Random Acts of Marketing: Why More Activity Won’t Fix Stalled B2B Growth

Last updated June 2026

Let’s be honest. If your company is between $5M and $50M and growth has flattened, what you have is rarely a lack of effort. More often, it is random acts of marketing, a lot of motion spread across a lot of channels with no single strategy beneath it, and no one accountable for the result. Many founder- and CEO-led B2B companies are doing more marketing than ever before. More posts, more email, more vendors, more dashboards. And still, the number will not move.

It feels productive. It is expensive. And it does not produce predictable growth. This article walks through why that happens, what it is actually costing you, and the questions to answer before you spend another dollar trying to fix it.

TL;DR: Random acts of marketing are disconnected tactics with no strategy and no owner. They keep good companies busy while growth stalls. The fix is not more activity. It is finding the real constraint, which usually sits upstream in leadership ownership, the growth system, or governance, before you hire, fire, or spend again.

Definition and context. What it is: random acts of marketing are tactics run in parallel without a strategy or a single owner. Why it matters: they consume budget and your time while leaving growth unpredictable. Who it is for: founder- and CEO-led B2B companies between $5M and $50M whose growth has stalled.

What “random acts of marketing” actually looks like

You probably recognize the symptoms. A campaign here because a competitor did one. A new channel there because someone said you had to be on it. A website refresh, a trade show, a burst of social posts, an SEO retainer, an email tool nobody fully uses. Each piece looks reasonable on its own.

The trouble is that none of them connect. There is no written plan that says why this channel, for this customer, in this order, is tied to this revenue target. So the activity runs in parallel instead of building on itself.

This is one of the most common patterns inside a stalled B2B company. It is not lazy. It is not cheap. It is busy. And busy is exactly what hides the real problem.

More activity is not the same as more growth.

Here is the hard truth. Activity and growth are two different things, and a lot of companies measure the first while hoping for the second.

You can see this when the reports look fine, but the bank account disagrees. Impressions are up. Traffic is up. Open rates are healthy. The agency deck is full of green arrows. But you still cannot say, with confidence, where your last five customers actually came from, or what next quarter’s pipeline really looks like.

When a CEO says “nothing is really working,” this is usually what they mean. Not that nothing is happening. Plenty is happening. They mean nothing is reliably turning into revenue, and they have lost the ability to tell which efforts matter.

That is the gap between activity and outcomes. Closing it is not a matter of doing more. It is a matter of governing what you already do.

The real constraint usually sits upstream of marketing.

When growth stalls, marketing becomes the default suspect. It is the most visible place the problem shows up, so it gets the blame and, often, the next check. But in many stalled B2B companies, marketing is the symptom. The real constraint sits upstream, in one of three places. The issue usually shows up through three lenses.

The lens	The question it answers
Leadership ownership	Who is accountable, at the executive level, for the growth number?
The growth system	Does marketing produce predictable pipeline, or is every customer a surprise?
Governance	Is marketing run like a P&L, with a budget tied to revenue and someone measuring it?

Leadership ownership

Ask a simple question. Who in your company owns the growth number? Not who runs the ads or sends the email. Who is accountable, at the executive level, for the strategy and the result? In most stalled companies, the honest answer is “no one, really,” or “me, by default.” When ownership is scattered across tactics, channels, and people, no amount of activity fixes it. There is no one steering.

The growth system

Does marketing feed a repeatable process that produces a pipeline every month? Or is every new customer a surprise that depends on a referral, a salesperson’s hustle, or luck? If it is the second, you do not have a growth system. You have random acts of marketing with a budget attached. Predictability comes from the system, not from the volume.

Governance

Can you answer three questions in ten seconds? What is your marketing budget? What revenue is it responsible for? Who measures whether it worked? If you hesitated on any of them, marketing is not being governed. It is being spent. When a CEO cannot answer those three in ten seconds, that pause tells me more than any dashboard. Spend without governance is how good companies fund guesswork for years.

Why does this keep landing back on the CEO’s desk?

There is a quieter cost to all of this, and it is you.

When no one owns growth, the CEO owns it by default. You become the integration layer between the vendors, the sales team, and the strategy that does not quite exist. You spend ten or more hours a month on marketing questions that should belong to a dedicated executive. That is not delegation. It is the opposite.

It is also why so many founders feel like the bottleneck in their own company. They are mentally drained from making reactive decisions about work they cannot fully evaluate, writing checks for results they cannot trace, and sitting in meetings about dashboards they do not trust. The business needs them to lead the company, and instead, they are managing marketing decisions they should not have to carry.

Hiring a senior marketer does not always settle it either. Marketing leadership carries one of the shortest average tenures in the C-suite, so even companies that bring in a head of marketing can face turnover and another reset before a system is ever built. And dropping a strong marketer into an ungoverned system usually resets the clock rather than fixing growth. Leadership instability and ungoverned activity tend to travel together.

The questions to answer before you spend another dollar

Before you hire a CMO, fire your agency, or increase the budget, it is worth slowing down long enough to answer a few questions honestly. These are the questions to answer first.

