Sustainability Has Moved Up the Agenda. The Way It’s Communicated Hasn’t Most businesses have started talking about sustainability. Some because they genuinely care about it. Some because customers are asking more questions. Some because it feels like something they should be doing. You can see it in the usual places. Website updates, new sections, a few lines added into proposals. The language is often similar. Responsible. Committed. Doing the right thing. It all sounds rea

Sit in enough leadership meetings and you start to notice the same moment. Marketing is in motion. Campaigns are live. Content is going out. Agencies are delivering. There’s plenty to point at. Then someone asks how much of it is turning into pipeline. And then the answers rarely line up cleanly. Marketing talks about activity. Sales talks about what they’re seeing in conversations. Finance looks at cost. Everyone has a view, but there isn’t a single version of the truth. Tha

Most growing companies eventually reach a point where marketing activity starts to increase. Campaigns appear. Content gets published. Paid ads begin running. Agencies may be brought in to support the team. Budgets slowly expand. From the outside, everything looks active. Inside the business, though, something often feels slightly unsettled. Marketing is happening, yet the commercial impact remains difficult to pin down. Leads arrive inconsistently. Pipeline fluctuates. Sales

In the early stages of a company, founder-led marketing is often a huge advantage. No one understands the product better. No one can explain the problem it solves with more conviction. No one cares more about winning those first customers. The founder writes the LinkedIn posts, speaks at events, joins the sales calls, and tells the story behind the product. That energy is infectious. It creates momentum. It helps a young company find its first customers and its first real pro

Many companies reach a point where marketing activity is everywhere. There are campaigns running. Content is being published. Paid ads are live. Events are happening. The team is busy. Yet the question still appears in leadership meetings: “Why aren’t we generating more leads?” At that moment the instinct is almost always the same. Do more. More campaigns. More content. More ads. More events. It feels logical. If activity increases, leads should follow. But in many B2B organi

You’ve just joined a new company. New title. New mandate. Maybe board expectations. Definitely pipeline pressure. And you discover you have three agencies already on retainer... Inheriting agencies is one of the most delicate parts of stepping into a senior marketing role. Handle it poorly and you create instability. Handle it well and you unlock momentum fast. I’ve walked into businesses where agencies were embedded, underperforming, overperforming, misaligned, loyal to foun

If you’re running a B2B company in that £2m–£30m+ bracket, you’ll recognise this moment - Marketing is happening. Everyone is busy. Pipeline still feels too dependent on a few deals, a few people, or a few lucky breaks. At that point, most founders and MDs ask the same question: “ Do we need to hire someone, bring in a consultant, or get an agency? ” The frustrating answer is: all three can work, and all three can fail, depending on what problem you’re trying to solve, and wh

At a recent marketing leadership event, the dominant theme was unmistakable - we’re now operating in what many are calling the “Intelligence Era”. AI-driven personalisation. Adaptive websites. Connected data ecosystems. Humans working alongside machines. Automation driving revenue performance. None of that feels futuristic anymore. It feels expected. The conversation has moved on from whether businesses should adopt AI. The discussion now is about how quickly, how responsibly

Most growing businesses think about marketing leadership when they need it. Few think about what happens after they’ve got it. Succession planning in marketing is rarely discussed in SMEs and scale-ups. Leadership teams focus on immediate priorities: pipeline, brand, product launches, growth targets. But as marketing functions mature, a quieter risk emerges - what happens when key people leave, roles change, or the business outgrows its current structure? The Hidden Dependenc

Most B2B businesses say they have case studies . Far fewer have case studies that genuinely influence buying decisions. Often, case studies become polite success stories. A logo, a quote, a short summary, a few vague outcomes. They look fine on a website. They fill a page. But they rarely change the course of a sales conversation. That’s a missed opportunity. In complex B2B buying, case studies are one of the few assets that can shorten sales cycles, build trust quickly, and

