Why Your B2B Marketing Feels So Inconsistent and How to Build Real Momentum

By Michael Buzinski, Founder/CEO & Fractional CMO

Table of Contents:

The Hidden Cost of Random Acts of Marketing

5 Pain Points That Are Really Strategy Problems

What a Real Marketing Strategy Actually Is (and Is Not)

The Core Components of a Sound Marketing Strategy

How to Start Building Your Strategy (Without a 3-Day Offsite)

How to Keep Strategy From Slipping Back into Chaos

What It Looks Like When Strategy Clicks

From Random Acts to a Real Revenue Engine

FAQs about Building Momentum with Your Marketing

 

For many years, 13 to be exact, I ran a creative agency. We produced everything in-house: website development, graphic design, audio and video production, social media, along with small and large format printing. We covered almost every marketing base you could imagine under a 13 thousand square foot roof. If you had a business, we could market it for you.

My little enterprise grew to a multi-seven figure energy suck. Serving and keeping track of 300 businesses a year with two dozen employees with a cool building in downtown Anchorage Alaska was a dream realized that quickly became a nightmare. Not because of the clients or the employees, but because I found myself with stagnant growth of my own company.

The problem was that we were trying to be everything to everyone, which ended up being less profitable than I had hoped. The situation had me working way too many hours and not keeping enough of the money the business was bringing in—like I was only keeping less than 5% of gross sales. This was a half decent living, but the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

So in 2018, I decided to close the doors on my brick and mortar behemoth and took the company 100% virtual. The year-long process of dwindling 300 clients down to a few dozen taught me a lot about who and how I wanted my business to serve. And in that process, I realized that we were, much like most agencies still do, allowing our clients to engage in random acts of marketing. We were content on taking on clients who told us what they wanted to do with their marketing (basically order takers) and tried to make sense of it all when things didn’t go quite their way in results.

The missing link in every case where campaigns didn’t completely blow through their goals was the lack of strategy. I confirmed this with studying the hundreds of campaigns that did perform beyond expectations. Every campaign that started with a strong researched back strategy was predictably more successful than those that didn’t. So why was that?

Strategy creates rhythm, consistency, and coherence; which are the keystones to real growth. A hundred random axe strikes to a tree probably won’t topple it, but a few dozen strikes to a strategic spot will bring it down easily. The same is true with your marketing. Strategy is the blade that, when properly yielded, brings structure to every part of your marketing, sales, and retention systems so they work in sync. 

Abraham Lincoln was quoted to say, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.” I think he was making a point about preparation and leverage, both byproducts of strategy. In other words, the tree isn’t the website, the logo, or the latest campaign idea. It’s the real goal: sustainable growth, higher margins, a business that doesn’t chew you up just to inch forward. The axe is everything you bring to that tree: your strategy, your offers, your messaging, your team, your tech, your processes. 

And the hours are the one thing you can’t manufacture more of; your finite time and energy. For years, I was hacking away at the trunk with a dull blade: endless projects, custom everything, constant activity. When I finally stopped to study what actually worked, it became painfully obvious—sharpening the axe (strategy) was doing more for my clients and my own business than swinging harder ever did.

This blog is about that shift. It’s about moving from random acts of marketing to a focused, well-sharpened marketing engine that lines up your tools, skills, systems, and plan around a clearly defined outcome. If you’ve been exhaustedly whacking at your own “tree” and wondering why it’s still standing, we’re going to look at how to sharpen the axe so every swing counts, and your time and energy finally produce the growth you’ve been working so hard for.

 

The Hidden Cost of Random Acts of Marketing

If you are like most B2B firms, marketing ideas rarely show up in a neat strategic plan. They show up in Slack channels or quarterly business meetings..
“Let’s boost that post.”
“We should try Google Ads.”
“Can we send an email about this new service?”
“Maybe it’s time to redesign the website.”

None of those ideas are bad on their own. The problem is that they usually are not tied to a clear strategy. They are quick reactions to pressure from the market, from leadership, or from a slow sales month. So the team stays busy, but the business does not feel any more predictable or scalable.

