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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Leverage Industry Benchmarks:
Utilize benchmarking data to understand your company's marketing efficiency compared to industry standards. This helps identify areas for improvement and ensures your marketing spend is optimized.
Measure Business Outcomes:
Focus on measuring the impact of marketing efforts on pipeline and business outcomes rather than traditional metrics like MQLs. This aligns marketing goals with business objectives and improves accountability.
Free to Paid Model:
Consider offering a free product to build an initial user base and provide value upfront. Transition these users to paid products by demonstrating the extended benefits and deeper insights they can gain.
Distributed Offices:
For startups, consider a distributed office model to balance cost efficiency and the benefits of in-person collaboration. This can enhance team culture and operational efficiency.
Transparent Communication:
Be transparent with your team about growth phases and potential changes in roles. Recognizing when different skills are needed at various stages of the company can help maintain a strong, adaptable team.
Conversation
Highlights
The Evolution of B2B Marketing: Why Traditional Metrics Are Failing Modern Companies
Marketing metrics are failing B2B companies. While marketing teams obsess over MQLs and conversion rates, finance teams struggle to connect these metrics to actual business outcomes. Meanwhile, the “dark funnel” continues to obscure the true impact of marketing investments.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Chris Golec, CEO & Founder of Channel99 and previously Demandbase, shared insights that challenge conventional B2B marketing wisdom. His perspective, shaped by decades of building B2B marketing technology companies, reveals why traditional measurement approaches are fundamentally broken—and what needs to change.
The Hidden Inefficiency in B2B Marketing
Most B2B marketing discussions focus on optimization tactics and campaign metrics. But there’s a more fundamental problem: B2B marketing is inherently inefficient by design. As Chris explains, “B2B, marketing is inherently inefficient, meaning most companies only sell to two or 3% of the companies out there because they’re targeting a certain industry, a certain size company, and they’re selling into tens of thousands of companies, not millions.”
This core inefficiency manifests in web traffic patterns: “Only 15-20% of the companies on their website have a potential of buying anything.” Yet most B2B marketing teams continue to measure and optimize as if every visitor represents potential business.
The MQL Trap
The problem extends beyond traffic quality to how we measure marketing success. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) have become the default metric for B2B marketing teams, but Chris argues this creates more problems than it solves: “It has a different meaning at every company. And what’s even worse is that within a company, it often changes. So it’s hard to look at results over time.”
This inconsistency leads to a dangerous cycle. “People build spreadsheets. If I generate 10,000 MQLs and 25% turn into SQLs and another 10% turn into opportunities, people start getting measured on MQLs and volume and cost.” The result? Marketing teams optimize for metrics that don’t actually matter to the business.
Illuminating the Dark Funnel
Perhaps the most significant blind spot in B2B marketing measurement is what Chris calls the “dark funnel.” He explains: “Most of the traffic that comes to a B2B website is from sources or channels that are unknown. Meaning it falls into this bucket just called Direct where people kind of just typed in the URL.”
The reality is more complex: “The people that are coming through that channel probably saw an ad, probably heard a podcast, probably read an ebook, probably saw a video or did one of these other things where you have all this content across the web, but you have no way to measure it.”
This creates a fundamental disconnect between marketing investment and measurable results. Marketing teams continue pouring resources into content and campaigns while lacking visibility into their true impact.
Rethinking Go-to-Market for Modern B2B
The solution isn’t just better measurement—it’s a fundamental rethinking of B2B go-to-market strategy. Chris challenges the traditional high-touch model: “The traditional two to one SDRs and huge sales and marketing overhead, it just feels really bloated and I think it can be a lot more efficient.”
His approach at Channel99 starts with providing immediate value through a free product: “People can come to our website, they can sign up for a service where they set up their total addressable market… within the next day they can start seeing their traffic, where it’s coming from and the quality of that traffic by channel and then how it compares to industry average.”
This product-led approach represents a shift from traditional B2B marketing, where value is often gated behind sales conversations and lengthy purchasing processes.
Building Teams for Different Growth Stages
The journey from startup to scale brings its own challenges, particularly around team building. Chris notes: “The team that you bring on kind of that one to 10 million is probably different than that 10 million to 100 million. Different passions, different skill sets.”
This reality requires careful consideration in early hiring: “Some people absolutely scale from one kind of phase to the next, but a lot don’t and a lot prefer to be in that early stage.” The key is maintaining transparency about these transitions while building for the next phase of growth.
The future of B2B marketing will require new metrics, new go-to-market strategies, and new ways of building teams. The companies that recognize these shifts early—and adapt accordingly—will be best positioned to succeed in an increasingly complex B2B landscape.
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