Struggling to stand out in B2B tech marketing? Start by asking better questions. Here are 12 essential questions to help you uncover real insight, sharpen strategy, improve execution, and measure what matters in 2025. If you’re frustrated by sporadic wins and invisible branding, these questions will help you create clarity.
Takeaways
- Understand your audience deeply and identify the root causes of your marketing challenges.
- Invest in both short-term tactics and long-term brand building, prioritizing awareness, confidence, and trust.
- Document consistent processes and get external help to fill capability gaps if needed.
- Ensure you’re measuring what matters and distinguish between forecasts and actual results.
Does This Sound Familiar?
“We’ve poured our hearts into building a product that truly makes life easier for our customers. What used to take a week, our solution can do in a day. Yet despite all the effort, we’re struggling to get leads. The big brands always get shortlisted. It’s an uphill battle to book demos. Conversion rates are low. Marketing doesn’t seem to work.”
It’s not that your product isn’t good enough. It’s more likely that you are:
- invisible
- trying to be everything to everyone
- not clear on your best-fit customer
- all short-term tactics, no long-term strategy
- product-led, not customer-obsessed
- all of the above
Not to mention that 95% of the folks you’re after are not in the market to buy—and likely won’t be for a while.
Plus half of the remaining 5% end up ghosting you and do nothing (because that's way less risky).
This is a good time to rethink, readjust, and get rid of old baggage. There’s no point in continuing to do the same things if they’re not working. That’s insane.
Let’s go back to the beginning and find out what’s causing all the frustration.
Insight
Got a marketing problem? Chances are you have an insight problem.
Everything starts with insight (some folks call it diagnosis). The better the insight, the better the outcome. It creates clarity and has a ripple effect:
Better Insight > Better Strategy > Better Execution > Better Metrics to Report.
The foundation for addressing this problem is understanding why these challenges exist.
1. How did our brand progress in the past year?
- Brand recognition is one thing. Brand reputation is another. Focus on how your brand has evolved and whether there is increased awareness, confidence, and trust. If you’re not sure, that’s an indication you’re not measuring what matters (see Metrics for more on that).
- Dive Deeper: Progress NOT Perfection: B2B Tech Marketing Strategies for Growth
2. How can we prepare for and leverage the potential of AI, specifically Causal AI, in our GTM strategies?
- Understanding what happens and why is key to market success and GTM accountability. With Causal AI, you can sift through data and show how your brand drives faster deals, bigger deals, and more deals—net of time lag and external factors—in minutes. You can also optimize spend, measure performance, and create various what-if scenarios that can forecast the impact your brand is having today and will have tomorrow..
- Dive Deeper: AI and the Accountability Era: GTM and Marketing in 2025
3. Which relationships (clients, partners, employees) matter most for our brand, and how will we invest in them?
- We can buy awareness, but confidence and trust are earned through genuine, meaningful relationships. That’s brand and culture in a nutshell, and it’s the glue that helps unknown brands become sticky. Confidence is contagious, and once you have it, you can pave the way to raving, loyal fans.
- Dive Deeper: Why B2B Tech Needs Brand Marketing to Earn Trust and Grow
Strategy
Without a coherent strategy rooted in solid insight, GTM efforts become scattershot.
Reactive, short-term tactics rarely work and only end up frustrating your audience. Remember the 95:5 Rule: Only 5% of your market is actively in the process of acquiring something from you. If you want to get on their Day-1 list, you have to ask the tough questions.
1. What marketing strategies or tactics are we leaving behind?
- Time for some housecleaning. Reassess the reliance on outdated and ineffective tactics. For example, if you insist on running short-term lead gen and demand gen campaigns, make sure they are backed by long-term brand campaigns. That’s the aircover you will need when future buyers are back in-market. As Peter Drucker once said, “Long-term results cannot be achieved by piling short-term results on short-term results.”
- Dive Deeper: 10 B2B Expert Insights: Why Brand-Building Trumps Demand Generation
2. What core GTM strengths can we double down on?
- Don’t boil the ocean. Focus on the things that actually move the needle. Everything else is a distraction. Focus on your differentiated value and amplify it with channels that work. Think of it like fishing: you want to bring the gear and bait for the fish you want to catch in the pond they are swimming in.
