Posted by
Maddie Saunders
This article shares the high-level takeaways from a webinar run by our CEO, Matthew Stibbe. To catch every pearl of wisdom, watch the full webinar here (gated content).
'Never in the field of B2B marketing has so much been expected by so many from so few.’ This was Matthew’s opener for our webinar on creating a more productive and effective marketing department.
It's a notion most B2B marketing teams will recognise. More content, more campaigns, more platforms, more tools, wrapped up in a constant pressure to prove ROI with fewer resources. A 2024 Marketing Week study found that the proportion of marketers focused on effectiveness had fallen from 75 percent in 2022 to just 53 percent two years later. Teams are working harder than ever, but impact isn't keeping pace.
The problem, Matthew argues, isn't effort. It's the system: 'Any system is perfectly optimised to deliver the results it gets,' he explains. 'If you want different results, you have to change the system.' More blog posts won't automatically generate more leads. More campaigns won't fill the pipeline. More tools won't make your team more productive. What will? Focus, clarity and a better framework for how you operate.
The marketing productivity problem
Most marketing teams aren't ineffective because people are lazy or unskilled. They're ineffective because they're operating without clear priorities, without consistent messaging and under constant pressure to respond to the latest request or trend. The result is reactive, fragmented activity that's difficult to measure and even harder to connect to revenue.
The answer, according to Matthew, comes down to a simple principle: 'What defines success is what you say no to, not what you say yes to.'
The 5-point framework for productivity and impact
To move from busy to effective, Matthew recommends prioritising five things:
1. Focus: Not everything on your to-do list deserves to be there, at least not today. High-performance marketing teams ruthlessly prioritise high-impact initiatives, cut or pause low-value activity and protect their time from constant interruption. The goal is to reinforce what's working rather than chase what's new.
2. Positioning: Weak positioning is, in Matthew's view, the number one reason marketing campaigns fail to deliver. If your messaging is unclear or inconsistent, every campaign starts from a deficit. Getting this right, and keeping it consistent across every channel, is foundational to everything else.
3. Systems: Effectiveness at scale requires repeatable processes. That means documented SOPs, shared ways of working, carefully chosen tools and clear KPIs with real accountability. Without systems, teams are constantly reinventing the wheel and institutional knowledge lives in people's heads rather than somewhere accessible that can benefit everyone.
4. Measurement: Matthew suggests a simple test for any metric you're tracking: will it make the car go faster? If your reporting doesn't lead to better decisions, it's measuring the wrong things. His recommendation is to identify 3-5 KPIs that you review weekly and can actually act on, and to invest in the underlying data quality that makes those numbers trustworthy.
5. Alignment: Marketing and sales need to share a definition of success. Marketing success should be a leading indicator of sales success, which means aligning on goals, handovers and metrics. It also means focusing on pipeline, not just leads. When marketing and sales are pulling in the same direction, both teams win.
A note on AI
No conversation about marketing productivity is complete without addressing AI. We describe ourselves as 'human-first AI pragmatists': optimistic about the technology's potential, but clear-eyed about its limits.
AI works well for accelerating low-stakes execution: transcription, research, workflow automation and routing incoming queries. 'It doesn't solve for manifesting expertise, experience, genuine thought leadership,' Matthew notes. McKinsey data supports a cautious approach: while mature AI users have reported meaningful efficiency gains, 94 percent of European marketing organisations are still at a low or moderate level of AI maturity. The opportunity is real, but so is the gap between hype and actual deployment. Read our AI Pragmatist’s Playbook to see what tools your competitors are using and what’s getting traction in the market.
Where to start
The framework is only useful if you act on it. Try this for the next two weeks:
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Audit what your team is currently doing, identify what's actually driving results and pause anything that isn't
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Pick two or three priorities and reinforce them
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Document one or two key processes
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Identify a handful of weekly KPIs to track consistently
Small, deliberate changes to how your team operates will do more for your effectiveness than any new tool or tactic. The goal is to do less, better, and see a genuine return rather than vanity metrics going up.
Want an objective, external look at how your marketing team is performing? Book a free 30-minute marketing review with one of our consultants.
