Written by: Beth Norton

It’s all-too-common for fingers to point at Marketing when there isn’t enough pipeline. Leadership (or more likely Sales, but *we *don’t need to point fingers here) will claim they’re not generating enough demand, they’re spending too much on events with too little ROI and the website and social posts aren’t quite landing in the way they’d expect. The marketing team is producing hundreds of assets, multiple campaigns are running simultaneously and actually, they’re over-capacity. So why isn’t it making a difference?

The instinct is: we need a new marketing strategy.

And sometimes yes, that’s the right approach. But sometimes, I’d say more often than not, the problem sits further upstream.

It’s not that marketing is broken. It’s that the business isn't aligned on the story they’re telling.

I’ve seen this happen a lot in high-growth businesses, where the product has evolved quickly, the customer has changed and new markets have opened up. The business typically responds by hiring more people and launching more products. Somewhere along the way, everyone starts telling a slightly different story.

Product talks about capabilities.

Sales talks about objections.

Marketing talks about audiences.

The CEO talks about the vision.

And the website is ambiguous because it says something else entirely.

Individually, none of these things are necessarily wrong. But collectively, they create confusion in the market. And confusion is expensive.

The alignment test

Here's a simple test:

If you asked your CEO, CMO, Head of Sales and Head of Product to describe your company in one sentence, would you get the same answer?

These are the five key questions I’ve been asking leadership teams in executive workshops recently:

1. Who are you really for?

Not everyone who could buy from you, but who is the customer you understand better than anyone else?

2. What problem do you solve?

Not what your product does, but what changes for the customer because you exist?

3. Why you?

Not a list of features. What makes you meaningfully different from the alternatives?

4. What do you want to be known for?

If a buyer remembered only three things about you, what should they be?

5. What does your buyer need to believe before choosing you?

Your buyer isn't just deciding whether your product works. Do they trust you enough to choose it?

If five senior people give five different answers, press pause on the marketing briefs. Because that’s an alignment problem.

And when there’s internal misalignment, Marketing ends up carrying the burden of solving problems it can't solve.

The team is asked to:

  • differentiate a product that hasn't been clearly positioned
  • create demand for an audience nobody has agreed on
  • produce content without a clear point of view
  • explain a product that has evolved faster than its messaging
  • make Sales and Product sound consistent when they've never agreed on the underlying story

And then everyone wonders why marketing isn't working.

When the business is too close to its own story

This is where I’ve seen value in having an external strategic perspective. Not because the people inside the business don't know what they're doing. But because they’re *too close *to it. Proximity creates blind spots.

Internal teams have lived through every product launch, every customer conversation, every internal debate and every iteration of the strategy. They know the history and the reasons behind every decision, which is valuable context.

But it's also a lot of noise. When you're inside a business every day, it becomes incredibly difficult to distinguish between what’s important to the business and what’s actually important to the market.

And one key thing to remember: your buyer is encountering your business without any of that context.

Sometimes the most valuable thing an external perspective can do isn't to come up with a new strategy. It's to remove the noise. To step back from the detail, challenge the assumptions that have become accepted as fact, connect the dots across teams and look at the business through the eyes of the customer you're actually trying to convince.

That's when you can start asking the questions that become difficult to ask when you're too close to the answers:

  • What are we actually trying to say?
  • Who are we trying to say it to?
  • What do we want them to believe?
  • Does everything we're doing reinforce that story?

Most commonly, the answer isn't a new strategy. It's clarity on the strategy you already have.

You can't market your way out of a positioning problem. You can't content-produce your way out of a differentiation problem. And you can't generate enough leads to compensate for a story your market doesn't understand.

Get the foundation right, and everything downstream gets easier.

The best marketing strategy doesn't start with what you're going to say.

It starts with deciding what you actually stand for.