Poor marketing decisions rarely announce themselves loudly. They don’t usually arrive as dramatic failures or obvious mistakes. More often, they show up in ways like: a campaign that underperforms, a tool that never quite gets adopted, an agency relationship that drifts, a website that feels dated but never quite gets fixed. Individually, these things feel manageable. Collectively, they become expensive. In growing B2B businesses, the real cost of poor marketing decisions is

Marketing technology promises efficiency, automation and insight. And in many cases, it delivers. But in growing B2B businesses, martech stacks often evolve in a very different way. A CRM gets added to organise contacts. An email tool follows. Then analytics. Then automation. Then a social scheduling tool. Then a reporting dashboard. Before long, your business has a collection of disconnected platforms , overlapping functionality, inconsistent data, and no clear view of what’

Most B2B businesses measure marketing. The problem is they often measure the wrong things. Marketing dashboards fill up with charts. Monthly reports get circulated. Numbers are discussed in leadership meetings. Yet when the inevitable question arises - “ Is marketing actually driving growth? ” - the answer still feels unclear. In many organisations, metrics have grown organically. A CRM report here. A campaign dashboard there. An agency’s preferred KPIs layered on top. Over

Ask most leadership teams what’s holding back growth, and you’ll hear familiar answers: pipeline volume, pricing pressure, longer sales cycles, tougher competition. Ask sales teams, and they’ll mention lead quality. Ask marketing teams, and they’ll mention lack of follow-up. Somewhere between the two sits one of the most persistent, and underestimated, growth blockers in B2B: misalignment between sales and marketing . It’s rarely dramatic. More often, it shows up as small fri

If you’ve ever stared at a marketing dashboard and thought, “Ok… but what does this actually mean?”, you’re not alone. Most businesses drown in data - clicks, impressions, followers, sessions - yet still struggle to answer the simplest questions: Is our marketing working? Are we getting value from our spend? What should we do next? That’s because too many dashboards measure activity, and not impact. They tell you what’s happening, but not why it matters. You need to build das

Every growing business hits the same wall eventually. You’ve got campaigns running. Your team is active. Your agency is producing work. But results? They’ve flatlined. Leads aren’t converting. The message feels off. And every new idea feels like more noise, not more traction. At that point, most businesses either: Hire a new agency. Redo the website. Launch another campaign. But what they really need isn’t more activity - it’s a marketing reset . What a Marketing Reset Actual

If there’s one question I've heard more than any other in my 20+ years working in marketing, it’s this: “How do we really know our marketing is working?” Most businesses can tell you their sales pipeline, revenue targets, win rates, quarterly forecasts… But ask about their marketing KPIs and you’ll often get something like: “Website traffic is up” or “We’re doing more on LinkedIn” or “Our agency says the campaign performed well.” These statements don’t answer the real questi

Demand generation sounds simple: attract leads, nurture them, and drive sales. But in practice, most B2B teams end up running hard without much forward motion. According to LinkedIn’s B2B Benchmark Report, 68% of marketers admit their pipeline is unpredictable, and more than half say marketing and sales are misaligned. If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Here are five common demand generation mistakes - and what to do instead. Mistake 1 - Focusing on Volume Over Qualit

Professional services firms live and breathe expertise. That’s their edge. It’s what wins clients, underpins credibility, and allows premium fees. But there’s a paradox - that same depth of expertise can make firms rigid, risk-averse, and slow to adapt. If your marketing feels stale, safe, or too predictable, expertise may be part of the problem. The Expertise Trap - Comfort Disguised as Strength Over time, expertise becomes internalised. You know your markets, products, clie

In B2B, it’s tempting to treat marketing as a series of projects: launch a campaign, push some content, run an event, then stop and regroup. But the brands that really win aren’t the ones with the flashiest one-off campaigns. They’re the ones that show up consistently, week after week, month after month. That’s where ongoing marketing support makes the difference. The Danger of Stop-Start Marketing I see it all the time. A business invests heavily in a new website or a big ca