A small B2B marketing team has more legitimate work than it can fully support. The founder wants a website refresh, sales needs a better deck, and campaigns still need attention. With only so many hours in the day, how do you decide what matters most?
B2B marketing priorities depend on how the business wins customers today and where that process is breaking down. Understanding that gives us a way to decide whether the website, the sales deck, or the next campaign deserves attention first.
How the work builds from the center outward
Before building a website or campaign, I want to know who the product is for, what problem it solves, and why someone would choose it. Those answers shape the positioning and what the website or campaign needs to communicate.
You could have the right product and still be telling people the wrong thing. If the right customers can’t see its value in how you describe it, you’ll struggle to find traction. As you learn, the product, your understanding of the customer, and the message evolve.
Alex Kracov, Lattice’s first marketer, described how the company’s messaging changed. In an interview with First Round Review, he explained that Lattice started by talking about OKRs and goals, then learned through customer conversations that performance reviews and performance management were where a bigger shift was happening. That understanding changed how the company explained its value. First Round Review
I think of this as concentric circles. At the center are the customer, their problem, the value of the product, and how we position it. Around that is the message we use to explain the value. Farther out are the places people encounter the company and the marketing that brings them there.
Take the website. Someone might arrive there after reading a post or talking with a salesperson. The site then has to explain the offer, give them enough confidence to keep going, and make the next step easy. That’s why I don’t treat the circles as separate boxes. One piece of work can serve several purposes.
A better-looking website won’t solve a targeting problem. If we’re talking to people who don’t care about the problem our product solves, I’d revisit who we’re trying to reach and what we’re telling them. But when qualified prospects understand the value and want to take the next step, we may already have a solid enough foundation. We shouldn’t keep rebuilding the center when the problem is farther out.
What we hear after putting the work into the world feeds back toward the center. Maybe prospects keep describing their problem differently than we do, or asking for proof we haven’t provided. Those responses should affect how we explain the product. If the foundation isn’t solid, more activity will just spread confusion faster. But solid doesn’t mean perfect. We need it clear enough to test and learn from the response.
By themselves, the circles can’t tell us what deserves attention first. To make that decision, I’d start with the business result we need to improve and work backward.
Work backward from the business outcome
I’d start by talking to the CRO, or whoever owns revenue. What drives revenue today? Where did our closed-won customers come from? What did it take to win them? I want to understand the sales motion, who buys versus who uses the product, and what we’ve learned from those deals. Contract value and where customers get their information matter because they change which marketing investments make sense.
What I really want to know is: where do we have the clearest opportunity to grow? Just because something is a good marketing strategy doesn’t mean it’s the right priority for this business. I want to understand what’s already worked for this product in this market, and whether we can make it repeatable.
From there, I would work backward from the number we’re trying to move and ruthlessly define the dependencies. If we need more opportunities, where do qualified conversations come from today? Referrals, form fills, events, sales prospecting? What made those prospects willing to have a conversation? I’d look for a weak point we can influence rather than taking “more opportunities” as an instruction to launch another campaign.
Two companies can both need more pipeline and still have completely different problems to solve.
The right demos close, but there aren’t enough
If the right people who get into a demo tend to become customers, that tells us something useful. They see the product, recognize how it solves their problem, and are willing to buy. I’d check where those meetings came from before assuming a wider audience would respond in the same way.
We need more conversations with people like them. Before deciding how to reach those people, I’d ask what has made the right buyers willing to give us 30 minutes.
Start with the pain they have. If someone’s hair is on fire and you approach them with a bucket of water, they’ll grab it out of your hands. If their head is merely warm, you might convince them to dump water on themselves, but they won’t grab it from you. Who you’re targeting and how urgently they need a solution matter.
Then there’s whether we’ve made it clear that we have the water. Does the pitch tell them what problem we’ll solve? Do they trust us enough to give us their time?
Someone might book through the website, email, LinkedIn, or after meeting us at an event. The right places depend on the customers and the company’s sales motion. Marketing can improve the message and experience at those touchpoints while coordinating with the salespeople who own prospecting and closing.
Using the circles, I’d look at what happens before a meeting is booked. Are enough qualified people encountering the offer? Once they see it, do they understand why the meeting is worth their time? Can they book easily? A distribution test addresses a different problem from clearer proof on the website or a simpler booking experience. Reaching more people could increase the number of meetings without improving the conversion rate, and those extra meetings are only useful if the prospects fit.
Demos are booking, but deals aren’t closing
Now imagine the reverse. We’re getting plenty of people into demos, but we can’t close them. That could mean we’ve done a good enough job generating interest and creating the impression that we solve a problem. But when people see the actual solution, something may not match what they expected.
The product may fall short of what they need. The positioning might have set the wrong expectation. Or the team might not have discovered the requirements that matter most to the buyer.
You can solve a customer’s problem, but they still need to believe it’s a good business decision to choose you. They might need to send emails, and your product sends emails, but will you still be around in two years? Is your support good? Are there bugs? Will you deliver as reliably as the incumbent? Choosing a vendor involves more than checking whether one capability exists.
