Marketing Is Not Sales

Last week I sat in two conversations, one with ASML, one with E.ON. Different sectors, advanced semiconductors and energy, different problems. One thing in common: neither has a CMO.

Not a vacancy waiting to be filled. A choice.

It would be easy to read that as marketing losing its seat at the table. I read it differently. Marketing did not lose the seat because the work stopped mattering. It lost the seat because it agreed, for a decade, to be measured by a number it cannot control.

We pay salespeople on what they can control

Think about how sales compensation works, and why it works.

A salesperson carries a variable salary tied to what they close. We are comfortable with that because closing is something they can influence. They run the conversation, handle the objections, time the deal. Reward follows control. That is the whole logic of commission.

Now apply the same logic to marketing. Marketing hands the relationship over at the MQL, the SQL, the SAL. Everything past that handover, the discovery calls, the negotiation, the procurement maze, the closing, is run by someone else. Marketing does not control the close any more than the salesperson controls the weather.

So when we put a closed-revenue number on marketing, we are paying a team for an outcome they were structurally removed from two stages earlier. The current language for this is "accountability without control," and in most B2B organisations nobody actually owns the middle, the stretch between MQL and closed deal where the pipeline quietly leaks. Marketing gets the blame for the leak and none of the levers to fix it.

Most of marketing's job is invisible to a pipeline report

There is a deeper problem, and it is not organisational. It is arithmetic.

At any given moment only about 5% of B2B buyers are in the market. The other 95% are not buying now, and many will not buy for months or years. This is the 95-5 rule, from the B2B Institute and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and it reshapes what marketing is even for.

Roughly half of marketing's job is to prime that 95%, so that when a buyer finally enters the market, yours is the brand that comes to mind. That priming is real work with real economic payoff. But the payoff is delayed and diffuse, and it is completely invisible to a pipeline report run this quarter. Measuring demand creation with a demand-capture metric is like weighing a tree every morning to check that it grew. You will see nothing, conclude nothing is happening, and cut it down.

Match the metric to the function

This is the same move I made in the previous piece about AI: stop using the wrong yardstick on the wrong thing. There I argued you match the metric to the maturity. Here you match the metric to the function.

Marketing does two different jobs and they need two different scorecards.

Demand capture, the bottom of the funnel, the 5% in-market now, is fair game for sales-style metrics: marketing-sourced pipeline, conversion, cost per opportunity. Measure it hard.

Demand creation, the priming of the 95%, needs its own instruments: share of voice, and specifically excess share of voice, the gap between your share of voice and your market share, which is one of the better predictors of future growth. Mental availability across category entry points, the situations in which a buyer might recall you. Branded search growth. Reach against the out-of-market audience. None of these is a vanity metric. Each is a leading indicator of demand that has not arrived yet.

Put a pipeline KPI on demand creation and you do not get discipline. You get a marketing team that quietly abandons the 95%, because the 95% never shows up in this quarter's number. You have optimised away the half of the job that builds the future.

Why this is a Value Gravity™ problem

A closed-revenue KPI behaves exactly like the AI-hype KPI I wrote about before. It is a magnet pointed at the thin, visible, this-quarter layer. It pulls attention and budget toward immediate activation and away from the dense layer where value actually accretes: the brand in the buyer's head, the customer relationships, the lifecycle, the category position you hold for years. Both the AI-now number and the sales-now number make the same mistake. They reward the surface and starve the base.

"But marketing has to be accountable"

Yes. It does. Let me be clear, because this argument is easy to misread.

I am not arguing that marketing should escape measurement. The 2026 mood is rightly one of accountability, and a marketing function that hides behind "brand is long-term" to dodge any number deserves to lose its budget. The argument is narrower and harder: measure marketing on the outcomes it can actually move, not on the one it was removed from at the handover.

And ASML and E.ON, neither with a CMO? They are not evidence against the function. They are evidence of the cost of measuring it wrongly for so long that it got absorbed into revenue operations and disappeared. A marketing function held to demand-creation metrics it controls, alongside honest demand-capture metrics where it shares the funnel, is one that earns the seat back. The way to keep the CMO is not to make marketing a junior sales team. It is to make marketing accountable for the thing only marketing can do.