Make Brand Building Part of the Growth Engine
Find the audience that matters. It's smaller than the budget assumes.
Brand has always been one of the harder investments for a B2B services firm to connect to revenue. Most CEOs and Boards accept that reputation matters, and that being known and respected by the right clients makes every sale easier. The spend behind it is harder to defend. It tends to be reported in impressions, awareness, and share of voice, judged largely on faith, and trimmed when a quarter gets tight. Brand building funded in fits and starts rarely compounds into much.
There is a better way to run it, and it starts with building brand the same way the rest of the growth engine is built. That means aiming it at the specific executives the company sells to, tying it to the account plans sales is already working, and measuring it in the pipeline and revenue it helps create. When brand investment shows up in the numbers the business already manages to, it earns its own case for more funding, and the organization can grow its reputation as fast as its results allow.
AI makes that far more achievable than it was a few years ago. A marketing team can now map who inside each target account shapes a buying decision, follow how those executives engage with the brand, and connect that engagement to where deals stand, continuously and across its whole target market. Work that once took a research team and a patient finance partner to piece together now sits in plain view, which shifts the economics of brand building firmly toward focus.
Early in my career I built brands the conventional way, around identity, recall, and visibility. My results changed when I planned the same disciplines with sales and held both teams to the same growth measures alongside brand ones.
Put Brand Inside the Commercial Plan
The most useful thing a CMO can know about brand building sits outside brand. It is how the company makes money: what it sells, to whom, through which accounts, and what separates good revenue from revenue that is expensive to win and hard to keep. A CMO who knows the sales plan for each priority account, where the company needs to grow, and where margin is strongest can point the brand at those places. Without that knowledge, a brand can become well known and still be known for the wrong things, with little effect on the pipeline.
Picture a firm launching a polished campaign around its full range of capabilities in the same quarter its sales leaders are pushing into three industries where it needs to win share. The campaign earns attention. Almost none of it lands with the buyers those sales teams are calling on, and the executives who matter most to the plan see a firm describing everything it does instead of one that understands their industry. Both teams did good work. The brand and the plan were pointed in different directions.
Structure matters here. The strongest arrangement I have seen places the CMO beside the head of sales as a peer, fluent in marketing, sales, and the economics of the business. Folding marketing under sales can help close the deals in front of the team, but it pulls attention toward the current quarter and leaves little capacity to build the reputation that fills next year's pipeline. A peer relationship, with shared goals and shared measures, keeps both horizons in view.
That is how I have run it. Planning brand and go-to-market alongside sales leadership, around the same accounts and the same numbers, is a large part of what helped a global services business where I led marketing deliver record bookings in two separate quarters.
“The most useful thing a CMO can know about brand building sits outside brand.”
Define the Audience Before Buying Reach
For most B2B services firms, the audience that decides whether the brand creates value is small enough to name. Take a firm pursuing two hundred priority accounts. Inside each one, perhaps six to ten executives shape whether the firm gets shortlisted, trusted, and hired. That puts the number of people whose opinion of the brand drives growth at around two thousand. Reaching two thousand specific people well is a very different undertaking from reaching a market, and a far less expensive one.
Many B2B brands are still planned as if they were consumer brands, aiming for broad awareness by default and paying for reach well beyond anyone likely to buy. For some firms that makes sense. Category leaders in business services and the largest software companies sell to so many buyers that mass recognition pays its way. Most firms are not in that position, particularly in early and mid-stage growth, and plenty of large ones aren't either. For them, being known and respected by the right few thousand people is worth more than being recognized by millions who will never sign a contract.
Defining the audience at that level has always been harder than it sounds. Buying groups shift, executives change roles and companies, and a target list built in January is out of date by June. AI makes it practical to keep that picture current: identifying who inside each account influences the decision, noticing when someone new arrives or a known sponsor moves to another client, and showing which executives are engaging with the brand and which have gone quiet. Brand investment can then be aimed at people instead of segments.
Starting here is one of the most capital-efficient ways to build a B2B brand. Concentrating on a well-defined buying audience produces returns that can be seen, traced, and reinvested, and it builds the reputation that later makes broader reach worth paying for.
Fund Precision First
Brand building gets expensive quickly, and the tactics with the widest reach usually cost the most. Out-of-home advertising, broadcast, flagship conferences, and sports sponsorships all have a place, especially working together as part of a larger mix. As a starting point, they can absorb most of a marketing budget while doing little the business can see in its top line.
