Why Marketing Teams Still Have to Fight for a Seat at the Revenue Table
Marketing teams that can't show a credible route from activity to revenue will keep losing the argument for their own seat at the table, no matter how strong the creative work is. That's the view our Managing Director, Karen Lloyd, shared on a recent episode of Blame It on Marketing, hosted by Emma and Ruta.
It's a subject the podcast had somehow never covered directly in over a hundred episodes, which says a lot on its own. Revenue is the outcome every marketing leader is judged against, and yet it's often the topic teams feel least confident discussing.
The “colouring-in department” problem
Karen didn't hold back on this one. Marketing that can't demonstrate its contribution to revenue risks being seen as decorative rather than commercial, she said, and as she put it on the episode, “if marketing aren't bringing the revenue in, then they can't really prove that they're valued… they are the colouring in department.”
Sales gets the public credit, the back-slapping, the bell-ringing, while marketing's part in the same deal - the event that started the relationship, the content that nurtured it, the campaign that kept the brand front of mind - tends to go unrecorded.
It isn't about marketing chasing short-term credit for the sake of it. It's about being able to point to the evidence when it matters, in the room, with the CFO present.
Why CRM access is not optional
One of the more practical moments in the episode came when Karen talked about data ownership. She described speaking to a marketer who wasn't allowed access to her own company's CRM, and her advice was simple: that needs sorting out straight away. Knowing the fields, understanding the attribution model, seeing how deals actually map through the system, this is a baseline commercial skill now, not something to hand off entirely to marketing operations.
It's a pattern we see often through our own placement work at Armstrong Lloyd. Marketers who don't trust their own data - and plenty don't - are usually right to be sceptical, because the attribution setup underneath it was never built with much rigour in the first place. The answer isn't to give up on data-driven reporting. It's to get closer to the CRM, not further away from it.
The two-pillar model: brand and demand, not brand or demand
A theme that kept coming back was the tug of war between short-term pipeline pressure and long-term brand building. Karen recalled being told by an experienced marketing leader, years ago, that a business relying solely on demand generation was heading for trouble, because sustainable growth needs brand awareness and demand generation running as two pillars at once, not one after the other. It's a view backed up by independently published research from LinkedIn's B2B Institute on balancing brand and demand investment, which has consistently found that B2B brands over-indexed on short-term lead generation underperform those that keep investing in brand alongside it.
In Karen's own words: “it's about… the thought leadership side of things, and just having yourself out there in your mind and then constantly growing and touching those people, as well as then obviously… chasing down the bottom of the funnel.”
Host Emma made a lovely point too, about how sales cycles get misreported. “If you add on the marketing part of that, you could be adding 400 days,” she said, arguing that quoting a three-month sales cycle without accounting for the nurture period beforehand seriously understates the true cost and duration of winning a deal.
When trust between sales and marketing breaks down
The conversation also turned to what happens when the sales-marketing relationship sours, including one story about a sales team's event leads being deleted by marketing before anyone had followed them up. Karen's view was consistent throughout: the founder or CEO is ultimately the one who needs to resolve this, because they're the ones setting the incentives that decide whether sales and marketing see each other as partners or as competitors for credit. On how to approach it before raising it, Karen said: “you basically said, I'm building my case up, I'm building my evidence, I'm showing what's going well.”
It's something we see reflected in our own experience placing marketing leaders into B2B businesses. The candidates who progress fastest into senior, commercially trusted roles are consistently the ones who can speak fluently about pipeline, attribution and CFO-level reporting, not just campaign output. Commercial acumen has quietly become a real hiring differentiator, not just a nice-to-have.
What can business and marketing leaders implement for their marketing teams?
If you're reviewing how your own marketing function operates, a few practical steps stand out from this conversation.
Give marketing genuine CRM access and training, not just dashboard views, so the team can trace deals back to the touchpoints that influenced them and speak the CFO's language in reporting conversations.
Protect budget for brand-building alongside demand generation, particularly when scaling into new sectors or international markets, where buyers may not recognise your company yet at all.
Make the founder or CEO accountable for sales-marketing trust, not just the department heads, since the incentive structures set from the top are usually the root cause of friction between the two functions.
Hire for commercial acumen when growing the marketing team, whether that's a first marketing hire for a scaling business or a senior leader who needs to sit comfortably in revenue conversations with sales and finance. It's exactly the kind of placement we specialise in at Armstrong Lloyd.
Watch the recent Blame It on Marketing episode here, and if you're reviewing your marketing team's structure, reporting, or commercial capability, we'd love to talk. Get in touch with Armstrong Lloyd to chat through what strong marketing hiring looks like for your business.
About Karen Lloyd
As the founder and director behind our recruitment approach, I bring almost 30 years of unique expertise spanning both recruitment and marketing. Having placed my first candidate in 1996, I've since built 5 start-ups, served as a Board Director for 25 years and developed recruitment strategies that work in competitive talent markets.
I'm also the host of "Spotlight on B2B Marketing", where I explore B2B marketing trends with industry leaders. My passion lies in helping global businesses grow their revenue-generating teams through strategic hiring and fractional CMO services.
About Armstrong Lloyd
Armstrong Lloyd goes above and beyond being a pure search firm - we partner with your business because we have all stood in your shoes as experienced hiring managers, marketing and operational business leaders. We have a hidden network that goes beyond LinkedIn searches, adverts, or referrals from ex-colleagues to ensure you're getting the top 1% of talent.
Whether you need interim leadership, marketing team building, or executive search across the UK and beyond, the team at Armstrong Lloyd are here to ensure you reach your commercial business goals by building the best marketing team and strategy to give you a competitive advantage.
Ready to transform your marketing team? Let's talk about how we can help you hire the right talent at the right time.
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