You do not have a demand problem. You have a decision nobody made
Who you are for, what you build for them, what you charge, and why anyone should choose you are structural decisions. In most businesses they were never taken. They accumulated. Product and marketing are then measured on the cost of compensating for that, which is why the spend rises and nobody can say what would make it fall.
Marketing is being asked to buy its way out of a decision
The pattern is consistent enough to be diagnostic. Pipeline is short of where it needs to be, so spend goes up. Leads arrive that look right on paper and do not convert. The response is more spend, tighter targeting, a different agency, and the same conversation again two quarters later.
Underneath it sits an absence rather than a mistake. Nobody has decided which segments the business is actually for and which it merely serves. Nobody has decided what it charges and why that is defensible. Nobody has written down what it says that a competitor could not say with a straight face. Those are commercial decisions, and while they are open every campaign has to work harder to compensate.
So marketing gets measured on the cost of the compensating. Acquisition cost climbs, the board asks why, and the honest answer, that it is buying its way around a decision nobody took, is not one a marketing function can usually give about itself.
Six kinds of work, all of them commercial before they are technical or creative
None of this is campaign production, and none of it is a feature request queue. Each one is a decision the business has to own, which is why it sits at board level rather than inside a marketing team, a delivery squad or an agency brief.
Positioning, and who you are actually for
Which segments the business is built to serve well, which it merely accepts, and what it can say that a competitor cannot. This is the decision everything downstream is compensating for, and it is a commercial judgement rather than a messaging exercise.
The revenue engine and its assumptions
The pipeline model end to end: conversion at each stage, what a customer costs to win, what they are worth once won, and which assumptions the forecast rests on. Most forecasts are arithmetic performed on numbers nobody has challenged.
Sales and marketing as one system
The handover, the definitions either side of it, and who owns what happens next. Where the two functions disagree about what a qualified lead is, that disagreement is usually years old and is quietly setting the cost of every deal.
Spend, stack and the agencies behind it
What the budget actually buys, what the tooling costs against what it is used for, and whether the agency and contractor arrangements would survive review. This is a procurement question wearing a marketing badge, and it is treated as one here.
Product strategy, and what you are actually building
Which problems the product is for, what it is deliberately not for, and how both follow from the segments already chosen. A roadmap is a set of commitments about where the next year of build money goes. Most are a list of requests ordered by who asked most recently.
Product development, and whether it ships
Discovery that tests demand before the build rather than after it, a backlog that reflects the strategy instead of the inbox, and a release cadence the commercial plan can actually be built on. Where capacity is the constraint rather than direction, our delivery teams take that on.
Sometimes neither one is what is wrong
A product problem and a go-to-market problem look identical from the outside. The pipeline is short, the forecast slips, and everyone has a theory. Holding both disciplines in one practice is what lets us say which it actually is, rather than selling whichever one we were hired for.
Sometimes it is neither. If the model does not work, if the market is smaller than the plan needs it to be, or if the price cannot carry the cost to serve, no amount of product or marketing work fixes it. It buys time and it raises the cost of the time it buys. Where we find that, we will say so, and what follows is a conversation about the business rather than a programme of work we would be paid for.
That is a real cost to us and it is the point. A practice that can only ever conclude "you need more marketing" is not diagnosing anything, and one that can only ever conclude "you need more features" is worse. Leadership and delivery are quoted separately here for the same reason: a blended rate is a quiet incentive to recommend more delivery.
A position, before a plan
Engagements here usually open by establishing what the business has actually decided, as against what it has accumulated. The gap between those two is normally the finding.
That means five things. Which segments the revenue actually comes from, as opposed to which ones the marketing addresses. What the product is committed to building next, and whether that follows from those segments or from the customer who asked most recently. What the pipeline model assumes, and which of those assumptions has ever been tested. Where sales and marketing define the same words differently. And what the spend is buying, across budget, tooling and the agencies in between.
The output is a position the board can defend and a pipeline model whose assumptions are written down, which is usually enough to act on, and occasionally enough to stop a programme that was about to be approved.
Seven areas, scored out of five. Assess only the areas that apply, see your rating on screen, and take the detailed PDF if you want it.
Most of your market is not buying, and that is the whole argument
Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute put the figure at roughly 5% of business buyers being in the market in any given quarter, in a 2021 paper published through LinkedIn's B2B Institute. The derivation matters as much as the number and is set out on the leadership page: it is computed from an average purchase cycle and a sales-cycle assumption, not measured in your market. Change either input and the figure moves. It is an argument about orders of magnitude, and it should be used as one.
What follows from it is uncomfortable for a demand-generation budget. If a small fraction of the market is in play at any moment, then spending aimed squarely at that fraction is competing with every other supplier for the same sliver, and the cost of reaching it rises as more money chases it. That is not a targeting failure to be fixed with better targeting. It is the shape of the market.
The lever that does move is being the business the other ninety-odd per cent think of when they do enter the market, which is a positioning and distinctiveness question rather than a campaign one, and it is slower and less satisfying to report on. Be warned that most of the figures quoted at you in this area come from agencies selling the service being measured. We have not used any of them here for that reason, and you should ask the same question of anyone who does.
Who leads this work
What the role is accountable for, and why an agency retainer is not the same purchase.
See the leadershipWhere it meets the operating model
Who you serve and what you charge are operating-model decisions. They get filed under marketing and then nobody owns them.
See Business & Operating ModelWhere it meets your spend
Agencies, martech and contractor arrangements are third-party spend, and they review like any other category.
See ProcurementStart with what you have actually decided
A proposition three people describe differently, segments chosen by accident, or a forecast resting on assumptions nobody has tested. A direct conversation about what has actually been decided.