Part one of a five-part series on building a B2B marketing function from scratch.

I joined a scale up to lead Marketing and quickly found that there was little semblance of a marketing function, had half the team cut from under me in the first few weeks, and rebuilt the whole thing from close to nothing in ninety days. That part, oddly, was probably the most straightforward part.

What I walked into was close to a shell. A culture that had taken many knocks over the years, no clear goals or accountability for sales and marketing, and a go-to-market motion that was mostly an idea. I am not going to wallow in it, because the interesting part is what came next.

My former boss Michael Dell said it best. Ideas are a commodity, execution of them is not. The build was the idea. The following weeks and months after were the execution, holding a course while an enterprise pipeline was built, with growing pressure on when it was going to arrive.

This post is the shape of the journey. How the build materialised, the lessons that actually mattered, and a map of the rest of the series, where I will take each piece apart properly.

Set the tone first

The culture matched the rest of it. Broken in places, and badly siloed, with teams heads-down in their own corners and little joining them up.

The first bar I tried to raise wasn’t a marketing one. It was the standard we held ourselves to, as individuals and as a function. Every interaction counted. Hold yourself accountable and lead from the front. You set the tone for everyone else. That’s leadership in my eyes.

Bringing something positive to the table isn’t in anyone’s job spec. I think it’s part of everyone’s job anyway. And when you sit on the leadership team, people look to you first. Whether you asked them to or not.

Tone shows up most in how a company communicates. The clearest sign of the silos was that there was no real company comms at all. So I proposed a kick-off. Get everyone in one room, reset, start afresh and a bit more openly. I owned it with the CEO. It was a hard one to push. We got there, and it gave us a tone we could build on.

That same instinct, raising the bar past my own four walls, ran right through the build. A brand is the sum of a thousand small interactions. The sales follow-up, the onboarding, the legal redline, the support reply. Most of them happen away from my team. None of it is marketing’s responsibility, but all of it is marketing’s problem when it’s not working, because it all shapes trust, perception and ultimately the brand. So I set the standard in my own house, then push, sometimes gently and sometimes less so, on sales, CSM, product and legal too. I’ve written separately about why marketing ends up being the function that cares about this when nobody else does. For now it’s enough to say that if you want to own the brand, you can’t pretend it stops at your own door.

But where is the pipeline?

Ninety days in, the majority of the pieces were in place and would now start to ramp. There were some early positive indications but no qualified pipeline with associated monetary value, because in an enterprise motion there would not be for months. That was known, or should have been. That is exactly when the pressure peaked.

Where is the pipeline. What is wrong. Should we start again. I had agreed runway going in, and under pressure it was being quietly forgotten. For a few days, it became almost unbearable and I seriously considered leaving.

I did not. I had the come-to-Jesus conversation instead. We were running an enterprise motion into accounts that had never had a deliberate touch before I arrived, by a company with next to no brand recognition in the space. Pipeline like that is built, not summoned, and tearing up the plan at month three would have been the final nail in the coffin for the business. So no, we do not start again. We stay the course. And staying the course never meant standing still, we refined every week. The CEO told me afterwards it took some courage to stand my ground, and that it helped. He backed off, said he would give me the time and would not intrude unless I asked, and from there it got better. Being genuinely ready to walk is often what lets you stay, and stay on your own terms.

It really comes down to one thing. They hired you because you are the expert, so trust your judgement and back yourself. My steer for anyone hitting the same wall is simple. If something is frustrating you, you believe you are right, and you have the evidence, have the conversation. If it is not worth the fight, fine, let it ride. The one thing not to do is the worst of both, caring about it and saying nothing, burying your head and seething. Stepping up and backing your own call, out loud, is the job they brought you in to do.

How it landed

The first quarter was all build, with little to show on the surface. Around months four to six the leading indicators moved, share of voice climbing, the right accounts engaging and qualified pipeline building significantly. Around ten to twelve the deals started to land, because that is how long the cycles run. After that it compounds.

By the back end of the 18 months, share of voice had gone from single digits to leading the field, new business had multiplied, and pipeline was at record levels and, better, predictable. A lean, tier-one team carried it, flat out the whole way, but the operating model did the heavy lifting that headcount used to.

The lessons that mattered

A few things held true across all of it.

• Qualify the role before you take it. This is the one I would do better on. Get trust, room and runway agreed before you sign, not somewhere around week three. Qualify the role before you take it… Get trust, room and runway agreed before you sign, not somewhere around week three. Confidence is a fine quality, right up until it stands in for diligence.
• Outsource what you cannot staff, own what is core. A three-person team cannot build everything, and should not try. You buy in the specialist execution, SDR and PR in our case, to get scale you could never build yourself, and you keep the narrative, the targeting and the strategy close. Economies of scale first, ownership later, as the function matures.
• Hold your nerve, and keep iterating. Nerve is not stubbornness. Hold the strategy, but use the data to refine and improve the execution underneath it, and test continually. Iterate, then iterate again.
• Over-communicate, the good and the bad. Tell people where things stand, relentlessly. The wins, the misses, and the messy middle. A board and a team that can see the plan and the progress hold their nerve. Surprise is the enemy, and silence reads as something to hide.
• Lead from the front. Sleeves up, in the work alongside the team, not narrating it from a slide. And give people a destination they can see, because the right goals and a clear picture of where you are heading make every hard call easier, for them and for you. Setting that, and carrying it beyond your own function when it matters, is a big part of the job.
• Point everything at revenue. When you are unsure what to do, that is the question that settles it.

The rest of the series

Over the next four posts I go deeper on each piece.

• You are not the hero of this story. Fixing the positioning, and why getting the story right is the highest-leverage thing you will do all year.
• No plumbing, no pipeline. The unglamorous and unsexy operational rigour nobody really blogs about, and the foundation every later post is built on.
• Signal over spray. Building a demand engine that lets a small team and a tight budget out-aim a much bigger one.
• Building a brand that opens doors. How a small company earns the right to be taken seriously by enterprise buyers, long before anyone meets a human.

Building from nothing is still the most satisfying thing you can do in this job, which makes me either good at it or slightly unhinged, and most days I cannot tell which. But the building is only half the skill. The other half is judgement, the sort it takes to read the conditions before you start and to hold the line once you have. Same muscle, two moments.

Godspeed.