CEOs that have never run a real marketing function often fall into a common trap. Revenue stalls, the board asks about pipeline, and the CEO goes shopping for a marketing agency for a quick fix.
Six months later we get a call for help and we jump on a call, going through a folder of blog posts, a rebranded website, three campaigns that generated a handful of leads, and an invoice that keeps arriving whether or not any of it worked.
We see this pattern often enough at KickDrum to say it straight: hiring a marketing agency before you’ve worked out where the business needs to change is one of the most expensive mistakes a growing company makes. Let’s be clear though – the fault rarely sits with the agency. It sits with whoever hired one before checking whether marketing was the right place to spend at all.
The pattern
It starts with a CEO or CRO deciding that the business needs “more marketing.” Nobody in-house has run a marketing function before, so they do what feels sensible: interview a few agencies, pick the one with the best case studies, and hand over the budget. The agency does what agencies do, writing blog posts, running paid campaigns, redesigning the landing page, and posting on LinkedIn three times a week.
Every one of those activities looks like progress: the dashboard fills with green metrics, impressions climb, traffic climbs, and somebody on the team feels busier than they did six months ago.
None of it moves the number the CEO cares about.
We’ve sat across from a founders who could recite, without checking notes, exactly how many blog posts the agency published that quarter, how many followers the company gained on LinkedIn, and how much the click-through rate had improved on the last three ad sets. He couldn’t say how many of those clicks turned into an inbound enquiry or a sales call. Nobody had asked the agency to track that, because nobody had told the agency it was the number that mattered.
Nobody had checked whether marketing was where the fix lived in the first place, either.
Busy work wearing a marketing costume
A marketing agency, however good, tends to work from a template. It has a playbook that’s produced results somewhere else before: a content calendar, some paid social, progress dashboards and easily defensible metrics. Someone built that playbook to resell to any client. It’s generic by design.
Without a GTM plan sitting above it, telling the agency which segment to target, which stage of the funnel is broken, and which message converts a prospect into a customer, that playbook runs in a vacuum. The agency optimises for the metrics it can control: content published, ads shipped. Those numbers can hit every target on the report and still leave the pipeline where it started.
The CEO isn’t wrong to feel uneasy about this. They watch spend go out every month, watch the team stay occupied, and still can’t draw a line from any of it to a fuller funnel or a closed deal. What’s missing is a strategy that connects the tasks to the business, built by someone who can see past marketing to begin with.
The porthole problem
A marketing agency, however well-briefed, looks at your business through one window: marketing. Everything it sees gets diagnosed as a marketing problem, because marketing is the only lever it holds.
Sometimes that diagnosis is right. But often it isn’t. The real constraint might be pricing that doesn’t match the segment you’re chasing, or a product built for one vertical and forced into three others. It might be a go-to-market motion built for direct sales when the market you’re entering buys through partners, or a demand-gen budget spent on a region with nobody on the ground to follow up the leads. None of that gets fixed by a better content calendar.
Solving it might mean spending nothing on paid acquisition for a quarter and putting the whole budget into channel enablement instead: a partner portal, reseller training. A marketing agency won’t recommend that. It’s not in their remit, and no agency is going to advise a client to spend less on the service it sells.
Why the CEO can’t name the problem
CEOs who’ve built a company from an engineering, sales, or a product background have never sat inside a marketing organisation and watched a GTM strategy get built. They might know how to run a sales team, because they’ve run one, or sat close enough to one to absorb how deals already in a pipeline work. Marketing doesn’t get the same apprenticeship, and neither does the discipline of weighing marketing against pricing, product, and channel before picking a lever.
A CMO, or someone who has run marketing at that level, starts further back than a marketing agency ever does. Before a single blog post gets written, they check whether the buyer, the pricing, and the route to that buyer, direct or through partners, are even aligned. Marketing is one of the last decisions they make, not the first.
Agencies aren’t the problem
None of this is an argument against marketing agencies. Some of the best work we’ve seen came from specialist agencies executing against objectives someone else set for them. A strong paid media team or a strong PR agency is a real capability, and building both in-house rarely makes sense for a scaling company.
The issue is sequencing, and scope. An agency is a set of tools. A hammer is excellent at driving nails and useless at deciding which wall needs one. Hand a contractor a hammer without a blueprint and they’ll drive nails somewhere, because that’s their job and they’re good at it. Whether those nails hold up the house is a different question, and nobody asked the contractor to answer it. Sometimes the house doesn’t need another nail. It needs a wall moved, which is a different trade altogether, and a hammer won’t tell you that either.
That question belongs to whoever holds the GTM plan: a CMO, a VP of Marketing, or a fractional marketing leader who’s built and run this function before. That person weighs pricing, channel, and product against marketing, decides which lever actually needs pulling, then briefs the agency against specific outcomes and holds them to it. Give the same paid media agency a clear brief, a defined audience, and a target tied to pipeline, and the work that comes back changes.
The tactics barely shift. The aim does.
What we do differently
This is the gap KickDrum exists to close. We don’t walk in and hand you a fresh set of agency deliverables, and we don’t start by assuming the answer is marketing. We start with the GTM plan: who you’re selling to, and what has to be true about the pricing and the product for that buyer to say yes. Then we look at the route to market, direct or through partners, and only after that at where marketing fits in. This is the real value of experienced, fractional talent at KickDrum Partners: you get a combined team’s worth of knowledge, experience and skills built over many years and marketing eco-system evolutions. Embedded in your team to really understand your challenges and create solutions – not just execute from a template.
From there we find what’s broken and fix, or help you fix, that first, whichever function it sits in. Sometimes that means directing the specialist agencies already on your roster so the paid spend and the content point at one target. Sometimes it means telling a client to cut their advertising spend and put the budget into channel sales tools instead.
If you’ve hired an agency and the activity is high but the results aren’t showing up in your pipeline, the fix might not be marketing at all. Get someone in the room who can tell you where the real lever is, before the next invoice arrives.
If that sounds like where you are, we’re always happy to run that diagnosis with you, and tell you honestly if marketing turns out not to be where the budget should go.