What a whole generation of B2B marketers get wrong

Your job is to move each funnel metric, except not everything at once.

I remember the early 2020s vividly, the narrative was shifting. Marketing wasn’t just lead gen play anymore. It was accountable for closed-won, retention, expansion, the whole customer journey.

It also spun a lot of new and funny titles. Pipeline Marketing Manager. VP of Customer Marketing. Full Funnel Lead.

Fair enough. That push wasn’t entirely wrong.

But I think it sent a lot of marketing leaders in the wrong direction.

The instinct it created was to design every program, every dollar, every campaign around moving the full funnel. And if you couldn’t show how it connected to the aggregate metric, it felt hard to justify. Especially when the board and the investors push for LTV over anything else.

Here’s where I think that breaks down. Most of your dollars are going into one specific stage. They should be. A webinar for mid-pipeline prospects is an acquisition play. Run it like one. The moment you start asking how it contributes to retention or long-term customer economics, you’ve muddied what you’re actually trying to do.

I know what you are thinking. Yes, early decisions have downstream effects. Good acquisition feeds better activation. Sharp onboarding feeds retention. Those patterns are real. But noticing them isn’t the same as designing programs to move everything at once.

The aggregate metric is the output of individual stages done well, over time, in parallel. I wouldn’t go at it directly. I’d find the stage that’s most broken or most opportunistic, put focused dollars there, and run it long enough to actually see results.

In my experience, that’s always where the returns have come from. Not from trying to attribute everything to everything.