Random acts of marketing have a very real cost:

• Wasted time and budget. You spread limited resources across too many half-built campaigns. Nothing runs long enough or consistently enough to prove whether it works.
• Burned-out teams. Your people are constantly context-switching. New requests show up faster than old ones can be finished. It feels like you are always behind.
• Stagnant growth and thin margins. Revenue may bump up here and there, but it does not compound. You rely on referrals and one-off wins instead of a repeatable engine.
• A founder stuck in the middle of everything. You end up as the final decision maker on every campaign, every tool, every hire. Instead of leading the business, you are coordinating chaos.

The hardest part is that, on the surface, it feels like progress. Calendars are full. Content is going out. Agencies are busy. Yet when you step back and ask a simple question like “What did all of this actually do for our pipeline or our profit,” the answer is usually fuzzy.

That is the hidden cost. Activity replaces momentum. Without a strategy, even strong teams with good ideas quietly hit a ceiling, because effort is not compounding in one clear direction. Your marketing looks active from the inside, but from the outside your buyers see inconsistency and noise.

 

5 Pain Points That Are Really Strategy Problems

When you strip away the noise, most marketing headaches are not really about tools or talent. They are about missing or fuzzy strategy. Here are five common pain points that usually trace back to that root issue.

1. Scattered efforts, no unifying plan

Everyone is working hard. Someone is on social. Someone is writing emails. Someone is tweaking the website. On paper, a lot is happening. In reality, no one is working from the same plan.

Without a unifying strategy, every idea competes for attention instead of aligning toward a clear outcome. Teams make decisions based on what feels urgent this week instead of what serves the business over the next 12 months. The result is a long list of projects and a short list of real results.

2. No consistent target or “perfect fit” client

If you have ever said “we can help anyone,” you have probably felt this one. Offers get broad. Messaging gets watered down. Pricing gets negotiated to death, because buyers cannot clearly see why you are the obvious choice for them.

When you do not have a defined, perfectly profitable prospect profile (P3P), marketing has nothing solid to aim at. Campaigns try to speak to multiple segments at once. Sales conversations zigzag based on who shows up that day. Strategy starts with deciding who you are optimizing for. If that choice is unclear, everything built on top of it will feel shaky.

3. Inconsistent messaging and positioning

Listen to three different touchpoints in your company. The headline on your homepage. The way a sales rep opens a discovery call. The way you describe your services in a proposal. If each of those sounds like a different company, your buyers notice.

Inconsistent messaging is a strategy problem, not just a copy problem. It usually means you have not settled on a clear promise, point of view, and value story. When that foundation is missing, every channel invents its own version on the fly. Prospects have to work too hard to understand what you really do and why it matters. Most will not bother.

4. Disjointed funnel and tech

You might have a CRM, an email platform, a scheduling tool, and maybe even a proposal system, but if they do not work together, you do not have a marketing operating system or revenue engine. You have a tech stack.

Disjointed funnels show up as leads that disappear after first contact, duplicate records all over the place, and no clean way to see where deals are getting stuck. No one can follow a buyer’s journey from first touch through to renewal in one view. That makes it almost impossible to improve anything in a focused way.

This is not just an operations issue. It is a strategic one. A clear strategy defines the key stages of your buyer journey first. Then you use tools to support that journey, not the other way around.

5. No clear ownership or scoreboard

If you ask “What is working in our marketing right now?” and the room goes quiet, you are looking at a strategy gap. The same thing is true if you ask “Who owns this stage of our funnel?” and get three different answers.

When ownership is fuzzy, accountability is fuzzy. People are busy, but they are not truly responsible for outcomes. Meetings become status updates instead of problem solving sessions. Reports get generated, but they are not tied to clear decisions.

Strategy fixes this by defining who owns which parts of the journey and which numbers matter. Once there is a simple scoreboard and clear roles, progress stops being a feeling and becomes something you can see and improve.

If these sound familiar, the issue is not that you need “better marketing.” You need a strategy that makes marketing worth doing in the first place.

What a Real Marketing Strategy Actually Is (and Is Not)

At this point it is easy to say “we need a strategy” and still mean “we need a better list of tactics.” That is not what I am talking about.

Most of what gets labeled as strategy in the B2B world is really one of three things:

• A 60 page slide deck that everyone nods through once and never opens again
• A list of tactics for the next quarter
• A brand guidelines PDF with colors, fonts, and logo rules

Those can all be useful, but none of them are a strategy by themselves.

