There Is No Such Thing As Build It and They Will Come
The marketing secrets B2B founders never learn and why consumer brands already know them
Before I built companies, I worked inside one of the UK’s most sophisticated marketing operations.
A business that has been, repeatedly, the single biggest advertiser in the United Kingdom. A company with a total marketing budget running into hundreds of millions of pounds annually. A team with econometrics specialists who could predict, with statistical precision, what a TV spot would yield in subscriber acquisitions eight weeks later.
That business was Sky.
I was there early in my career, running social and content for NOW TV when they were still forty people. I wasn’t running the machine. But I was inside it. And it changed how I see everything.
When I left and started building companies of my own, I kept noticing the same thing.
The founders and operators I encountered had never been inside a machine like that. They had never seen what a truly engineered sales and marketing funnel looks like. They were running campaigns the way people cook without a recipe. Throwing things at the wall. Using intuition. Hoping something worked.
Some of them had great products. Most of them had a systems problem they’d misidentified as a marketing problem.
The single most valuable thing I’ve ever applied to scaling companies is this: consumer marketing rigour, applied to B2B.
That’s what this essay is about.
Sales Is Not a Dirty Word
There is a deeply embedded cultural awkwardness in the B2B and startup world around sales. Founders who would happily spend weeks on a product sprint will visibly wince at the word “outbound.” There is a quiet belief in many tech companies that great products sell themselves, and that anything too “salesy” is somehow beneath the mission.
This is one of the most expensive myths in business.
Sales is not manipulation. It is not pressure. It is not the person who won’t stop calling you about a PPI claim.
Sales, done properly, is helping a human being who has a real problem understand that you have a real solution, and making it easy for them to say yes. That is it.
That is the whole job.
The companies I’ve built and invested in that have scaled fastest are the ones that killed this cultural anxiety early. They treated revenue generation as an engineering problem, not a personality contest. They built systems. They measured obsessively. They iterated.
The best consumer brands never apologise for wanting customers. Their entire operation is built on one premise: design the most efficient possible path from a person not knowing you exist to becoming a paying customer who stays.
That’s the model. That’s what we’re building.
The Funnel Is Not a Metaphor
People throw the word “funnel” around loosely. It ends up meaning everything and nothing.
A funnel is a system that moves human beings from a state of not knowing you exist, to being willing to give you money, to actively telling other people about you. It has distinct stages. Each stage has a different job. Each stage requires different tactics, different messages, and different metrics.
The six stages that matter:
Awareness. Make the right people know you exist.
Consideration. Give them a reason to take you seriously.
Decision. Remove the friction between interest and action.
Purchase. Make the buying experience clean and frictionless.
Retention. Keep them. Every churned customer is a broken unit.
Advocacy. Turn customers into distribution. The only truly scalable channel.
Most founders spend 90% of their marketing budget at the top two stages and then wonder why they churn. The funnel is a loop, not a line. What happens at retention and advocacy feeds back into awareness. The companies that win build the whole system, not just the top.
The most sophisticated consumer marketing thinking is never at the top of the funnel. It’s at the bottom. Retention economics at scale are ferocious. The difference between a customer who stays three years and one who leaves at six months is enormous. Every touchpoint, every renewal moment, every piece of communication should be designed with that in mind.
Most B2B companies treat retention as an afterthought. The ones that scale don’t.
The Ideal Customer Profile Goes Deeper Than You Think
Before you build anything, you need to understand who you’re building it for. This is not just a targeting exercise. It is a behavioural science exercise.
The biggest mistake I see founders make is building an ICP that is purely demographic. Company size. Industry. Title. That is the beginning. It is not the end.
What you actually need to understand about your buyer is psychological. What do they fear? What do they want to be seen as? What keeps them awake? What does progress look like to them? And critically, what does it cost them emotionally and professionally to change from their current behaviour?
Clayton Christensen’s Jobs-to-Be-Done theory is the most useful lens I know here. People don’t buy products. They hire them to do a job. When someone buys project management software, they’re not buying project management. They’re hiring clarity. They’re hiring the feeling of being in control. They’re hiring the ability to look competent in front of their team.
If your marketing speaks to features, you’re losing. If it speaks to the job, the actual emotional and functional outcome the buyer wants, you’re winning.
Three levels of purchase intent
Not everyone who fits your ICP is ready to buy right now. This is where most B2B funnels break down.
Low intent people have the problem but aren’t actively seeking a solution. They might not even have named it yet. Your job is education. Content, ideas, frameworks. You’re building mental real estate, not closing deals.
Mid intent people have identified the problem and are beginning to explore options. They’re reading comparison pages, watching demo videos, talking to peers. Your job is differentiation. Show them why you, why now, what makes you the logical choice.
High intent people are in active evaluation mode. They want demos, pricing, case studies, references. Your job is conversion. Make it easy to say yes, make the risk feel low, and move fast before you lose the moment.
