Diagnosing What's Wrong with Your Growth Strategy and How to Fix It
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As a CEO, you know something's not right with your marketing. Pipeline isn't growing fast enough. Your team talks about campaigns and engagement, but you can't connect it to revenue. You're investing, but not seeing the returns you expected.
In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd sits down with Dani Smallbone, a fractional CMO who specialises in diagnosing and fixing broken marketing strategies. With over 20 years helping venture-backed scale-ups turn investment into sustainable revenue growth, Dani reveals the frameworks she uses to identify what's truly broken, and the practical steps to fix it.
From market pivots that unlock new growth to rebuilding underperforming teams, Dani shares the insights CEOs need to assess whether their marketing challenge requires transformation or just better execution.
IS YOUR MARKETING PROBLEM ACTUALLY A BUSINESS PROBLEM?
One of Dani's most critical insights challenges how CEOs diagnose marketing underperformance. Often, what appears to be a marketing execution problem is actually a fundamental business issue that marketing has exposed.
"Marketing cannot be the sole engine of growth. Growth is a team sport."
Her climate tech case study illustrates this perfectly. The diagnosis revealed that the market they were targeting was too limited to support long-term growth due to regulatory barriers. "The overall total addressable market was going to be too small beyond two years worth of ambition," Dani explains.
Rather than simply improving campaigns or hiring more marketers, the solution required pivoting the entire business model, repositioning the product to target a very small number of global customers with extraordinarily high ACV. Within 24 months, they had built "a client list to die for."
Similarly, in her HR tech example, transformation required multiple components working together: completely rebuilding demand generation, addressing product differentiation, creating distinct brand messaging, and fundamentally changing who they were selling to.
The lesson for CEOs: before assuming you have a marketing problem, ask whether you have a product-market fit issue, a scalability problem, or a business strategy misalignment that marketing simply can't overcome. As Dani notes, "You've got to have the right product. You've got to have a marketplace that is able to scale."
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THE LEADERSHIP ALIGNMENT CEOS NEED
If your marketing team celebrates engagement rates and campaign metrics but can't explain their impact on revenue, you have a problem Dani sees repeatedly.
"They run a great campaign, they have fantastic engagement rates, et cetera, et cetera. But they're not always really truly aligned with commercial outcomes."
Her med tech case study demonstrates what transformation looks like. The marketing function was executing well on traditional marketing metrics, but "they didn't really understand how all of those things linked into the commercial strategic objectives of the business."
The solution involved building comprehensive understanding of how each percentage point improvement at each funnel stage translated to client retention, churn reduction, LTV, and CAC. This shift in thinking; from marketing metrics to commercial metrics, delivered a 20% revenue increase.
But the transformation went deeper. Once the marketing team understood their commercial impact, they could take on a truly strategic role. They identified that the company had maxed out their current market share and needed to explore new territories and AI-enabled products. "The strategic lens of marketing to look at, okay, so what do we got now? What are we really good at? Where could we take this in terms of new product, new territories?"
For CEOs, the question isn't whether your marketing team is busy, it's whether they're driving commercial outcomes. And the responsibility for ensuring marketing integration sits squarely with the CMO: "It's the CMO's job. One of the CMO's most important jobs is to be a very good diplomat, politician, advocate, champion."
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What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
✔️ The five warning signs that indicate your marketing needs transformation, not just tweaking
✔️ How to diagnose whether you have a positioning problem, execution problem, or team problem
✔️ Real case studies of successful business pivots driven by marketing insights
✔️ How to evaluate if your marketing metrics actually connect to commercial outcomes
✔️ The "magic trio" of CPO, CRO, and CMO alignment that drives scalable growth
✔️ Three critical questions to ask yourself when you sense something's wrong
✔️ Whether your CMO can actually change a culture that doesn't value marketing
✔️ Different triggers that signal trouble in early-stage versus established companies
KEY ADVICE FOR CEOS
When CEOs sense something isn't right with marketing, Dani offers three practical steps:
Acknowledge the instinct: "If you're questioning if something's not right, then that's the best starting point. You can't fix something if you don't know you haven't got a problem."
Look for evidence: Do you have a clearer instinct than just a feeling? Is there evidence supporting your concerns? This helps narrow down which area needs exploration.
Assess fundamental alignment:
Is your strategy aligned throughout the business?
Do your teams have the same set of OKRs?
Do you understand how your commercial funnel breaks down step by step?
Are your C-suite leaders collaborating properly?
If any of these areas show gaps or misalignment, it's time to bring in help—whether from board members, CEO networks, or external experts like fractional CMOs.
TODAY’S GUEST
Connect with Dani on LinkedIn
Dani Smallbone is a fractional and interim CMO specialising in helping venture-backed scale-ups build predictable, repeatable growth engines that turn investment into sustainable revenue growth. With over 20 years of experience transforming marketing functions, Dani has helped scale companies from scrappy startups to £40M in annual recurring revenue across B2B SaaS, FinTech, HealthTech, EdTech, and AI sectors.
Dani has held CMO positions at companies including Elliptic (blockchain analytics), HR Duo (AI-powered HR tech), ieso (digital mental health), and served as Divisional CMO at Mind. She also mentors founders and CEOs at Octopus Ventures.
Known for her razor-sharp commercial mind and ability to cut through the noise, Dani focuses relentlessly on driving commercial outcomes rather than marketing vanity metrics—turning underperforming marketing teams into agile, insight-driven growth engines.
OUR HOST
Karen Lloyd is a passionate marketing head-hunter and recruitment expert specialising in marketing and C-suite in the technology sector. With over 25 years of experience in the recruitment industry, Karen brings a unique depth of expertise that sets her apart from most recruiters.
Over her career, Karen has accumulated a wealth of experience that includes serving as a Board Director and being actively involved in growing a business for 13 years. Karen has been a part of five start-ups, giving her first-hand knowledge of the critical importance of hiring the right people.
Connect with Karen on LinkedIn
Currently, Karen is the founder and Director of Armstrong Lloyd. She leads a very special team that partners with businesses and empowers them to build industry-leading marketing teams for some of the most exciting B2B technology brands - from small agile and disruptive start-ups to global giants providing a wealth of product and service offerings.
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