Dave Kellogg has this great joke about board meetings:
“What’s the scariest thing a CEO can hear in a board meeting?
‘The marketing section is up next.’”
It’s funny, because it’s often true.
When this part of the board meeting goes wrong, you can feel it in the room. The CFO suddenly gets very interested in what’s on their laptop. The VP of Sales starts checking their phone. Everyone’s body language says “I’m about to hear a lot of jargon and acronyms that don’t mean a whole lot to me.”
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Marketing isn’t a mystical dark art. Marketing is a functional discipline - just like sales, finance, engineering, and all the rest. This means (even though it can seem complicated) it has fundamental rules and principles that you can adhere to, twist, measure, pin down, and drive.
But if that’s true, then why does marketing still seem like the squishiest section in your board deck?
Here’s the bad news: It’s probably (at least in part) because your CMO is making their job seem more complicated than it needs to be.
The good news: Simplifying the job isn’t that hard.
Your CMO Has Three Jobs
Your marketing leader (at least in my world of B2B) has three jobs to do. That’s it. Three.
Job 1: Capture demand
There are people out there right now with budget actively looking to buy something that solves the problem you solve. They’re comparing options. They’re googling “[your competitor] alternatives” or “best [solution] for [their problem].” They have a literal OKR due this quarter and it is to buy one of what you sell.
These kinds of prospects are gold. They close faster and more predictably than any other because they’re already in buying mode. They have timeline, budget, and urgency. Your competitors are already fighting for these deals.
The question is: are you even in the fight?
Your CMO’s first job is to make sure that you are. That’s what it means to capture existing demand. It means showing up when these “buying mode” people are doing their research. It means being in the consideration set when they start making their list of who they’re going to talk to. And it means making it easy for them to start a conversation with you.
To do this, your CMO needs to have a point of view on where high-intent buyers are looking for what you sell, and then they need to get a little obsessive about showing up there. For some companies that’s Google search. For others it’s G2 or Capterra or industry review sites. It could be paid ads, SEO, or a presence on comparison sites. The specific tactics matter less than the discipline: your CMO needs to take a stance on where people shop when they’re ready to buy, and then they need to make damn sure you show up when they do. The goal here is hand-raisers—people who want to talk to you and your sales team today, not six months from now.
The way to measure this: demo requests from your website. Your CMO should be able to tell you how many came in last month, how many became qualified opportunities, what you spent to get them, and what they’re testing next to improve those numbers. If demo requests are going up and the cost per demo is staying flat or going down, you’re capturing more of the existing demand that’s out there. If not, you’re probably losing deals to more visible, more trusted competitors who are finding a way to get in front of the existing demand that’s out there.
Job 2: Generate signals
Most people who will eventually buy one of what you sell aren’t ready to buy right now. They might be thinking about the problem. They might be trying to figure out if what you do is even relevant to them. They might be ready in three months. They might be ready in eighteen months. You don’t know yet, and neither do they.
But here’s what you do know: when they ARE ready, you want to be the first call they make. That means staying visible, staying relevant, and staying top of mind while they figure things out.
Your CMO’s second job is to generate signals from these “not yet but maybe someday” people. That means putting thinking and perspective out into the world (content, events, webinars, whatever) and then paying very close attention to who pays attention back. Who downloads the guide. Who shows up to the webinar. Who reads three articles in a week. Who visits your pricing page twice. These are buying signals. Little breadcrumbs that tell you someone is getting a little closer to being ready to buy.
Doing this well means having a system for creating content that actually resonates with people in research mode, and then tracking who engages with it. Blog posts that explain the problem you solve. Guides that help people evaluate solutions. Webinars that teach them something useful. The specific formats matter less than the discipline: your CMO needs to put helpful, relevant content in front of prospects, make it easy for them to engage, and then track who leans in.
And then, when someone generates enough signals, your CMO needs to create a process (maybe with some help from sales) about how you follow up and offer up a conversation. And for the people who aren’t ready yet? Marketing hangs around. That’s what nurture means—hanging around in a helpful, non-annoying way so someday, when they are ready, you’re the obvious call.
The way to measure this: leads generated and their conversion rates. But first, your CMO needs to define what the hell a lead actually is. This is critical. A lead isn’t just anyone who downloaded one piece of content. It’s someone who generated enough signals (enough engagement, enough behavior) to indicate real interest. Your CMO should be able to tell you: here’s what qualifies someone as a lead, here’s how many we generated last month, here’s how many turned into opportunities, and here’s what content or channels are producing the best signals. If leads are going up and their conversion rate to opportunities is staying strong, you’re building real relationships with future buyers that will slowly turn into pipeline and closed-won deals. If not, either your lead definition is wrong or you’re wasting your time on marketing activities that don’t effectively create signals.
Job 3: Make selling easier
Your CMO’s third job is to make selling easier. That means giving your sales team the clarity, tools, and supporting materials they need to have better conversations and close more deals.
Doing this well means two things. First, it means being the interpreter. It means your CMO needs to feel responsible for knowing what customers actually care about and translating that into what your sales team needs to say. To do this, your CMO should be spending lots of time talking to customers and prospects (not just listening to sales call recordings, but actually having conversations with these people) to understand what job they’re trying to get done, what they care about, what confuses them, and what they need to hear to feel confident in a buying decision. Then it means translating what they learn into stuff sales can actually use: positioning that resonates with prospects, a standardized pitch deck that gives structure to first sales calls, clear answers to the objections that come up repeatedly, and messaging that makes sense to the people you’re trying to sell to.