The reason most B2B funnels underperform is that companies apply high intent tactics to low intent audiences. Aggressive demos and pushy follow-ups sent to people who are still in the education phase churn your top of funnel and damage your brand.
Build a content system for low and mid intent. Reserve your sales resource for high.
For every campaign, ask: who is this for, what job are they trying to do, and what would move them one step closer to buying. If you can’t answer all three, don’t spend money on it.
Know Your Market Before You Build Your Funnel
TAM, Total Addressable Market, is something founders put in pitch decks and rarely use operationally. That is a mistake.
Knowing your real TAM is the foundation of everything downstream. How many leads you need to generate. How big your sales team should be. How long your growth runway looks. Where you’re in danger of saturating a market before you’ve built the infrastructure to expand.
Mature consumer businesses think this way constantly. When you’re operating in a finite market, your entire commercial strategy is shaped by its size. You know roughly when you’ll hit saturation. You plan the next product, the next segment, the next geography, accordingly. Most B2B founders never think this far ahead.
Top-down TAM takes a big market number and applies a percentage. It sounds impressive in decks. It is operationally useless.
Bottom-up builds from your real ICP upward.
Number of ICP companies that exist, multiplied by your Average Contract Value, equals your Total Addressable Revenue.
Example: 50,000 companies in the UK fit your ICP. Your ACV is £8,000. Your bottom-up TAM is £400M. If you can realistically capture 5% over 5 years, your target revenue is £20M ARR.
Once you have that number, work backwards. If you need £5M ARR in year two at £8,000 ACV, you need 625 customers. At a 25% win rate, you need 2,500 qualified opportunities. If 20% of leads become qualified, you need 12,500 marketing leads in the year. Roughly 1,040 per month.
Now you know your pipeline target. Now you can build backwards to the activity required to hit it.
Every other approach is hope dressed up as strategy.
Distribution Is a Product Decision
Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares wrote Traction in 2014.
It remains the most useful go-to-market framework I’ve encountered. The core insight is simple: most companies underinvest in distribution and overinvest in product. The companies that win figure out their distribution engine as seriously as they figure out their product.
The best consumer brands understand this instinctively. They don’t just build great products. They build distribution machines. Every channel is treated as a testable, measurable, optimisable system. Not a vibe. A machine.
Weinberg’s Bullseye Framework maps 19 traction channels: viral and referral loops, PR and earned media, unconventional PR, search engine marketing, social and display ads, offline ads, SEO and content marketing, email marketing, engineering as marketing, targeting blogs and publications, community building, speaking and events, outbound sales, affiliate and partner programmes, existing platforms, trade shows, offline events, business development, and existing customer channels.
The job is not to pick the one that feels most intuitive. It is to systematically test several, identify which two or three have real signal, and go deep on those.
Run a structured test across your top five candidate channels. Allocate a small equal budget to each. Enough to get signal, not enough to bet the business. Measure strictly. After 30 to 60 days, one or two channels will show disproportionate return.
Then do something counterintuitive. Stop everything else.
Pour resource into what’s working. Optimise relentlessly. This is where most companies fail. They keep spreading effort across too many channels because it feels diversified.
What it actually is, is diluted.
At any given stage, one primary acquisition channel and one secondary. Five channels that are all sort of working is not a growth engine. It’s expensive noise.
Design the Path, Don’t Leave It to Chance
Every stage transition in the funnel requires a trigger. Something has to happen that nudges the prospect from passive awareness to active consideration, from consideration to evaluation, from evaluation to purchase. Most companies leave this to chance. Smart companies design for it.
People don’t make large commitments unless they’ve made a series of smaller ones first. This is one of the most well-evidenced principles in behavioural psychology. Cialdini called it commitment and consistency. It maps directly onto how B2B buyers move through funnels.
The best consumer subscription businesses have understood this for decades. The path from a free trial to a long-term contract is never a single jump. It is a carefully sequenced series of small yeses. Each one building on the last. Each one making the next step feel natural rather than frightening.
Your marketing system needs to do the same thing.
Awareness to Consideration: read a LinkedIn post, follow, read an article, sign up to a newsletter. Consideration to Decision: download a template, attend a webinar, request a demo. Decision to Purchase: trial, pilot with one team, full rollout. Purchase to Retention: onboarding, first value moment, expanded usage, renewal. Retention to Advocacy: NPS survey, case study, referral programme, community.
Each step is small. Each step is intentional. None of it happens by accident.
Here is the mindset shift that separates great B2B marketers from average ones. Your buyers are humans before they are buyers. They scroll the same apps, feel the same emotions, respond to the same storytelling and social proof that drives consumer decisions.
