Go on. Be honest. And is it demand for outputs rather than outcomes being heard from sales or commercial heads?
Many organisations fall into this trope.
Teams begin with formats and calendars: we need four blogs, a white paper, six LinkedIn posts and a webinar. Activity becomes the strategy. And it’s often being driven by sales who think they know how campaigns should run.
Now sales might have very strong customer insight & knowledge. But they’re not the experts in driving perceptions and behaviours. That’s what Marketing does. And in high-value B2B, that means nurture… and nurture needs appropriate content.
You can see why it happens though. Content production is visible and manageable; market change, buyer behaviour and commercial outcomes are harder to manage. As we say. internal stakeholders tend to request deliverables rather than outcomes. And Marketing has to push back. Because if you do, the results will be FAR better.
What to adjust? Work backwards from business objectives and rea insight into buying behaviour (talk to customers!): markets/accounts; buying situations; stakeholders; questions/barriers; desired behavioural change; content; distribution; measurement. Require every significant content initiative to have a stated commercial job.
CMI’s 2025 research is revealing: among marketers rating their strategy moderately effective or worse, 42% cited unclear goals, 39% failure to connect content to the customer journey and 35% insufficient use of data.
