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.
What I Actually Do
I help mid-market B2B companies ($10M–$200M) figure out whether their growth constraints are rooted in ICP fit, positioning, marketing systems, or commercial process misalignment. Before they spend more money on execution that won’t land.
The short version: I help companies stop doing the wrong marketing faster.
I also write about how AI is changing what’s possible for lean marketing teams. The version where you have three people, a real budget constraint, and a leadership team that needs to see results before they’ll invest more.
How I Work
I typically start with a diagnostic engagement. Fixed fee, fixed duration. I interview your team, talk to sales, look at how leads actually move through your system, and evaluate whether your ICP definition, your messaging, and your commercial process are aligned or working against each other. You get a clear, written assessment: what’s broken, what’s working, and what to prioritize before spending another dollar on execution.
If the diagnostic reveals deeper work, we talk about what that looks like. But I don’t sell that upfront. I sell clarity. The architecture comes after.
I am selective about who I work with. If your company is looking for someone to promise 50 new leads in two weeks, I’m not the right fit. If you’re serious about fixing the infrastructure behind revenue growth, we should talk.
Curious?
If this sounds like your situation, let’s talk. I set aside time each week for a free 30-minute conversation. I’ll ask about your marketing structure, your pipeline, and where you think the bottleneck is. Then I’ll tell you what I see and whether I think I can help. If I can’t, I’ll say so in the first ten minutes and give you back your time.
