The Harsh Reality of B2B Marketing

Why Marketing Leadership Tenure Is Shrinking and What We Can Do About It

The tenure of marketing leaders has been steadily shrinking, with the average now hovering around just one year.

Continue Reading: Fortune 500 Companies are Eliminating Chief Marketing Officer Roles

Many marketing leaders have expressed growing frustration with the challenges in demonstrating success—especially when their efforts target enterprise buyers.

So what are some of the most common hurdles marketers face today?

Continue Reading: Adapt or Die: Your Company is Either Growing or Dying

The Most Common Hurdles Marketers Face Today

Here are some of the most common hurdles marketers face today:

It’s nearly impossible to ensure emails land in recipients’ inboxes.
Paid search campaigns rarely deliver long-term, sustainable results—enterprise buyers often aren’t even searching for solutions this way.
Social media advertising costs have skyrocketed, making it a less viable option for many teams.
Cold calls and unsolicited outreach are increasingly ignored as everyone’s schedules become more demanding.
Industry events tend to attract more vendors than actual buyers.
Understanding and influencing buyer discovery preferences feels like an uphill battle.
SDR (Sales Development Representative) outreach is delivering diminishing returns.

When stepping into a new marketing leadership role, especially following a predecessor deemed “unsuccessful,” there’s intense pressure to deliver quick wins. You might get lucky for a quarter—maybe one of these tactics works briefly—but more often than not, these results aren’t sustainable. The cycle leads to mismatched expectations, strained relationships, and, ultimately, broken careers.

This raises some pressing questions:

Is marketing, in its current form, losing its relevance?
Are CEOs placing unrealistic demands on marketing teams?
What needs to change for marketing leaders to succeed in this evolving landscape?

It’s time to rethink the strategies, align expectations, and explore innovative approaches to regain momentum and make marketing the transformative force it’s meant to be.

Here's the Reality: The Struggles of Modern Marketing Teams

B2B companies need to invest a lot of capital (i.e. staffing, advertising, tech…) to build a brand, penetrate a market, and gain market share as quickly and efficiently as possible. Then taper off that spend to preserve profitability and longevity. When was the last time you saw an ad for Campbell’s soup? They’ve been around forever and no longer need to run ads.

On this blog, I talk A LOT about branding. I encourage you to check out some of those posts, which can be linked to from the Brand page, or by using the ‘Branding’ filter on the blog.

Consider the analogy of flying a plane or a rocket ship. Most of the effort and energy is getting lift off. Once you are in the air, you can ease up and maintain flight.

If you’ve built a strong enough brand (branding is like gravity, the bigger the brand, the stronger the pull), you can sustain long flights with minimal injections. If you don’t, you may have take off and land, take off and land, take off and land. It’s inefficient and expensive.

Companies who don’t invest enough capital in the beginning, don’t focus on brand, aren’t positioned well in the market, keep changing leadership, keep changing strategy, keep hiring expensive sales and marketing people, keep chasing hard to find clients… yeah, they’re going to struggle.

Brand building is like planting seeds – if you don’t plant seeds, there will be nothing to harvest. If you and all your competitors are picking through the same lame crop, yeah, it’s going to be slim pickings and harder to acquire new customers.