Why fixing B2B marketing starts in the wrong place
When B2B marketing underperforms, the diagnosis almost always lands with the content, the channels, the campaigns or the team. It rarely points to the operating model underneath.
And the response is predictable with marketing refining campaigns, rewriting messaging through to changing agencies in extreme cases. Whilst more content gets produced the commercial impact often remains stubbornly similar, largely because the presenting problem and the real problem are rarely the same thing.
In essence, there is a faultline that runs through many underperforming B2B marketing functions. And it can prove difficult to fix as it tends to start at the very foundation and works its way through every layer of execution. By the time it becomes visible in campaign performance or pipeline numbers, it has usually been present for some time. However, it almost always becomes visible in marketing first, which is the primary reason that marketing is seen as the problem.
Whilst the conditions of 2026 haven't created this faultline they are making it harder to ignore. And harder still to recover from. Markets are moving faster than most planning cycles were built to absorb and buyer behaviour is shifting in ways outdated assumptions cannot track. Budgets are under greater scrutiny and many Boards want faster returns. Alongside this is the constant background pressure to do something with AI that's creating work overload in some organisations and paralysis in others, neither of which addresses the structural issues underneath.
Understanding where the problem actually starts changes everything about how you fix it.
The foundation: product-market fit
Everything in the operating model sits on top of one question: does what the business sells map clearly onto what the market urgently needs. And we don't mean historically, but now?
In stable markets, this question can go unasked for years. The current environment is much less forgiving as competitive dynamics are shifting faster, AI-native competitors are entering markets with lower cost bases, and buyer definitions of value are evolving. What created genuine product-market fit two years ago may already be under pressure today. And businesses that aren't actively re-testing this assumption are often the ones finding it increasingly difficult to drive up marketing performance.
However, despite slowing conversion rates or less effective messaging, this isn't primarily a marketing problem and the marketing function is rarely in a position to resolve it alone. The more effective response would be to name it as a strategic question for leadership to answer before asking marketing to solve it through iterating campaigns.
The Ideal Client Profile: where drift becomes operational
If product-market fit is the foundation, ICP is often the first place misalignment becomes operational.
Most businesses have an ICP, yet far fewer have seriously challenged whether it still reflects the market they're operating in today. The ICP has traditionally been built with input from sales conversations, product assumptions and historical success patterns that were agreed and documented at a specific point in time. And in the meantime, the market has moved on.
This is where marketing drift begins to compound. In other words, there's a gradual loss of alignment between market reality and marketing strategy when the assumptions underneath it stop being continuously revisited and re-evaluated. As a result marketing campaigns continue targeting the right audiences for a business that no longer quite exists. Pain points that felt commercially urgent eighteen months ago have become background noise and, worse still, new ones have emerged that the ICP doesn't reflect at all.
The commercial cost of an unreviewed ICP tends to bubble up in different places. There may be a drag in marketing execution where, for example, campaigns may still run efficiently but generate declining returns. Sales may start pushing back, questioning whether marketing understands the buyer or is producing messaging that simply doesn't convert. Pipeline quantity may drop (and quality inevitably drops with it) and overall sales conversion deteriorates in ways that are genuinely difficult to attribute to any single cause. This is because the root issue isn't the campaign, the channel or the team but is what everything was built on.
When marketing teams are stretched, as many in B2B are today, they are asked to do more with less, to demonstrate impact faster and absorb increasing operational complexity. So, unless the business undergoes a full strategy pivot, the discipline of continuously re-testing ICP assumptions gets overlooked and therefore inadvertently deprioritised. There are many businesses operating with a static ICP in a fast-moving market, unaware of any issues, let alone insight into how wide the chasm is with their buyers.
Positioning: the layer that's never quite finished
Once ICP assumptions drift, positioning usually drifts with them. And positioning has a particularly difficult failure mode because, unlike ICP drift, it rarely happens invisibly.
Most leadership teams already know their positioning could be sharper and it is likely most marketing teams have been under pressure to revisit it repeatedly. The challenge is rarely awareness, but a blend of commitment and competence, and that combination is harder to sustain than most businesses anticipate.
