Who owns
growth?
The changing role of marketing in commercially driven organisations
When you’re asked for more leads
Ten points, drawn from the evidence in this report, for a Marketing Leader under pressure to become a lead-supply function for Sales.
None of this argues against accountability. It argues for being accountable over the right time window, across the whole buying journey, and alongside Sales.
The accountability paradox
Marketing should take more ownership of growth, not less. But owning growth is not the same as owning this quarter's leads, and confusing the two is quietly weakening the function that creates tomorrow's demand.
Most Marketing Leaders in complex B2B businesses will recognise the pattern. The board wants proof that marketing contributes to revenue. The Sales Director wants more qualified opportunities, now. Budgets drift towards whatever can be counted fastest. Within a couple of planning cycles, marketing has become a lead-supply function for sales, judged on volume, and the work that makes buyers prefer you before they are ready to buy has been cut because nobody could prove it in ninety days.
The pressure is real and growing. In Madison Logic's 2026 survey with Harris Poll of more than 300 marketing decision-makers, three-quarters reported rising expectations of accountability, and nearly two-thirds said leadership now judges them on pipeline contribution rather than lead volume. Yet only 19% were very confident they could measure performance across the full funnel.
reported rising expectations of accountability
judged on pipeline contribution rather than lead volume
very confident they could measure performance across the full funnel
So this report asks one question: when marketing is asked to become more accountable for growth, how does it avoid becoming simply an extension of the sales department?
Our answer is not to resist commercial accountability. It is to accept more of it, on terms that reflect how B2B buyers actually behave. After a summary of the latest independent evidence, the sections that follow set out why the lead-generation trap is so easy to fall into, how responsibilities between Marketing and Sales should be drawn, how to organise and measure around the buying journey, a diagnostic to show where your organisation stands today, and a simple model a Marketing Leader can take into the room with their CEO or Sales Director.
The evidence at a glance
Independent research from 2025–26 points one way: B2B buyers choose their supplier long before they talk to sales, yet budgets and measurement are drifting towards the moments just before purchase. That mismatch is the root of the growth-ownership problem.
Four patterns stand out across the studies we reviewed.
Buyers decide before they make contact
What it means: most of the decision is made in the period marketing is responsible for. A model that measures marketing only by the leads it hands to sales ignores the stage where deals are actually won.
Buyers make first contact with a seller around 61% of the way through their journey, down from 69% in earlier years. The average buying cycle is 10.1 months.
94% of buying groups rank their shortlist before speaking to any seller. The vendor contacted first wins about four deals in five.
The winner is on the Day One shortlist 95% of the time, and 85% of buyers had prior experience with the vendor they chose.
When buyers had not ranked a favourite before first contact, the first vendor they spoke to won only 57% of the time. Preference is formed before the sales conversation, not by it.
A typical buying decision involves 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external influencers; procurement is a decision-maker in 53% of cycles.
Only around 5% of B2B buyers are in-market at any given time.
Budgets are drifting towards the short term
What it means: under budget pressure, spend gravitates to the ends of the funnel that report fastest. Client growth, often the cheapest revenue a B2B firm has, is being squeezed most.
Marketing budgets are flat at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026 (7.7% in 2025); 56% of CMOs say they lack the budget to deliver their strategy.
Awareness and conversion now take 62.6% of media spend, up more than 10% since 2024, while loyalty and retention spend has fallen 29% to under 15%.
The most mature marketing organisations put more into loyalty and retention. Gartner suggests others may be over-weighting the channels easiest to measure and automate.
Binet and Field's B2B benchmark is roughly 46% brand-building to 54% activation.
Accountability has outrun measurement
What it means: marketers are being asked to prove impact with instruments that cannot see most of the journey. The rational response, retreating to what can be counted, is the trap described in section 1.
75% of marketers report rising accountability expectations; nearly two-thirds are judged on pipeline rather than lead volume. Only 19% are very confident measuring the full funnel.
Confidence in reporting pipeline influence is 53%; pipeline velocity, 34%. 46% say attribution gives no stage-level insight.
