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Brand spend has a branding problem in many B2B boardrooms. CMOs can improve the conversation by tying reputation to revenue opportunities, balancing long-term brand building with short-term activation, establishing awareness baselines, studying won deals, and using executive frustration about low awareness to fund multi-year growth plans that connect brand to pipeline reality and executive ambition.
In many B2B boardrooms, “brand” is treated like a nice-to-have until revenue gets hard. Then it becomes the first budget line someone circles with a red pen and a suspicious look. The problem is not that brand does not matter. The problem is that brand often gets explained in language executives do not trust.
So let’s call it reputation, preference, awareness, mental availability, market confidence, or “the reason we get invited into more deals.” Use whatever language opens the door. The CMO job is to connect long-term brand building to revenue reality without pretending it behaves like a lead form.
A strong reputation does not close every deal, but it can improve your odds before Sales ever speaks. Known companies get more consideration. Trusted companies face less skepticism. Distinctive companies are easier to remember when buyers finally enter market.
As the original piece noted, most CMOs agree on the irony:
“The concept of brand has a branding problem.”
One Huddler used a simple reminder with executives:
“I keep reminding our exec team that only 5% of our target is in the market every quarter.”
That is why brand matters. If most buyers are not ready now, your job is to be known, trusted, and preferred before they are ready. The B2B Institute’s 2030 B2B Trends research argues for long-term brand building as a durable driver of growth, not a decorative extra.
The CMO move: Reframe brand as future demand creation, not current-quarter softness.
Short-term activation is easier to measure. That does not make it sufficient. If all spending goes to capturing existing demand, you eventually run out of demand to capture and start blaming the landing page.
The original newsletter pointed to the common B2B Institute idea of balancing long-term brand building and short-term sales activation. The exact ratio will vary by company stage, category, and growth model, but the principle holds: You need both memory and motion.
One Huddler summarized the education challenge:
“Our job is to educate, especially our CFOs who want to cut everything right now. We still have to get the market excited and show a preference for our brand.”
That is the heart of it. Cutting all brand investment may make the quarter look cleaner. It can also make next year’s pipeline colder.
The CMO move: Show the trade-off between short-term savings and long-term demand risk.
You cannot improve what you have never measured. Before asking for serious brand investment, CMOs should establish a baseline for awareness, consideration, preference, share of voice, category association, analyst perception, review presence, and competitive standing.
Some Huddlers used lower-cost tools like BrandOps or BlueOcean. One Huddler shared:
“We used Blue Ocean to create a baseline... giving us brand scores on multiple dimensions.”
The point is not to create a perfect measurement system. It is to create enough signal to make the executive conversation more concrete. Baselines let CMOs show movement, diagnose weakness, and connect reputation to commercial outcomes over time.
The CMO move: Start with a baseline, then track whether awareness and preference are moving in the right direction.
Sales teams often study losses. Useful, yes. But wins can reveal how brand, content, events, customer proof, and executive visibility influenced the journey.
One Huddler said:
“When we help accelerate the pipeline, I look at the journey analysis.”
Another added:
“We look at high revenue wins across the year and how many touch points they had with our brand, then track that in our CMS.”
A third CMO described a more direct comparison:
“We’re now looking at all the won accounts that had marketing engagement and all the wins that had no marketing touchpoints, and then we’re comparing how long it took to close and average deal size. We expect this will reveal the lift marketing provides and our overall business impact.”
This is where brand starts sounding less abstract. If accounts with meaningful marketing engagement close faster, buy bigger, or convert at higher rates, the CMO has a better revenue story.
The CMO move: Analyze won deals for marketing engagement, velocity, deal size, and win-rate patterns.
Sometimes the best brand-budget opening comes from a CEO who is tired of being unknown. One Huddler shared their CEO’s lament:
“I’m sick of working at a company where no one knows we are in the market”
That triggered the right question:
“How do we get known?”
That is the moment a CMO should be ready for. Not with a vague “we need brand” plea, but with a multi-year plan that connects awareness, reputation, category presence, demand creation, sales confidence, and profit discipline.
The CMO move: Convert executive frustration into a funded reputation plan with milestones and commercial logic.
Brand spend is hard to defend when it is framed as a soft activity with fuzzy outcomes. It becomes easier when CMOs connect reputation to market entry, buyer confidence, sales velocity, deal quality, and future demand.
The goal is not to make brand behave exactly like demand gen. It will not. The goal is to show executives how reputation creates revenue conditions that demand gen alone cannot manufacture.
Connect brand engagement and reputation metrics to commercial signals such as win rate, deal velocity, average deal size, direct traffic, branded search, and consideration.
Brand works over time and influences buyer confidence indirectly, while executives often prefer short-term metrics that are easier to attribute.
Measure awareness, consideration, preference, category association, share of voice, review presence, analyst visibility, and marketing engagement across won deals.
Use business language: Future demand, reputation, sales efficiency, deal confidence, risk of underinvestment, and the trade-off between short-term cuts and long-term growth.