The Field is a bi-weekly newsletter about how marketing is designed and run in eMobility companies. It's written from the perspective of a fractional CMO working with founders, CMOs, and commercial leaders in the eMobility field.
Your dashboard is green. Your pipeline is not.
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Hi Reader, Most scaling B2B tech companies measure marketing activity. Website visits. Content downloads. Webinar registrations. LinkedIn impressions. It feels like control. It looks like progress. But none of it explains why deals are not closing. When revenue slows down, those metrics rarely provide an answer. They only show that the engine is running, not whether it is going anywhere. What I’m seeingWhen I look at the marketing dashboards of scaling companies, they are usually full of green arrows. Traffic is up. Engagement is up. The cost per click is down. But when I sit in the pipeline review, the story is different. Sales is struggling to close. The deals that do come in are smaller, take longer, and require more discounts. Marketing reports volume. Sales feels friction. A thousand website visits do not matter if the visitors do not understand what you do. A hundred content downloads are useless if the content does not shift their perspective. High engagement on LinkedIn is vanity if it does not translate into commercial authority. You are measuring the noise, not the signal. The illusion of attributionMeasuring activity creates an illusion of attribution. If a lead downloads a whitepaper and then books a demo, the dashboard says the whitepaper generated the lead. But that is rarely how B2B buying works. The buyer probably heard about you from a peer. They saw your CEO speak at an event six months ago. They read three of your LinkedIn posts. They visited your pricing page twice. And then, right before they were ready to talk, they downloaded the whitepaper. The dashboard credits the last touchpoint. It ignores everything that built the trust. When you optimise for the dashboard, you start producing more whitepapers and fewer perspective-shifting insights. You optimise for the click, not for the mind. You build a machine that is very good at capturing demand that already exists, but terrible at creating it. Lead generation creates conversations. Authority determines who closes. Most companies optimise for the first. Almost none build the second. How I’d approach itStop asking marketing to prove its value through short-term attribution. Instead, look at the signals that actually indicate a strong foundation. Are we winning deals faster? Are we discounting less? Are buyers mentioning our content in sales calls? Are competitors starting to repeat your language? Those are the signals of a working marketing system. They are harder to measure on a dashboard, but they are the only ones that matter on the P&L. If you want to know if your marketing is working, do not look at the analytics. Look at the sales conversations. If the buyer arrives educated, aligned with your perspective, and ready to discuss implementation rather than justification, your marketing is working. If they arrive confused, comparing you to the wrong competitors, and asking for a discount, your marketing is failing. Even if every dashboard is green. Your perspectiveWhat is the one metric your leadership team cares about most right now, and is it actually driving revenue? See you in two weeks, Theo Reichgelt Connect with me on LinkedIn |
The Field
The Field is a bi-weekly newsletter about how marketing is designed and run in eMobility companies. It's written from the perspective of a fractional CMO working with founders, CMOs, and commercial leaders in the eMobility field.
Hi Reader, When growth slows down, most scaling B2B companies make the same mistake. They widen the target audience. It feels like ambition. It looks like a strategy for scale. But in reality, it is the fastest way to make your marketing invisible. What I'm seeing When I review the target audience definitions of scaling companies, they usually read like a wish list. They want to sell to enterprise, but also mid-market. They target the CIO, but also the VP of Operations and the Head of...
Hi Reader, Most scaling B2B companies have marketing. Campaigns running. Content going out. A LinkedIn presence. Maybe some paid media. What most of them do not have is a marketing system. Those two things look the same from the outside. They feel completely different from the inside. One performs. The other just stays busy. What I’m seeing When I start working with a scaling B2B tech company, things break quickly. A few basic questions are enough. Does leadership tell the same story as...
Hi Reader, When revenue growth slows, the reaction is almost always the same. Hire someone who can sell. A senior sales director. A seasoned business developer. Someone with a network, a track record, and the credibility to open doors. It feels like the right move. In many cases, it is the most expensive mistake a scaling company can make. What I'm seeing A senior sales hire in B2B typically costs between €150.000 and €200.000 per year. Sometimes more, once you include on-target earnings,...