I’d start by reviewing lost deals and listening to the sales conversations. What did buyers expect, and what changed their minds?
If buyers were promised a capability the product doesn’t have, I’d correct the message and discuss the gap with the product team. That takes us back toward the center. Doubts about support call for evidence of reliability, which I’d work on with sales. Until we understand why deals aren’t closing, more demand generation may feed the same problem.
Both companies may ask marketing for more pipeline. I wouldn’t give them the same plan.
Give the work the amount of effort it deserves
Finding the likely constraint still doesn’t tell us how much effort to put into fixing it. AI makes it easier to put together a website, a design, or a piece of content quickly, but it’s also easy to put out work that looks thrown together. A poor first impression can erode trust before a buyer has taken the product seriously.
The quality bar depends on the buyer and the stakes. A company selling a high-value product to a cautious buying committee has different credibility requirements from one selling a low-cost self-serve product.
Bringing the website up to an acceptable quality may be one of the best things you could do. It still needs to look credible, but that doesn’t mean spending $300,000 and four quarters building it. Once the website is doing its job, spending another three months making it look marginally better might return less than reaching more intended customers. Taking a logo from a six out of ten to an eight and a half might improve the logo. But is that the best use of your marketing team’s next week?
Channel choices also need to justify the time and money they take. An event can give a small company real face time with buyers and decision-makers. If the right people will be there, that might be one of the fastest ways to generate awareness and conversations. An expensive booth doesn’t automatically mean high ROI. You have to consider how many relevant people you can reach, the cost, the time involved, and what happens after the conversations.
Prioritizing one opportunity doesn’t make the rest of the work disappear. Existing campaigns, customer education, and necessary sales support still need attention. The central task is choosing what gets focus first while keeping the baseline work running. The systems you use can make that easier to maintain, especially when recurring work starts to justify marketing automation.
Reusing good work can also free up time for the priority we’ve chosen. We can spend one session writing a substantial blog and then use what we’ve developed to create social posts, maybe video, or useful sales material. That only helps if each piece is valuable where it appears. Repurposing gives us leverage; it doesn’t automatically give us an audience.
Keep the customer conversation running
The priorities need to change as the team learns. When the company lacks historical data, you still have to make bets. Customer and sales conversations can help you see what your dashboards won’t. But getting time with customers is difficult. People are busy, some won’t respond, and you can’t assume the next interview will happen just because you need it.
I wouldn’t rely entirely on sales to arrange those conversations. Don’t be afraid to do your own outreach for research, partnerships, or other marketing needs. A founding marketer needs to know how to reach people, even if that doesn’t mean owning the sales team’s job.
I’d make customer feedback part of the weekly sales and marketing conversation. Listen to call recordings, ask about recurring objections, and talk to customers when you can. That gives marketing something to work from even when direct interviews are difficult. Keep a record of the patterns and bring them into planning. If several intended buyers keep asking about support, the next campaign could explain how it works and give them evidence that we can deliver.
But you have to know who the feedback is coming from. If you’re targeting one kind of company but most of the feedback comes from large enterprises, you can start changing your product, positioning, and messaging to fit people who aren’t even the customers you intend to serve at this stage. You can’t take every piece of feedback at face value. Look for patterns among the right customers, and don’t let one person’s opinion redirect everything.
A practical way to set B2B marketing priorities
Look at the requests in front of you. You need to understand the goal behind each one before deciding how much work it deserves.
Take the founder’s website request. I’d ask what makes them think a redesign is needed. If qualified buyers are getting confused, the problem might be the positioning or a page that doesn’t explain the value. Trouble booking a demo would call for a different fix.
Sales might be asking for a new deck when an active deal only needs a specific piece of proof. I’d rather fix that immediate gap than rebuild every slide. I’d compare those fixes by what they could improve, how soon, and how much time they would take from the work we still need to maintain.
These are the questions I’d take into that planning conversation:
- How does this company attract and win customers today? Look at the actual closed-won customers, where they came from, and what has worked with this product in this market.
- What result needs to change? More qualified conversations, more demos, better conversion to customers, or something else? Be specific about the number.
- What needs to happen for that result to improve? Work backward through the dependencies. Which things can affect it, and where does the evidence suggest the process is breaking down?
- Are we missing something at the core? Do we understand the right customer, their problem, why they should choose us, and whether they believe we can deliver? If that isn’t clear, more activity could scale the wrong thing.
- What is the relative return on the work in front of us? How quickly could it pay off, what will it cost in time and money, what risks does it introduce, and where are we seeing diminishing returns? What can wait without losing the opportunity?
- What can we test and learn from while keeping the necessary work moving? Make reversible decisions quickly, use what we already have where it’s good enough, and make sure the information coming back from customers changes what we do next.
In the end, I keep coming back to the same question: if I do this, what result will it improve, and why does that matter to the business?