1. Where did your last five closed deals actually come from? If the answer is referrals rather than any intentional channel, your marketing may not be the thing producing your growth.
2. When deals are lost, why do they lose? If it is a poor fit, that points to strategy. If it is poor follow-up or price, that points to execution. Those are different problems with different fixes.
3. Could the business survive a slow quarter of referrals? If that thought makes you uneasy, you are more dependent on luck than on a system.
4. Can everyone on your team describe your ideal customer the same way? If not, you do not have a positioning problem you can solve with more posts. You have an alignment problem that more posts will only amplify.

None of these is a marketing tactic. They are diagnostic questions. They tell you where the wall actually is, and the answer is frequently somewhere other than where you were about to spend.

What clarity actually looks like

CMO Advisers worked with a manufacturer that had been in business for nearly four decades with almost no formal marketing. No website worth the name, no email list, and a sales pipeline that lived entirely in the founder’s head. Referral-dependent, invisible in the market, while competitors were running at well under full capacity in a declining industry. The instinct in that situation is to start doing things. Run ads. Build a website. Post more.

The work did not start there. It started by identifying the constraint, which turned out to be a leadership gap, not a market gap. Once that was named and owned, the activity that followed was sequenced and accountable, and the company added meaningful new business while competitors left the market. The difference was not more effort. It was a clear answer about what was actually holding growth back, followed by a system to fix it.

That is the order that works. Diagnosis, then ownership, then system, then activity. Reverse it, and you get random acts of marketing.

There is one more leak worth naming. When sales and marketing run on different leaders with no shared accountability, the gap between them quietly costs a company a real share of its annual revenue. That is a structural problem, and no new campaign will close it. The fix has to be structural, too.

A practical next step

If any of this sounds like your company, the responsible move is not to sign another vendor or greenlight another campaign. It is an honest, independent read on where your growth is actually stuck.

An audit is not the same as a diagnosis. An audit hands you a long list of things that could be improved. A diagnosis tells you the one thing actually holding growth back. That distinction matters when your next decision involves real money.

That is exactly what the Executive Marketing Readiness Review is built to do. In 30 days, it produces a written determination on one question: Is executive marketing leadership your real growth constraint, or is it something else? You keep that answer, whether or not we ever work together, and you can take it to your board or your leadership team to make your next decision with confidence instead of guesswork.

If you want a faster read first, the 12-question self-check covers the same framework in about five minutes. Either way, you stop funding guesswork before the next expensive decision.

You have spent enough time being busy. The next move is clarity.

Frequently asked questions

What are random acts of marketing?

Random acts of marketing are disconnected tactics run in parallel with no strategy underneath them. A campaign here, a new channel there, a few email sends, an SEO retainer, none of it sequenced or tied to a revenue target. It looks productive and costs real money, but because the pieces do not connect, it rarely produces predictable growth.

Why isn’t more marketing activity growing my revenue?

Because activity and growth are not the same thing. You can raise traffic, impressions, and open rates while revenue stays flat, which usually means the work is not governed and no one owns the outcome. Adding more volume on top of a missing system only makes the problem more expensive. Growth comes from a sequenced plan and clear accountability, not from doing more at once.

How do I know if marketing is really my growth constraint?

Start with a few honest questions. Who owns the growth number at the executive level? Where did your last five customers really come from? Could the business survive a slow quarter of referrals? If those answers are uncomfortable, marketing may be the symptom rather than the cause, and the real constraint sits upstream in ownership, the growth system, or governance. The way to know for certain is an independent read, not a guess.

What is the difference between random acts of marketing and a growth system?

A growth system is sequenced, owned, and tied to revenue. Random acts of marketing are parallel tactics with none of those. One produces a predictable pipeline. The other depends on luck and tends to get more expensive the longer it runs.

Is a marketing audit the same as a diagnosis?

No. An audit usually returns a long list of things that could be improved. A diagnosis returns a clear answer on the one thing actually limiting growth. You can act on a diagnosis. An audit often just adds to the pile.

Do I need a full-time CMO to fix this?

Not necessarily. The first step is determining the constraint. The right answer might be leadership, structure, governance, or something outside marketing entirely. Hiring a full-time executive before you know which one you are solving for is how expensive mistakes happen.

What if the constraint is not marketing at all?

Then that is what the determination should say. The point is an honest answer before the next expensive decision, not a predetermined conclusion. Sometimes the wall is in sales, the offer, or something sitting on the CEO’s desk.

What is the Executive Marketing Readiness Review?

It is a 30-day executive diagnostic. It answers one question in writing: Is executive marketing leadership your real growth constraint, or is it something else? You get a written determination you can take to your board or leadership team, and you keep it, whether or not we work together. It is built to give you decision-grade clarity before you hire, fire, or spend again.

This article is based on CMO Advisers’ Executive Marketing Readiness Review framework, led by Mark Toney. Mark has spent more than 20 years helping founder- and CEO-led B2B companies move from founder-led sales to governed growth. At CMO Advisers, the work focuses on finding the real constraint on growth and installing the leadership and systems that fix it.