🕵🏻♂️ How to show marketing impact on revenue in 90 days
Here is a modern B2B marketing paradox:
Leadership wants faster results, bigger numbers, cheaper acquisition, bolt on AI everywhere, all at once. But at the same time: buying cycles have lengthened, budgets are tighter, market noise created by AI slop is deafening, and the long-term brand programs required to generate revenue are not approved.
The system is set up against us, B2B marketers. And unless you change the system, it keeps winning.
But here is the problem with fixing it.
The only way to prove there is a better approach to marketing is to run it. The only way to get approval to run it is to show it works. But leadership won’t fund anything that doesn’t have immediate ROI. And you can’t show ROI in 90 days in an 18-month sales cycle.
This is the trap too many of us are stuck in.
Over the past six years running full-funnel ABM programs with enterprise B2B teams across North America and Europe, we’ve worked out a way to break out of it.
In this newsletter, we’ll share the framework we covered in our new book, Full-Funnel B2B Marketing: How to Survive as B2B CMO in AI Era and Long Sales Cycles.
How to deliver the best next CTA for every buyer aligned with the level of intent and buyer journey stage
B2B buying process is like a playground (credits to Ashley Faus): buyers from the same account come and leave it simultaneously. They all might have different needs and intent.
Here is what we do to adjust tABM and demadn gen playbooks to buyer's behavior and level of intent:
-Map out with sales different signals, level of demand, and standard actions
-Review every week all signals from strategic accounts and customize CTAs from our playbook
We've been doing this manually for years. I thought there is no technology that can enhance this process and was absolutely blown away after a chat with Doug Madey and Den Kozlov from Influ2.
They've added contact-level GTM orchestration that allows to trigger next-best actions across ads, sales cadences, CRM and MAP campaigns dynamically based on each individual buyer’s own interests, engagement, and stage in the buyer journey.
Sharing a recording of the webinar where they show some of the buyer-personalized playbooks aligned with the buyer journey stages.
The threat: why the current B2B marketing playbook is broken
Last year we spoke to 50+ B2B CMOs for The State of Full-Funnel B2B marketing research. Here are the top 4 challenges we found.
1. Broken attribution based on last clicks
According to HockeyStack research, 400-plus touchpoints are required before a B2B purchase. Buyers research on LinkedIn, attend your webinars, hear about you on podcasts, visit your website multiple times over months. None of that shows up in the CRM, only the last thing that happened before they booked a call. Leadership makes budget decisions based on that data.
They don’t fund long-term programs that they can’t measure and approve budgets for short-term programs that produce volume (MQLs), not pipeline and revenue.
2. Horizontal GTM misalignment
Even inside marketing teams we often see misalignment. Content teams chase traffic. Demand gen focuses on MQLs. SDRs KPIs are booked calls. And only Account executives own revenue.
The crazy reality is that everybody is so much focused on local KPIs, that nobody really cares if their activities have an impact on pipeline and revenue.
3. Short-term ROI pressure
Long-term brand programs take 6 to 12 months to show pipeline results, but get cut before you can show anything.
4. AI FOMO
There is pressure to implement AI everywhere, but most teams are struggling to get results from it. As one CMO told us: it “scales the illusion of process.” If the underlying playbook is broken, AI just accelerates it.
It creates a false mindset: “I just need to survive this quarter, and it will be better”. But it’s like rearranging the chairs staying on Titanic.
It never gets better. Because surviving this quarter means making the same decisions that broke the pipeline last quarter.
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Academy includes:
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Private Slack community to answer all your questions
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Behind-the-scenes sessions. See what’s working and what doesn’t work and why on the “behind the scenes” sessions where we review the campaigns we are running for our clients and us.
Learn more and join the academy here.
The solution: align your programs with how B2B buyers actually buy
Ashley Faus from Atlassian brilliantly described the reality of a B2B buyer process:
“B2B buyer journey is like a playground. People can enter and exit as they want, they can go in any order, they can do whatever they want.”
“The buyer journey has NEVER been linear, but apparently we’re pretending that AI suddenly made this true 🤦♀️
NOPE.
