The strategy looks fine. That’s what makes this so hard to diagnose.

Revenue leader reckons the plan needs refining. Marketing leader reckons they’re doing the work. Both of them are looking at the strategy — and neither is looking at what’s underneath it.

The first one is the obvious one to spot, junior or mid-level marketers can run campaigns, test variations, iterate on copy — but they tend to optimise the variables directly in front of them rather than questioning whether those are the right variables at all.

I worked with one company where the marketer had been tweaking creative and testing Meta audiences for eight months. Proper busy. But they were running variants on the wrong channel entirely. Shifted spend to Google, changed the messaging, got them from zero to 500 enquiries a day in six weeks. The marketer was learning. He just didn’t have the experience to see that the channel was the problem, not the creative.

The second pattern: the strategy was built for a team that doesn’t exist yet. A three-person team with a junior-to-mid skill mix cannot run signal-based outbound, programmatic SEO, and paid social simultaneously — and do any of them properly.

But that’s often exactly what gets planned. Nobody does the maths. The gap doesn’t show up in the planning document. It shows up three months later.

Then there’s the political one. The marketing leader has a plan, has capability, has a budget — and is still fighting for meeting time and chasing sign-offs. Because the CEO doesn’t believe marketing contributes to revenue.

No amount of better execution fixes a belief problem at leadership level. It’s a closed loop, and it looks exactly like a marketing execution problem from every angle.

The last two are more technical. Tools that got built and never adopted — a scoring model handed to a sales team who ignored it and manually hacked LinkedIn instead.

And broken measurement, which is more common than anyone wants to admit. Conversion tracking firing on wrong events. Double-counting across platforms. Three weeks of real ad spend with no reliable data underneath it. The dashboard looks fine. The graphs are moving. But it’s data-decorated, not data-driven — which is a very different thing.

Every one of these five patterns looks like a strategy problem from inside the organisation. That’s what keeps the loop running.

​Read it here​

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That's it for now.

See you soon.

Oren

Oren Greenberg Ltd., 86-90 Paul Street, London, Greater London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom
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