Strategic thinking is a crucial part of the marketing skillset, at least on paper.

Over half (58.2%) of the 450 respondents to Marketing Week’s State of B2B Marketing survey have seen the function assume a greater strategic role over the past year. Thinking specifically about their own career, 51% have seen the strategic nature of their role increase. Only 11.4% say it has declined.

However, a tension sits at the heart of those numbers. A quarter (23.4%) of all respondents report a skills gap around the understanding of strategy within their team.

In large B2B companies, the figure is even starker. More than a quarter (28.6%) claim strategic skills are missing. The data suggests marketing’s strategic scope is growing, but capability and confidence are not.

If something doesn’t align, you reframe it so it does, or you dump it. You can’t do everything. Saying no is part of strategy.

Brittany Lindquist, 8×8

Whether you’re sitting inside a 40-person startup or a global matrix, the same challenge appears: marketers want more authority and say they’re being given more strategic responsibility, yet too few feel equipped to step into it.

That friction is clear in the lived experience of marketing leaders. They talk about the gap between being invited to the strategic table and knowing how to operate confidently once get there. They report being pulled back into tactics, while negotiating the pivot from functional specialist to a business leader who happens to come from marketing.

CMO at freelance marketplace Fiverr, Matti Yahav, has experienced this shift.

“It starts with understanding the business and speaking the relevant language,” he says. “I would spend time walking with sales, listening to customer calls, joining meetings. You cannot influence if you don’t understand their world.”

The biggest mistake marketers make, he argues, is thinking strategic influence comes from perfecting marketing craft alone.

“Having the customer in mind is always the marketer’s job,” he says. “But you also need very strong legs in the business and the numbers. When you can talk in the same language as sales and finance do, it becomes a win-win discussion.”

Yahav argues strategy does not begin with tactics or campaigns, but with a view of the business that is long-term and structured. He urges his B2B marketing peers to have a North Star to aim for, supported by strategic long-term goals and specific short-term KPIs.

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The order matters, he explains, because too many marketers start at the wrong end.

“A lot of marketers start with the how,” says Yahav. “Which channel, which content, which activity. That is backwards. First you ask: Who is the customer? What is the company trying to do? What is the market doing? And then you talk about the how.”

AI is accelerating the expectations placed on marketers as data is more accessible than ever. As Yahav explains, whereas in the past he would require an analyst to get him the numbers, today he expects his team to have the relevant AI tools so data “is at their fingertips”. That said, data isn’t everything.

“We have more data than ever, but we shouldn’t forget our gut feeling. The greatest marketers always used intuition. Even today there are things data cannot tell you,” he suggests.

Critical thinking

Head of marketing at Black Dice Cyber, Rachael Simpson, first joined the business in 2023 as a consultant shaping communication strategy ahead of a potential IPO, before taking on a broader remit.

“It’s very common in tech companies that the CTO or CRO come first and marketing comes later,” she says. “You end up in this hamster wheel of excitement and speed, and you don’t question the structure or the decisions.”

Early on she found herself pulled into taking orders from sales, becoming the go-to for everything, not the person defining direction.

When you can talk in the same language as sales and finance do, it becomes a win-win discussion.

Matti Yahav, Fiverr

Her strategic pivot came from asking uncomfortable questions.

“I started to push back and say ‘Why?’” Simpson recalls. “Why do we need this? What is it for? What are we trying to achieve?”

The willingness to challenge senior voices enhanced her credibility in the business.

“It made the founder think: ‘She knows her stuff. She’s not just writing press releases. She understands strategy,’” she says.

Critical thinking, Simpson argues, is the defining skill for marketers who want greater influence.

“People get wrapped up in doing, doing, doing. More campaigns, more tasks, more clicks, more shares. Critical thinking is asking why you’re doing it, backing it up with data and having the confidence to challenge,” she explains.

Strategic influence is not about seniority, but about how you show up. Simpson argues you don’t need 20 years marketing experience to ask about what kind of problem the business is trying to solve. She believes junior marketers can develop strategic influence if they ask the right questions and resist being swept into activity for the sake of it.

Most B2B marketers have ‘greater strategic role’ in business versus last year

A major part of her role has been building clarity in the business. The team analysed lost deals and saw consistent feedback that people didn’t understand what Black Dice Cyber did, or how it was different. She and her colleague organised calls with customers the firm had lost.