No one wakes up and declares, “I shall enter the Consideration stage today!”
The linear funnel (and its newer cousin, the looping decision journey) is all about a marketer trying to imply where someone is in a buying process or force them down a specific path with a single destination: BUY TODAY!!!
Heck, even the name, “buyer’s journey” assumes this person becomes a buyer, when in fact, 40%-60% of journeys end in no sale/no decision 🤦♀️
Pitfalls of the linear funnel:
Assumes the journey starts at “awareness”, when in fact, the journey starts long before someone becomes aware of the problem, solution, your company, and/or your offering
Generally fails to recognize the difference between a user and an economic buyer, and struggles to acknowledge the complexity of a buying committee
Focuses on implicit intent vs. explicit intent, with marketing and sales teams attempting to guess at signals of buying readiness amid a sea of noise
Instead, we need to treat the buyer’s journey as a playground.
Our job as marketers is to make that playground seamless, helpful, and impactful, no matter which path the audience takes.”
From my experience, to make it happen, there are 5 keys to success.
Strong go-to-market fundamentals. Messaging, positioning, product-market fit, etc.
Cross-functional collaboration. Influencing the buyer journey is not a marketing job only. It requires content, demand gen, SDR, AE, customer success, and revenue operations working toward the same targets, not chasing their own local KPIs.
Influencing the entire buyer journey. From awareness to expansion.
Full-funnel attribution. You cannot always report on revenue for every program you run (especially for long-term programs). But you can show how you are creating awareness, progressing strategic accounts, and generating pipeline.
Pilot, operationalize, scale (POS framework). Whatever you want to try, start with a small-scope pilot. Show it works. Then build SOPs, add AI to automate proven processes, and scale.
But even to get a chance to start working on these 5 elements, you need to get a buy-in from leadership. Here is the framework we use.
The buy-in: how to get permission from leadership to change the system
The biggest mistake we’ve seen (and made ourselves multiple times during our corporate days) is going to your leadership and telling them “we need to change how marketing works”. Then, pitching the solution and requesting approval.
The lesson I learned the hard way:
Your leadership won’t fund a new program until they agree that there is a problem worth solving NOW.
There are two types of buy-in you need to get in this order.
1. Problem buy-in first
Before people are ready to change, they need to believe there is a problem worth solving right now. Ken Roden, ex VP of Marketing at CrossKnowledge, shared with us his experience.
When they faced an issue of MQLs not converting into pipeline, he did not go to leadership saying “we need to stop MQLs and do ABM.”
He asked: “Are you noticing that MQLs are not converting at the same rate as before?”
He analyzed MQL data to show declining lead quality. He highlighted the gap between high MQL volume and low pipeline contribution. He let leadership reach the conclusion themselves, then framed it against the strategic priorities they already cared about: improving win rates in enterprise accounts.
2. Solution buy-in second
Once leadership agrees there is a problem, you can start working on a solution. But you need support from the “change champions”: your colleagues who are already frustrated with the status quo and ready to try something different.
Define together:
The challenges you need to solve
How they impact your performance and key metrics
How can you solve them
How do you know it works? Define clear tangible indicators. E.g. Not improved brand awareness, but 7 strategic accounts hit our engagement threshold.
Don’t try to make a revolution. Think about current and scheduled activities, and how you can leverage them to achieve your goals.
To get approval for it, you need position it as an experiment:
one quarter
a small cross-functional team
no new budget or resources required,
no paused programs.
Position it as “We want to try a different approach with a narrow set of accounts and see whether it produces better results than what we do currently.” The only requirements for this experiment are:
Focus on efficiency, not volume. Measure how efficiently you are converting strategic accounts into pipeline, not how many MQLs you generated.
Use allbound attribution. Instead of fighting over marketing-sourced versus sales-sourced, agree that all results from the pilot accounts belong to the cross-functional team. The credits will go to account owners.
Shared pipeline target. The cross-functional team owns one number: pipeline from the pilot cluster. Not separate KPIs for each function.
