The Machine, aka Marketing or Revenue Operations, is the engine that makes your marketing plan and campaigns hum. What happens when the machine breaks down? Here’s five!
For years, we’ve talked about the Five F’in B2B Marketing Fundamentals: the master plan, the knowledge, the story, the campaign, and the machine. They’re the core workstreams every CMO needs to actively own if marketing is going to deliver awareness, revenue, and trust.
We’ve spent plenty of time explaining what good looks like. But what happens when one of those fundamentals breaks?
This is the first in a series exploring what failure looks like when marketing fundamentals are ignored—and we’re starting with the machine. Not because it’s the most glamorous, but because when it fails, everything else quietly unravels.
The machine is the engine room of marketing and/or revenue operations: data, technology, analytics, processes, and people. When it works, marketing feels fluid and productive. When it doesn’t, marketing feels like a hamster wheel powered by frustration.
Here are five very real ways marketing fails when the machine is broken.
Fail #1: Marketing Earns a Poor Reputation Internally
Marketing rarely thinks of itself as a service organization, but internally, that’s exactly what it is.
Creative services, content, events, web updates, digital assets, campaign execution—much of the organization relies on marketing to deliver these things on time and at quality. When the machine behind those services is broken, internal customers feel it immediately.
Poor technology creates bottlenecks. Broken workflows lead to endless rewrites. Approval processes stall. No one knows turnaround times, capacity, or priorities. And because there’s no visibility or measurement, frustration turns into distrust.
This isn’t about brand awareness or pipeline—yet. It’s about credibility. Internal customer satisfaction is the foundation on which trust is built. If marketing can’t reliably deliver internally, it will never be trusted to deliver strategically.
And because marketing is often viewed as a cost center rather than a profit center, a poor internal reputation comes with consequences: budgets get cut, headcount freezes, and strategic ambitions shrink.
The irony? When the machine works well, marketing doesn’t feel like a hamster wheel at all. People spend their time productively, expectations are clear, and internal confidence rises.
Fail #2: Campaigns Miss Their Mark
Campaigns are where a broken machine becomes impossible to ignore.
Modern B2B campaigns are deeply machine dependent. Content management, web experiences, ad tech, marketing automation, email, analytics, attribution—all of it must work together. When it doesn’t, campaigns fail in subtle but expensive ways.
Assets don’t get reused. Messages go to the wrong personas. Lists are inaccurate. Testing breaks down. Reporting is unreliable. And when campaigns underperform, the instinct is often to blame the tactic—when the real problem is the machine underneath.
This is where many teams make a critical mistake: they assume they have a technology problem. But scratch the surface and you usually find something else—broken processes, bad data, or teams that were never properly trained to use the tools they already have.
Campaigns don’t fail because a single channel underperforms. They fail because campaigning is holistic, and the machine that weaves everything together is misaligned.
Fail #3: Sales Productivity Suffers
Sales may want a human relationship with marketing, but in reality, most of their support comes through systems.
Account data, engagement insights, opportunity handoffs, sales content, attribution—this all flows through the marketing machine. When it breaks, Sales feels unsupported, and marketing gets blamed.
Leads don’t make sense. Content exists but can’t be found. Data isn’t trusted. Attribution becomes a battlefield. Time gets wasted arguing instead of selling.
In these environments, pipeline becomes unpredictable—and that’s fatal. The commercial team always has the ear of leadership, and marketing will never win an argument about why revenue is stalled.
This is why revenue operations has emerged as a discipline. Sales and marketing are too interdependent for separate, fragile machines. When marketing drops the ball operationally, sales efficiency drops with it—and good salespeople don’t stick around in systems that make their jobs harder than necessary.
Fail #4: Customers Lose Trust
Trust isn’t built through clever messaging alone. It’s built through recognition—knowing who the customer is, what they own, where they are in their lifecycle, and how they’ve interacted with you.
That knowledge lives in the machine.
When systems don’t work, customers feel it. They receive generic communications. They’re asked for information they’ve already provided. Sensitive messages go to the wrong audience. Sales and support show up uninformed.
As organizations scale, these failures become more damaging. Personal relationships are replaced by systems, and if those systems are broken, the experience collapses.
We’ve seen versions of this before—early social media teams acting as service channels without access to service systems, or SDRs running disconnected prospecting tools that clash with existing account relationships. In each case, the result is the same: inconsistent experiences that quietly erode trust.
You can’t build customer trust without a reliable, shared view of the customer—and that’s squarely the machine’s responsibility.
Fail #5: Marketing Loses Business Credibility
This is the inevitable conclusion of the first four fails.
When marketing struggles to deliver internally, execute campaigns, support sales, and protect customer trust, it loses credibility as a business function. Not just emotionally—but operationally.
The machine isn’t just about execution; it’s about measurement and learning. If marketing can’t analyze performance, explain results, and course-correct with confidence, it won’t earn a seat at the table.
What follows is a dangerous spiral: more scrutiny, more reporting demands, more attribution debates, and less strategic freedom. Marketing becomes defensive. Teams lose confidence. Innovation slows. Talent leaves.
Eventually, marketing spends more time justifying its existence than driving growth.
Why The Machine Matters More Than You Think
The machine underpins every other marketing fundamental. Without it, even the best strategy, story, or campaign will fail to scale.
More importantly, a broken machine doesn’t just hurt outcomes—it hurts people. Teams lose confidence. Leaders lose trust. Organizations stop believing marketing can make big swings.
And confident marketing requires confident marketers.
Fixing the machine isn’t about buying more technology. It’s about aligning technology, processes, data, analytics, and skills around clear business goals. When those pieces work together, marketing earns credibility, trust, and the freedom to focus on what actually moves the business forward.
In the next posts in this series, we’ll explore what happens when the other fundamentals fail. But if the machine is broken, none of the rest will matter.
No matter how strong the idea, a stalled engine won’t take you anywhere.
You can listen to me and Ian discuss these fails on the podcast
Photo by michal-matlon-YTKh06aL7to-unsplash.jpg on www.unsplash.com
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