For too long, B2B marketing has been managed with a fundamental and frustrating misconception: that it should behave like a vending machine. You input a dollar (budget), press a button (campaign), and out pops a predictable, deterministic revenue return

In an episode of the Tomorrow’s Best Practices Today podcast, Kathleen Schaub, former VP at IDC and author of Marketing in the Great, Big, Messy, Real World, believes that marketing is a complex system because it deals with people.

Moving past the “vending machine questions” requires four essential mindset shifts. 

1. Budget: Think Like an Investor 

The first change is recognizing that the marketing budget is not a cost—it is an investment.

  • Future Value: Like a 401k or venture capital, marketing delivers almost all of its value in the future.
  • Risk for Return: Leaders must think like venture capitalists: they must be willing to risk their funds for what they believe will yield greater future value. The old accounting view of marketing as a cost must end where strategic thinking begins.

Key insight: Present your proposals as a portfolio of investments. The focus should be on the revenue-making potential and the long-term future value, rather than immediate, near-term ROI.

2. Planning & Measurement: Think Like a Navigator 

Marketing operates in a constantly changing world, making the traditional, static annual plan obsolete.

  • Wayfinding over Central Planning: Adopt the concept of wayfinding. This practice emphasizes incremental learning: you take a step, observe what happens, learn from it, and adapt.
  • Decouple Cadences: You must unlock the cadence of activities that happen at the “edge”, where marketing meets customers, from the slower pace of annual financial planning. Campaigns at the edge may need to change daily, while the strategic mission changes more slowly.
  • Flexible Metrics: Data serves as your GPS, but metrics must be managed flexibly. Instead of rigid targets, performance should be managed in ranges to account for normal variation, much like a baseball player’s batting average.

Key insight: Lead with adaptive planning. Help clients understand that the process of moving forward requires wayfinding, not sticking rigidly to a plan that may have become irrelevant.

3. Decision Making: Think Like a Statistician 

This shift is crucial: you must abandon the desire for certainty and accept probability.

  • Stop Seeking Certainty: Vending machine questions like, “If I give you this dollar, what am I going to get back?” must be replaced by the acceptance that you will only ever have a probability of success.
  • Metrics as Dialogue: Reporting should be a collaboration and metrics must inform a dialogue about the process; they are not the end product. Don’t use a few near-term metrics as a simplistic stand-in for the complexity of the long-term customer journey.
  • The Problem with Attribution: Rules-based attribution (last-touch, first-touch, etc.) that attempts to be predictive is often disinformation. In a complex environment, you must discover the way forward, you cannot predict it. Attribution remains useful for showing what customers do before they buy, but it’s not predictive in a linear way.
  • AI for Patterning: Use sophisticated analytics, including AI, to find patterning. AI is good at identifying the patterns that persist and are more important as an indication of what might happen in the future.

Key insight: Shift reporting from deterministic guarantees to probabilistic outcomes and analysis of patterning. Use metrics to discover there’s an “issue that needs to be addressed”, or that the variation is normal.

4. People Management: Think Like an Ecologist 

Performance is not purely individual; it happens at the intersection of the person and their context.

  • Create an Ecosystem: Marketing leaders must focus on creating an ecosystem for their team that will bring out their best performance.
  • Break Silos: The easy-to-manage functional silos (e.g., “we’re the events group,” ) prevent the agility needed to deal with constant change.
  • Integrated Teams: Flatten the hierarchy and move toward creating integrated, agile teams. These teams should match the customer job and can include pieces of sales and marketing integrated together, responsible for solving a piece of the customer’s problem.

Key insight: Favor integrated, cross-functional teams aligned with the customer journey. This supports the necessary agility and moves past the functional silos that stifle performance.

The Buy-In Journey: From Frustration to Relief

Gaining buy-in from senior leadership is not a vending machine, either. Marketing leaders must apply what they know about the customer journey to their internal relationships.

  • The Commitment Journey: Treat buy-in as a journey, moving people through awareness, understanding, and persuasion to commit to change.
  • Relief is the First Step: Many executives, including CFOs, feel relief when the problem is clearly articulated. The persistent issues between sales, marketing, and finance stem from the mismatch between the deterministic way business is managed and the complex nature of marketing.

By adopting these four mindsets, marketers can stop “beating their head against the wall” and achieve better, more realistic results.

Watch the entire episode for even more insights from Kathleen! 

Ready to get started with B2B social media marketing? Let’s chat!

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