Published Thursday, 5 November 2026 | By Noleen Thompson, LadyBugz Marketing
In new UK research, 84% of chief executive officers (CEOs) and senior leaders said they see marketing as a support function. Here are the hard questions that come with that view, and how marketing and sales leaders can answer them in the board’s own language.
Key Insights
- Most surveyed CEOs don’t see marketing as a growth engine: 84% of the CEOs and senior leaders surveyed see marketing as a support function rather than a commercial growth driver (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)).
- Blind spot 1, ghost revenue: sales gets the credit for growth because it is closest to the deal, while the months of work that made the buyer ready to talk stay out of sight. 77% think sales drives growth more than marketing does (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)).
- Blind spot 2, the credibility crunch: many business leaders doubt that marketers have the commercial know-how to shape strategy, yet don’t fully involve them in the numbers. 88% say marketers would be more credible if they spoke the language of business, while 76% don’t involve marketing throughout their full revenue forecasting process (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)).
- Blind spot 3, the AI value trap: AI has become a reason to cut. 75% have already reduced marketing investment or headcount because of AI, and 80% believe they can keep cutting without hurting growth (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)).
- Unclear alignment with sales is the biggest brake: asked what holds marketing back at board level, about four in ten leaders chose unclear alignment with sales, the most common answer (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)).
- CEOs want both sides of marketing: 87% agree the best marketing combines creativity, brand building and commercial impact (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)). They want the case made in their language.
To answer a CEO or board with a marketing blind spot, use their language: revenue, pipeline (the deals in progress that could turn into revenue), cost and risk. Back it with a few numbers your sales lead agrees with, and never claim credit for every deal. I’ve spent more than 28 years in sales and marketing. In my experience, the hardest boardroom questions come down to whether the board trusts the person answering.
Sometimes it’s about whether they trust their own people. A CEO once told me they didn’t want to train their staff on LinkedIn, because then they’d be headhunted. My answer: well actually, your staff are your biggest fans if they become your brand ambassadors.
The questions below are built on the findings of a new UK report, The CEO blind spot, published by B2B Marketing and its Propolis community. The research surveyed 150 CEOs and senior leaders at B2B (business to business) companies with revenue above £20 million in June 2026. I haven’t seen a South African equivalent yet. If you run marketing or sales in a medium or large business here, I doubt much of it will surprise you.
If you’re building the plan these answers sit in, start with our guide to a board-ready B2B marketing plan.
How do you prove marketing’s value when you’re not in the revenue forecast?
Marketers prove value from outside the forecast by bringing the board something the forecast is missing: what buyers are doing and asking before they ever speak to sales. Ask for a seat in the forecasting conversation with that insight in hand, rather than asking for credit after the numbers are set.
Plenty of marketers are stuck in a loop here. B2B Marketing and Propolis found that 76% of business leaders don’t involve marketing throughout their full revenue forecasting process, and 65% don’t involve it in their full growth strategy decision-making (The CEO blind spot, 2026). The report points out that marketers are often expected to prove their commercial value before they’re given a say in commercial decisions.
What to say: “I’d like to bring buyer insight into the next forecast review. Here’s what the companies in our pipeline were reading and asking before sales met them.”
What evidence to bring: real, named accounts (the specific companies you sell to or want to win) rather than made-up buyer profiles, which marketers call personas. Show which ones you want to win, where growth should come from (new customers, or existing ones buying more), and what you’re hearing from them.
What to avoid: asking for a seat because marketing “should be there”. Boards make room for people who bring something they need.
How do you answer a CEO who says sales drives growth, not marketing?
Agree that sales closes the deal, then show what happened before the first meeting. In a long B2B sale, the buyer has often heard of you and read your thinking before sales gets involved. Make that earlier work visible without trying to take the deal away from sales.
In the same survey, 77% of leaders think sales is a bigger driver of growth than marketing, and 81% say marketing budgets are harder to justify than sales budgets (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)). The report’s name for the hidden part is ghost revenue: revenue that marketing helped create, credited somewhere else.
What to say: “Sales closed it. Here’s how the buyer first found us, and what they’d seen before they called.”
