Your CEO Is Your Best Marketing Channel. That's the Problem.

How B2B companies lose the recipe that works, and how to get it back.

We've all seen it. End of quarter, pipeline is light, and the CEO walks over to the sales floor. Picks up the phone. Sends a few emails. Closes more in a week than the team did all month.

Nobody finds this surprising. But nobody asks the obvious question either: what does the CEO have that the other channels don't?

The answer is simple. Trust. Credibility. Context. Relationships. The CEO walks into every conversation carrying all four. That's the recipe. It's also the highest-converting marketing channel any company will ever have.

And it has a ceiling.

One person. One network. Finite hours in the day. So we hire salespeople to extend it. Then marketing to broaden it. And somewhere in that evolution, the recipe gets lost. We replace trust with volume. Relationships with retargeting. Context with keywords. Then we wonder why pipeline feels like a grind.

Here's what it looks like when the recipe breaks down.

The company that tried every recipe at once

A B2B SaaS company with a strong product and market leadership in their space. Marketing was running campaigns for everything. Too many landing pages. Too many paid ads. No unifying message. Plenty of activity. Underwhelming pipeline.

The fix wasn't adding more channels. It was cutting them.

They consolidated around a handful of conversations they needed to own, killed the programs that weren't pulling their weight, and reinvested in the few that had the right ingredients. First quarter after the change: webinar registrations up nearly 4x. Paid search pipeline more than doubled. A new account-based program generated over $4M in pipeline from zero.

Not by doing more. By doing less, with focus.

If focus works, why is it so rare?

That story makes the answer sound obvious. So why don't more companies do it?

It's not stupidity. It's fear, and measurement.

We're afraid of missing the one channel that might work. A board member reads an article about ABM and suddenly it's on the roadmap. A competitor shows up at a conference and we panic-sponsor a booth. Someone on the team suggests video and now there's a YouTube initiative with no strategy behind it.

And underneath all of that: we default to the channels we can measure, not the channels that actually work.

Which brings us to the thing nobody wants to talk about.

The attribution mirage

At a professional services firm, CRM data told a clean story. Leads came from organic search and paid search. Easy to measure, easy to justify the spend.

Except when we actually talked to prospects, a different story emerged. They'd heard about the firm from a client. Or they'd seen a presentation at a conference. They Googled the company name after they'd already decided to reach out.

The digital channel captured the lead. It didn't create the demand.

This happens everywhere. The channel that gets credit in the CRM isn't the channel that did the work. And because we trust the data, we keep investing in capture channels and starving the ones that created the demand in the first place.

The wrong data leads to the wrong question

When the data always points to capture channels, we naturally ask "which capture channels have the best ROI?" That feels rigorous. It's also the wrong question.

There are really only two jobs a channel can do: build demand or capture it.

Content, events, referrals, thought leadership: they build demand. They create the trust and awareness that makes someone Google your name six months from now. Paid search, retargeting, outbound sales: they capture demand. They convert people who already know they have a problem and are shopping for a solution.

Both matter. But if we only invest in capture, we're fishing in a pond we're not stocking. And if we measure demand-building channels by capture metrics (this quarter's conversions, direct attribution), everything looks broken. So we cut them. And then we wonder why pipeline dried up.

Back to the recipe

This is where the CEO's recipe comes full circle.

That CEO on the sales floor. The phone call works because of everything that came before it. The reputation. The relationship. The credibility built over years of showing up. It's demand that was built long before it was captured.

The channels that build demand are the ones that carry those same ingredients (events where we show up in person, content that demonstrates we understand the problem, referrals from customers who trust us enough to make an introduction). The channels that only capture demand don't carry those ingredients at all. That's why a capture-only strategy eventually stalls. There's no trust in the system.

Customer advocacy might be the most overlooked channel of all. Lowest cost. Highest trust transfer. And most companies starve it because all the energy goes to acquiring new logos instead of turning happy customers into a growth engine.

Five channels, not seventeen

We're not saying ignore measurement. We're saying measure the right things for the right channels. A demand-building channel shouldn't be judged by this quarter's pipeline. A capture channel shouldn't get credit for demand it didn't create.

And if the budget is finite (and it always is), start here: pick one or two channels that build demand. Pick one or two that capture it. Invest in customer advocacy. That's five channels, not seventeen.

Give them time. Learn what works. Adjust.

The matrix

We mapped 17 B2B marketing channels across funnel stage, effort, ROI, and marketing budget allocation. Not to tell anyone which channels to pick, but to make the building-vs-capturing distinction visible.

Because the goal isn't to find the "right" channels. It's to know whether you're building, capturing, or kidding yourself.

Free download, no form: outcome.marketing/channel-matrix

Outcome Marketing is a methodology and marketplace for B2B SaaS and Technology Services companies.