The most expensive failure in business-to-business (B2B) marketing is not a bad campaign. It is a good campaign built on a premise that stopped being true two years ago. Companies rebuild their messaging, hire a new demand generation lead, rip out the marketing technology (martech) stack, and run the whole exercise on top of an ideal customer profile (ICP) nobody has revalidated since the last funding round. Tiffany Lyman Otten, Principal of The Otten Collective, who works as a fractional and interim chief marketing officer for B2B software as a service, professional services, and hybrid companies with complex go-to-market (GTM) motions, puts the diagnosis plainly. “Most GTM strategies fail on assumptions nobody went back and checked,” she says. Why do customers buy? Who is the real ICP? Where are competitors strong? Those answers move, and they move faster now than at almost any point before. “Think of what you were doing in your job two years ago,” Otten says, “and you see why that doesn’t make sense.” The failure is rarely execution. It is a strategy pointed at a market that has already rearranged itself.
The Shortlist Is The Market
The funnel is a reporting convenience, not a description of behavior. Buyers move non-linearly between problem-aware, solution-aware, and brand-aware, doubling back, stalling, and jumping stages depending on what happens inside their own organization. Otten’s read on where that leaves vendors is blunt: somewhere between 85 and 92 percent of companies buy from a shortlist they built early, often from the first name or two on it. “Land on that list and you’re in the game,” she says. “Miss it and you’re fighting for scraps.”
This should change how marketing leaders think about spend. If the buying decision is effectively narrowed before a vendor ever hears from the account, then pipeline generation that fires after an inquiry arrives is competing for the remainder, not the prize. The work that matters happens earlier, upstream of any form fill, and it depends on knowing precisely whose consideration set you are trying to enter. Otten is firm that this cannot start with tactics. Nail the ideal customer profile (ICP) first, then define the total addressable market (TAM), serviceable addressable market (SAM), and serviceable obtainable market (SOM) before anything else moves. “Know exactly whose shortlist you’re trying to reach,” she says. Without that, demand generation becomes an expensive way to discover who was never going to buy.
One Sentence, Then A Spreadsheet
Otten’s second test is deceptively small. A team should be able to name the buyer, the problem, and the value in a single sentence. Most cannot, and the inability is diagnostic. It means the value proposition is generic, which means it was written for the market rather than for a person at a specific stage of a specific decision. The fix is granular work: pairing specific value propositions against specific pain points, mapped for each buyer at each point in their journey.
Where that intelligence comes from matters more than most teams assume. The instinct is to mine the customer relationship management (CRM) data, and Otten calls that the wrong path. “You don’t need perfect CRM data,” she says. “Get that intel from stakeholder interviews and from closed-won and closed-lost conversations, because the real reasons live outside your CRM.” That is an uncomfortable position for organizations that have spent years and real budget on data hygiene, but it reflects something true about how deals close. The reason a buyer chose you, or passed you over, is usually revealed in a conversation that nobody logged. Otten’s recommended destination for all of it is refreshingly simple. Put it in a spreadsheet. “It doesn’t need to be elegant,” she says. “It becomes your content bible.” Organizations that insist on an elegant artifact tend to produce nothing at all.
Where RACI Charts Hide The Holes
Alignment is the part leaders assume is handled because a RACI chart, or responsibility assignment matrix, exists. Otten treats that document with suspicion. “When you look at a RACI, which questions remain?” she asks. “If we know who is responsible, do we know who approves it? And more importantly, do those roles change depending upon part of the deliverable?” A webinar looks like one owned initiative. It is not. “There’s a lot that goes into the webinar itself. But what about all the promotion tactics? Suddenly you see where the RACI can mask holes in your execution.” The person loading an email promotion into the marketing automation platform is almost certainly not the person launching the LinkedIn campaign, and if nobody has broken the work down to that level, the gap surfaces at the worst possible moment.
Otten’s framing is that a webinar is a Big C campaign, and the email and the social promotion are the little c campaigns underneath it that determine whether the Big C succeeds. Each needs an owner, and it is, in her words, shockingly easy to miss that. The Otten Collective uses a more detailed internal model called iCompass built for this problem, but the model matters less than the discipline of mapping the team against every job to be done. She adds a second filter most assignment exercises skip: every motion needs an owner who is both skilled and motivated to run it. Unless a marketing department is fully staffed, there is usually enough work circulating to route tasks toward where people genuinely excel. Run the exercise once properly and it becomes reusable. “You now have a campaign in a box that can streamline your future programs,” Otten says. What she does not recommend is attempting all of it. “Prioritize the things that remove the most friction in the revenue process, and do those well. That’s your North Star.”
Follow Tiffany Lyman Otten on LinkedIn or reach out to The Otten Collective for more insights on B2B GTM strategy, buyer journey mapping, and marketing team alignment.
