong sales material, only to force prospects or customers through awkward follow-up, unclear emails, clumsy document workflows, or confusing authentication steps.

The marketing team is then told that engagement is weak or take-up is lower than hoped, when the actual problem is that the experience after attention is too brittle or inconvenient.

Businesses often underestimate how much commercial effect lives in these details because they sit awkwardly between departments. Nobody fully owns the whole journey, so marketing gets judged for the visible front end of a process whose deeper friction is dispersed across systems and teams.

This is especially common in B2B, where Gartner describes buying as a nonlinear journey across digital and human interactions, shaped by organisational process, stakeholder concerns, and buyer confidence. Companies still flatter themselves that buyers will tolerate more friction simply because the purchase is serious. Sometimes they do.

Often they don’t. They go quiet. Delay. Use the current workaround a little longer. Choose the clearer competitor. Forward the document rather than complete the intended flow. Ask procurement to stall. Drift out of the process.

None of that necessarily shows up in a clean marketing report. It simply makes marketing look weaker than it otherwise would have been.

The same pattern appears in pricing.

A company can have decent awareness, a respectable market position, and competent marketing, then still struggle because the pricing model is misaligned with buyer expectations, internal approval thresholds, or perceived risk.

Marketing gets asked for better messaging, better objection handling, more nurture, or more leads. But if the price or packaging is making the business hard to buy, more marketing pressure may be the wrong first response. The answer may be a pricing decision.

Sales quality can create the same distortion.

A company can blame marketing for weak commercial performance when the real issue is that sales follow-up is patchy, discovery is inconsistent, qualification is loose, handoffs are poor, or the close process creates unnecessary drag.

Marketing is then asked for tighter targeting, more persuasive content, better proof, and stronger nurturing. These may help, but only after the business has checked whether sales itself is adding the drag.

This is where lead-centric thinking can distort everything in the background.

Forrester has argued that lead-centric systems can produce very low end-to-end yield, with fewer than 1% of leads converting to closed deals.

If leadership still treats lead volume as the serious signal, the business keeps feeding the wrong proxy and then blaming marketing when revenue quality disappoints.

The hard part is that businesses prefer the marketing diagnosis because it preserves the rest of the system.

If the problem is framed as marketing, the founder doesn’t have to question product choices, reopen pricing, scrutinise sales, redesign operations, or touch the website. Communications design can stay neglected. Leadership keeps its existing view of the business intact.

Marketing becomes the most convenient location for organisational discomfort.

That’s why the assumption survives so easily. It’s intuitive.

It is also politically useful.

A growth friction audit

A more useful way to think about this is as a growth friction audit.

When commercial performance feels softer than it should, ask where the system is making growth unnecessarily hard before asking what more marketing should do.

That audit should look across at least five areas.

Market presence: Is the company known enough, remembered enough, and understood well enough in the category?

Journey and UX: Once attention exists, is it easy to navigate, trust, and act?

Sales conversion: Are enquiries followed up well, handled consistently, and moved through the process without avoidable drag?

Pricing and packaging: Does the commercial model make the offer easier to value and approve, or harder?

Product and communications experience: Once people interact, are there points of confusion, friction, awkwardness, or workarounds that weaken confidence or adoption?

Only after looking across those should the business decide how much of the issue really sits in marketing execution itself.

It stops the company diagnosing every growth problem with the same blunt instrument.

Two firms, two diagnoses

The contrast is easier to see with two similar firms.

Take two similar B2B firms with roughly equal budgets.

Company Blame treats disappointing growth as a marketing issue by default. Lead flow drops: marketing gets new targets. Conversion softens: marketing rewrites the pages. Campaigns underperform: marketing changes agencies. Sales struggles: marketing produces more assets.

Every symptom gets routed back towards marketing first.

Company System starts one level wider.

It still examines marketing performance, but it also looks at the conversion path, pricing friction, buyer handoffs, UX barriers, product onboarding, communications design, and customer effort.

It asks whether marketing is weak, or whether marketing is pushing against too much downstream resistance.

From the inside, Company Blame always has a visible response ready: new targets, new pages, a new agency, more assets.

Company System can feel slower at first because diagnosis is less flattering. Some of the hardest problems turn out to belong to product, operations, leadership, or commercial design rather than to marketing.

Over time, it has a better chance of becoming easier to grow because it removes drag instead of endlessly trying to overpower it.

This is also where one of the most damaging phrases in company life needs retiring.

“Marketing should just make it clearer.”

Clarity helps when the offer is sound and the journey is workable. It has limits when the thing being clarified is awkward, hard to buy, mispriced, badly framed, or unnecessarily effortful.

That is a reason to stop expecting communication to compensate for deeper design weaknesses forever.

The same applies to “educating the market”. Some markets do need education.

The phrase becomes dangerous when it lets a company treat buyer confusion as ignorance rather than evidence of internal friction.

Marketing is told to educate because the business is more comfortable diagnosing buyer ignorance than internal friction, and then to pour effort into explanation when simplification might have done more.

The better founder question

This chapter also changes how founders should interpret underperformance.

If marketing seems weaker than expected, there are at least three possibilities.

First, marketing may genuinely be weak. The strategy, creative, targeting, messaging, or channel execution may be poor.

Second, marketing may be doing an adequate job in a market the company has made too hard to convert. The issue is friction elsewhere.

Third, the company may be expecting marketing to deliver results that only a broader commercial system can produce.

Those are different realities. They imply different actions.

A founder’s job is to diagnose properly before turning the screws.

This is where the book’s wider argument comes back into focus. Again and again, the business has mistaken a visible, manageable, defensible explanation for the fuller commercial truth.

It has over-trusted what is easiest to see, measure, or blame. Marketing has carried much of that burden because it lives close to visible activity and visible symptoms.

But growth does not happen inside the marketing department.

It happens in the relationship between market presence, memory, timing, pricing, usability, product experience, buying journey, sales execution, communications design, and trust.

Marketing matters most when the rest of that system is not working against it.

That means the better founder question is:

Why isn’t marketing working?

And then:

Where are we making growth harder than it needs to be, and how much of that sits in marketing versus the rest of the business?

That is a harder question because it may send responsibility back upwards and outwards.

It is also the question that makes several other “marketing problems” look rather different - including the way the company thinks about price, which is where Pricing is a sales problem begins.