The better first investments reach the exact audience the firm is targeting and can be traced back to specific executives, opportunities, and deal pursuits. Executive roundtables and briefings, account-specific content and events, digital advertising aimed at named buying groups, and thought leadership built around the issues those executives are working through all fit that description. Each costs relatively little, and each produces a signal the business can follow into the pipeline. Revenue won this way funds the next round of investment, which is how brand building starts paying for its own growth. When the moment comes to add broad-reach tactics, the organization's financial health matches its ambition.
A narrow audience still calls for a wide set of channels. Executives form their view of a firm across many moments, from an industry event to an article a peer forwards to a meeting with someone who clearly understands their business. A firm that leans on one or two channels tends to get lost behind competitors who show up everywhere those executives look. The discipline is planning across every channel with the named executives at the center, so each investment reaches the same people from a different direction and the effect builds.
Running that many channels for a few thousand specific people used to demand more content and coordination than most teams could produce. AI closes much of that gap. It can adapt a core point of view for each account, industry, and channel, keep the message consistent from one touchpoint to the next, and show which combinations are moving particular executives closer to a decision. That makes budgeting practical at both levels: the overall mix the business funds, and the specific plan for each account inside it.
68% Start With a Favorite. 55% of the Time, It Wins.
Forrester surveyed nearly 18,000 global business buyers. On average, 13 internal stakeholders influence each purchase decision, so preference is formed across a whole group long before a vendor is in the room.
Measure Brand in Pipeline and Revenue
Measured across a whole market, brand shows up as awareness scores and share of voice, numbers that are hard to connect to anything the CFO manages. Measured at the level of the account and the executive, it shows up in the same numbers sales is held to. That means tracking which named executives are engaging and how often, whether relationships are deepening across the buying group or resting on a single sponsor, and how quickly opportunities move, how often they are won, and how much the firm's footprint inside each account grows. Brand and sales then report against the same results, and the conversation with the CEO and CFO becomes one about returns.
AI makes this level of measurement routine. It can connect a roundtable invitation, a forwarded article, and a follow-up meeting to the executive who received them and the opportunity that followed, where that link once depended on someone remembering to log it. The earliest signals become visible too, which matters because the most valuable brand work in B2B services happens long before a formal buying process begins.
Shaping a deal early is where the returns are largest. Combining brand with systematic, proactive outreach tied to individual account plans and named buyers, I have taken win rates from the low teens to 60 to 70 percent and above, largely by shaping opportunities well before there was an RFP to respond to. Inside existing clients, using the brand and the relationships it strengthens to expand our footprint has grown account revenue two to five times within 12 to 24 months.
The cost of doing this is modest relative to what it returns. Programs typically ran at a few hundred dollars per account per month and drove tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in pipeline and revenue won within the same fiscal year, across accounts at scale. Deals worth hundreds of millions were won with a small fraction of one percent of the account's revenue spent bringing them in, through highly personalized, experiential engagement with the executives making the decision. Results at that level have consistently covered the full cost of my marketing staff and programs in less than a quarter, often within weeks. That is the clearest evidence I know that brand built this way pays for its own growth, and it is a return broad brand building is rarely able to show in the numbers.
Adjust Strategy Once Execution Holds
Building brand this way takes careful planning and steady execution, and it pays off most once the system runs reliably. With brand, sales alignment, the channel mix, and measurement working together, the choices leadership adjusts become strategic ones. Leadership can decide which sectors deserve more investment, which accounts are ready to expand, which relationships need attention ahead of a renewal, and where the firm should build a reputation it does not yet have.
Picture a quarterly review where marketing and sales leaders sit down with the same view of every priority account. Engagement among executives at one client has doubled since a new sponsor arrived. A sector the firm entered a year ago is producing opportunities faster than planned. Two accounts that looked promising have gone quiet. The decisions that follow are about where to move money and people next, and they can be made in days because the evidence is already in the room.
This is where brand building earns its place in the growth engine. Every account won strengthens the firm's reputation and opens the next one, and the revenue it produces funds the next round of investment. For CEOs and Boards, brand becomes one of the most dependable and measurable sources of growth the business has, and one that can be steered account by account. Above all, the firm becomes known and respected for the right things by the right people. The executives who matter most see it as a firm that understands their business, the issues in front of them, and what it takes to earn their trust over a long relationship. That reputation is the lasting value of brand building, and the pipeline, win rates, and revenue all follow from it.
About John Fildes
I grow the top line by connecting marketing to business strategy. By leveraging powerful positioning, content marketing, and client insights, I help organizations drive qualitative and quantitative results at scale.
I've built an amazing network of incredibly talented people over the years. What I've appreciated most is those who have invested in me, mentored me, and helped me become the talented professional I am today. I pay it forward by doing the same for other high performing professionals and entrepreneurs.
Learn More: Growth Leader | Business Builder | Leadership Multiplier
All views are my own and not those of my current or prior employers.
