Before you read this, understand one thing:
This piece has the potential to trigger industry gaslighting at scale.
You’re going to see people reframe it.
Pretend it doesn’t say what it clearly says.
They’ll post things like:
“Of course marketing isn’t solely responsible for revenue…”
“We just want accountability, not scapegoats…”
“You still need to prove ROI somehow…”
But they won’t actually address what’s written here.
Because if they did, they’d have to admit:
They’ve been lying.
To their teams.
To their boards.
To themselves.
So if you’re a marketer reading this?
Don’t let them talk you out of what you already know in your gut.
If we keep pretending this system works, we don’t just hurt marketers, we ruin the credibility of marketing as a function. That’s not just a tactical problem. That’s an existential one.
And if you’re an executive reading this, looking for one more excuse to fire your CMO?
This piece isn’t for you.
But I hope you read it anyway.
Because if you don’t?
You’re next.
The Lie That Rewired the Entire Industry
The lie is simple:
That marketing generates revenue.
Not influences. Not supports. Not enables.
Generates.
It sounds reasonable. It sounds aligned. It sounds like accountability.
It’s not. It’s delusion dressed up as strategy.
This belief has infected the entire B2B ecosystem—especially SaaS. But it started long before that.
In the 1950s, marketing was theater. Mad Men storytelling. Salesmanship in print. Then it became direct response mail. Then infomercials. Then email blasts. Then click-through rates.
And somewhere in that evolution, a dangerous idea took hold:
That if you could measure a response, you could claim the sale.
That mindset is what birthed performance marketing. And performance marketing is what broke the definition of marketing altogether.
Now, it shows up in job descriptions, board decks, investor calls, and budget justifications.
And it is killing marketers.
Because if you believe marketing generates revenue, you’ll hold it accountable for outcomes it doesn’t control.
And if you hold it accountable for things it can’t control, you’ll always end up with the same result:
Marketing gets blamed.
The more you tie marketing to revenue,
The more you shorten the measurement window.
The shorter the window,
The worse the strategy.
The worse the strategy,
The harder the blame lands on marketing.
You might not see it yet. But it's already happening.
The best marketers are leaving.
The creative ones.
The technical ones.
The ones who actually know how to build demand.
They’re quitting.
Burning out.
Moving to other industries.
Starting their own thing.
Not because they’re weak— Because they’re awake.
They’ve seen the rot. They’ve read the contracts. They’ve built campaigns on fake data and been fired for the results, and they’re done.
So what happens next?
You’ll still have dashboards. Still have MQLs. Still have attribution models built by vendors grading their own homework.
But you won’t have marketers.
You’ll have spreadsheet jockeys. Pipeline puppets. Brand decorators.
You’ll have the illusion of marketing, without any of the substance.
And by the time you realize the only people who could save your company have already left?
It’ll be too late.
You may be thinking: "Bullshit."
Okay.
You want proof?
You're reading one.
The Reality They Refuse to Admit
Marketing does not carry quota. Marketing does not close. And even though some courageous, lucky marketing teams may have had a hand in pricing, marketing does not negotiate pricing when trying to close a deal.
Sales does. Product helps. CS reinforces.
Marketing does something more dangerous: It builds the conditions under which revenue is even possible.
That’s not a soft claim.
It’s a structural truth.
Marketing builds:
- Familiarity
- Believability
- Trust
- Desire
- Recall
None of those things close a deal.
Yet, all of them are why a deal ever had a chance.
If you think marketing is a revenue engine, you’re measuring sparks by how many miles the car drove.
It’s not just a delusion.
It’s a system.
You’ve been living inside it the whole time.
Marketing is not a battering ram.
It’s not a slot machine.
It’s not a quota machine.
It’s the immune system of the business.
When it's working, nothing looks wrong.
When it breaks, everything breaks.
Because marketing doesn’t generate demand.
It detects misalignment.