84% say marketing is now about proving ROI, yet 48% admit they are guessing which activities drive purchase decisions. 90% think marketers who cannot show impact will struggle to justify budgets.
Brand is undermeasured, so it is underfunded
What it means: the C-suite is open to the brand argument. What is missing is a measurement model and an executive story that connect brand to commercial outcomes. That is the gap this report is designed to fill.
84% of companies are stuck in a "brand doom loop": weak brand measurement leads to low confidence, which leads to less funding.
Companies with a strong brand strategy are twice as likely to exceed their growth goals. Over half of C-suite executives want their CMO to explain how brand links to business strategy.
Brand effects take at least six months to show, but only around 4% of B2B marketers measure beyond that window.
A note on the evidence: several of these studies are published by vendors with a commercial interest in their conclusions, and most rely on self-reported surveys. We cite them because the patterns are consistent across independent sources, not because any single figure is definitive.
The lead-generation trap
Accountability turns tactical because organisations reward what is easiest to count, not what matters most. A form fill can be measured this week. A buyer's preference for you, formed eighteen months before they issue an RFP, cannot.
Leadership asks marketing to prove its commercial contribution.
Marketing reaches for the metrics it can already report: leads, MQLs, cost per lead.
Budget follows those metrics towards activation, paid search, gated content and retargeting.
Brand and category-building work, whose payback is slower, looks unaccountable and is cut.
Fewer buyers arrive already favouring you, so leads get harder and costlier to win.
Marketing is asked for more leads. Return to step 3.
The evidence says the ratchet destroys value. Les Binet and Peter Field's analysis for LinkedIn's B2B Institute found B2B businesses grow best with roughly 46% of budget on brand-building and 54% on activation. Brand effects build more slowly but last far longer, and they make later activation work harder. Their conclusion was blunt: focusing only on the bottom of the funnel undermines long-term profitability and makes activation itself less efficient.
The B2B Institute's later work with Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute sharpens the point. Only around 5% of B2B buyers are in-market at any moment; the other 95% will not buy for months or years. Marketing that only speaks to the 5% competes in a small, crowded room, while ignoring the buyers who will decide next year's revenue. The same research found most B2B marketers expect significant sales within two weeks of a campaign, which only makes sense if marketing works by instant persuasion. It mostly does not.
The measurement gap makes the trap worse. Madison Logic's May 2026 research found confidence is high at the top of the funnel but collapses as opportunities move towards revenue: 53% are confident reporting pipeline influence and just 34% pipeline velocity. When the metrics leaders care about most are the hardest to prove, teams retreat to the ones they can prove. That is how accountability becomes tactics.
Budgets show the ratchet at work. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey found budgets flat at 7.8% of revenue, with awareness and conversion now taking 62.6% of media spend while loyalty and retention spend has fallen 29% since 2024. Gartner's own warning is that less mature teams may be over-investing in the channels easiest to measure and automate. Optimisation, as its analysts put it, is not the same as strategy.
The problem is not that marketing is measured on revenue. It is that it is measured on revenue over too short a window, through too narrow a lens, and alone.
Who owns the customer?
Nobody owns the customer outright; each function owns a different part of the decision. The old handoff model, where marketing passes a lead over a wall and sales takes it from there, no longer matches how B2B buying works.
Buying groups research anonymously, involve several stakeholders and move between digital and offline channels long before they speak to a salesperson. Madison Logic's research points to inconsistent definitions of a qualified lead, patchy sales follow-up and a lack of shared process as the main reasons good engagement fails to become pipeline. These are boundary problems, not campaign problems.
The scale of the shift is striking. 6sense's 2025 study of nearly 4,000 buyers found that 94% of buying groups rank their shortlist before speaking to a seller, and the favourite at that point wins about 80% of deals. Forrester counts 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external influencers in a typical decision. By the time a salesperson is invited in, the customer has usually been shaped by everything marketing did, or failed to do, in the months before. If marketing owns that period, it shares ownership of the customer.
