"Marketing is not a gumball machine."
This seemingly simple statement encapsulates the core issue with the traditional B2B playbook. As one of the creators of the old "Marketo playbook," I've seen firsthand how an intense focus on MQL generation, tied to highly measurable metrics, has led us astray.
While this approach did help marketing earn a seat at the revenue table, it's increasingly clear that the old playbooks are broken. We sit it in:
Missing pipeline
Low SDR productivity
High CMO turnover
Poor alignment
Sure, there are factors besides the broken playbook at play. Economic factors like too many solutions chasing not enough buyers, and layoffs making seat-based pricing difficult, are part of the issue. But I think it’s deeper than that. I think that years of too many emails, overly promotional content, aggressive meeting requests, gated pricing, etc. — all driven by overly ambitious targets and relentless pressure to squeeze more leads out of ever-smaller budgets — have poisoned the buyer experience and damaged the traditional playbook beyond repair.
It's time for a new go-to-market approach, one which stops chasing MQLs and treating marketing like a gumball machine, and starts by refocusing on the core fundamentals including doing right by the customer experience.
Do Right By The Customer Experience
The relentless pressure to hit short-term MQL and pipeline goals is a direct result of the old playbook we created. We taught executives and boards to view marketing as a "budget in, leads out" machine, and they became addicted to the sugar rush of MQLs. But this short-term thinking has led us astray.
In the face of these pressures, it's all too easy to lose sight of what really matters: doing right by the customer. We find ourselves doing things to make the number rather than delivering the best customer experience. But by focusing on short-term metrics at the expense of the customer experience, we're actually hurting our ability to deliver on those very metrics in the long run.
When we bombard buyers with unwanted emails, gate content that should be freely available, and sic SDRs on anyone who dares to download an eBook, we're not building relationships — we're burning them. It's not the gating itself that's the problem, it's the terrible experience buyers have after they fill out that form.
Think about it: how eager are you to buy from a company that's been calling and emailing you repeatedly just because you registered for a webinar? How likely are you to continue engaging with their content or recommending them to your peers? Short-term, these tactics might boost meetings, but long-term, they erode trust, damage our reputations, and make it harder to engage buyers in meaningful ways.
And AI is only going to make things worse. More mediocre content will create more noise, even as AI that summarizes our emails and gives answers in search without needing to click to websites will make it harder than ever to reach buyers. The only way to get our messages across in this new world is to focus on what AI can’t summarize: experiences. That means focusing relentlessly on providing value and building genuine human connections, not just pumping out more content and emails.
Resisting the siren song of short-termism is hard but essential. It means shifting our focus from quantity to quality, from quick wins to long-term relationships. It means treating buyers as people, not leads, and genuinely seeking to help them succeed.
Practically, this looks like:
Creating content that's so valuable buyers would pay for it, then giving it away for free
Making it easy for buyers to try out your products, find pricing and packaging information, and connect with sales on their terms
Personalizing outreach based on a deep understanding of the buyer's context and needs, while avoiding unnecessary “do you want a demo” emails
Building genuine community and connection with your audiences
Investing in customer success and advocacy, not just customer acquisition
A simple litmus test can guide us: Will this deliver a good buyer experience? If yes, it stays. If not, it goes. By consistently choosing the customer's experience over short-term metrics, we build the kind of trust and goodwill that fuels long-term growth.
Focus On The Fundamentals: Product Market Fit, Positioning, and Reputation
I've seen it time and again: CEOs, CFOs, and boards getting bogged down in the tactics of marketing when business results aren't meeting expectations.
They scrutinize cost per lead, squabble over marketing- versus sales-sourced pipeline, obsess over headlines in press releases, and question the effectiveness of specific programs. But this is treating the symptoms, not the problem.
The reality is that pipeline generation and revenue are complex, dynamic systems. If something's not working, it's rarely a simple narrative, and the real issues often lie deeper, in the fundamentals of the business: product market fit, positioning, and reputation.
Without nailing these fundamentals, no amount of heroic marketing execution will deliver the results the business needs. But when they’re right, even an average marketing team can shine.
That's why it's so ironic that for 15 years, the B2B playbook has put all the attention on highly-measurable MQLs and tactical execution, at the expense of focusing on these fundamentals. We've been so busy optimizing our gumball machines that we've neglected the very things that made those machines work in the first place
Product-Market Fit
Product-market fit (PMF) is the foundation upon which all successful businesses are built. It's the degree to which your product satisfies a strong market demand and solves a painful, urgent problem for your target customers. When you have strong product-market fit, everything else in your go-to-market strategy becomes easier — your message resonates, your sales cycles shorten, and your customers become your biggest advocates. But no amount of clever advertising, aggressive discounting, or heroic selling can compensate for a product that doesn't effectively solve a real, pressing need in the market.
PMF is not a one-time event but an ongoing process. As markets and customer needs change, ensuring your product continues to deliver real value is essential. Even companies with strong product-market fit can fall out of alignment; for example, Drift went from being one of the hottest companies around to one that had missed the mark on an evolving category.
Positioning
Positioning is the art of defining how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. It's about carving out a unique space in the market and in the minds of your target buyers: fastest, best designed, safest, most modern…. While product-market fit is about ensuring your product solves a real, pressing need, positioning is about differentiating yourself from the alternatives and owning a distinct place in the buyer’s mind.
