Stick with me for a moment…

You’re in a quarterly review. Your CEO is looking at the pipeline and asking what marketing can do right now, for cheap, to produce real sales results. You know the honest answer. You also know that answer won’t go over well.

Most B2B companies don’t have a marketing problem. They have a marketing infrastructure problem. The campaigns, the content, the trade show booth. None of it works if nobody has answered the harder questions first. Who are we actually selling to? What do they care about? Is our message landing, or are we just talking to ourselves?

I’ve spent 20 years inside B2B companies watching this exact meeting happen. Leadership asks marketing to fix the pipeline. Marketing runs more campaigns. The pipeline doesn’t move. Everyone points at marketing. The cycle starts over.

The problem was never effort. It was architecture.

Who I Am

I’m Doug Jones. I’ve led marketing inside industrial and technical B2B companies for two decades. Manufacturing. Distribution. Precision engineering. The kinds of companies where the sales team has been around longer than the marketing function, and where marketing still gets treated like a cost center instead of a commercial system.

I write about what I see from the inside: the gap between what executives expect from marketing and what marketing can actually deliver without structural change. I write for the people in those buildings who know something is off but can’t get anyone to slow down long enough to figure out what it is.