When I moved from consumer marketing into B2B software, I didn’t change the framework. I changed the emotional levers. Instead of entertainment and escape, the levers became professional status, fear of being left behind, desire for control, relief from chaos. The tactics looked different. The psychology was identical.
Salesforce built an entire economy around Dreamforce because they understood the human desire for belonging and status. HubSpot built a media company before they built a software company. Notion spread like a consumer app because it made people feel creative and organised.
B2B buyers are not rational actors. They are humans in professional contexts, with professional fears. Market to the human.
Pipeline Is Maths, Not Hope
The most important number in any sales-led business is pipeline coverage ratio. The ratio of total pipeline value to your revenue target for a given period.
The standard benchmark is 3x to 4x. If your quarterly target is £500,000, you need £1.5M to £2M in qualified pipeline to have confidence you’ll hit it. The reason for the multiple is attrition. Deals that slip. Prospects that go dark. Decisions that get delayed.
Serious commercial teams never go into a quarter without knowing their pipeline position precisely. Running at 1.5x coverage is a crisis. Most of the B2B startups I encounter are running at 1.5x and calling it a pipeline.
Work backwards from your number every quarter.
Revenue target of £500K. Apply a 3.5x coverage multiple and you need £1.75M in pipeline. Divide by average deal size of £15K and you need 116 qualified opportunities. Apply a 20% MQL-to-opportunity rate and you need 580 MQLs. Now determine the channel mix to generate those 580 MQLs.
If you can’t get there with your current budget and channels, something has to change. More budget, better conversion rates, or a higher ACV. One of those must move.
Finding your leaks
Most funnels don’t fail at awareness. They fail at specific transition points.
High traffic, low MQL conversion means the content is attracting the wrong audience or the CTA isn’t compelling enough.
High MQL, low SQL rate means your qualification criteria are too loose or sales aren’t following up with urgency.
High SQL, low demo-to-opportunity rate means your demo isn’t building urgency. The narrative isn’t landing.
High opportunity, low win rate means you’re losing at negotiation, to competitors, or because the internal champion can’t sell it upstairs.
High win rate, high churn means you’re winning the wrong customers. The ICP has drifted.
Run this audit every quarter. Fix the biggest leak first. Then the next one.
Creative Is the Variable Most People Ignore
The single biggest lever most software companies aren’t pulling is systematic creative testing. This is where consumer brands run rings around B2B companies. Consumer brands have to test relentlessly. Their market is less forgiving. The feedback loops are faster. They’ve learned that creative is often the variable, not the channel.
At serious consumer marketing scale, every creative decision is a hypothesis. Every campaign is a test. Nothing is assumed. Everything is tested, measured, and fed back into the next cycle.
The truth most people don’t want to hear: the same audience, on the same channel, with the same budget, can produce radically different results depending on the creative. The message, the hook, the format, the framing. These are often more important than the channel itself.
Test one variable at a time. Headline, image, CTA copy, or offer. Set a clear success metric before you start. Run tests for long enough to matter, at least 250 conversions per variant before drawing conclusions. Build a swipe file of every test and result. Patterns emerge over time that are more valuable than any individual result.
And the winner is never the finish line. Once a variant wins, it becomes the control. The test never stops.
The first three seconds
In a world of infinite content and finite attention, the hook is everything. The first line of a LinkedIn post. The first three seconds of a video. The subject line of an email. These determine whether anything else gets read.
Consumer advertisers have understood this for decades. Most B2B marketers still haven’t caught up.
Three hooks that consistently outperform:
The Counterintuitive: “The reason your pipeline is full but revenue is flat has nothing to do with your sales team.”
The Specific Number: “We doubled qualified pipeline in 60 days without increasing headcount. Here’s the exact playbook.”
The Confession: “I spent three years doing outbound the wrong way. Here’s what I wish someone had told me.”
Measure Less, But Measure What Matters
You cannot manage what you do not measure. But more importantly, you cannot improve what you are not measuring in the right way, at the right cadence, with the right people in the room.
Most companies have too many metrics and not enough insight. They track thirty things on a dashboard and make decisions based on gut feel. The best companies track fewer things with more rigour, and connect every metric to an action.
The core funnel KPIs worth tracking:
MQL Volume. Top of funnel health. Growing 10 to 20% month on month in early stage is the target.
MQL to SQL Rate. Quality of targeting. 20 to 40% for a well-defined ICP.
SQL to Opportunity Rate. Sales qualification discipline. 50 to 70% if your ICP is tight.
Win Rate. 20 to 30% for early SaaS.
CAC. Customer acquisition cost. Should be less than 33% of 12-month LTV.
LTV to CAC Ratio. 3:1 minimum. 5:1 is strong.
Pipeline Coverage Ratio. 3 to 4x your quarterly target.
Churn Rate. Under 2% monthly for SaaS.
Channel CAC by Source. Track this religiously. Double down on the lowest.
