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 marketing is running. Your foundation is missing.
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Hi Reader, Most scaling B2B companies have marketing. 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. What I’m seeingWhen 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 sales? Do you have a clear answer to why your company, and why now? Which segments are you prioritising, and which are you consciously ignoring? In most cases, the answers are vague, inconsistent, or different depending on who you ask. That is not an execution problem. That is a foundation problem. And no amount of campaigns, content, or budget will fix it. The system underneathOver the past years I have developed a simple way to look at marketing that I use with every client. I call it emOS, the Embedded Marketing Operating System. It describes marketing as six connected layers, not as a collection of campaigns or channels. The first three layers form the foundation. Layer one: market reality. Who buys, why they buy, and how decisions get made. Layer two: messaging. Why you, why now, and why it matters. Layer three: strategy. Where you play and how you win. These three layers are not glamorous. They do not show up in your analytics dashboard. But they are what makes everything above them work. Layers four, five, and six are where marketing becomes visible. Infrastructure, execution, and optimisation. Content. Campaigns. Paid media. Performance tracking. This is where most companies spend almost all of their time and budget. The problem is sequence. You cannot execute your way to a strong position if the foundation underneath is missing. Execution without foundation is just expensive activity. How I’d approach itI would start by being honest about which layers are actually in place, and which ones only feel like they are. Most companies have fragments. A positioning statement that was written two years ago and no longer reflects the market. A value proposition that the sales team quietly ignores because it does not land in conversations. A channel strategy that was inherited rather than chosen. Most companies do not have a marketing problem. Leadership, marketing, and sales each have a slightly different answer to the same basic questions. That gap is where performance leaks. The goal is not to build everything at once. It is to understand which part of the system matters most right now, and build that deliberately before scaling the layers above it. Clarity and structure before scale. Always. If you are wondering where your own system is strong and where it is leaking, that is exactly what we work through in the Marketing Performance Workshop. We use emOS as the reference model to identify gaps, align the team, and decide what to build next. If you want to see how this looks in practice, reply “emOS” and I will send it over. Your perspectiveWhich of the six layers is weakest in your organisation right now, and does leadership know it? 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 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 seeing When I look at the marketing dashboards of scaling companies, they are usually full of...
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,...