Getting your positioning right is critical to everything else in your go-to-market strategy. It informs your messaging, your brand, your content, your target audience, and even your product roadmap. When your positioning is sharp, your ideal customers immediately grasp the value you offer and why you're the best choice for them. Your marketing and sales efforts become more efficient and effective because you're not wasting time and resources talking to the wrong people or explaining why you matter.
But when your positioning is muddled or misaligned, everything gets harder. Your message falls flat because it doesn't resonate with your audience's needs and priorities. You struggle to differentiate from competitors and get caught in feature-comparison battles. Sales cycles drag on as prospects struggle to understand the unique value you provide. In short, weak positioning makes every other part of your go-to-market more challenging and less effective.
Brand
Your brand is more than your colors, logos, and design. It’s how people feel about you when you're not in the room, formed by every interaction they’ve had, from your website and content to your sales reps and customer service. While positioning is about what they think about you, your brand is about how they feel about you. It’s about speaking to the reptilian brain, which is so influential in decision making.
A strong, positive brand opens doors and makes everything else easier. It's the difference between a cold outreach that gets ignored and one that gets a response. It's the reason people pay a premium for a product they trust over a cheaper alternative they don't. It's what turns customers into advocates who sell for you even when you're not there.
On the flip side, a weak or negative brand is an anchor that drags down every other go-to-market effort. You'll struggle to get attention, convert leads, close deals, and keep customers. You'll have to work twice as hard and spend twice as much to achieve the same results as a company with a strong brand.
The challenge, of course, is that building a strong brand takes time and consistent effort. It's not something you can hack or shortcut. The old playbook of gated content and self-promotional thought leadership isn't enough anymore. Today's buyers are too savvy and too inundated with content to fall for thinly veiled sales pitches. They want authentic, valuable experiences with brands they can trust.
Focusing on these fundamentals is not easy. It requires a fundamental shift in mindset and a willingness to challenge the status quo. But for companies who get it right, the rewards are substantial — not just in pipeline and revenue, but in the kind of deep customer relationships that drive sustainable success.
Selling Long-Term Thinking to the C-Suite and Board
Convincing leadership and investors to embrace these ideas and make these investments is no easy feat. The pressure to deliver short-term results is immense, and shifting focus to harder-to-measure initiatives can be met with skepticism or outright resistance.
The CMOs who will be most successful in driving this change are those who excel at collaborating with their peers and leading strategic dialogues around business fundamentals. They must be able to articulate how factors like product-market fit, positioning, and reputation impact the bottom line, and build consensus around the need for a more balanced approach.
It will be important to frame the discussion around concepts the CEO and board care about, such as competitive positioning (instead of marketing “positioning”) and reputation (instead of brand). Redefining the CMO role as Chief Market Officer, focusing on the market rather than the job of marketing, will help with this framing.
They will also need to engage with fellow leaders in a dialogue about metrics. Get buy-in about the changing B2B dynamics, the importance of fundamentals and experience, and then finally ask “given everything we’ve covered, what metrics do you want to see from marketing in the future”. This Socratic method will help them buy into the new metrics that are crucial for marketing's success in today's B2B environment.
Of course, CMOs should have some suggested answers in their back pocket, including:
Brand awareness and reputation sentiment — tracking this longitudinally with quantitative and qualitative surveys is more important than ever. (If you just don’t have the budget for this, direct traffic to the website can be a proxy for awareness.)
Target account engagement — before someone spends money with you, they’ll spend time with you.
Shared pipeline goals, e.g. total pipeline created for new business and expansion, compared to what’s needed — instead of squabbling over who gets credit.
Net-revenue retention (NRR) and net-promoter score (NPS) — two different metrics that together demonstrate the fundamentals are in place.
While marketing can’t “control” all these metrics themselves, focusing on them nonetheless aligns the team to the business and focuses marketing efforts on what matters.
While arguably the CMOs who were best at math and operations “won” during the old playbook, in the new playbook the most effective CMOs will be those who can not only articulate the need for change but also build buy-in and alignment across the organization, who can elevate marketing from a tactical lead generation function to a strategic driver of company growth. They'll be the ones who don't just report on marketing activity, but shape the direction of the business based on deep customer and market insights. They'll need to be compelling communicators, savvy collaborators, and strategic business leaders who can connect marketing initiatives to overall business success.
Embracing the New Playbook and the Future of Marketing Technology
The new B2B playbook prioritizes product-market fit, positioning, and brand reputation as the foundation of go-to-market success. It recognizes that without these fundamentals, no amount of tactical execution can drive lasting results. It also puts the customer experience at the center, resisting the temptation of short-term metrics in favor of building genuine, long-term relationships.
But the changes won't stop there. The marketing technology stack that powered the old playbook, centered around traditional marketing automation platforms, will also need to evolve. We'll see the rise of a new generation of AI-powered solutions designed to support personalized, adaptive customer experiences. These platforms will leverage intelligent segmentation and dynamic content to deliver the right experiences to the right buyers at the right times, all while providing marketers with the efficiency and insights they need to drive results.
The future of B2B marketing is not about incremental improvements to the status quo. It's about a fundamental rethinking of how we engage buyers, measure success, and leverage technology to build meaningful, lasting relationships. It won't be easy, but for those willing to challenge convention and lead the way, the rewards — in the form of stronger brands, happier customers, and healthier pipelines — will be substantial.