We usually put the solution in a short executive memo which includes:
Recap of the problems,
The cost of doing nothing
Pilot outline
The team and responsibilities
The success criteria
The requirements.
As far as we know, a lot of B2B executives prefer this format.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you’re already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We’ll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.
The proof: how to plan and run a 90-day pilot
The goal of the pilot is not revenue which is impossible to show in 90 days if you have a long sales cycle. The goal is to prove the new approach with the leading indicators, and to secure the buy-in to scale.
Here is our approach.
Step 1: Define success criteria with leadership and sales before you start the pilot
Good leading indicators we use with almost every client:
Discovery calls with buyers from strategic accounts
Senior stakeholders from target accounts signing up for your events or engaging with the content
Replies and conversations with buying committee members
We used the same leading indicators with Magali Finet-Perdu, an enterprise sales rep at CrossKnowledge. We ran the ABM pilot across 130 target accounts with ACV above $500,000 and buying cycles of three or more years.
“Budgets are not decided on the spot. A company may make a purchase decision once every three years,” she said. Within six months, the team engaged 35 of those 130 accounts in multiple meetings. Marketing contribution to the pipeline increased from 30-40% to 60%.
We knew it’s not revenue, but it was a firm proof to the leadership that the new approach works, and worth scaling.
If success criteria are not defined before the pilot, different people will define them differently after the pilot. Fix them in writing.
Read a detailed case study with CrossKnowledge here: https://fullfunnel.io/abm-pilot-program/
Step 2: Prioritize accounts for a single cluster
We already covered cluster targeting and account priporitization frameworks in detail, so I’ll share a brief reminder.
A cluster is a group of accounts that have the same use case or challenge. When you plan your pilot, focus just on one cluster and one buyer persona (e.g. Economical buyers).
Then, segment all accounts from this cluster into three lists:
Active focus accounts. These accounts know you, there is some relationship with the buying committee, and there is product need evidence. You work with sales on opportunity creation for these accounts with a fully personalized plan.
Future pipeline accounts. These accounts show some engagement and awareness, but you do not know if they are in-market. You run account research, validate the need, and build the relationship.
Cluster ICP accounts. All other accounts fitting your ICP. You put them in your current demand gen and brand awareness programs until they hit your engagement threshold.
These lists are dynamic. Every week, during the weekly pilot sync, you review signals and decide which accounts to move to another list, which remove, or add.
Build your account prioritization framework - Live Workshop
A 2-hour hands-on live, virtual workshop where you build a three-tier account prioritization framework using your own closed-won deals, and leave with 3 accounts prioritized and ready to work on.
This framework helps you to:
Identify in-market accounts that deserve 1:1 attention, and the playbooks to run with sales right now
Develop clear criteria to identify which accounts are perfect fit and engaged enough to avoid biased opinions like “I feel this is a good account”
Stop wish list targeting, spreading your efforts and budget on hundreds of accounts that won’t convert into pipeline
Increase account-to-pipeline ratio and build joint KPIs with sales: a shared, documented process both teams own.
When: 27th May, 3pm CET - 9am ET.
Format: 2 hours, live, virtual.
For whom: B2B marketing leaders, ABM and demand gen leaders. We highly recommend bringing in sales counterparts (senior sales reps, VP of sales, or Account Executives) to achieve strategic alignment right on the workshop.
Included: deal analysis template, account prioritization template, workshop recording.
Step 3: Convert your existing programs into account-based, not build from scratch
You do not need to start over. Take your current and scheduled programs and make them cluster-specific and account-based.
A great example is our client Backbase. They have multiple use cases and multiple target industries. But instead of talking about AI in banking broadly, they focused on one use case - improving advisory efficiency in the wealth management segment targeting both technical and economical buyers with adjusted narrative.
Step 4: Prepare a program timeline with the core activities
Everybody from your pilot team needs to know what will happen when, and what to expect at each milestone. Create a shared calendar and put all the activities including pilot prep and execution.
Step 5: Agree on responsibilities and realistic time commitment
Here are three roles are essential:
Program lead. Usually a senior B2B marketer. Owns the process, the coordination, the reporting. This person guarantees the sustainability of the pilot and makes sure it does not die after week two.
