Marketing’s Real Job: Make Revenue Inevitable
Here’s my unpopular opinion:
Marketing doesn’t exist to “build awareness.” Marketing exists to make revenue feel inevitable.
Awards are nice. Viral posts are cute. But if your work doesn’t make it easier for money to show up in the bank account, you’re an expensive hobby.
Especially in SMB and startup land, you don’t get to hide behind vanity metrics.
Awareness Without Direction Is Just Noise
Most companies think they have an awareness problem.
Most actually have a clarity problem.
People don’t need to “hear about you more.” They need to understand:
Who you’re for
What problem you solve
Why you’re the best, safest, or fastest way to solve it
If you can’t say that in one or two sentences a human can repeat at a bar, you don’t have a marketing strategy. You have a word cloud.
Revenue Follows Friction Removal
When I look at a business, I don’t start with channels. I start with friction:
Where do prospects hesitate?
Where do deals stall?
Where do customers ghost you?
Then I ask, “What could marketing build that would remove this friction?”
Examples:
Prospects don’t understand pricing → create a brutally honest pricing explainer
Deals die with the CFO → build a one-page ROI argument written for a CFO brain
Customers don’t log in after week two → design a “Week 2 win” email plus in-app nudge
Every time you remove friction, revenue gets closer to inevitable.
Marketing Owns the Story AND the Scoreboard
I love stories. I love analogies. I’ll happily write posts about what I learned from TV shows, garage sales, and youth sports.
But there’s a difference between stories and storytelling.
Good marketing:
Tells a clear story about who you are and what you do
Connects that story to numbers you actually track
If your dashboard is full of impressions, clicks, and likes—but no one can tell me your:
Cost per demo
Lead-to-opportunity rate
Churn rate
LTV:CAC ratio
…then we’re playing dress-up, not doing marketing.
You don’t have to be a data scientist. But you do have to care enough to know if what you’re doing is working.
Revenue Is a Team Sport—Marketing Is the Point Guard
Sales closes deals. Product builds the thing. CS supports the customers.
Marketing is the point guard who:
Sees the whole floor
Decides where the ball should go
Makes everyone else’s job easier
Sometimes that means passing the ball (handing sales a layup with a perfectly warmed-up lead). Sometimes it means taking the shot (launching a direct-response campaign). Sometimes it means calling a timeout and saying, “Our messaging is confusing everyone, including us.”
The point is not who gets credit. The point is: Does the scoreboard move?
Bottom line:
If you want a simple filter for every marketing idea:
“Will this make revenue more inevitable in the next 3–12 months?”
If the honest answer is no, it’s probably a distraction.
