B2BFYI #8: Intentionality in B2B marketing

Welcome! 👋 The B2BFYI newsletter is for complex B2B marketers looking for a competitive edge. Covering brand, content, technology and lead generation, B2BFYI serves as a guide to building a more effective marketing strategy.

B2BFYI is written by industry veterans Chris Bennett (Strategy), Geoff Bretherick (Creative) and Philip Bennison (Tech), and published weekly. You can sign up here to get issues straight to your inbox.

I’ve spent the last 7 years agency side as Head of Strategy, advising clients on how to build authority B2B brand that actually win business. But before that I spent another 7 years inhouse, 3 of which as a marketing team leader.

One of the most challenging parts of those roles wasn’t doing the marketing, it was getting the marketing function in the business to run in a way that delivered for the business needs.

These were the endless streams of business-as-usual work combined with finding ways of driving revenue, collaborating with sales, growing the brand and owning demand gen. It’s a LOT. And finding a balance is, frankly, super hard. There just aren’t enough resources, time + internal engagement for you to get it all done.

In this issue I wanted to focus on the only way to make it somewhat work: balance. Creating an equilibrium that checks all those boxes without disrupting any one too much, but also not letting one take over.

As an example, when I ran the digital comms at Earlham Institute (a UK-government funded national science research centre) I was able to balance our outputs in a way which enabled the team to spend at least some of the time on new initiatives away from BAU.

The result? Won an Excellence with Impact commendation for a social media campaign (that we ran on our own initiative), which not only came with high praise from the institute’s actual funders, but also a £10K grant.

The important bit? It bought the team visible credibility internally. So when we got around to reworking the website, I was able to go and get the budget DOUBLED.

And all the while, BAU was being handled so nobody was frustrated.

I hope this issue helps you run the ship more smoothly in 2026!

Most B2B marketing teams are stuck in an endless tug-of-war.

On one side: BAU. The emails, the decks, the "can you just quickly..." requests that keep on piling up.

On the other: the work that actually drives the results you care about - revenue. Campaigns. Demand gen. Testing. New initiatives that could genuinely shift the scales.

And in the middle? You + your team. Trying to do both. Feeling like you're failing at everything.

And from what I’ve learned working with over 100+ B2B marketing teams is that you probably can't fix this. Not completely, anyway.

Most internal marketing teams don't control their own destiny. You don't set the budget. You don't have final sign-off. You can't just decide what parts of BAU to cut without incurring the wrath of some other deparment. Or the leadership team.

So what CAN you do?

Aim for equilibrium.

Not perfection. Not total control. Just... balance. A sustainable state where you're meeting enough objectives, across enough areas, to keep the machine running AND make progress on what matters.

Here's how to get there:

Stop thinking in terms of "enough" or "not enough." Think in terms of allocation.

Where is each hour going? Map it. Literally. Track a week if you have to.

Then ask: does this split reflect our actual priorities?

Spoiler: it usually doesn't 😬

Most teams discover they're spending 70-80% of their time on work that accounts for maybe 20% of their impact. The fix isn't getting more resources (good luck with that budget request). It's reallocating what you've already got.

This is broadly summarised as the Pareto principle (or the 80/20 rule). Roughly 80% of impact comes from 20% of input. You definitely don’t want to be operating the other way around!

A few practical moves:

The elephant in the room with prioritisation advice is that most of it assumes you have control. Marketing teams rarely have that.

"Say no to everything that isn't essential!" Great. Tell that to the CEO who wants a last-minute deck for the board meeting.

"Focus on your top 3 priorities!" Yeah, let’s get right on that. Except you've got 9 stakeholders with 11 different definitions of "top priority."

The reality for most B2B marketing teams is that you can't always choose WHAT you work on. But you can choose HOW you work on it.

Prioritisation within constraints looks like:

The goal here isn't perfect prioritisation. It's creating enough space for the work that matters, even when everything feels urgent.

BAU isn't the enemy. It's the baseline.

Someone has to send the emails. Update the website. Create the sales collateral. Respond to the "quick question" that's never quick.

The problem isn't that BAU exists. It's that it expands to fill every available hour if you let it. It’s like water - fits whatever is there. In this case, it can feel more like acid than a refreshing drink.

The trick is containment:

Think of BAU like a utility bill: necessary, but not something you want to overpay for. Too often it simply doesn’t deliver the impact you need internally, as it is fully expected that you do this work. Without visible internal impact, there’s little room for the marketing team to demonstrate their OWN ability to tip the scales of business revenue. And this is what will get you more resources.

Not everything that feels productive IS productive.

Busy isn't the same as effective. And in B2B marketing, it's dangerously easy to confuse activity with impact.

You can spend a week perfecting a piece of content that nobody reads. You can run a campaign that generates hundreds of leads that sales never closes. You can build a beautiful brand that doesn't translate to pipeline. You can create the greatest ever whitepaper, only to not have the budget to run ads to it - so it’s a waste of time, basically.

So how do you know what actually matters?

Start by tracking backwards from revenue:

Then protect that work. Fiercely. Unflinchingly. Like it was a winning lottery ticket you have yet to turn in.

When someone asks you to drop everything for a "quick" project, you need to know what you're trading off. "I can do that, but it means pausing the campaign that generated 40% of last quarter's pipeline." Suddenly the conversation changes. Get OTHER PEOPLE to make that decision, and shift the burden to them.

Even better, flat out say “no”. Sorry, this is going to negatively impact our Q3 targets. If you really need this work doing, you’ll have to go and ask the CEO if he’s cool with missing those targets in order to get your slides done.

When something lands, most teams do the same thing: move on.

New quarter, new campaign. Fresh ideas. Different approach.

This is a mistake.

If you've found something that works - a content format that resonates, a channel that converts, a message that lands - your job isn't to chase a shiny new thing. It's to squeeze every drop of value from that winner.

What doubling down looks like:

Most teams spread themselves thin chasing the next big thing when they should be milking their existing winners dry.

This is the hardest one.

Because in most organisations, marketing doesn't get to say no. You're a service function. You support the business. When leadership wants something, you deliver. It’s your job, after all.

But here's what you CAN do: make the trade-offs visible.

Instead of a flat out “no”, try:

The goal isn't to win every battle. It's to ensure leadership makes decisions with full information. If they still choose the shiny new project over the revenue-driving campaign, that's their call 🤷 But at least they're making it consciously.

Over time, this builds credibility. You become the team that delivers realistic assessments, not the team that says yes to everything and then underdelivers.

The goal isn't to do everything perfectly. And aiming for perfection will paralyse you.

Instead, try to find a rhythm where you're delivering enough across the board, while still carving out space for the work that actually matters.

Perfect prioritisation is a fantasy for most B2B marketing teams. You don't control enough of the variables. But equilibrium? That's achievable.

A state where BAU gets handled without consuming you. Where the needle-moving work gets protected. Where you're saying "not yet" often enough to keep your sanity, but delivering enough to stay credible.

Balance isn’t compromise. It’s strategy.

And in a year where budgets are tight, teams are stretched, and everyone wants more for less - it might be the only strategy that actually works.

That’s it for this issue of B2BFYI. If you found this useful, forward it to a fellow B2B marketer who’s drowning in BAU and wondering where their week went.