The weekly cadence
The rhythm of a high-performing GTM team is weekly. A structured 60-minute meeting. Every growth, marketing, and sales leader in the room. Same agenda, every single week.
Pipeline review, 15 minutes. Every deal in late stage. What moved, what stalled, what needs escalation. No storytelling, just status and next action.
Funnel metrics review, 10 minutes. This week’s MQL volume, conversion rates, channel breakdown. Are we on track for the month?
Campaign and creative results, 10 minutes. What ran last week, what did it produce, what’s launching this week?
One focused problem, 15 minutes. One issue limiting funnel performance right now. Deep discussion, specific decisions, clear owner.
Next week priorities, 10 minutes. What is each function committing to? Written down, visible to all.
Never skip the meeting. Never run it without data. Never let it become a status update without decisions.
The cadence creates accountability, which creates momentum, which creates pipeline. Creating a predictable funnel is the only way your sales and marketing team can sleep at night. And it’s the only way you, as a founder, can run a business rather than just react to one.
Double Down on What Works
The most common growth mistake I see is spreading budget across too many channels because it feels safer. It isn’t. It’s diluted.
Once you have signal, once one or two channels are clearly outperforming, the job is to move decisively. Double the budget. Hire into that channel. Build the infrastructure that makes it scale.
A channel is worth doubling down on when it meets four criteria. It’s repeatable. It’s efficient, with an LTV to CAC ratio equal to or better than your benchmark. It’s scalable, meaning volume can increase without costs growing proportionally. And the customers it acquires retain and expand better than average.
Kill channels that aren’t meeting those criteria, even if they have momentum inside the organisation. Every underperforming channel you fund is taking resource from a performing one.
The compounding channel
There is one channel that satisfies all four criteria better than any other, over time. Content. Specifically, content that ranks organically, builds brand authority, and generates inbound leads while you sleep.
The economics at scale are extraordinary. Zero marginal cost per lead. Growing over time rather than flat. And the credibility that comes from earned trust rather than paid reach.
The companies I’ve seen build the most durable growth engines all have one thing in common. They invested in content before they needed it. They built the audience before they built the funnel.
Publish one piece of genuinely useful original content every week. Not content that promotes you. Content that teaches something your ICP needs to know. Do this for 12 months without expecting results. Then measure. The compounding will be visible in a way that no paid channel can match.
Retention Is Where the Money Actually Lives
Here is the painful maths that most founders discover too late. If you are churning 5% of your customer base monthly, you are losing more than half your revenue annually just to stand still. Every pound spent acquiring new customers is partially funding the replacement of customers you couldn’t keep.
The best consumer businesses are built around this reality. The cost of acquiring a new customer is substantial. The economics only work if customers stay long enough to generate a meaningful return on that acquisition cost. So retention isn’t a customer service function. It is a commercial imperative, measured and managed with the same rigour as acquisition.
Most B2B companies treat retention as an afterthought. They celebrate new logos and ignore the quiet churn happening at the back door. A business with great retention and modest acquisition still compounds. A business with great acquisition and poor retention is a leaky bucket.
The first value moment
The single most important determinant of long-term retention is time to first value. How quickly does a new customer experience the outcome they signed up for?
Map this ruthlessly. What is the first thing a new customer needs to do to experience real value? How many steps does it take? How many could be removed? What percentage of new customers reach that moment within the first 72 hours?
That number is your retention predictor.
Building an advocacy programme
Advocacy is not an accident. It is a programme.
A case study and testimonial library makes it easy for happy customers to share their story. Referral incentives give customers a reason to bring others in. A community creates peer connection, increases switching costs, and generates organic word of mouth. Advisory programmes involve your best customers in product direction. They become invested in your success. Co-marketing with complementary tools reaches each other’s audiences at zero cost.
The most scalable marketing channel you will ever build is a customer base that grows itself. Design for that from day one.
Build the Machine, Not Just the Campaign
Working inside a world-class consumer marketing operation early in my career showed me what a real commercial engine looks like. Hundreds of people, hundreds of millions in budget, all pointed at one problem. Move human beings from not knowing you exist to paying you money and staying.
I’ve spent the years since applying that same thinking at a very different scale. Across the software companies I’ve built. Across sixty-plus investments. And the pattern is always the same.
The companies that scale don’t have better products.
They have better systems.
Better pipelines. Better feedback loops. Better discipline around what’s working and the courage to cut what isn’t.
They stopped running campaigns and started building machines. The ICP was precise. The channel mix was deliberate. The creative was tested, not assumed. The metrics were tracked weekly. The pipeline was always three times the target. The customers stayed and told others.
Campaigns are events. Funnels are systems. Events fade. Systems compound.
Build the machine.
And then let it run.
Venture Wisely, by Alex Packham. Wealth, mind, energy. For those building a life that lasts.