What is the role for marketing in a business built on relationships?

Many B2B businesses reach £3-5m+ in revenue without marketing playing any meaningful role.

One day your business didn’t exist.
Then it did.
A founder with an idea.
Followed by hard work and hustle.
A few early wins.
Then people, systems and back-office support to keep up.

Fast forward a few years, if things have gone well – you’re operating more like an established business. Yet this stage, it is still remarkably common, particularly in B2B companies, to get here despite (not because of) your marketing. And if you’re a business that’s grown through networking and relationship building, it’s not uncommon to reach £2-3m in sales without having invested much in marketing at all.

In most SMEs there comes a point when leaders start talking about how the business should ‘do more marketing’, but the question remains:
what role would marketing play, that would justify the spend?

Or put differently: what exactly would marketing do that sales isn’t doing already?

If any or all of this sounds familiar, this article was written for you. In the context of a business built on sales hustle, founder energy or key accounts – I’ll explain how marketing can and should earn a seat at the table and start contributing to the next stage of growth.

Let’s assume for now that your directors and your sales team are fairly well connected in your sector. You/they attend the right events, network in the right circles, and because your space is quite niche – it feels like you know most of the key buyers in your category.

You don’t need more leads, but you do want more market share. You need to improve your win-rate, but not at the expense of profitability.

With this in mind, it’s difficult to picture how traditional forms of marketing would have any material benefit.

In this situation, the role for marketing is clear:

Do whatever it takes to make sure when a potential buyer enters your market, your brand is the easiest, simplest and most convenient choice.

Why? Decades of research has proven that in all product and service categories, B2B and B2C, human beings are surprisingly lazy when making purchase decisions. If the product or service we’re considering is even slightly difficult to buy, evidence suggests that more often than not, we move on and buy an easier alternative.

How is ‘ease of purchase’ a marketing job? Let me explain…

There are three ways a marketing function can influence how easy a brand is to buy.

1. Presence in research and shopping channels.

Defined as: Knowing exactly where buyers research before they speak to sales - and showing up consistently.

In an era when most purchases involve some form of research before speaking to a person, if your brand isn’t in the places people go “shopping” it simply can’t be bought.

Your sales team might know everyone, but they don’t know how many sales they’ve missed through being difficult to find.

These channels might include search engines, directories, LLMs, events, forums, aggregators or comparison sites. The places people go pre-purchase will be unique to your category and buyer – and figuring this out is a marketing task, not a sales task.

2. Prominence in sales channels

Let’s assume your brand shows up in all the right places. It is still incredibly easy to be overlooked or ignored. The human brain is hard wired to filter out the thousands of brands it encounters every day, so the reality is most content gets ignored. Careful consideration of the clutter (competitive and situational) your brand contends with in each channel, and applying creativity to ensure you get noticed and not screened out, is an essential part of competing in any market. 

Your sales team might know everyone, but they don’t know how many sales they’ve missed through blending in with the crowd. 

This could mean standing out in an events hall, gaining that extra click in Google, or remaining top of the list in a directory. It takes creativity, persistence and careful thought to remain the most prominent brand in your category, and a mature marketing function will deliver this in spades.

3. Tipping the scales in a sales process

Consumers generally buy on emotion – how much do I want this vs how much can I afford it. Businesses, or to be more specific, professionals at work – make purchase decisions with a different equation in mind:

RISK ADJUSTED VALUE
Perceived Value - Perceived Risk = Likelihood of Purchase

In other words, “what benefits does this bring me and my employer?” set against “what is the risk to the organisation, and my career, if this goes wrong”.

The value side of the equation is instinctively understood and most businesses do a reasonable job of articulating the value their product or service brings. 

The personal risk, or fear of professional and career consequences of a poor buying decision, however, is rarely talked about and therefore mostly overlooked.

If B2B buyers took an honesty pill, what you’d really hear pre-purchase is questions like:

How will I look to my boss if you’re rubbish?
What hassle are you likely to cause me?
Will you work hard, or be hard work?

And quite often the real reasons for choosing one supplier over another would be embarrassing if said out loud;

Jeff said they were good.
They’ve worked with XYZ before, who are bigger than us.
They’re going to make me look sharp.

The perceived personal gain or risk plays loudly in B2B buyer’s minds yet often little is done to understood or mitigate this.

Where to start? Again, a marketing task.

There are a wide range of steps a marketing team can take to tip the risk adjusted value scales, such as:

- Handling objections through content creation
- Serving up reassuring case studies mid-research
- Social proof woven into sales collateral
- A website experience that builds trust and authority
- Removing friction from the enquiry process

And on top of this, conducting regular customer research to understand and mitigate reasons not to buy. This is the kind of work a mature marketing function gets excited about, and will work wonders for your lead conversion.

Final Thought

If you’re in a relationship business in a relationship driven sector, and you’ve been wondering how marketing can drive growth, the answer is simple:

Relationship-driven businesses don’t need more marketing noise.
They need marketing maturity.

And maturity shows up in one simple outcome:
You become the easiest brand to buy in your category.

The goal? Marketing so good you never miss a sale.

I hope you found this article useful to clarify the commercial role for marketing in your business. Without this clarity, SMEs typically end up with an under-powered function, and quite often a one-person-marketing-team. To read my thoughts on the single marketing hire, I’ve published another article on the topic here.

If you find these articles and way of thinking useful, you can read more about my background and the type of work I do here.