Marketing Isn’t a Cost Centre. But Most Marketing Departments Are.

When the Budget Gets Cut

There’s a pattern I see play out with uncomfortable regularity in B2B tech companies.

Growth stalls. Revenue targets slip. Headwinds hit: competitive pressure, a funding gap, a slower market. The leadership team sits down to figure out where to cut. And marketing? Marketing goes first.

(Sometimes it’s a full freeze. Sometimes it’s a quiet 30% trim with a lot of “we’ll revisit this next quarter” energy. Either way, it’s gone.)

I’ve heard founders and CEOs describe this as a difficult decision. Honestly? In most cases, it isn’t. It’s the logical one. When marketing can’t show a clear line between what it does and what the business wins, treating it as discretionary spend makes complete sense.

Here’s the thing, though: the problem isn’t that CEOs undervalue marketing.

It’s that most of what gets called “marketing” has earned exactly that response.

Real MARKETing vs. A Promotions Department

Here’s a question worth sitting with: what does your marketing team actually do?

If the honest answer is “they run campaigns, manage the website, send emails, post on LinkedIn, and generate leads,” you don’t have a marketing department. You have a promotions department. And that distinction matters more than most founders realize.

Here’s a working definition worth keeping:

Marketing is the work a company does to understand what people need, create offerings that meet those needs, and make sure those offerings are easy to find, buy, and value.

Notice what's not in that definition. There's no mention of campaigns. No social media. No lead generation. Those things aren't marketing. They're promotion. And promotion is just one part of the picture.

The classic 4Ps of marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion) exist because marketing, done properly, is involved in far more than getting the word out. It’s involved in understanding the market deeply enough to inform what gets built, how it gets priced, how buyers find and purchase it, and only then—how it gets communicated.

Real MARKETing starts with the market itself. It means genuinely understanding your ideal customers: who they are, what problems keep them up at night, how they make decisions, and what alternatives they’re weighing against you. It means being clear on your positioning. Who you’re specifically for, what makes you meaningfully different from the alternatives, and why that difference matters to the people you’re trying to reach. It means having a deliberate strategy for getting in front of the right audience, not just any audience.

(Most companies skip straight to promotion. It feels productive. Campaigns launch, content gets published, ads run. Things are happening. The problem is that without the upstream work, you’re communicating clearly about the wrong things to the wrong people. Just faster.)

This isn’t a critique of marketers. Most marketing teams are executing exactly what they’ve been asked to do. It’s a structural problem. Marketing has been scoped down to a promotions function and then judged by revenue metrics it was never set up to influence.

That’s what we need to fix. And it starts with understanding what Real MARKETing actually touches.

The Formula That Changes the Conversation

There’s a concept in B2B sales and marketing called pipeline velocity: a measure of how fast revenue moves through your business. It’s not new, and it’s not complicated. But in my experience, most marketing teams have never seen it, and most CEOs have never thought to connect it to marketing.

The formula looks like this:

(Deals × Deal Value × Win Rate) ÷ Sales Cycle Length = Pipeline Velocity

Four variables. Four levers. And here’s what nobody tells the marketing team: Real MARKETing influences every single one of them.

Not peripherally. Not indirectly. Directly—through the foundational work of understanding your market, defining your ideal customers, getting clear on your positioning, and building a deliberate strategy to reach the right audience.

Most marketing teams aren’t measured against any of these levers. They’re measured against MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), a score marketing assigns to a contact based on their behaviour (clicks, downloads, page visits, email opens) to indicate they might be ready for a sales conversation. It’s a metric that marketing controls (and manipulates) entirely, that sales routinely ignores, and that means precisely nothing to a CFO trying to understand what the marketing budget actually bought.

(Ask your sales team what they think of the leads marketing sends them. Then ask your CFO if MQL volume has ever informed a budget decision. I’ll wait.)

The gap between what marketing measures and what the business actually cares about is where the trust problem lives. And it’s fixable, but only if marketing is doing the right work in the first place.