A real marketing strategy is much simpler and much more concrete:

• A clear choice about who you serve first
• A clear decision about what problem you will solve for them right now
• A clear path for how they move from stranger to lead to client to advocate
• A simple scoreboard that tells you if that path is working

If you do not have those four things, you can spin up as many campaigns as you want and get no momentum. Teams will keep improvising. Sales will keep selling whatever they think they can. Leaders will keep chasing the next tool or channel because nothing feels solid.

The way I look at it, strategy is the operating system that tells every campaign, tool, and team member what their job actually is. It is the layer underneath your content calendar, ad spend, and technology choices. When it is clear, a lot of decisions get easier. When it is fuzzy, everything feels like guesswork.

In the next section we will break that idea down into core components you can actually build from, so strategy stops being a fuzzy concept and starts becoming something you can see and use every week.

The Core Components of a Sound Marketing Strategy

A good strategy does not have to be complicated. In fact, if your team cannot repeat it in a few sentences, it probably will not get used. These are the core pieces you need in place so your marketing can start building real momentum.

1. Clear outcome and timeframe

First, you need to know what you are aiming at.

Pick one primary business outcome for the next 6 months. For example:

• Increase qualified opportunities by 30 percent
• Grow recurring revenue to a specific target
• Raise profit margin by a few points while holding revenue steady

Then translate that into a 90 day focus. Shorter time frames create urgency and clarity. And notice that I didn’t say to look at 12 months. That is on purpose. After 20 years of marketing over 1200 companies, I can tell you with certainty that you cannot predict your business situation in 12 months. You cannot predict what the market will look like in 12 months. 12 months is too far away, so let’s compress your strategy over the next six months and see what you can do in two 90-day sprints. Then recalculate where you are at that point and decide whether your strategy needs to be tweaked.

A big key to success beyond keeping your time constraints short is to tie your outcome to revenue or profit, not vanity metrics. Website traffic, impressions, or likes might be helpful indicators, but they are not the win. Your team should know exactly what a “good quarter” looks like in numbers over gut feelings.

2. Perfectly Profitable Prospect (P3P)

Next, define who you’re building your marketing strategy for. Not in a broad “any business with 10 to 500 employees” way, but in a clear, specific way. For years marketers have been touting the ICP or Ideal Client Profile, which, when you are getting started (below $1M) can get you by. But it will only get you so far.

This is because once your business pushes past six figures, a basic ICP is usually too broad to protect you from PITA (Pain In The A**) clients and margin killers. You can fill the pipeline with “right industry, right size” prospects and still end up with people who drain your team, churn early, and quietly push good employees out the door.

A Predictably Profitable Prospect Profile (P3P), tightens the filter with three tests: 

• Core Value Fit: Do we share the same values when it comes to our business? High core value fit creates immediate trust levels that shorten sales cycles, decision processes, and lengthens business relationships. 
• Culture Fit: Do we work in a similar rhythm and style? If you are an agile company trying to serve a methodical client, you will most likely be frustrated with how slow they move. Conversely, the client feels rushed and pushed around. Both parties feel the friction, which causes employee burnout on your end and short lifetime value from the client side. Both cost you money and reputation in the end.
• Delivery Fit: Can they actually leverage our outcomes profitably? If a client isn’t able to utilize the outcomes of your service, they won’t see the value of your service and thus, will feel they have wasted their time and money—no matter how well you perform. So they will leave with a bad taste in their mouth, giving you a bad review (if any) and no chance of a referral.

When you apply those filters, you reduce exposure to high-friction accounts and start stacking clients who stay longer, treat your team well, and grow profitably with you.

3. Defined core offer and promise

If strategy is the operating system, your core offer is the main application that runs on it.

Decide what you want to sell first and best. That does not mean you can never sell anything else, but it does mean your strategy is built around one flagship offer. Document things like:

• What is included and what is not
• How it is delivered
• How long it typically takes to see value
• What transformation or outcome you are promising

When this is fuzzy, marketing becomes a collection of generic messages. When it is clear, every campaign can point toward the same next step.

4. Simple, consistent message

Now capture the story your market needs to hear again and again.

Your message should answer three questions in language a non marketer can understand:

• Who is this for
• What problem are you solving first (the bigger, the better)
• What changes for them when it works

From there, you can adapt it slightly for different formats, but the core should stay the same across your website, sales calls, decks, emails, and proposals. Consistency is not about being boring. It is about building recognition and trust so that buyers feel like they understand you before they ever talk to sales.

