Your Marketing Function Doesn't Have a Strategy.
Here's a Free Tool to Build One.
Ask your CEO what marketing’s strategy is.
Not the campaign calendar. Not the trade show schedule. Not the social media plan.
The actual strategy.
If the answer sounds like a list of activities, you don’t have one. And if you’re in B2B manufacturing, distribution, or any industrial vertical, there’s a very good chance that’s exactly what you’ll hear.
I’ve spent 20 years in B2B marketing. I’ve worked in electrical supply distribution, commercial printing, and precision motion and automation. Different industries, different products, different customers. The same problem everywhere: marketing operates without a strategic framework. It runs tactics and calls it strategy.
The reality is most B2B companies treat marketing like a service desk. Sales needs a flyer. The website needs updating. There’s a trade show in six weeks. Someone saw a competitor’s LinkedIn post and wants to know why we don’t do that. Every request is urgent. None of them connect to a larger logic model that explains why marketing exists in the first place.
This isn’t because B2B marketers are incompetent. It’s because nobody asked them to think strategically. And when they try, the tools available to them are either too academic to be useful or too tactical to be strategic.
The Gap Between Tactics and Strategy
There’s a concept in strategic planning called a strategy map. It comes from Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the same people who created the balanced scorecard. The idea is straightforward: you define a desired future state, then you work backwards to identify every assumption that must become true for that future state to exist.
Not goals. Not KPIs. Assumptions.
An assumption is a present-tense declarative statement. “Our marketing function consistently generates qualified demand that sales can convert.” That’s not a goal. It’s a condition. And the question isn’t whether you want it to be true. The question is what else has to be true underneath it for that condition to hold.
When you start decomposing a root assumption into the drivers, conditions, and capabilities that support it, you end up with a logic model. A map of interdependencies that shows you exactly where your strategy is strong, where it’s weak, and where you’re operating on hope rather than evidence.
This is not new thinking. Operations leaders use these frameworks. Finance leaders use them. CEOs who went through executive MBA programs have seen them. But almost nobody applies them to marketing. And in B2B, where marketing is already fighting for credibility and budget, the absence of strategic architecture is a problem that compounds every year.
Why I Built This
I built the Marketing Strategy Map Builder because I was tired of watching B2B marketing functions get reduced to task execution. I wanted a tool that forces the strategic conversation. Not a template you fill in. Not a worksheet with boxes. A structured interview that pulls the thinking out of your head and organizes it into something an LLM can turn into a real strategy map.
The tool is a prompt. You copy it into your preferred LLM (I recommend Claude), and it walks you through a structured interview covering five phases:
Calibration. Who you are, how your organization is structured, and how familiar you are with strategic planning. The interview adapts its depth and pacing based on your answers.
The BHAG. Your Big Hairy Audacious Goal for marketing. Not a quarterly target. The 10-to-25-year destination that would fundamentally change what marketing means for your company. This phase starts with a brutally honest assessment of where marketing actually stands today, because you can’t build a credible goal on a foundation of denial.
Primary Drivers. The 2-4 major strategic outcomes that must be true for your BHAG to be realized. These are the pillars of your strategy, not activities.
Downstream and Enabling Assumptions. The specific conditions, capabilities, and operational infrastructure required to make each driver true. This is where tactics finally enter the conversation, but only after the strategic logic is established.
Consolidation and Validation. Redundancy checks, reality pressure tests, gap analysis, and a strategic readiness score that tells you honestly how far you are from where you need to be.
The output is a structured markdown file containing a full interview transcript and a machine-parseable summary. That summary can then be fed into an LLM instruction set to generate your actual strategy map and reference document.
How to Use It
The process is simple.
Copy the prompt into Claude (or your preferred LLM). Start the conversation. Answer the questions as thoroughly and honestly as you can. The prompt will push you for specifics, challenge your assumptions, and name contradictions when it finds them. That’s by design. A strategy built on comfortable answers isn’t a strategy.
Plan for 90 to 120 minutes. Don’t rush it. The quality of your output is directly proportional to the honesty and specificity of your answers.
Pro-Tip: Typing leads to shorter, less substantive answers which weakens your strategy map. Don’t type, just speak.
When the interview is complete, the LLM will produce a structured output document. That document becomes the instruction set for building your strategy map.
One note: the prompt will adapt to your level of familiarity with strategic planning. If you’ve built strategy maps before, it will move faster and challenge harder. If this is new to you, it will explain concepts as they come up without condescending. Either way, the output is the same structured logic model.
The Prompt: Marketing Strategy Map Builder
Try It. Tell Me What You Found.
That’s the tool. Copy the prompt into Claude (or any LLM), answer the questions, and see what your strategy map looks like.
I built this because the conversation that Richard Kowalski just had with the prompt is the conversation that most B2B marketing functions never have. Not because the questions are hard. Because nobody asks them.
The output won’t be perfect on the first pass. It will be honest. And honest is the starting point for every strategy that actually works.
If you use it, I want to hear what happened. What surprised you. Where the prompt pushed you into territory you hadn’t thought about. Where it exposed a gap you already knew was there but hadn’t named.
Reply to this post or find me on LinkedIn. I’m genuinely curious what you find.