Introduction: Bad assumptions
A book about sensible decisions that produce the wrong marketing system. B2B companies often fail at marketing because the business...
The demand is there
A controlled sentence that shrinks the market to whoever is already buying. It is usually said in a controlled voice. Pipeline is...
Better targeting
When broader presence feels risky, the room reaches for precision. Once a company accepts that the market is larger than the active...
We'll do brand later
A respectable way to postpone the work that makes growth easier later. It's one of the most respectable ways a company can...
Performance drives revenue
A sentence that sounds balanced - and still moves the budget. It's the kind of sentence that can make everybody in the room feel...
More marketing
The moment activity starts to substitute for strategy. After a soft quarter, it is one of the easiest things for a company to say. We...
What makes us different
Where positioning gets reduced to copy. A lot of companies start sounding unusually earnest once the conversation turns to difference....
More research first
A responsible-sounding brake that often delays commitment. Few sentences sound more responsible inside a company than this: let’s do...
Creative should explain it
Where B2B marketing becomes sincere - and forgettable. After enough pressure, a lot of B2B marketing becomes sincere, careful and...
I'll know good creative
Where reviews get confident - and unhelpful. Creative review is where confidence often arrives before usefulness. Creative should...
If we can measure it, it worked
Where weak decisions put on a lab coat. Weak marketing decisions look much more respectable once they put on a lab coat. I'll know...
This post did well
Where social metrics replace strategy without anyone calling it that. This is how a lot of B2B social strategy loses the plot while...
Useful content will bring demand
The respectable hope that keeps teams busy. This post did well already showed how visible social response can stand in for commercial...
The problem is in marketing
The convenient diagnosis that protects the rest of the system. When commercial performance softens, leadership often looks for the...
Pricing is a sales problem
A tidy division that hides a sharp commercial lever. Pricing gives companies a tidy place to hide from one of their sharpest...
ABM will solve it
When focus becomes a theory of growth. ABM can make a struggling B2B company feel strategically sophisticated very quickly. ABM will...
PLG keeps marketing lightweight
Where conversion mechanics get mistaken for the whole growth model. PLG flatters modern B2B founders because it makes growth sound...
PR will build awareness for us
Coverage, credibility, links, memory: different jobs, one messy label. PR is an attractive answer to a familiar founder anxiety: too...
Coda: Better assumptions
A final pass over the pattern - and the judgement founders need around marketing. By this point in the book, the pattern should feel...
Email is everywhere and somehow still underbuilt
Email keeps winning the planning meeting, then losing the growth argument, because most teams only invest in the cheapest version of...
Marketing ops overload
When a marketing team spends most of its week formatting work, moving work, and proving work happened, the work that needs judgement...
Small markets, big impact
When your total addressable market fits in a spreadsheet, you don't run marketing at scale, you run marketing under constraint....
The career risk factor
Most B2B marketing builds account profiles around firmographics and intent signals. Meanwhile, deals often turn on something quieter:...
The lever era hangover
Digital used to feel like a lever you could pull for quick growth. Now reach is more expensive, measurement is less reliable, and...
Budget amnesia
Early-stage constraint forces repetition, reach, and prioritisation. Then funding arrives, and everyone pays to forget those habits....
Organisational fundamentals
You can make great marketing decisions without reciting the research, as long as you make it normal for the research to shape what...
Marketing weather
A lot of marketing research describes the forces that usually keep markets stable, and people keep reading it like a set of...
The harvest-first trap
Most B2B teams talk about this as a budgeting problem. In practice, it is usually an operating model problem. If you build the week...
The reach tax
The first time you're offered real distribution, someone else usually wants to rewrite your brand. The reach tax is the compromise you...
The dashboard defence
In B2B, the dashboard often arrives after the decision and is treated as if it came first. Many B2B marketing decisions are made...
The presence debt trap
Most marketing 'strategy' is activity you can sustain for two weeks and then abandon when the quarter tightens. The work that...
Timing over precision
You can't control when buyers enter the market, but you can control whether they have heard of you when they do. Precision targeting...
The attention bottleneck
We see thousands of brand messages a day. Most disappear without trace. The real challenge in B2B marketing isn't access - it's...