Introduction: Bad assumptions

B2B companies often fail at marketing because the business keeps making sensible decisions that add up to the wrong system.

Sales wants more opportunities this quarter, finance wants cleaner accountability, product wants clearer messaging, and marketing is asked what will move fastest. Nobody in the room is trying to make bad decisions. That’s precisely the problem.

The choices that follow sound commercially mature:

• focus on in-market demand
• tighten targeting
• hold “brand work” for later
• invest where attribution is strongest
• publish more useful content
• ask for more proof before committing

Individually, each decision can be defended. Collectively, they produce a company that gets weaker at creating the conditions for future demand.

Bad Assumptions is about that gap.

The argument in one sentence

B2B marketing often underperforms because founders and executives misunderstand the conditions marketing needs in order to work. That misunderstanding is not easy to recognise. It arrives as a web of assumptions that feel disciplined and serious.

Over time, those assumptions shape budgets, hiring, reporting, creative standards, and cross-functional behaviour. Eventually they shape outcomes.

Why weak assumptions have become more expensive

The pressure on B2B leaders has changed. B2B buying is less linear, more digitally supported, and spread across more buying activities.

Buyers can do more evaluation before they make contact. Channels carry more competing data. More companies are competing for the same buying signals.

Boards and managers want confidence. And confidence often gets represented by the metrics easiest to track, rather than the effects most important to growth.

A company can look active, analytical, and busy while becoming less likely to be remembered in the buying situations that matter, less trusted when risk enters the conversation, and more dependent on force at the point of conversion.

You can do the wrong things, for longer, and feel like you’re getting it right.

What this book is

This book is a diagnosis of the assumptions that most often weaken B2B marketing from the inside. It is written for leaders dealing with real constraints: board scrutiny, finite budget, uneven execution, and imperfect data.

It is practical without pretending that a few hacks can fix a weak marketing system. It takes performance seriously while resisting the fantasy that every company needs the same budget split, funnel model, or category strategy.

It argues for better commercial judgement around marketing.

You won’t need to become a marketing scientist to use this book. You’ll need to examine the assumptions behind your current decisions.

The through line

Across every chapter, a single pattern repeats. The business gives prestige to what is immediate, attributable, and defensible. It gives less precedence to what is cumulative, probabilistic, and slower to appear.

So it keeps selecting the form of marketing that feels safest in internal meetings, then wonders why external growth feels harder than expected.

This pattern affects more than campaigns. It shapes culture. It teaches teams what gets rewarded. It teaches leaders what sounds doable.

It teaches marketers which work will survive pressure.

Over time, the company builds a narrower theory of growth.

The assumptions this book challenges

Each chapter tackles one assumption that appears reasonable but distorts decisions:

• demand is there, we only need to capture it
• better targeting is always the answer
• brand can wait
• performance is the only real revenue work
• more activity equals better strategy
• positioning is mostly messaging
• more research removes risk
• creative only needs to explain
• measurable equals true
• social reaction equals market effect
• useful content equals demand strategy
• weak results are mainly marketing’s fault
• pricing sits downstream in sales
• ABM is a growth philosophy
• PLG allows marketing to stay lightweight
• PR can substitute for broader market presence

Most of these ideas contain a partial truth. The danger comes when a partial truth gets promoted into a whole-company decision rule.

How better decisions usually look

Better decisions are rarely more complicated. They are usually less confused.

They start with clearer distinctions:

• demand capture versus demand creation
• short-term signal versus long-term contribution
• precision as a tool versus precision as ideology
• measurement for learning versus measurement for theatre
• content production versus commercial role
• marketing execution issues versus system friction

From there, leaders can ask better questions.

What can we prove this quarter? What are we making more likely over the next four quarters?

Which channel is performing - and what does that mean? What made that channel easier for us?

What should marketing do next? What in the wider business is making growth unnecessarily hard?

This is where judgement matters most. Every approved tactic also sets a condition: what gets funded, what gets measured, what survives pressure, and what the team learns to repeat.

Who this book is for

If you are a founder, CEO, MD, commercial lead, or board-level operator in a B2B company, this book is written for you. If you are a CMO or marketing leader trying to improve the quality of decision-making around marketing, this book is also for you.

The language is commercial on purpose. You will see research-backed reasoning throughout, but translated into decisions you actually have to make: budget, evidence, creative, teams, pricing, and the uncomfortable habit of diagnosing underperformance without defaulting to blame.

How to read it

You can read this book straight through. You can also use it diagnostically.

If your immediate problem is expensive pipeline, read Chapter 1, 2, 4, and 10 first. If your issue is confused messaging and generic work, start with Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9. If output is high but results are thin, go to Chapters 11, 12, and 13. If commercial pressure keeps collapsing back into discounting or over-focus, read Chapters 14, 15, 16, and 17.

A final note before we begin

Readers often arrive at a marketing book looking for a new tactic. But a lack of tactics is rarely the problem.

This book asks for something harder and more useful. It asks you to inspect the assumptions that make some tactics look legitimate and others look optional. Once those assumptions change, downstream decisions become easier to see.

Budgets become less erratic. Creative has a better chance of surviving pressure.

Measurement gets more honest. Positioning gets clearer. Pricing gets less defensive. Sales and marketing have fewer reasons to work at cross-purposes.

The work starts with better judgement about the commercial conditions that let marketing compound.