What evidence to bring: a handful of recent wins traced back to the buyer’s first contact with you, agreed with the salesperson who closed each one.
What to avoid: arguing over percentages of credit. Nobody on the board wants to referee that fight.
How do you protect brand building when the board only wants leads?
Protect brand building by presenting it as next year’s pipeline, with milestones the board can check along the way. Leads are the harvest. Brand is the planting, and a business that only harvests eventually runs short. Show both in the same plan, in the same business terms.
76% of leaders say they can no longer justify marketing investment unless it generates leads (named people or companies who’ve shown interest in buying), and just as many are putting short-term sales ahead of long-term brand building (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)). The report warns that this pattern makes growth harder to sustain and repeat.
What to say: “Here’s what we’re doing for this quarter’s pipeline, and here’s what we’re doing so next year’s buyers already know us.”
What evidence to bring: milestones that lead towards revenue, such as more of the right people engaging with you, or target companies starting conversations. Where results take time, the report recommends measurable milestones that show progress towards commercial results.
What to avoid: defending brand with the word “awareness” on its own. Without a link to revenue, it sounds like a cost.
How do you report marketing results without overstating your impact?
Report marketing’s contribution alongside sales, never instead of it, and claim less than you could. Boards trust a modest number that sales has signed off far more than a big number that marketing worked out alone. Credibility built this way grows over time, and one inflated claim can undo a year of it.
76% of leaders believe marketers overstate their impact on revenue (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)). Marketers seem to feel the gap too: in a separate survey of marketers in the same report, only 18% said they can consistently show business impact to the C-suite, the top executive team.
What to say: “Marketing contributed to these deals, and sales agrees with this list.”
What evidence to bring: a short, joint view of results rather than a marketing-only dashboard. We’ve written about why your marketing report may be misleading you and what to show instead.
What to avoid: counting every deal where a prospect once clicked on something.
What does “speaking the language of business” mean for a marketer?
Speaking the language of business means talking about revenue, margin, pipeline, keeping customers and the cost of winning new ones, instead of clicks, reach and campaigns. Boards use those words to make every other decision. Marketers who report in them get heard. The rest get filed under support.
88% of leaders think marketers would be more credible if they spoke the language of business, and 79% want them to talk less about creativity and more about results (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)). Plenty of marketers were never trained in finance. It can be learnt.
A few translations to start with:
- Instead of “reach went up”, say which target companies are now engaging, and how many of them are in the pipeline.
- Instead of “the campaign performed well”, say what it cost and which deals it fed.
- Instead of “brand awareness”, say what share of new conversations started with the buyer already knowing your name.
Before the board pack goes out: cut it down. The report recommends a small set of meaningful business measures over a long list of marketing metrics.
What to avoid: jargon. If the CFO (chief financial officer) has to ask what a term means, it doesn’t belong in the pack.
How do you answer a board that wants to cut marketing because of AI?
Answer an AI-driven cut by separating what AI does well, such as drafting and admin, from the work it can’t do. Building relationships and deciding where to compete still need people. Then offer the time AI saves as capacity for growth work, before someone books it as a saving.
75% of leaders have already reduced marketing investment or headcount because of AI, and 80% believe they can keep cutting marketing budgets without affecting growth (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)). The cuts go well beyond admin. Thought leadership (articles and talks that share an expert’s point of view under their own name), market research, customer relationship building and strategic marketing planning all appear on the report’s list of areas where AI is driving cuts.
What to say: “AI has made us faster. Here’s the growth work we’ll put that time into.”
What evidence to bring: one or two named growth jobs the saved time will pay for, with an owner and a date.
What to avoid: fighting AI itself. The report is clear that AI, used well, can improve creativity, productivity and commercial impact.
What happens to the pipeline when marketing gets cut?
When marketing gets cut, the pipeline often looks fine for a while, because today’s deals started months ago. The gap arrives later, and by then nobody links it back to the cut. We call this ghost revenue in reverse: the loss is as hard to see as the original contribution was.
