If you’re a B2B founder, tech leader, or growth minded operator and your marketing feels like a black hole of time, money, and quiet frustration..
This is for you.
Because when marketing isn’t working, it doesn’t usually fail loudly.
It fails politely.
A few campaigns here.
A new tool there.
Some content that technically shipped.
And still no real momentum.
I’m Holly Mack. I work as a Fractional CMO with scrappy B2B teams. MSPs. SaaS companies. IT service providers. The kind of businesses that don’t need more ideas. They need marketing to actually pull its weight.
If you’ve ever felt like marketing should be doing more than it is, you’re not wrong.
Why it’s not working
Let me guess.
You hired an agency and got a beautiful strategy deck that never made it past kickoff.
You downloaded every B2B growth playbook you could find. They’re still sitting in a folder somewhere because no one owns execution.
You ran a few campaigns. Tracking is fuzzy. Leads are weak. And when someone asks what’s working, the room goes quiet.
Meanwhile, you’re still wearing five hats.
Budget is tight.
And internally, marketing is treated like a cost center instead of a growth engine.
Here’s the part most people miss.
The problem isn’t your product.
Or your niche.
Or even your team.
The problem is that you’re trying to do marketing without a system.
What to do instead
This is the system I teach and use. It’s lean. It’s practical. And it’s designed for teams that need results, not theater.
1. Set the foundation up right
Most marketing problems are actually positioning problems.
If your messaging is vague or your ICP is basically anyone with a wallet, nothing downstream will work. Paid ads won’t save it. Content won’t fix it. Outbound will feel painful.
Get brutally clear on four things.
Who you serve.
The urgent and expensive problem you solve.
What makes you meaningfully different from the 37 others in your space.
And what your actual offer is.
Here’s a quick test.
Can someone land on your site or LinkedIn profile and instantly answer
Is this for me?
And why should I care?
If not, pause the campaigns. Fix this first.
2. Start where you already win
Most teams try to grow by adding more channels. More tactics. More noise.
Instead, start with what’s already working quietly in the background.
Look at your last ten deals.
Where did they come from?
What do your best clients have in common?
If most of your revenue came from referrals or founder led outbound, great. Build the system around that first.
This isn’t about doing more.
It’s about doing more of what already works. On purpose.
3. Build a real operating system
Marketing usually doesn’t fail because the ideas are bad.
It fails because execution disappears the moment things get busy.
You need a simple operating system.
A shared content calendar people actually look at.
Clear ownership. Who owns this campaign. This asset. This number.
A weekly 30 minute check in.
A lightweight dashboard with three to five KPIs tied to pipeline, not just impressions.
Marketing is a revenue function.
Treat it like one.
4. Build a lean content engine
Content fuels everything.
SEO.
Inbound.
LinkedIn visibility.
Email nurture.
Sales follow up.
You don’t need a content army. You need a system.
Start with the format you can sustain. Writing. Video. Audio. Pick one.
Define clear content pillars so your audience doesn’t get confused. Then repurpose.
One core idea can become a LinkedIn post, a blog, an email, and a sales follow up.
And don’t just post and disappear.
Engage with intention.
Reply to comments.
DM people who interact.
Content should start conversations, not end them.
5. Get proof because trust converts
Marketing today is about building trust at scale.
That means proof.
Case studies.
Testimonials.
Client screenshots.
Third party reviews.
Public wins from real customers.
People don’t want your pitch.
They want evidence.
Stop hiding your best proof in PDFs and pitch decks. Put it everywhere. Homepage. LinkedIn. Emails. Sales conversations.
Make trust unavoidable.
6. Do outbound like a human
Outbound still works. Just not the way most teams do it.
No more
Hi first name, saw you’re crushing it at company.
We’re past that.
Good outbound uses intent. Who’s visiting your site. Who’s researching your category.
It goes multi channel. Email. LinkedIn. Light remarketing.
And it personalizes with context, not just name tags.
Outbound should feel like a conversation. Not a campaign.
7. Scale without chaos
Once you know what works, the goal changes.
It’s no longer do more.
It’s do less personally.
That means delegating execution.
Hiring a doer, not another strategist. Someone who ships.
Using AI for leverage, not thinking. Repurposing. Summarizing. Organizing.
Documenting systems so other people can run them.
The goal isn’t growth at any cost.
It’s growth that doesn’t require you to be everywhere all the time.
The takeaway
If this feels calmer than most marketing advice, that’s intentional.
Marketing doesn’t need to be louder.
It needs to be built.
If you want help implementing this without guessing, I teach this exact system inside my free 6 Week B2B Growth Sprint.
It’s for founders wearing too many hats.
Lean teams trying to make marketing make sense.
B2B businesses ready to stop winging it.
You’ll walk away with something you can actually run. Delegate. Scale.
No agency tax. No fluff.
Just a system that works.