Most B2B marketing teams, especially those in manufacturing and OEM companies, are set up for failure right from the get go, and once you see it, it is hard to unsee.
In many organizations, marketing is hired to execute tasks long before anyone decides what success is actually supposed to mean in financial terms. The assumption is that activity will eventually lead to results, and that measurement can be figured out later once there is enough momentum to analyze.
That order of operations quietly creates the problem marketing spends the rest of its life trying to defend.
Contents
Execution Comes First. Definition Comes Later.
The first marketing hire is usually a doer, someone to update the website, manage brochures, handle trade shows, send emails, and keep social channels active. All of that work has value, and none of it is inherently wrong, but it is rarely anchored to a clear revenue goal or a defined path to pipeline contribution.
As activity increases, leadership often adds another doer to keep up with demand. Campaigns start running more frequently, lead volume grows, reports get generated, and there is a general sense that marketing is doing more.
What never gets built is a measurement spine that connects that activity to revenue in a way finance and leadership can trust.
Only after money has been spent and a team built does the inevitable question surface.
“So… is this actually working?”
At that point, the question is almost impossible to answer, not because the marketers are ineffective, but because no one designed the system to produce an answer in the first place.
Long Sales Cycles Make the Problem Harder to See
Manufacturing does not benefit from fast feedback loops. Sales cycles routinely stretch nine, twelve, sometimes even twenty four months, which means the person running a campaign today may never be able to tell what influenced a deal that eventually closes.
Finance looks at the spend line and sees certainty. Marketing looks at activity metrics and sees effort. Sales looks at the pipeline and sees mixed quality.
There is no shared language in the middle that allows those perspectives to line up.
That gap is where trust erodes, even when everyone involved is acting in good faith.
The Wide Net Problem No One Wants to Name
Traditional B2B manufacturing marketing is heavily oriented around casting a wide net because it is familiar, scalable, and relatively easy to execute.
Trade shows, lead forms, broad email campaigns, and general awareness efforts all fit neatly into this model. The underlying logic is hope based, even if no one calls it that. Touch enough people, often enough, and something will eventually convert.
The challenge is that hope does not survive contact with a CFO.
Wide net tactics make it extremely difficult to prove causality, and even harder to forecast outcomes. You can report on impressions, clicks, leads, and attendance, but none of those metrics answer the question leadership actually cares about, which is whether marketing is predictably influencing revenue.
Industry research consistently shows that a majority of B2B marketers struggle to connect marketing activity to pipeline and closed revenue, especially in long cycle, multi stakeholder environments like manufacturing. The work is happening, but the proof is missing.
This is where frustration starts to surface, because marketing is incredibly busy, but structurally incapable of answering the question it is being asked.
Why Account Based Marketing Changes the Conversation
This is where Account Based Marketing becomes important, and why it often feels disruptive rather than incremental.
Account Based Marketing is a B2B approach where marketing and sales focus on a defined set of high value accounts instead of casting a wide net. The goal is to align activity around the accounts that matter most and engage real buying groups with intent, rather than chasing volume and hoping something converts.
Account Based Marketing does not magically fix marketing. What it does is force specificity into a system that previously relied on ambiguity.
And the data supports that distinction.
Industry surveys show that adoption of Account Based Marketing is now widespread, with research indicating that roughly 70 percent to more than 90 percent of B2B organizations use some form of ABM. That shift has been driven by the need for clearer accountability, not by trend chasing.
More importantly, outcomes improve when ABM is used intentionally. Multiple studies report that 87 percent of marketers say ABM delivers higher ROI than other marketing strategies, and organizations running mature ABM programs have been shown to generate up to 200 percent more revenue than those relying primarily on traditional volume based approaches.
That performance does not come from better tactics. It comes from better alignment.
Once a target account list is clearly defined and agreed upon, measurement changes immediately. Teams can see which accounts engaged, which moved into sales conversations, which stalled, and how those movements relate to pipeline and revenue.
Instead of asking abstract questions like “Is this working?”, leadership can look at specific accounts moving through identifiable stages of the buying process. That clarity changes the nature of internal conversations and creates a shared language across marketing, sales, and finance.
Account Based Marketing exposes gaps that were always there. It does not create them. It simply removes the cover that wide net marketing provides.
The Perfect Storm That Sets Marketing Up to Lose
This is the pattern that repeats across manufacturing organizations.
- Execution first hiring
- No revenue definition up front
- Long sales cycles that blur attribution
- Disconnected systems across marketing and sales
- Wide net tactics that resist measurement
- Accountability that arrives late
And then marketing gets blamed for not proving something it was never structurally set up to prove.
That is the failure.
Why CFO Frustration Is Actually the Signal
This is why CFO reactions to marketing performance are often sharp, and why the questions they ask can feel confrontational.
They are not anti-marketing. They are anti ambiguity.
From a financial perspective, a system that produces spend without clarity and effort without confidence is unacceptable. The frustration is not a personality issue. It is a rational response to a structural problem.
The Real Narrative
Marketing does not fail because it is ineffective. It fails because leadership asks it to operate without a financial operating system.
Most marketing teams are judged on outcomes they were never structurally capable of producing. Fixing the people does not fix the problem, and replacing the team rarely changes the result.
Fixing the system does.
When success is defined first, systems are connected, and measurement is designed before execution, marketing stops being a cost center that needs defending and starts becoming a growth engine leadership can actually trust.
If you’re ready to learn more about ABM Marketing please reach out, we’d love to walk you through it.