B2B Marketing and Propolis make a related point. When growth is credited to the moment revenue appears, future investment follows that pattern, and the work that makes future buyers want what you sell gets less attention (The CEO blind spot, 2026).
What to say: “If we cut this now, here’s roughly when we’d expect to feel it, and what we’ll watch to catch it early.”
What evidence to bring: the length of your typical sales cycle, so the board can see the time lag for itself.
What to avoid: predicting doom. Show the lag, offer early warning signs and let the board decide.
Should AI write your thought leadership when the budget is cut?
AI can help draft thought leadership, but it shouldn’t replace the person behind it. Thought leadership works because a real expert puts their name to a real opinion. Take that away and buyers have no reason to trust the piece, or to remember who wrote it.
Thought leadership and marketing operations (the systems and admin that keep marketing running) share the top spot on the list of areas where AI is driving cuts to B2B marketing investment (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)). We’ve written about why human-led AI beats AI-only marketing.
What to say: “Let’s use AI to save our experts time, and keep their voice and judgement in every piece.”
What evidence to bring: what your experts know that nobody else can say. Patterns they see across clients count, and so does local market knowledge, or a strong opinion they’ll put their name to. Our B2B Ambassador Programme helps experts share that in their own words.
What to avoid: publishing generic AI copy under an executive’s name.
How do sales and marketing stop arguing about lead quality?
Sales and marketing stop arguing about lead quality when they share a target, agree what a good lead looks like and work from the same pipeline report. While each side keeps its own scoreboard, both can be right about the other and the business still loses.
Asked what holds marketing back at board level, about four in ten leaders chose unclear alignment with sales, the most common answer. Difficulty proving ROI (return on investment) was chosen by fewer than one in five (B2B Marketing and Propolis, The CEO blind spot (2026)). The report recommends shared objectives, shared measures of success and a common view of pipeline, revenue and growth.
What to say, together: “Here’s the pipeline we’re both accountable for.”
What evidence to bring: one joint report, presented by the marketing and sales leads side by side. Our piece on aligning sales and marketing goes deeper.
What to avoid: celebrating wins separately. When a deal closes, let sales tell the board how marketing helped. It lands better coming from them.
Frequently asked questions
What is the CEO blind spot in B2B marketing?
The CEO blind spot is the gap between how marketers see their role and how CEOs see it. In a survey of 150 B2B leaders for the UK report The CEO blind spot, by B2B Marketing and Propolis (2026), 84% saw marketing as a support function rather than a growth driver. The report describes three blind spots: ghost revenue, the credibility crunch and the AI value trap.
What is ghost revenue?
Ghost revenue is revenue that marketing helped create but that gets credited elsewhere, usually to sales, because sales is closest to the moment the deal closes. The CEO blind spot report by B2B Marketing and Propolis (2026) uses the term.
Does the CEO blind spot research apply to South Africa?
The CEO blind spot is UK research, and we haven’t found a South African equivalent yet. The pressures it describes, such as sales-led boardrooms, budgets tied to leads and AI used as a reason to cut, are ones medium and large South African B2B companies are likely to recognise. When you quote the figures, say they come from UK research.
What should a marketer bring to a board meeting?
Bring a few business measures rather than many marketing metrics, insight about the real companies you want to win, and a view of results that sales has agreed with. Speak in revenue, margin, pipeline and cost.
How can marketers become more commercially credible?
Learn how the business makes money, report in the board’s terms, claim less than you could and share results all year rather than only at budget time. The CEO blind spot report found 83% of leaders would trust marketers more if they showed stronger commercial understanding.
A last word, over lunch
If we were having lunch and you asked me where to start, I’d say this. Pick the one question on this list your CEO or board has actually asked you. Sit down with your sales lead before the next meeting and prepare the answer together, in rand and pipeline, with evidence you both stand behind. You don’t need answers to all nine at once.
Our marketing audit looks at your whole B2B marketing strategy, including whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers mention and cite you. A LadyBugz strategist checks every report by hand.
Questions? Contact me at noleen@ladybugz.co.za
Noleen Thompson, Managing Director and Founder, LadyBugz Marketing
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