Who drives revenue at your company?
Last year at B2B Forum, Sophia Agustina highlighted how B2B marketers feel about driving revenue…
Eek!
But she also gave a prescription your organization can use to cure this common challenge.
For Sophia’s insights, watch the video clip or read the transcript below.
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I’ve led the advisory board for the CMO Council for about six months now, and we did a study. And basically the study shows that…
70% of marketers today are not confident in driving revenue.
And that’s whether it’s a small company or a big company.
I worked for IBM previously, and I’m going to share a case study in terms of how we try to connect the dots [from] brand to demand for IBM sponsorship.
But whether you’re a big company or a small company, everybody in this room is right:
It’s so hard for us to drive revenue today!
And one thing that remains true…
We have so many different go-to-market strategies popping up today, right? You have ABM. You have PLG. But in order for us to connect the dots between your brand campaigns and your demand campaign, companies are struggling in terms of…
Where do you place your big bets?
Do you place it on your brand or do you place it on your demand?
So I’m a strong believer that brand drives demand and also it’s all a holistic view.
So with that, the study shows that these are the five different pain points that marketers are experiencing, and I have experienced that over 15 years I’ve been in B2B.
I don’t want to make you raise your hand again, but I’m sure at least one of these pain points are resonating with you, right?
So “organizational silo” in today’s age is not only aligning your marketing and sales, but also aligning your cross-functional team. You have so many omnichannel strategies and then more and more companies are building out their teams with the Center of Excellence.
So with that, there’s so many different components of a marketing strategy—as well as campaigns—that you need to connect the dots from brand to demand.
Another one, which I mentioned earlier, is where do you put your big bets?
Where do you place your resources in this day and age, [when] budget is scarce?
I was going to ask you another question again, but how many of you had at least 20% of your budget cut the past six months?
So I’m going to share with you a 9C’s framework where we focus on the customer to help you identify, how do you deliver the right customer value that would drive business outcomes and drive that conversion.
The other one I want to focus on here is the lack of ownership of outcomes.
So I’m sure you’ve heard so many different GTM leaders mentioning about who should own the go-to-market strategy.
And more and more it’s a holistic view from the executive team, where the CEO should be responsible for driving the overall go-to-market strategy across the board.
So that way, there’s alignment.
A few years ago, I was working for Iron Mountain, and this really resonated with me. This was 2007, so I’m dating myself, but that was my first B2B experience.
The CMO at the time mentioned to us, “you guys can be in this room and you can have tension around certain strategies that you want to implement, certain campaigns. But at the end of the day, we have to leave this room with an alignment. And if you are not aligned, work it through.”
So that really, really resonated with me. That was my third month at Iron Mountain.
I used to work for B2C previous to then, for retail and financial services. So really honing in on that is really key. So throughout my career, that’s what I really focus on.
And you’ll see in the example from IBM that the KPIs, as well as the revenue strategy, have to be collaborated from the top down and then really over communicated what those goals are.
So I’m glad that the 70% is right. I want to make sure that CMO Council is giving credibility here. You guys did not raise your hand when you say nobody’s having challenges.
And that my friends are only the internal issues.
Those are only the internal pain points around collaboration in integrating organization silos, owning the go-to-market and KPIs, as well as how do you deliver campaigns and marketing strategies that deliver that value to the customer.
Then we have the external factors.
It’s always been a customer’s world, right? But more and more today…
Everybody wants instant gratification. Not only in B2C, but also in B2B.
That’s the reason why you have PLG coming up this past year, because 80%, maybe even now 90%, of the customers like you and me are already researching online, already talking to your peers here to actually get insights. Who should I be working with, right?
Published July 11, 2025
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