Modern marketing is about cooking the potato

Marketing’s job is to make sales easier

At this year’s Digital Marketing World Forum London 2026, one of the sessions that stayed with me most came from Les Mills. The session focused heavily on brand, commercial alignment, and how customer expectations continue to evolve across both B2C and B2B environments.

One of the strongest takeaways was how connected modern customer journeys have become and how difficult it is for organizations to create consistent commercial experiences when sales, marketing, and product teams operate independently from one another.

The session described this alignment very simply: Same story. Same evidence. Same energy.

That is very relevant for B2B organisations today, especially as customer journeys become longer, and are shaped by more touchpoints before a sales conversation ever happens.

Potential buyers arrive more prepared than before

One particularly interesting observation from the session was the idea that B2C has already trained today’s B2B buyer.

Buyers expect personalised experiences, relevant communication, educational content, and familiarity with brands long before they speak to sales. In many ways, the traditional “pitch-led” approach is becoming less effective because buyers no longer expect their first interaction with a company to happen during a meeting.

Instead, buying journeys increasingly happen through ongoing exposure across channels, content, recommendations, events, communities, and digital experiences over time. The session by Les Mills described this as “looping journeys” rather than linear funnels, which feels significantly closer to how buying behaviour actually works.

This changes the role marketing plays commercially.

Marketing is no longer simply responsible for generating awareness, creating campaigns and brand consistency. Marketing is now also shaping how prepared a buyer is before a sales engagement even begins.

Sales don’t want a raw potato

There’s a funny analogy I keep coming back to when thinking about this and it’s that Sales does not want a raw potato. They want the potato peeled, salted, cooked, and preferably already turned into something easy to serve.

That potato is the MQL.

While simplified, the analogy reflects something commercially important. The easier a lead is to continue a conversation with, the easier it becomes for sales to build momentum, trust, and progression. That means marketing’s role is not simply to drive traffic or generate form fills. Marketing’s role is preparation.

Preparation through:

• Education
• Exposure
• Familiarity
• Category understanding
• Proof points
• Relevance
• Repeated touchpoints
• Consistent messaging

By the time a meeting is booked, the buyer should ideally already understand the problem space, recognise the company, and feel a level of familiarity with both the brand and the solution.

This is where strong collaboration between marketing and sales becomes critical. Marketing creates the momentum and context leading into the conversation, while sales continues and translates that momentum into commercial outcomes.

When those functions operate in lockstep, customer journeys feel significantly more connected.

Familiarity is no longer enough

There is a major difference between being known and being chosen. And I think this is where modern B2B marketing has changed significantly over the last few years.

The old model of marketing being primarily responsible for awareness or lead generation simply does not stretch far enough anymore. Especially not in longer, more complex B2B buying journeys where buyers move through dozens of touchpoints before a sales conversation ever happens.

Today, marketing is increasingly responsible for preparing the “potato” long before sales ever receives it. Not through one campaign or one ad, but cumulatively over time. Through blogs that frame the problem clearly. Through leadership advocacy on LinkedIn. Through events, webinars, customer stories, nurture journeys, paid campaigns, sales enablement, thought leadership, follow-up communication, and repeated exposure across channels.

Individually, those activities can sometimes feel small or disconnected but together, they shape familiarity, trust, relevance, and commercial understanding over time as buyers rarely move directly from “never heard of you” to “ready to buy.” They move gradually through recognition, validation, understanding, internal conversations, repeated exposure, and growing confidence in both the problem and the company behind the solution.

That is why marketing today is no longer just about generating visibility.

It is about helping sales receive a buyer that already feels significantly warmer, more informed, and easier to continue the conversation with than they would have otherwise.

Internal alignment matters more than ever

Most organizations already understand the importance of alignment conceptually. The real challenge is operationalizing it consistently across teams, platforms, regions, agencies, reporting environments, and customer journeys. Because customer experiences only feel connected externally when organizations are connected internally first.

A large part of that comes down to having a shared internal language across the business. A shared understanding of what is being measured, how performance is interpreted, which KPIs actually matter, and how different teams contribute to the same commercial outcome. Without that shared understanding, organizations quickly start pulling in different directions. Sales interprets performance one way, marketing reports it another way, leadership looks at different numbers, and customer journeys that looked connected on paper start becoming messy in practice.

This becomes especially visible in the relationship between sales and marketing, which still often operates far more siloed than many organizations realize. Both functions are ultimately responsible for carrying the same customer journey forward, yet they are not always working from the same terminology, context, priorities, or understanding of what the buyer actually needs at different stages.

That is also why collaboration between sales and marketing can carry entire organisations when it works well.

Growth happens before the sales call

Marketing shapes the narrative long before a sales conversation happens. Through content, campaigns, events, webinars, thought leadership, advocacy, enablement, and repeated exposure across channels, marketing gradually prepares the buyer over time. It builds familiarity, frames the problem, creates relevance, and helps the market understand why something matters in the first place.

Or to return to the potato analogy. Marketing’s role is often taking that potato from a small spud into something significantly more prepared before sales ever receives it. Not instantly, and not through one activity alone, but cumulatively over time through dozens of touchpoints working together.

As a marketing manager at a scale-up, this is probably one of the biggest shifts I have reflected on over the last few years. Modern marketing is no longer just campaign execution or lead generation. It increasingly becomes the connective layer between commercial teams, customer understanding, operational structure, and long-term growth.

Because ultimately, strong growth rarely comes from visibility alone. It comes from organisations where sales, marketing, product, and leadership are aligned enough internally to create customer journeys that feel connected externally.