How to Avoid Marketing Theatre in B2B

"I saw you liked Lenny's last post" isn't relevance. It's desperate. "I see you are passionate about B2B marketing" isn't rapport. It's stalking. "I am building a network of like-minded professionals" isn't networking. It's a lie. You think you are building a relationship, but you are just making noise. The team at Cannonball GTM calls this Email Cosplay. Most outbound emails fail for one reason. You think you are the main character. You think the prospect cares about your features, your impressive slide of logos, or that you went to the same college as them. They don't. They didn't wake up thinking about you. They woke up in a specific, painful situation. If you want to earn a reply in 2026, you need to follow the Cannonball Principles: 1/ 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧  Don't target people. Target conditions. Real personalization is: "We have seen this exact constraint in teams like yours, and it creates this predictable failure mode." 2/ 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐞𝐬  No one cares about your logos. They care about peers who are in their exact same mess. Social proof isn't about brands they know. It's about problems they recognize. 3/ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝟑-𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐑𝐮𝐥𝐞 If you need paragraphs, you don't understand the situation. Cut it down with a machete. Structure: Situation → Insight → Inquisition. 4/ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 "𝐈𝐧𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧" 𝐂𝐓𝐀 Stop asking for "15 minutes." Ask for the truth. "Am I close?" or "Is it different on your side?" beats "Can we chat?" every time. Here is the only template you need (steal this): Subject: 2-5 words max (to the point) You are probably dealing with [Specific Situation] right now. Most teams get stuck because [Constraint / Tradeoff]. Am I close, or is it different on your side? That’s it. If you can’t say it that clearly, you don’t know their problem yet. Earn the reply. Then earn the revenue.

Is your marketing team doing any actual marketing, or are they just the internal optics department? I openly discussed with Sam on the Breaking B2B podcast. The brutal truth is that most marketing teams do nothing but reverse engineer what they think the CRO wants to see in a dashboard. Here's a statement I really want you to sit with: 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘻𝘦𝘳𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘒𝘗𝘐𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘰 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭 𝘣𝘶𝘺𝘦𝘳. Go ahead... I'll wait. Not that one. That one either. When marketing’s worth is measured primarily through a set of executive-facing KPIs, those KPIs stop being indicators and start being targets. It’s why “pipeline influence” is more about credit-claiming than actual influence. It’s why the term “attribution” in most orgs means creative accounting, not insight. When you build for the dashboard instead of the market, you’re no longer solving buyer problems. You’re solving executive anxiety. How the loop works in practice: 1. 𝗚𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝘀𝗸: “What will make the CRO happy next quarter?”     2. 𝗣𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘅𝘆: Identify a KPI that signals that story (MQLs, sourced pipeline, influenced revenue).     3. 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲: Build the campaigns most likely to generate that KPI, even if they don’t move the actual business needle.     4. 𝗦𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝗻: Present the results in a way that feeds the political narrative.     Then you start over. "What does the market need to see from us?" slowly becomes "What do they need to see from me?" That’s the moment marketing stops being a growth function and starts being an in-house PR agency for internal stakeholders. Here's what happens: • Creativity dies • Brand equity erodes. • Data integrity collapses. • Market intelligence is ignored • Every quarter is an emergency, so every campaign is disposable    Eventually, the team’s core skill stops being market-making and becomes political survival. If you’re a marketing leader who’s sick of running campaigns for an audience of one, here’s where you start: 1. Rebuild your measurement stack on constraints, not optics. Identify the specific bottleneck in the buyer journey, and measure the metrics that prove you’ve moved 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙩.     2. Separate market KPIs from political KPIs. You’ll still need a CRO-facing dashboard, but treat it as a 𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙤𝙧, not the driver of your roadmap.     3. Create a parallel scorecard for market health. Track message recall, share of voice, category association, and qualitative trust signals. These will never be on the CRO’s dashboard unless you put them there.     4. Make the CRO your partner, not your customer. Agree on cause-and-effect logic. Show how your market-facing metrics 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘥 to their revenue metrics over time.     5. Reclaim creative risk. Set aside budget and cycles for work that might not make the dashboard for six months but will actually shift the market.