It filters out the noise.
It kills weak positioning before it spreads.
It creates antibodies to bad-fit buyers and messaging that backfires.
And when you suppress the immune system, you open the business to infection:
- Churn
- Misinformed product roadmaps
- Bad-fit accounts
- Internal chaos masked as GTM innovation
Marketing is not your closer.
It’s your defender.
The Fallout
Here’s what happens when companies believe the lie:
A content marketer is told their blog "isn’t performing" because pipeline slowed.
A brand strategist gets cut after a pricing change tanks conversions.
A head of growth is fired for poor sales execution they never controlled.
And behind it all it a dashboard glowing green with metrics that never meant anything.
This isn’t a few bad bosses. This is a pattern. A belief system. A rot.
And while marketers are left to pick up the pieces, they're not entirely off the hook themselves.
Because the lie doesn’t just live in dashboards.
It’s in job titles.
In performance reviews.
In resumes full of made-up metrics:
- “Influenced $14M in pipeline”
- “Sourced 1,200 MQLs per quarter”
- “Generated $2.8M in attributed revenue”
When there is no accurate way to verify a single claim like this, these numbers don’t mean anything.
This doesn’t absolve marketers. It indicts the system that trained them to lie, rewarded the ones who did, and punished the ones who didn’t.
And marketers make shit like this up all the time. Why?
Because it's the only language left that anybody hiring seems to care about.
"Somebody cried because they were touched by the messaging and visuals of the ad my team designed."
You're fucking hired.
All of you.
But we all play along—
until the system eats us too.
The Qualified Pipeline Delusion
Let’s talk about qualified pipeline.
Because if there’s one phrase that’s been abused, inflated, and bastardized beyond recognition—it’s this one.
It sounds legitimate. Strategic. Tied to revenue.
But there’s one fatal flaw nobody wants to admit:
If an entire industry can’t agree on what something means—then it doesn’t exist.
And we don’t agree.
We don’t agree on what counts as qualified. We don’t agree on what stage it's measured at. We don’t agree on how it’s tracked, who gets credit, or what source matters most.
Ask ten companies what “qualified pipeline” means.
You’ll get eleven definitions.
Ask ten CMOs what they’re measured on.
You’ll get twelve disclaimers.
That’s not accountability.
That’s make-believe.
Qualified pipeline is not a metric.
It’s a negotiation—one that happens after the fact to explain a number nobody understands.
And marketers are the ones getting fired for not hitting it.
How to Automate Yourself Out of a Job
Let’s not forget the entire industry that fell for the lie:
That you could outsource your entire job to a tool.
Let’s walk the chain.
- Marketing is held to revenue.
Not influence. Not enablement. Not contribution.
Revenue. - Revenue becomes “Qualified Pipeline”
...only once everybody throws a fit.
A term so vague and inconsistent it becomes a boardroom Rorschach test. - To hit that target, marketing needs proof of intent.
Not truth. Not trust. Just signals.
The more behavioral noise, the better. - Enter the vendors.
“Intent data” becomes the new currency.
If you can track it, you can claim it.
And if you can claim it, you can sell it. - CMOs outsource strategy to tools.
It’s not messaging. It’s not clarity. It’s not craft.
It’s a signal score— stitched from an IP lookup, co-op behavior, third-party cookies, and consent theater. - Entire marketing functions become automated hallucinations.
You don’t need alignment. You need an ABM platform.
You don’t need positioning. You need a dashboard. - And guess what?
It still doesn’t fucking work.
Because the tools weren’t built to generate demand.
They were built to simulate demand.
To create the illusion of movement.
To manufacture justification.
We built a machine to make marketing feel like sales.
And now we’re shocked when it fails like sales too.
Because software doesn’t carry quota either.
Where the Lie Came From
It came from attribution software.
From pixel vendors.
From insecure CMOs trying to justify creative work with revenue math.