Four Levers, One Foundation

Lever 1: Number of Deals

The number of deals in your pipeline starts with awareness. If your ideal customer doesn’t know you exist, they can’t become a deal. Full stop. (After all this time in Canada, you’d think I’d get used to saying “Period.” I really can’t. Sorry.)

Real MARKETing builds the conditions for deals to appear. Through consistent visibility with the right audience, long before they’re actively buying. When a prospect enters the market, you’re already familiar. Already credible. Already on the mental shortlist.

A lot of this happens in what marketers call dark social: the peer recommendations, private group chats, conference conversations, and forwarded newsletters that never show up in any analytics tool. A prospect might have followed your thinking for a year before they raise their hand. When they do, the CRM stamps it “sales-sourced” because that’s the last recorded touch. Marketing built the conditions. Sales got the credit.

This is why obsessing over precise attribution (however sophisticated your model) is largely a losing battle. What you can do is make it structurally more likely that the right deals show up, by being consistently visible and relevant to the right people. That requires a clearly defined ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): a specific description of the type of company you’re best positioned to win and serve. Without it, you’re generating noise, not pipeline.

Lever 2: Deal Value

Here’s the connection most founders haven’t made: your positioning directly affects the price you can command.

When your messaging connects what you do to a business outcome the buyer genuinely cares about (revenue growth, risk reduction, operational efficiency: outcomes that either make money or save it), the conversation is about value, not cost.

If your messaging is feature-heavy or unclear, the conversation defaults to cost comparison. Procurement gets involved. Discounting starts. Margin shrinks.

Undifferentiated companies compete on price by default. That’s not a sales negotiation failure. It’s a positioning failure that shows up in the sales negotiation.

Lever 3: Win Rate

A skeptical CFO will tell you win rate is a sales problem. Better reps, better process, better pitch. And sales execution does matter. Nobody’s arguing otherwise.

But ask a harder question: if sales is consistently pitching to the wrong companies, do you expect them to win?

Win rate is significantly influenced by who enters the pipeline in the first place. When the ICP is clearly defined, and targeting is deliberate, sales is having conversations with companies that have the problem, the budget, and the urgency. They’re in rooms they can actually win.

Clear positioning influences win rate in a second, less obvious way. When a prospect arrives at a sales conversation already understanding what you do and why you’re different, the education has already happened. Objections that would normally consume two meetings have been addressed by the content they consumed on the way in. Messy positioning means every deal requires more convincing, more time, more opportunities to lose.

Sales can only win deals they should be in. Real MARKETing determines which deals those are.

Lever 4: Sales Cycle Length

Long sales cycles frustrate everyone. They delay revenue, consume sales capacity, and drive up the cost of every deal.

Poorly targeted prospects take longer to close. They need more convincing, more stakeholder involvement, and more internal justification. Buyers who arrive uneducated take longer to close. Sales has to do all the teaching from scratch. And when the person championing your solution internally has to convince their CFO, their IT lead, legal, and their board, the internal selling process either moves quickly or stalls entirely, depending on how clearly they can explain your value without you in the room.

That said, there are things marketing (and frankly, nobody) can fully control. Procurement processes have their own timelines. Buying committees have their own politics. And in any significant B2B purchase, there’s an often-overlooked dynamic at play: the Fear of Messing Up (FOMU).

Big decisions put careers on the line. The champion isn’t just evaluating whether it works. They’re calculating the personal risk of being wrong. That fear drives excessive due diligence, endless internal review cycles, and the dreaded “no decision” outcome that kills deals nobody technically lost.

Real MARKETing addresses this directly. Not by pressuring buyers to decide faster, but by reducing the friction and perceived risk that slows them down. That means mapping the full customer journey, not just the awareness stage at the top of the funnel, but the consideration and decision stages where deals actually stall. It means creating the content, case studies, ROI calculators, and comparison frameworks that give your champion the ammunition they need to make the case internally. And feel confident doing it.