I've seen board decks where marketing wanted to present 47 slides. Beautifully designed. Rich with impressions, numbers of blogs posts, social followers. During the leadership team review, the CFO asked one question: "Which of these programs contributed to the pipeline we closed last quarter?" Silence. That's marketing theater. It looks like work. It feels like progress. It costs real money. And it evaporates the moment someone with P&L accountability asks a direct question. Here's how to spot it in your own organization: 😒 Your marketing team reports metrics you've never seen on a board slide. (Impressions are not a board metric. They never will be.) 😑 Campaign spend increases quarter over quarter but pipeline contribution stays flat. 😕 You can't trace a single closed deal back to a specific marketing program with any confidence. 😵💫 Your agency sends monthly reports longer than your S-1 will be; none of it maps to revenue. The fix isn't more dashboards. It's a different starting question. Instead of "what did marketing do this month," ask "what did marketing produce that sales used to close revenue?" #B2BMarketing #CMO #MarketingStrategy

We've all seen them: those generic social media posts, the shotgun email blasts to irrelevant audiences, the sponsorships at events with zero connection to your target market. I call this: random acts of marketing. This scattershot approach leads to scattershot results. It's not impactful, it's ineffective. Think about it: are you more likely to win over a prospect with a generic message or one that speaks directly to their challenges and needs? Here's why random acts can be a career killer: ↳ Brand dilution: Inconsistent messaging across platforms confuses your audience. They won't understand your value proposition, making it an uphill battle to win them over. ↳ Damaged reputation: Bombarding prospects with irrelevant content paints you as desperate and unprofessional. In a competitive landscape, that's a reputation you can't afford. 73% of B2B buyers reported feeling overwhelmed by irrelevant marketing messages. So, how do we combat the "we need some marketing" mentality? It's time for an honest (and yes, hard) conversation. Here's what we can do: ↳ Push back on the "need for some marketing." Explain the difference between random acts and a strategic approach. ↳ Frame it as a "tactic" discussion. "Let's explore the potential consequences of random marketing and compare them to the benefits of a well-defined strategy." The alternative? A comprehensive marketing strategy. This plan should encompass a mix of owned, earned, paid, and rented channels. Here's the beauty: by strategically integrating these channels, you can measure much more holistically. You can also see what's resonating with your audience and what's falling flat. This data-driven approach allows you to refine your strategy and maximize your ROI. It's the difference between marketing that gets noticed and marketing that gets you put on notice. By ditching the random acts and embracing a strategic, integrated approach, you'll not only boost your marketing effectiveness but also set yourself apart as a marketing professional to watch. #marketing #b2b #earnedmedia #b2bpr

I keep coming back to a slightly uncomfortable thought about modern B2B go-to-market; we’ve become extraordinarily good at producing activity, and strangely bad at producing conversations. We have dashboards for everything. Sequences for everything. Stages, gates, hygiene rules, mandatory fields, lovingly curated workflows; whole RevOps careers now depend on making this machine hum. And it does hum. It just doesn’t ring. Somewhere along the way we quietly decided that if something is measurable, it must be progress. Emails sent; tasks completed; touches logged; “engagement” carefully inferred from a pixel having a little think about being loaded. The CRM is immaculate. The calendar is not. Meanwhile the only genuinely scarce resource in B2B has been left to rot in a corner; a real, two-way conversation with a properly senior human who can actually buy something. Here’s the mildly heretical part. If your connect rate is broken, everything else is theatre. Beautiful theatre, granted; well-lit, well-scored, and extremely expensive. But still theatre. You can have pristine ICPs, world-class data, elegant messaging, and a tech stack that would make a VC weep with joy; if your reps can’t reliably get a decision-maker on the phone, you do not have a go-to-market strategy. You have a reporting strategy. This is just Theory of Constraints wearing a slightly nicer blazer. Fix the binding constraint first; then, and only then, worry about polishing the rest of the machine. In most companies the constraint is not leads. It’s not budget. It’s not even talent. It’s conversations per hour. Until that becomes the primary design goal, we’re going to keep shipping “productivity” that makes everyone busier; and almost nobody richer. Hannah Ajikawo Richard Smith James Donaldson Simon Miles