From VCs demanding short-term metrics to validate long-term bets.
Somewhere along the way, marketing stopped explaining what it actually does—and started pretending it was sales.
And second we did that, we signed the death warrant.
Because once you say "marketing generates revenue,"
you inherit all the accountability with none of the control.
And when the numbers don't line up?
You get blamed.
This Wasn’t an Accident
It was architecture.
The belief that marketing should be tied to revenue didn’t emerge from truth. It emerged from need.
VCs needed proof of traction.
CROs needed a scapegoat.
CMOs needed a seat at the table.
And martech vendors needed something to measure.
So they built a system that could give everyone what they wanted...
...as long as nobody asked too many questions.
They didn’t fix attribution.
They faked it.
They didn’t align go-to-market.
They shuffled blame downstream.
Meanwhile, marketers inherited a stack built on stitched signals, junk data, and KPIs engineered for optics—not outcomes.
It’s not that the system isn’t working.
It’s working exactly as designed.
That’s the problem.
The lie persisted because it was profitable.
Not for the companies.
For the investors.
If you can create the illusion that marketing = revenue, then you can justify any valuation. CAC becomes gospel. Payback period becomes prophecy.
And as long as everyone believes the chart, nobody asks where the data came from.
And if you're somehow one of the few who built a clean attribution model and aligned comp structure? Congrats.
You're the exception. Not the proof.
More likely, you’re selling the illusion.
It's the SaaS version of mortgage-backed securities: Bundle fake signals into a believable narrative, sell the upside, offload the risk.
What Marketing Actually Does
It creates clarity. It builds memory. It introduces new frames of reference. It makes people want to listen to the pitch.
Marketing generates the ability to generate revenue. And the more truthfully it operates in that role, the more powerful it becomes.
But when you force it to play a role it was never built for? You break it. You turn strategic marketers into lead-chasing performance clowns. You turn brand builders into spreadsheet warriors. You turn campaigns into noise.
And you still miss the number.
When you force marketing to prove revenue, It stops being art. It stops being science.
It becomes math for people who hate numbers and don’t trust humans.
The work gets flatter.
The writing gets safer.
The creative dies.
And what’s left isn’t strategy.
It’s pageantry.
The Incentive Pyramid: How Marketing Became a Game of Quiet Exploitation
The Core Hypocrisy
You want to know what makes this even more perverse?
Sometimes, CMOs are comped on marketing-attributed revenue.
Sometimes, they’re not.
Sometimes, it’s “marketing-sourced pipeline.”
Sometimes, it’s “qualified pipeline.”
Sometimes, it’s total bookings.
Sometimes, it’s none of the above.
But the team almost never knows either way.
Show of hands—
Did you know your CMO (and probably a few others in leadership) are getting commission?
"Sales gets commission, not marketing. Everybody knows that."
That’s the default belief. The canon. The foundational assumption baked into every marketing team—until the moment it isn’t.
Meanwhile:
- Writers are being pushed to hit performance metrics they didn’t create.
- Designers are optimizing for demo clicks while flying blind.
- Campaign managers are losing sleep over numbers tied to someone else’s comp plan.
The lie doesn’t just live in metrics.
It lives in incentives.
The ones no one talks about.
You want alignment?
Then everyone needs to know what game they’re playing and who’s cashing the bonus check.
This isn’t just a misunderstanding anymore.
It’s a deliberate misalignment people are financially incentivized to protect.
It doesn’t just elevate the stakes.
It makes it ethical.
The Bonus They Never Told You About
If your CMO is comped on revenue, but your marketing team isn’t, that’s not a performance model. That’s an extraction model.
Because when it works, the CMO gets the payout. And when it fails, the team gets performance-managed, reorganized, or laid off. That’s not accountability, that’s exploitation.
This turns quiet resentment into a structural callout.
We're no longer just defending marketers—
We’re exposing the upside asymmetry.
It's finally time to give angry marketers language they didn’t have before.