Second, it means listening to what sales needs and then building it for them. What would make their job easier right now? A simpler, better pitch deck? Battle cards for competitive deals? Case studies that help demonstrate ROI? Calculators that help quantify value? Your CMO should be asking sales what they need, building it, and then following up to see if it actually helped. This creates a feedback loop where marketing is constantly improving the assets and materials that sales relies on, and creating a healthy tension between themselves and the sales team by debating the answer to this question: “What, if we built it for you, would most help you close a few more deals this quarter?”
The way to measure this: win rates and sales team engagement. Your CMO should be able to tell you: here’s our win rate in competitive deals, here’s how it’s trending over time, here’s what sales has been asking for to help them close more deals, and here’s what we’ve built in response. If win rates are going up, it usually means sales and marketing are working well together. It means marketing is creating strong positioning and supporting materials, and sales is executing well on calls. If win rates are flat or declining, you need to figure out where the breakdown is happening. Is the positioning unclear? Is the pitch not resonating with prospects? Is the competitive differentiation weak? That’s on marketing to fix. Or is the issue that call execution is inconsistent? Are reps going off-script or not handling objections well even when they have good materials? That’s on sales leadership to address through coaching and enforcement of standards. Most sales leaders need marketing’s help to create that standard and the supporting materials in the first place—but once the standard exists, it’s on sales leadership to make sure their team is actually performing up to code.
Wait… That’s It?
When you look at marketing through this three-job lens, everything gets clearer fast. A thousand tactics collapse into a few simple responsibilities. The noise dies down. The job (both doing it and talking about how well it’s being done) suddenly feels manageable.
But wait, you’re probably thinking. What about account-based marketing and dark social and content strategy and brand awareness and SEO (or is it AEO now?) and all the other marketing terms I’ve been told are best practices?
Yeah… about those. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but those are just fancy words for different parts of the three jobs.
“Demand generation?” That’s creating content that generates buying signals. Job 2.
“ABM?” That’s identifying the companies you want hand-raisers from, then doing Jobs #1 and #2 to those companies until they turn into hand-raisers or leads.
“Content marketing?” Again, Job #2 — putting useful thinking out into the world and paying attention to who pays attention.
“Brand awareness?” That’s what happens when you do all three jobs well.
And while we’re here: let’s talk about “demand generation” for a second. I don’t like that term. It’s misleading. You can’t actually create demand. It’s impossible to manufacture it out of thin air. You can’t hypnotize someone into wanting something they don’t need. What you can do is help people recognize a problem they already have. Give them language for it. Help them understand why it matters and what it’s costing them and what they can do next to start fixing it. That’s not creating demand; that’s surfacing it.
The demand was already there; latent, unarticulated, and waiting for clarity.
Marketing’s job is to provide that clarity.
Where This Goes Wrong
Most CMOs don’t fail because they don’t know these jobs exist. They fail because the jargon/complexity monster sinks their claws into them and they get stuck in a reactive cycle of doing random marketing things without having a grounding philosophy behind the work. In other words, they're doing a lot, but they don’t have a basic standard or framework that they’re building towards. As a result, they stir up a lot of unintended muck in a clumsy attempt to get the three jobs done in an indirect, roundabout way.
What do I mean by “stirring up muck”?
Launching random campaigns. Redesigning the website for the fourth time. (Somehow the website is always “not quite right.” It’s never fast enough or modern enough or conversion-optimized enough. This will always be true and that’s mostly ok but don’t let it be the reason that marketing isn’t working for you.) Chasing the hot new channel (”We should make a company tiktok.”) without a real hypothesis. Rebranding when nobody was confused about your brand in the first place. Writing “thought leadership” that nobody asked for and nobody will read.
It’s a lot of activity. It’s a lot of work. But it doesn’t move the business forward.
What you want is a CMO who shows up and says:
“Here’s our system for capturing demand. Here’s how many hand-raisers we created last month. Here’s how many of those turned into qualified opportunities. Here’s what we’re testing and tweaking next to make things better.”
“Here’s our system for tracking buying signals. Here’s how many people created enough signals for us to call them a “lead” last month. Here’s how we’re following up with those leads and how many turned into qualified opportunities and closed-won deals. Here’s what we’re doing to tighten that system up, and here’s what we’re putting out there next to keep the stream of leads flowing.”
“Here’s how our win-rates are trending and what sales asked for this month. Here’s what we built for them. Here’s what they’re saying about it, how we think adoption is going, and what we think they need next.”
How good does that sound?
How different does that sound than the marketing conversation you’re used to having?
How much better would your business be performing if you had that conversation every month?
Yeah. Exactly.
If you’re a CEO, that’s the conversation you deserve to be having.
And that’s the CMO you should hire.
Author’s Note: Thanks to Sidney Waterfall for the original inspiration for the “three jobs” framework used in this article. Sidney writes a fantastic Substack focused on B2B GTM strategy - you can check it out here.
In my follow-up to this article, I’ll be sharing the interview framework I use to test for these three qualities in CMO interviews. Until then, I’d love it if you subscribed to the newsletter. It’s free and it always will be.
Love it. Clear, practical thinking. Thank you.