5. Primary marketing engine

Your primary marketing engine is the repeatable system that turns right fit strangers into sales conversations. It is not a single campaign or a single channel. It is the combination of three things working together for a specific audience:

• How they first discover you
• What makes them raise their hand
• How you follow up until they are ready to talk to sales

This is where most teams overcomplicate things. They try to run five “engines” at once and wonder why nothing feels mature. A webinar series here, some outbound there, a bit of paid search, a podcast, a trade show calendar, all competing for time and budget. Instead of one strong engine that improves every quarter, they end up with a handful of half built motions that never reach their potential. Your strategy should name one primary engine you are committed to building and refining, then treat everything else as support, over having many competing motions going on at once.

To get started, choose one primary engine for the next 6 months, such as:

• Outbound campaigns with a strong follow up sequence
• Content plus nurture, using webinars, guides, and email
• Partner and referral motion with a clear ask and process

Your engine is the system that repeatedly turns strangers into sales conversations. Once you choose it, you commit to building and improving it instead of jumping to the next tactic at the first sign of friction. Once you see progress, find other engines that can feed into it over creating ones that run in parallel. This allows you to start leveraging your efforts, which will create much more profitable results.

6. Scoreboard and rhythm

Finally, you need a way to decide whether you should keep or change your strategy. This comes from measuring outcomes. That means:

• A small scoreboard with 3 to 5 key numbers you review regularly
• A simple rhythm for looking at those numbers and making decisions

For most B2B firms, the scoreboard might include:

• New qualified leads
• Opportunities created
• Win rate
• Sales cycle length
• Retention or expansion rate

Then you set a weekly and quarterly rhythm. Weekly to catch issues early. Quarterly to step back, see patterns, and make bigger adjustments. When the scoreboard and rhythm are in place, strategy stops living in a document and starts living in the way you run the business.

How to Start Building Your Strategy (Without a 3-Day Offsite)

You do not need a retreat in the woods to build a real strategy. You need a clear picture of where you are, one meaningful outcome, and a few good decisions about where to focus. Here is a simple way to get started that you can tackle in a couple of focused working sessions.

1. Audit your last 90 days of marketing

Start with a reality check.

Pull up your calendar, project board, ad accounts, and email platform. Make a simple list of everything you and your team have done in the last 90 days to attract or nurture buyers. Campaigns, posts, emails, events, sponsorships, outbound sequences, website changes. All of it.

For each item, ask three questions:

• What was the specific goal?
• Did we measure it in any meaningful way?
• Can we see any link between this and pipeline or revenue?

You are not trying to build a perfect report. You are trying to see patterns. Where are you spreading yourselves thin? Where are you doing work that is not tied to any clear goal? That is your baseline.

2. Choose one primary outcome for the next 90 days

Next, decide what matters most right now. One primary outcome. Not ten.

Examples:

• Increase qualified discovery calls by 25 percent
• Shorten average sales cycle by 15 percent
• Improve client retention for a specific segment
• Create a steady flow of expansion opportunities from existing clients

Pick the one outcome that would make the next quarter a clear win for you. Write it down, set a timeframe, and share it with the team. This becomes the lens for every marketing and sales decision in the next 90 days.

If an idea does not support that outcome, it goes on a later list.

3. Pick your core engine and park the rest

With your outcome chosen, decide which marketing engine will drive it.

For example:

• If you need more qualified conversations, you might focus on outbound plus a strong follow up sequence.
• If you have traffic but low conversion, you might build a content plus nurture engine with a lead magnet and educational email flow.
• If you have a strong installed base of clients, you might prioritize a referral and expansion engine.

Choose one primary engine to build and improve for the next 6 months. That does not mean you stop everything else, but it does mean you stop starting new things that are not connected to that engine. I suggest that you only introduce new efforts at your quarterly review so you can better focus on the sprint at hand and give your engine all of the energy it needs to be successful.

Everything you do should either:

• Feed that engine with more of the right people, or
• Improve how that engine converts and retains them.

4. Align your message around one clear promise

Now that you know who you are targeting and what outcome you want, tighten your message.