A more useful division of labour assigns each function a clear lead role across the whole relationship, with deliberate overlap where it matters most.
That means who the business is trying to be chosen by, why, and how preference is built over time, not just how many leads arrive this month.
The salesperson remains the authority on what it takes to win and close a specific opportunity.
The handoff points are where value leaks. They need shared definitions, service levels and a single view of the account, signed by both directors.
The question to ask is not "whose lead is it?" but "what does each function need to do so we are chosen more often?"
What Marketing controls, influences and depends on
Section 2 set out who leads at each stage. This map makes the boundaries practical: for each pipeline outcome, what Marketing decides alone, where it shapes the outcome with others, and what it needs from Product, Finance, Sales and Operations to deliver. Controls decides and delivers alone. Influences shapes the outcome with others. Depends on cannot be delivered without another function acting.
Disputes that can't be settled at working level go to the joint Marketing–Sales review within five working days; what is still open goes to the CEO, with the shared scorecard — not credit — as the arbiter.
Organising for growth
A marketing team built around campaigns and channels will optimise campaigns and channels. To own growth, it has to be built around the buyer's journey.
Most B2B marketing teams are organised by output: digital, events, content, brand, marketing operations. Each produces activity and reports its own numbers. Nobody is accountable for whether the business is more likely to be chosen next year than it was last year. We suggest organising instead around three jobs, with shared capabilities underneath:
Demand creation
Make the business known, distinctive and preferred among the whole market, including the 95% not yet buying
Brand and proposition, thought leadership, PR, broad-reach media, category insight
Share of voice, salience and preference among target buyers, growth in engaged target accounts
Demand capture
Turn active interest into qualified opportunities, quickly and with context
Search, ABM, intent data, nurture, website conversion, sales enablement content
Qualified opportunities, conversion between stages, speed to sales engagement
Client growth
Help the business keep and expand its best relationships
Client communications, advocacy and referencing, cross-sell propositions, client events
Retention, expansion revenue, reference and referral rate
Shared foundations
Make the other three work
Marketing operations, data and CRM, insight, creative studio
Data quality, a single view of the account, reporting trusted by Sales and Finance
This structure does three useful things. It gives brand-building a commercial job description rather than treating it as discretionary spend. It puts conversion specialists alongside sales rather than at arm's length. And it makes client growth a marketing responsibility, which in many B2B businesses is where the fastest, cheapest revenue sits.
The client-growth job matters more than many teams assume. 6sense found 85% of buyers had prior experience with the vendor they eventually chose, which makes every current client relationship part of the next sales cycle. Gartner's 2026 data shows the most mature marketing organisations invest more in loyalty and retention, not less.
In a smaller team the same three jobs might be three hats worn by a handful of people. The point is not the org chart. It is that every person in marketing can say which of the three jobs they serve, and how it will be judged.
Can marketing and sales leaders describe the buying journey in the same words? If not, they are measuring different things.
Is there someone in marketing whose objective runs beyond this financial year? If not, demand creation will always lose budget arguments to demand capture.
Measuring what matters
Marketing proves its commercial contribution best by measuring different things over different time horizons, then tying them together in one model the CFO trusts. Judging everything against this quarter's sales guarantees the long-term work loses.
The measurement problem is structural, not cosmetic. Madison Logic's research found nearly two-thirds of marketers cite fragmented data as their top barrier, and 46% say their attribution models offer no stage-level insight. More than half say strong top-of-funnel performance sometimes fails to become meaningful pipeline. Traditional attribution was built for a linear journey with one buyer; complex B2B purchases have neither.
The B2B Institute has made a related point about timing: brand effects take at least six months to show, yet very few B2B marketers measure beyond that window. In other words, many organisations are not set up to see the value of the work they are cutting.
Gartner calls the result a "brand doom loop": weak brand measurement produces low confidence, which attracts less funding, which weakens measurement further. In its survey of 426 senior marketers, 84% of companies were caught in it. Yet companies with a strong brand strategy were twice as likely to beat their growth goals, and more than half of C-suite executives want their CMO to explain how brand links to business strategy. The appetite is there; the measurement model usually is not.