Sales development. One person with at least an hour a day dedicated to work on the pilot accounts. Multi-threading across enterprise buying committees and constant engagement is almost impossible without this function.
Content. One person responsible for adapting existing content for sales that they can share on LinkedIn, at events, and in direct outreach.
Define realistic commitment (e.g. 10 hours / week), but this commitment has to be explicit and agreed with sales leadership before the pilot starts.
Step 6: Define 30/60/90-day leading indicators
You need to define some milestones for your team to see if you are on track. It shouldn’t necessarily be lagging indicators (e.g. discovery calls booked), but could be executional milestones.
For example, at 30 days:
accounts are prioritized and segmented into three lists
the team is aligned on process
sales rep started sending connection requests to target buyers,
you are seeing the first content engagement and early responses.
At 60 days:
the number of engaged accounts is growing
Sales rep runs a detailed account research for the accounts from the future pipeline list,
buying committee members are being connected and engaged
target accounts are registering for your events
At 90 days:
active focus accounts have personalized activation plans,
discovery calls are being booked
After a pilot you need to run a quick analysis:
How many of your cluster ICP accounts have moved to the future pipeline?
How many of your future pipeline accounts have moved to active focus?
How many discovery calls have you booked?
These metrics are your proof that this new approach works.
Step 7: Create a program dashboard
We usually put three categories of metrics on a pilot dashboard.
1. Pipeline metrics: opportunities created, pipeline value, and revenue. This is the language leadership speaks. Include it even if the numbers are small at first.
2.Leading and lagging indicators: leading indicators show your effort (accounts contacted, content shared). Lagging indicators show the program efficiency: replies and conversations with the target buyers, discovery calls booked). Track both. What you want to see is a positive trajectory among both indicators.
3.Account velocity: how quickly accounts are moving through the three lists. This is the most important signal of whether the pilot program is working. If accounts are stuck in cluster ICP after 60 days, something in the awareness and engagement approach needs to change. If accounts are moving to a future pipeline and active focus, the pilot is working.
Tell leadership at the start that the dashboard will be live and updated weekly. Here is an example.
If you want to launch a pilot ABM, need templates and step-by-step guidance, check out our full-funnel academy: https://fullfunnel.io/academy/
Step 8: Present the pilot to your team and leadership before the launch
Before kicking off the pilot, we recommend hosting one final alignment meeting with your leadership. The agenda is simple:
Remind them why you are running the pilot
what the success criteria are
the 30/60/90-day milestones,
the dashboard and metrics
who owns what in this program
Next, walk through the pilot your team.
The most important part of this meeting is confirming that every person on the pilot team understands not just what they are doing, but why, in what order, and how their activities connect to everyone else’s.
I’ve been on many presentations where the program lead was afraid to push for this level of detail. Usually, the ABM lead just asked the team:”Do you understand what to do?” “Yeah” “Cool, let’s go”
This is where the pilot cracks. Make sure that everybody, indeed, understands the pilot, the responsibilities, and the expectations from them. Address any concerns before kicking off.
Then, move to the execution.
Execute the pilot
Step 1: Run weekly pilot sync meetings
Without a weekly sync, the pilot dies in the second week.
Every week:
review tasks completed and planned for the next week
Capture wins and early success (replies, buyer engagement, etc)
surface bottlenecks and their root causes. If something is not working, diagnose why before deciding to pivot. A bottleneck and a bad tactic are different problems.
update the account engagement data,
decide which accounts to move and to focus on
The weekly sync meeting keeps the program agile and keep the momentum
*We have a detailed breakdown of these meetings here: https://fullfunnel.substack.com/p/how-to-run-marketing-and-sales-alignment
Step 2: Track your progress weekly in the pilot dashboard
Update the dashboard after every sync and share with leadership including in the recap email, including:
Wins
Bottlenecks and help needed
Next week plan
If the pilot numbers are improving, week by week, that is the evidence you need to defend the program and secure the next phase.