In one short paragraph, answer:

• Who is this for
• What urgent problem or struggle you help them solve first
• What changes for them when it works

Then look at a few key touchpoints:

• Homepage hero and subhead
• Sales one liner or elevator pitch
• The way you describe your core offer in proposals or decks

Update these so they use the same language and the same promise. Your goal is that a prospect who sees your website, talks to sales, and reads a follow up email feels like it is all part of one clear story, not three different versions of your company.

5. Assign ownership and set a simple scoreboard

Finally, decide who owns what and how you will track progress.

Start with four stages:

• Attract: Who is responsible for creating awareness and generating leads?
• Nurture: Who is responsible for educating and warming those leads?
• Close: Who is responsible for turning opportunities into clients?
• Keep and grow: Who is responsible for retention and expansion?

Put real names next to each stage, not departments. Then create a simple scoreboard with 3 to 5 numbers that you will look at every week and every quarter. For most B2B firms, that might include:

• New qualified leads
• Opportunities created
• Deals won and win rate
• Average sales cycle length
• Retention or expansion rate

Schedule a recurring 30 to 60 minute review each month or quarter where you look at these numbers and ask three questions:

• What is working that we should keep or double down on?
• What is not working that we should fix or stop?
• What will we commit to testing or changing before the next review?

That is it. No marathon offsite. No giant binder. Just a clear outcome, a chosen engine, a unified message, and a simple way to keep everyone aligned.

If this still seems like a heavy lift for you, or you think an outside perspective can better answer the hard questions, please use this link to find a time for us (or someone on my team) to discuss how we can help you.

How to Keep Strategy From Slipping Back into Chaos

A clear strategy is a strong start, but do not set it and forget it. Without a few simple guardrails, you can drift back into random acts of marketing without noticing. The following practices keep your strategy honest and your team aligned.

1. Kill campaign clutter

More campaigns do not equal more growth. Most B2B firms get better results from one or two strong, repeatable systems than from six scattered experiments. Before you approve a new idea, ask one question: “Does this support our primary engine and our 90 day outcome?” If the answer is no, it goes on a parking lot list. This isn’t meant to kill creativity, rather channel it into the parts of your system that can actually move the numbers that matter.

2. Automate for consistency, not for cloning humans

Automation should make it easier to do the right things every time, not pretend a robot can build relationships for you. Use automation for reminders, lead routing, follow up triggers, and simple nurturing that would otherwise get forgotten. Keep human contact for key moments like discovery calls, proposals, and renewal conversations. The best systems handle the routine work in the background so your team can show up as real people when it counts.

3. Unify your message across channels

Once your strategy defines who you serve and what you promise, protect that message. Review your website, outbound scripts, ads, decks, and email templates. They should all describe the same problem, the same outcome, and the same core offer in slightly adapted language. When different teams start inventing their own versions, you create noise in the market and confusion inside the company. A short internal messaging guide and a quick review process for new copy go a long way here.

4. Run weekly 15 minute funnel checks

You do not need a two hour meeting to keep a pulse on the system. Block 15 minutes once a week to look at your basic funnel numbers. New leads, new opportunities, deals won, deals stuck, and anything notable in retention or expansion. Ask three questions: What looks healthy, what looks off, and what one small adjustment can we make this week. These short, consistent reviews keep strategy connected to reality and prevent surprises at the end of the quarter.

5. Protect focus from shiny objects

New tools, platforms, and playbooks will keep showing up in your inbox. Some of them will be useful, most of them will be distractions. When a new idea hits your radar, run it through two filters: Does it support our defined outcome, and does it strengthen our primary engine. If the answer is not a clear yes, put it on a later list and stay the course. Momentum comes from depth, not novelty. Your team needs permission to ignore the noise so they can fully build what you have already chosen.

What It Looks Like When Strategy Clicks

It is easy to talk about strategy in theory. It is more useful to see what happens when it actually lands inside a real company. When we started with Calinisan Management Services, they were doing what most growing B2B firms do: staying visible, saying yes to a lot of ideas and relying on busy work to keep opportunities coming in. The team was busy alright, but marketing felt like a collection of disconnected efforts rather than a system.

We worked together to get clear on a primary outcome, define a P3P, tighten the core offer, and choose one main engine to build first. From there, we aligned messaging across channels and set a simple scoreboard so everyone could see whether the work was moving the right numbers. The result was more focus, more confidence in what to say no to, and a direct line from marketing efforts to revenue.