You want shared accountability
Then start with shared upside.
Until then, stop calling it alignment.
It’s just leverage.
The Prestige Trap
And the punchline at the end of all of this is that most CMOs never even see that bonus.
They chase the number.
They pressure the team.
They optimize the funnel.
They defend the dashboards.
They perform for the board.
...And then they get fired anyway.
No bonus. No legacy.
Just another name on the spreadsheet.
Even the ones who “benefit” don’t really benefit. This absolutely kills the illusion that climbing the ladder is safety. The top is just a slightly higher place to fall from.
Because if marketing is set up to fail from the beginning—
What else would you expect?
This isn’t accountability.
It’s a churn engine.
So what about the rest of us, you ask?
We see it.
We’re done.
No one wins in this system.
Some just lose slower than others.
To Whom It Will Concern
This is the part they’ll screenshot.
This is the part they’ll whisper about.
This is the part that makes the room go quiet.
If you’re a CRO blaming marketing for low pipeline—
But you’ve never defined a clear, enforceable SLA for lead follow-up—
You’re not leading a revenue team.
You’re running a scapegoat factory.
If you’re a CEO who demanded brand investment one quarter
and demanded attribution the next—
Congratulations:
You’ve gaslit your own marketing team and called it “alignment.”
If you’re holding marketing accountable for a number they don’t own,
while cutting the budgets that allow them to even influence it—
That’s not accountability.
That’s sabotage.
You signed off on the stack.
You approved the attribution model.
You nodded along to stitched dashboards built on behavioral scraps
and called it “truth.”
You don’t get to act surprised when the system breaks.
You built it that way.
You want to fix this?
Good.
Then memorize this:
The Terms of Surrender
Then here are the new terms:
1. Revoke Revenue as a Marketing KPI
If marketing doesn't control the full sales cycle, it cannot be measured by the end of it.
2. Redefine Performance
Focus on the leading indicators: memory lift, attention, clarity, trust, brand recall, buyer readiness.
3. Burn the Attribution Fantasy
Treat dashboards as directional. Not divine. Replace attribution models with buyer behavior that actually reflects human reality.
4. Give Marketers Veto Power
If the tools affect what they’re measured on, they should have full say in whether they use them.
5. Hold Execs Accountable for Stack Decisions
If you're an executive who approved a martech stack built on co-op data, stolen intent, and dark-funnel voodoo, you don't get to blame the marketer who inherited it.
6. Shared Accountability
Comp the team that actually did the work. If marketers are held to metrics tied to an executive's bonus, and no one tells them, that's not alignment. That's a con.
7. Say It Publicly
Tell your team: "You're not crazy. The system was. We're fixing it. Say it before the best marketers are gone and all you're left with are glorified spreadsheet jockeys.
Final Transmission
Marketing is not a revenue engine. It is the ignition system. And you’ve been measuring the spark by asking how many miles the car drove. If you still want to blame your marketers for missing revenue, ask yourself this first:
Whose number was it, really?
If you’re still pretending it was marketing’s number, then don't be surprised when there's no one left to market you.
By then, all the dashboards in the world won’t save you.
One day soon, the SEC will ask public companies how they’re measuring performance.
One day soon, a class-action lawsuit will ask where the leads actually came from.
One day soon, a marketer will be asked to defend the integrity of their dashboard in front of a board of directors.
And when that day comes—
“We were just doing what everyone else was doing”
...won’t be good enough.
If this feels emotional, that’s because it is.
But emotion isn’t the absence of logic.
It’s the signal that something is unequivocally, profoundly wrong.
Postscript:
You might be wondering…
Who built this system?
Who kept it alive?
Who actually profited while marketers burned out, broke down, and walked away?
That’s coming next.
And I promise you:
Everyone was in on it.
If you’re still here, you’ve earned the uniform.
You saw what they did. Now show them what side you’re on.