“We got deeper feedback, did market research, built a new messaging framework and then took it back to those customers. We weren’t trying to win them back. We just wanted their view,” she says.

Partners and existing customers said this work made the product easier to explain. Based on this experience, Simpson believes marketers overvalue dashboards and undervalue conversation.

“We’ve become so data-obsessed that we sometimes avoid talking to humans,” she says. “Qualitative feedback is OK. It’s vital. Just pick up the phone.”

Her most strategically impactful decision was choosing to overhaul the firm’s partner strategy after noticing many relationships were informal, unstructured and not delivering. She built a scorecard, analysed markets, defined criteria and formalised enablement.

“Strategic influence is about spotting patterns, spotting problems, coming up with a solution and presenting it clearly,” Simpson says. “It’s also about speaking the founder’s language, the CRO’s language, the developer’s language. Understanding people. Internal marketing matters as much as external.”

Business acumen

If Simpson’s experience shows how strategy works in small companies, Brittany Lindquist’s role as head of marketing strategy at AI-powered contact centre 8×8 shows how it stretches across a large organisation.

According to Lindquist, the CMO’s role, and by extension the entire marketing leadership team, has changed dramatically in recent years.

“The CMO has to extend their role beyond marketing and become a business leader,” she says.

“In the past you had the product-marketing CMO who was story-driven but struggled with numbers, and the demand CMO who focused on pipeline and not brand. Now the CMO has to influence finance, product, HR, partners, the chief customer officer. You need business acumen. Not just marketing expertise.”

For her, influence begins with structure. Any strategy has to align to company level OKRs (objectives and key results).

“A lot of strategy at the C-level is about recognising dependencies,” she states. “I depend on you to meet my goals, you depend on me to meet yours. All the programmes and campaigns underneath that strategy have to ladder up to the top.”

For Lindquist, the distinction between strategy and tactics is not philosophical, it’s practical.

“Sometimes I have to go into a tactical meeting and remind the team: this isn’t an argument. This programme aligns to the company strategy, so we do it. It’s not optional. That’s what strategy does. It defines what we commit to,” she explains.

Campaigns may be quarterly and roadmaps are often fiscal, but strategy is multi-year, Lindquist argues. If a company has a three-year vision, the CMO should think how marketing investments match that “time horizon”.

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That long-term lens becomes critical when balancing brand investment against the pressure to deliver short-term revenue.

“Any company that understands brand is long-term will set aside the right strategic narrative and investment to support it,” says Lindquist.

“B2B companies make the mistake of treating brand as something immediate. Change the colour palette this quarter, change it again next quarter. It’s disconnected. You’re trying to create the same level of love for a product as you have for something in your personal life. If the brand keeps shifting, customers won’t feel anything.”

Indeed, she argues companies typically don’t see the benefit of brand work for nine to 12 months.

“If you’re on the demand side and you expect a dollar of pipeline for every dollar of brand, you’ll think brand doesn’t work. But brand fuels demand. It’s long tail,” Lindquist adds.

Critical thinking is asking why you’re doing it, backing it up with data and having the confidence to challenge.

Rachael Simpson, Black Dice Cyber

Her most significant strategic decision this year was pushing through a major brand investment despite internal resistance.

“It was so different people were unsure,” she says. “I made the decision that we were going all in. You can say you don’t like it once, but after that you commit. And now we’ve won awards for it.”

Lindquist believes strategic influence requires consistency. Whenever she encounters resistance she always goes back to the goals.

“If something doesn’t align, you reframe it so it does, or you dump it. You can’t do everything. Saying no is part of strategy,” she adds.

Lindquist gives the example of a request for French localisation that wasn’t in the fiscal plan. She explains the marketer wasn’t wrong, but there was no budget and so the company had to say no for this year. This discipline comes from referencing the plan daily.

Customer insight sits at the centre of her strategic decision-making. Her team conduct ICP (ideal customer profile) research, win-loss analysis, customer interviews and discovery during deals. They receive data from sales and insight from social listening. The idea is that when 8×8 makes a major investment in messaging or campaigns, customers are “there from the beginning”.

Ultimately, listening remains a foundational leadership skill.

“I have a sticky note on my desk that says: listen. It stops me making judgements too fast,” Lindquist explains. “It helps me influence the team, because they trust that I hear them.”

We will continue reporting from our State of B2B Marketing research in the coming weeks. Read all the content so far here.