Step 3: Document what works with screenshots and examples
Make screenshots of every win:
Buyer replies to sales outreach
Comments to content on LinkedIn
Signs ups to the webinars
Plus, document everything that worked. This becomes your foundation for scaling/
Step 4: Overcommunicate wins to your team and leadership
Share every win, even the early and small ones.
When the first senior buyer at a strategic account responds to outreach after months of silence, communicate it. When a target account registers for your event, communicate it. When a discovery call gets booked with an account that previously ignored sales reps, communicate it immediately.
Leadership has short memories. Whatever you agreed on at the start of the pilot, they will forget soon.
If you do not share progress, they will default to asking about revenue. Sharing wins also reminds them of what the expectations were.
Another reason - it creates a buzz among other teams and sales reps: “What are they doing? Can we do the same?”.
The best way to secure scaling is getting the attention of other team members.
Step 5: Run a pilot retrospective and define areas to improve
At the end of the pilot, bring the team together and define:
What went well?
What are the areas that still need improvement?
We usually prepare a shared google doc and ask everybody to put their thoughts into it. Then, use it as a foundation for the next quarter planning, ensuring there is a constant improvement of what we are doing.
Step 6: Prepare the next quarter’s program and present to leadership
Obviously, you don’t stop at this pilot. A successful pilot buys you enough trust from leadership to continue. An imperfect pilot, with an honest retrospective and a clear plan for iteration, can do the same.
The next iteration is where you improve specific parts of the process based on what you learned, bring in more accounts or a second cluster, and start adding AI to automate the parts of your proven processes (e.g. account enrichment or account research).
Present the next quarter plan to leadership with the same structure as the original pilot memo:
what we learned
what we are improving
what the new targets are
what success looks like in the next 90 days.
TLDR
You can’t make an internal revolution and blow up the existing marketing function. You can do it through a slow and gradual change management. There is no other choice.
If you try to optimize the broken playbook, you can gain some time, but it will inevitably fire back.
Choose wisely.
We covered this framework in detail in our new book, Full-Funnel Marketing: How to Survive as a B2B CMO in the AI Era and Long Sales Cycles. If you are running an ABM program or trying to get one approved, the buy-in and pilot planning chapters are the ones to read first.
Order Full-Funnel B2B Marketing book
Stop chasing MQLs that don’t convert. Start building an enterprise pipeline that sales actually thanks you for: without massive budgets, organizational overhauls, or waiting for perfect conditions.
Built from 50+ enterprise ABM programs across companies from $10M to $1B+ ARR, this book gives you the systematic approach that helped dozens of B2B marketing leaders:
Fix the broken GTM playbook and drive millions of revenue from new programs developed and tested over a couple of quarters
Quickly prove impact of new marketing programs with 90-day pilots to earn runway for longer-term brand and demand programs
Create repeatable playbooks that work within the constraints most B2B CMOs face: long sales cycles, skeptical executives, misaligned incentives with sales, and quarterly pressure to hit pipeline targets
Get leadership buy-in for changing marketing playbooks without asking for additional budget or resources
Deploy AI to refine and accelerate proven playbooks, not just “do more with less”
Align marketing and sales around revenue and pipeline generation (not leads)to stop working in silos
Scale proven playbooks (what works) across the organization
Systematically move strategic accounts through the buyer journey:from unaware to sales opportunities
No matter where you are:
running on a ‘quarterly MQL hamster wheel’, unsuccessfully trying to optimize within impossible constraints,
dealing with frustrated sales teams,
fighting attribution battles with leadership,
or simply knowing your GTM playbook is broken but not being sure how to fix it
this book gives you the blueprint to transform your marketing function without internal revolution, starting from today.
I think we let go of a lot of programs that we don’t give enough time to build up. We are also reluctant to let go of some initiatives that we cannot justify the rationale for but they’ve been part of the practice, so we just keep doing them.
In my experience, new budget often goes to new programs before the existing ones are actually measured. A 90-day pilot on what you already have forces the discipline that gets skipped when the check is already written. The teams that do this well come out with a story that plays better in the board deck.