Long term: future demand
Medium term: pipeline health
Short term: commercial outcomes
Report contribution, not credit.
Stop arguing over which touchpoint "sourced" a deal. Ask what moved opportunities forward and what made the business more likely to be shortlisted.
Agree the model before the year starts.
The CEO, CFO, Sales and Marketing Leaders should sign off the measures and the time horizons together, so long-term measures are not reopened every quarter.
Protect a long-term budget line.
Ring-fence demand-creation investment, judged on its own measures, rather than letting it compete week by week with activation.
Share the bottom line.
Pipeline and revenue targets should belong to both Marketing and Sales. Each function then has its own lead indicators that explain how it contributes.
The HARPP growth-ownership diagnostic
Before changing structure or measures, a Marketing Leader needs an honest view of where marketing sits today. We see four stages, from lead supplier to growth owner. The research in this report suggests most B2B organisations sit at stage 1 or 2, and the shift to stage 3 is where the biggest commercial gains are.
The stages are cumulative. A growth owner still generates leads and reports pipeline. The difference is that those measures sit inside a wider model, rather than defining marketing's worth.
Ten-question self-diagnostic
Score each statement 0 (not true), 1 (partly true) or 2 (true today).
Tick a score per statement
Agree one qualified-opportunity definition with Sales and start tracking one long-term demand measure.
Stop arguing attribution. Propose shared pipeline targets and a protected demand-creation budget line.
Build the three-horizon scorecard with Finance and give marketing explicit client-growth targets.
Take the scorecard to the board and test the model in a new segment or market.
The statements a team scores lowest on usually point to the right place to start. Questions 3, 4 and 9 tend to be the hardest, because they depend on agreement outside marketing. That is why the model in the next section is designed to be taken into the room.
A better model: the HARPP Growth Model for Marketing
Marketing should own the whole demand strategy, from first impression to client expansion, while Sales owns deal progression, and both answer to one shared measure of commercial growth.
The model replaces the brand-versus-sales divide with three connected stages of one growth system.
Create demand
This is the work aimed at the 95% of the market not buying today. It shapes how buyers think about the problem, makes the business distinctive and familiar, and earns a place on the shortlist before any RFP is written. It is not "brand" as discretionary spend. It is the cheapest source of future pipeline the business has.
Capture demand
When buyers move into the market, marketing makes it easy to find, evaluate and engage the business, and passes context-rich opportunities to sales quickly. This is where marketing and sales work most closely, under one agreed definition of a qualified opportunity.
Grow value
Marketing supports live deals with proof and insight, then helps keep and expand the best clients through advocacy, client communications and cross-sell propositions. Sales leads the relationship; marketing makes it stronger.
One shared commercial measurement model.
The three stages are measured on their own lead indicators and time horizons (section 4), but they roll up into one set of commercial outcomes that Marketing and Sales own together. Nobody wins by shifting credit; both win when the business is chosen more often.
Taking it into the room
A one-page agenda for a Marketing Leader's next conversation with the CEO or Sales Director:
Before the meeting, complete the diagnostic above with your leadership team. Your stage tells you which of the five agreements to lead with.
Agree the problem.
Show where current measures sit. If most of them are short-term activation metrics, name the risk: the business is harvesting demand it is no longer creating.
Agree the split of roles.
Marketing leads demand strategy; Sales leads deal progression; the overlap is written down, including one definition of a qualified opportunity and a follow-up standard.
Agree the budget logic.
Set a protected share for demand creation, informed by benchmarks such as the 46:54 brand-to-activation split found for B2B, and judged on long-term measures.
Agree the scorecard.
One page, three horizons, reviewed jointly with Sales and Finance, fixed for at least a year.
Agree the first test.
Pick one segment or priority account list, apply the model for two to three quarters, and review the evidence together.
The goal is not a ceasefire between Marketing and Sales. It is a shared answer to the question this report began with. Who owns growth? Both functions do, and marketing should be the one that owns the demand behind it.
Sources
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