A few years ago I was in a room defending a marketing budget. The question across the table was the standard one. How do we know this is going to work. What’s the ROI. How do we measure whether this investment is worth it. I’ve heard that question in a lot of different rooms. That afternoon I said something I’ve been using ever since. Think about this as a sales rep equivalent. And a multiplier.
It landed. And I think it’s worth explaining why, because the framing changes the whole conversation.
What nobody questions
A company will put a salesperson on the road without much debate. Salary, vehicle, travel expenses, territory coverage. By the time you add it up you are at a meaningful number, and nobody stops the hire to ask what the ROI will be per quarter. Nobody demands proof that this specific person will produce a specific dollar amount before the offer letter goes out.
The assumption is that you hired someone because they can sell, so you point them at the territory and tell them to go. They don’t get validated. Nobody asks what they are going to go through to sell the product effectively. They get expenses, a car, and a calendar. And by the time you total it up, you have easily spent a couple hundred thousand dollars, and the question of whether it’s going to work never really came up.
Nobody questions it because a salesperson feels tangible. There is a human being in the car building relationships, having conversations, learning the customer’s business. The investment feels obvious. The return feels like a matter of time. Marketing should be thought about the same way. In a lot of companies, it isn’t.
Where the comparison does the work
Here is what this multiplier framing actually captures. If marketing is doing its job well, it shouldn’t just make one salesperson more effective. It should make all of them better. Not in a vague brand awareness sense. In a specific, practical sense.
You know it’s working when salespeople start telling you something. They’ll say things like, I walked into that first call and they already had a rough sense of what I was there to talk about. They could almost recite the two or three things the product is supposed to be best at. I didn’t have to start from zero. That’s the feedback that tells you the investment is doing what it should.
A rep who walks into a first call where the customer has already heard of the product and has a rough sense of what it does is starting from a different place than a rep walking in cold. They are not spending the first half of the conversation on context. They are having a more substantive discussion faster. The proof is already in the room. The objections have been partially addressed before anyone picked up the phone. And the story is consistent with what the marketing said, so the customer is not recalibrating between what they read and what the rep is telling them.
That’s what good marketing does for a sales team. It doesn’t replace the rep. It improves the conditions the rep walks into. And if that is happening consistently across every rep in the field, you’re not getting one rep’s worth of output from the investment. You are getting more. You are getting velocity in the funnel that a single salesperson on their own can’t create.
The measurement problem
The reason this framing matters is that sometimes marketing gets evaluated the wrong way. I’m not anti-measurement, not at all. You need business measures and real KPIs. But the question of whether marketing is working gets collapsed into a much smaller question, usually something like click-through rates or impressions, and those numbers become the proxy for value.
But they’re not. They are early funnel signals at best. In B2B, especially in categories that involve real capital decisions and real procurement cycles, you don’t grow markets on ad clicks. The customer who eventually signs a deal isn’t doing it because they saw a banner. They’re doing it because something built trust over time, because the story was consistent, because by the time the rep showed up they already had a sense of who was behind the product.
I’ve watched organizations get so enamored with what they can measure that they start directing everything toward it. And I get it. Measurement feels responsible. It feels like accountability. But if the metric you’re tracking doesn’t connect to whether salespeople are walking into better conversations, you’re measuring the wrong thing. You’re making yourself feel smart without getting better.
The best product stories I’ve seen come from companies where the marketing leader had real credibility in the revenue conversation. Not someone defending impression counts in a quarterly review. Someone who could sit across from the sales leader and talk about what’s blocking deals and what marketing could do about it. That’s a different conversation. It starts from what sales needs and works backward.
When marketing becomes a cost center
I’ve talked to business owners who say, it’s not doing anything for me, so why would I keep throwing money at it. And I understand why they feel that way. When marketing is disconnected from the sales effort, when it becomes the promotions department, the tricks and trinkets that show up at the trade show, it does become hard to trace to a deal. It looks like overhead.
But what I tell them is, you haven’t seen what it should look like yet. When marketing is genuinely built around the sales effort, when the targeting is honest, when the story is built for the rep’s actual conversations and not for the internal review deck, when the tools produced are things a rep would actually pull up on a Tuesday, the whole thing performs differently. It stops being an expense. It starts being a multiplier.
The question worth asking
The problem with campaign metrics as the primary yardstick is that they don’t fully capture what matters. They don’t tell you whether reps are walking into better first calls. They don’t tell you whether channel partners have more confidence because the market context was set well. They don’t tell you whether deals are moving faster because the customer was partly convinced before anyone made contact. Those things are harder to measure cleanly. But they are the actual output.
I will often go directly to sales on this. When you walk into a first meeting, what does the customer already know. What do they believe about the product before you say a word. What questions are they asking that tell you they have been paying attention. That feedback, gathered consistently, tells you more about whether the marketing investment is doing its job than any dashboard. If salespeople are walking into better conversations than they were six months ago, something is working. If they’re not, the right response is to figure out what’s missing, not just cut the spend or add more to the pile.
When marketing is working right, the story is tight, the targeting is honest, the proof is ready, and reps are walking into conversations that are already partly won. That’s not a 1.0 return on the investment. It’s more.