- Dive Deeper: 3 Ways to Gain Actionable Brand Insights for B2B Tech Growth
3. How do we define GTM success beyond just leads and revenue?
- Shift your focus and investment to elevating your brand reputation: awareness, confidence, and trust. If you want to grow long-term, 50% to 60% of your marketing budget should be allotted to brand building. Why? Because in B2B, brand is often overlooked, but it’s critical for reducing buyer risk, speeding up deals, and driving growth.
- Dive Deeper: Proving Brand Value in B2B Tech: 5 Key Insights from Mark Stouse
Execution
Unfortunately, most B2B tech companies insist on focusing almost entirely on short-term execution without a guiding strategy.
A recent Deloitte study showed that short-term performance marketing is up from a 60% investment in 2023 to almost 70% in 2024 over long-term brand building. All the while, short-term tactics like lead gen and demand gen have not delivered on the promise for over 15 years.
It’s a headscratcher that needs rethinking.
1. What daily habits can we upgrade to improve our marketing focus and results?
- Without consistency and frequency, we have little chance to make an impression, let alone build a reputation. Consistency starts with getting everyone on the same page. Daily, weekly, and monthly activity is much easier to execute when things are documented for everyone to see and follow.
- Dive Deeper: How to Create a Brand Playbook for B2B Tech | Free Template & Guide
2. Where do we need external support to boost B2B tech marketing?
- One person can’t do it all, especially the foundational pieces. Understanding the cause and effect of good foundational marketing will help everyone down the line. Investing in specialists (e.g., brand strategists or demand-gen experts) can cover gaps in internal expertise, particularly in the early stages of growth.
- Dive Deeper: The Cause & Effect of Positioning and Messaging in B2B Tech Campaigns
3. What bold marketing risks will we take to stand out?
- One of the key aspects of taking risks is asking better questions and facing reality. Oftentimes we don’t want to give up on something for fear of missing out or fear of messing up. One “risk” every B2B tech company should take is niching down to the smallest viable market category. Once you do, you’ll soon realize it was never a risk.
- Dive Deeper: Niche Marketing for B2B Tech: Unlock Faster Growth and Higher ROI
Metrics
Much of the frustration with sporadic wins and poor conversion in B2B tech stems from measuring the wrong metrics or measuring Marketing (a non-linear multiplier) like Sales (a linear multiplier). Even things like revenue and sales velocity are forecasted, not measured.
We need to ask better questions: Are we measuring? Or forecasting? The difference matters.
1. How much did our marketing investment multiply Sales effectiveness and efficiency?
- Marketing investments multiply sales effectiveness by generating higher-quality leads, optimizing pipeline velocity, and reducing wasted effort through precise targeting and measurement of ROI. AI tools can further enhance this by predicting outcomes and identifying high-value opportunities. When done right, Marketing can increase Sales effectiveness by 8x and Sales efficiency by 5x on average.
- Dive Deeper: Proving Marketing’s Value in 2025 and Beyond
2. How long does it take for our marketing investments to improve Sales performance?
- Long-term brand-building investments typically take 6–12 months to show measurable impacts on sales performance. Quick wins are possible through demand-gen efforts, but sustainable growth requires consistent investment in building trust and recall.
- Dive Deeper: B2B Brand Marketing: The Long-Term Play for Sustainable Growth
3. What metrics matter most to measure the success of our marketing?
- Success metrics should focus on lead quality (not just quantity), brand reputation, customer engagement, and long-term indicators like brand recall. These metrics align marketing efforts with sustainable growth and deeper customer relationships. Causal AI tools like Proof Analytics can help measure and monitor these metrics.
- Dive Deeper: How To Generate Quality Leads By Boosting Your Brand Reputation
Final Thoughts
Addressing the challenges of B2B tech marketing requires diagnosing the real causes, not just treating the symptoms.
If we’re invisible, it’s likely because we haven’t invested enough in customer research and long-term brand building.
If we’re stuck with sporadic results, it’s often due to a lack of alignment between insight, strategy, execution, and metrics.
Questioning all these areas helps us move from frustration to clarity, build a stronger brand, and a more effective GTM engine.
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This article is AC-A and published on LinkedIn. Join the conversation!