This is because positioning tends to get revisited in bursts, for example a rebrand, a new market entry, a product pivot, and then it gets left to settle again. This is partly because finishing it properly requires something genuinely difficult to sustain simultaneously, that’s to say strategic confidence, commercial clarity, organisational alignment and the operational discipline to protect that work from constant short-term delivery pressure. Most businesses have some of these but few have all of them at the same time. And fewer still have - or need - in-house marketers with the experience and capacity to drive it through to a point where it actually holds.
The result is positioning that becomes clear enough to use, but not sharp enough to resonate cleanly in the market. Over time it drifts further as the market continues to evolve and the business adapts to each new situation with a slightly different story.
In my experience, positioning drift shows up most clearly in the sales conversation. When sales teams find themselves competing on price rather than value, or when loss rates are climbing despite a product with genuine USPs, they react by iterating their messaging and end up operating from a different messaging framework to marketing. When the market begins to feel commoditised even though the business knows it is offering something distinctive, the issue almost always sits upstream in positioning.
AI pressure is now accelerating this with some businesses racing to reposition around AI faster than the thinking underneath has evolved. Others are delaying while waiting for clarity that may not arrive on a convenient timeline. Neither response creates coherent positioning and both almost certainly expose themselves to a widening faultline.
Go-To-Market alignment: where the faultline becomes expensive
By the time the drift reaches GTM execution, the damage is already structural. The ICP has fragmented, the positioning lacks consistency or cohesion and different commercial functions may be operating from different assumptions about value, urgency and fit.
According to Aberdeen Group research, aligned companies grow 20% annually compared to a 4% revenue decline for poorly aligned organisations. Yet many sales and marketing teams still operate from fundamentally different interpretations of what good looks like, and that is where the commercial cost begins to compound.
The pattern I see most often starts with the absence of a single clearly agreed ICP across the commercial team. Marketing defaults to broad market coverage, targeting everyone who might plausibly be relevant (and in the process targets no one). The result is higher spend, lower response rates and diminishing ROI. Sales, in the meantime, will likely have shifted focus to a narrower set of accounts reflecting their own interpretation of the ideal customer. Both functions are working toward the same number but from entirely different pictures of who they're trying to reach. The misalignment is rarely dramatic but is usually quiet, cumulative and expensive.
This is where the authority gap becomes commercially visible. Not because marketing lacks capability, but because it often lacks sufficient influence over the strategic assumptions shaping execution in the first place. And when performance weakens, the diagnosis settles on execution rather than on the operating model underneath it. This is when the faultline widens.
What changes when the diagnosis is right
The businesses getting the most from their marketing investment treat performance as a systems question and not a content one.
That means ICPs that are commercially specific and continuously reviewed as opposed to being documented and assumed. Positioning is actively maintained and not periodically revisited. GTM alignment is built around shared commercial definitions rather than assumed agreement. Revenue expectations are grounded in what the market will actually bear and with marketing functions with strong market knowledge, and enough authority to challenge assumptions when required.
It also means approaching AI as an operating model question rather than just a tooling question. AS we move forward through 2026 and beyond, the businesses getting the greatest value from AI will rarely be the ones adopting the most tools. They'll likely be the ones that already had the discipline, rather than rely on AI to create it, and continuously re-test assumptions, share market intelligence effectively and align commercially across functions. Those businesses layering AI onto already misaligned systems will be at great risk of accelerating drift.
When the operating model works, in other words when ICP is current, positioning is held consistently, and GTM functions are genuinely aligned, marketing is well placed to do what it's actually for. That’s not simply generating visibility, but creating the clarity, trust and tension that makes movement feel safer than standing still for the buyers who matter most. And from a leadership perspective, a well-functioning marketing operating model builds board confidence and is able to fully shift the conversation away from detailed activity metrics toward genuine commercial contribution.
None of this starts with a campaign brief. It starts with a thorough strategic assessment of where the faultline actually runs and visibility into how far up the operating model the crack has already spread.
Marketing drift rarely announces itself and neither does the operating model problem underneath it. Both are worth re-evaluating before you dive into concluding you have a marketing execution problem.
If your marketing keeps underperforming despite good execution — let's speak. Element 8 works with B2B marketing leaders to build strategy grounded in market reality.
Marketing That Moves is a series exploring what B2B marketing looks like when it has the clarity, authority and commercial grounding to make a real difference.
