Why Is It So Hard to Explain B2B Marketing Value to Your CEO?

Most CMOs try to prove their value to the CEO by approaching it from the ROI side – more dashboards, better attribution models, tighter metrics tied to pipeline.

And for a CFO, that makes instant sense. Straight profitability proof is their language.

But in B2B, you know things are not that simple and marketing’s job alone is nowhere near that straightforward or transactional. Try securing brand budget on the back of a last-click attribution report and see how far you get.

We’ll talk more about the CFO conversation with concrete examples in a future post.

For the moment, let’s focus on the big boss. Your CEO. Or, even better, the founder who still has the final say on where the money goes. How do you explain marketing value when you’re constantly juggling execution across all 4Ps and the person signing off on your budget only sees one of them?

It’s all in their perception.

Here’s what most marketing leaders learn the hard way:

The CEO’s perception of what marketing is determines what you’re allowed to do with it.

If your CEO views marketing as a necessary cost – something you spend on, hope for the best, and rationalise as “we need to be out there” – then every conversation you have about strategy, budget, or headcount starts from a defensive position. You’re not discussing what marketing should do. You’re justifying what it costs.

And in most mid-market B2B tech companies – or even manufacturing, industrial, health-tech and bio-tech – the CEO’s mental model of great marketing almost always comes down to the same thing: Promotion.

They’ve seen Salesforce, Airbnb or Screwfix campaigns... Apple keynotes, Nike’s storytelling …and they think that’s what great marketing looks like.

They’re not wrong that those are brilliant.

But they’re looking at the tip of the iceberg and mistaking it for the whole thing. When your CEO equates marketing with promotion – campaigns, ads, content, social media – or brand communications and branding – they’re working with one quarter of the picture. And if that’s the lens they use to evaluate your work, your budget requests, and your strategic recommendations, the game is rigged before we even stand a chance.

Don’t fight their perception. Start there.

The instinct most marketing leaders have at this point is to correct the CEO.

Pull out the good old Binet and Field data, explain demand generation theory, walk them through the full marketing funnel, or try your best to connect some part of revenue increase to marketing efforts.  

This almost never works.

Not because the information is wrong, but because it positions you as the person who thinks the boss doesn’t get it. Nobody responds well to that, especially founders who built the company long before the marketing team existed.

This is where Chase Hughes’ PCP model – Perception, Context, Permission – becomes genuinely useful.

If you’ve seen Chase on Diary of a CEO recently, you’ll know the framework, but the short version is:

All influence follows the same sequence.

-> You acknowledge someone’s current perception
-> Shift the context so they can see the situation differently
-> And that gives them permission to act on the new understanding

It applies to interrogation rooms and infomercials and, as it turns out, in B2B conversations.

Here’s how that looks in practice.

Perception: acknowledge where they are

Find out what your CEO thinks great marketing looks like.

Let them give you the example: 

Maybe it’s Airbnb’s brand campaigns, maybe it’s a competitor’s trade show presence, maybe it’s something they saw on LinkedIn last week.

Whatever it is, acknowledge it and praise it genuinely. Recognise why it’s effective. Go as deep as you feel it's useful. And then say something like: “No wonder that’s what most people think is great marketing. It’s the most visible part.”

That one line opens a door without putting anyone on the defensive.

Context: widen the lens using their world

Now you have space to bring the CEO closer to marketing’s actual job-to-be-done – creating more and better customers i.e. meeting the needs of your customer at a profit (Philip Kotler) i.e. the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large (American Marketing Society)...

Whichever definition you prefer to turn to, it is not just about promoting the product, the services, or the company.

This is where the remaining 3Ps (Product, Price, Place) come in, and you'll need to use contextual examples from your CEO's sector, not generic marketing theory.

Lightly mention how marketing shaped the company they admire – not just the campaigns but the product decisions, the pricing model, the distribution strategy... their entire go-to-market.

And then pull them into your own past work, relevant to the kind of company they’re leading right now.

Here are two of mine:

Example 1: An industrial distributor stuck in a discount spiral.‍

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This mid-market distributor was convinced they had a pricing problem. Customers were pushing back on cost, so every quarter meant deeper seasonal discounts, thinner margins, and a race to the bottom that competitors were winning anyway. When we actually dug into what their customers cared about, price wasn’t even in the top three. The real friction was in the sales and fulfilment process – sales was disruptive, orders were slow, communication was inconsistent, getting the right product to the right site was unreliable. That’s the Place in the marketing mix.

Once we fixed that – streamlined the buying experience, reduced friction in ordering, improved delivery communication – something counterintuitive happened. We didn’t just stop the discount spiral. We could now sell products at prices higher than competitors because the buying experience carried so much differentiation and so much less hassle that customers were happy to pay more. Same products, quicker, with less headaches – resulting in a significant profit increase - as we detail in our work with a mid-market industrial distributor.

You can check the portfolio case here.

Example 2: A B2B tech company with too many products and not enough deals.

The client’s GTM strategy relied on dozens of individual products addressing every possible segment you can imagine – way too complex for their sales reps to successfully execute on. The sales cycle was painfully long, prospects were confused, and pipeline was wide but shallow. The fix wasn’t better campaigns. It was Product and Pricing strategy. We restructured their entire GTM from an overwhelming catalogue into one unified platform under a single subscription – software WITH a service (you got me, not Software-as-a-Service, but software with hands-on service bundled in) – addressing only a focused number of ideal customer segments. A process we walk through in our work with Redox. The impact was immediate: sales reps could identify better prospects, explain the offer in one sentence, and close quicker. But the bigger win came after: the repositioning put them on the radar of multiple big-tech companies, not just as a vendor but as a preferred partner – which moved them materially closer to the acquisition opportunities they'd been chasing for the past 12–36 months.

Permission: close with results that let them act

Those are only two examples from our own portfolio. The specifics in your situation will be different. But the principle is the same every time – when you’ve acknowledged their perception and given them enough context to see marketing beyond promotion, you’ve earned the permission to propose something meaningful. Not because you lectured them on marketing theory, but because you showed them what happens when marketing touches the parts of the business that actually move profitability.

Meet your CEO where they are – just like your customer.

The whole approach is the same one you’d use on an ideal customer. Acknowledge their perception i.e. where they are. Give them context to understand where they need to be. Close with permission to go there i.e. results you’ve already created.

The irony is that meeting someone where they are and moving them toward a better understanding –  that’s marketing too. If you can’t do it with your own CEO, it’s worth asking what that says about how you’re doing it with your market.