Marketing’s job isn’t just to fill the pipeline. It’s to reduce friction at every stage of the process, including the stages that happen behind closed doors, long after your last sales call.

Why the Dots Never Get Connected

So if Real MARKETing influences all four levers, why doesn’t marketing talk about it this way?

Here’s the thing: most marketing teams report MQLs because MQLs are easy. Easy to generate, easy to count, easy to present in a slide deck. They’re a metric marketing controls entirely, which makes them feel safe to report.

But safe metrics aren’t the same as meaningful ones.

A CFO staring at an MQL report is looking at a number that marketing defined, marketing measured, and marketing deemed sufficient. The scoring criteria get quietly adjusted when the numbers slip. And nobody in the boardroom can draw a straight line from that number to closed revenue.

(The MQL problem isn’t just a reporting problem. It’s a symptom of a deeper one. If your marketing team can’t connect their work to deals, win rate, deal value, and sales cycle length, it’s often because they haven’t built the foundations that would actually move those levers in the first place. You can’t report what you never intentionally built.)

This is the part that stings a little, so I’ll say it plainly.

If your positioning is unclear, your ICP is loosely defined, and your messaging doesn’t meaningfully differentiate you from the alternatives, more marketing activity doesn’t help. It amplifies the problem. You’re communicating the wrong things to the wrong people with more budget and more urgency.

And so the CFO, armed with an MQL report and a growing sense that marketing spend isn’t doing much, makes a perfectly rational decision.

The budget gets cut.

Marketing has basically trained the business to undervalue it by measuring itself against metrics that don’t matter, and by failing to build the foundations that would let it measure the things that do.

That’s the real problem. And it’s not the CFO’s fault for not connecting the dots. It’s marketing’s job to connect them. And most marketing departments, scoped down to a promotions function and measured by activity metrics, were never set up to do that.

What to Do About It

Before you do anything else, it’s worth figuring out which camp you’re actually in. These three questions won’t take long. But sit with them honestly. The answers will tell you more than any marketing audit.

1. Can everyone involved in selling, building, or marketing your product describe your ideal customer in exactly the same way? Or do you get different answers?

2. If a prospect asked anyone on your sales or marketing team why they should choose you over the two or three alternatives they’re already considering, could they answer that clearly and specifically? Or would the answer be vague?

3. When did your marketing team last present anything to you other than leads, clicks, or MQL numbers? Have they ever connected their work to win rate, deal value, or sales cycle length?

If you’re not happy with your answers, that’s not a marketing execution problem. It’s a foundations problem. And foundations are fixable, but only if you start in the right place.

The sequence matters. Clarity first. Who are your ideal customers, what do they care about, what alternatives are they weighing, and why should they choose you? Get sharp on those questions and the answers inform everything downstream: your messaging, your strategy, your channel choices, your sales conversations.

Then strategy. How do you reach the right audience deliberately, build awareness and trust over time, and create the conditions for deals to appear? Not a list of tactics. An actual plan.

Then execution: the campaigns, the content, the demand generation (activities designed to create interest and drive leads), the sales enablement. The promotion piece. Which, done on top of clear positioning and deliberate strategy, works considerably better than it does without them.

(This is the order most companies reverse. They start with tactics because tactics feel productive. Then they wonder why the pipeline is thin, the win rate is disappointing, and the CFO is eyeing the marketing budget again.)

When Real MARKETing is in place, when marketing is genuinely doing the full job, not just the promotions piece, the connection to pipeline velocity becomes visible. Deals appear more consistently. Win rates improve because sales is talking to the right people with the right message. Deal value holds because positioning is clear and differentiation is real. Sales cycles shorten because buyers arrive educated, and champions have the tools to sell internally.

Marketing stops looking like a cost centre.

Because it stops behaving like one.

And the budget? It stops being the first thing cut. Because it's no longer the hardest thing to justify.

Not sure whether your marketing team is pulling these levers or running a promotions department? That’s probably worth a conversation. You know where to find me.