5 Marketing Questions Every CEO Is Afraid to Ask

Marketing is a lot like oxygen. You don’t notice it when it’s there. You only notice it when it’s gone.

If you’re a CEO, a business owner, or on the board, you’ve probably asked: “What exactly are we getting for our marketing spend?”

It feels like a fair question. Because unlike sales quotas or production output, marketing isn’t neat and tidy. It’s slippery. Deals in B2B don’t close in a week—they stretch across months or years. Multiple people sit at the buying table. Countless touchpoints pile up and blur together. By the time the deal closes, it’s nearly impossible to isolate the one dinner, email, or webinar that made it happen.

And so, when pressure builds and the CFO sharpens the pencil, marketing is the first expense that looks optional. Sales has numbers. Operations has benchmarks. Finance has models. Marketing? Too often, it feels invisible.

But oxygen is invisible too. Until you run out.

1. Can a single campaign really claim the credit for a million-dollar deal?

The math isn’t neat. It’s not a straight line from “we ran a campaign” to “we closed a deal.”

Here’s why:

• Long sales cycles. Enterprise deals aren’t sprints. They’re marathons. Sometimes ultra-marathons. By the time a contract gets signed, the webinar from last spring feels like ancient history. And yet, that tiny spark may have been the moment your company entered the buyer’s orbit.

  
  

• Too many decision-makers. The average B2B deal now involves 6–10 stakeholders. Each one has different priorities, and each consumes different content. The CTO may remember the whitepaper. The VP of Ops may point to the LinkedIn campaign. The CFO may recall a dinner at an industry event. The truth? All of it mattered.

  
  

• Attribution is messy. First-touch, last-touch, multi-touch. Each model tries to simplify the story. None captures reality. It’s like crediting a single violin for the entire symphony.

  
  

• Invisible interactions. The whispered referral. The handshake at a trade show. The coffee meeting that never made it into Salesforce. None of it shows up in the dashboard, yet these are the nudges that move million-dollar deals forward.

  
  

When the pressure’s on, marketing is the first expense that looks optional. After all, the spreadsheet is clean. But be careful. The absence of proof isn’t always proof of absence.

Marketing is driving ROI. It just refuses to show up in tidy rows and columns.

So the question is, how does marketing actually show its impact? 

And more importantly, how can it do so in a way that business leaders like you can see, trust, and measure?

Because if marketing is fuel, we need a dashboard that tells us how far the car can go. Not just how much gas we poured in.

In B2B, that means looking beyond the easy numbers—the clicks, the impressions, the emails sent. Those are activity logs, not business outcomes. What matters is the stuff that ties directly to growth: how marketing accelerates deals, influences revenue, and increases the lifetime value of a customer.

The challenge—and the opportunity—is to make the invisible visible. To take what feels like a fog of webinars, dinners, ads, and whitepapers, and connect it to the thing every leader cares about: revenue.

That’s where the work begins.

2. Are you looking at the correct “success” metrics?

Most leaders see marketing as lead generation. A way to fill the top of the funnel. A numbers game. More emails, more ads, more names on a list.

But that’s a narrow view. Marketing isn’t just about filling the funnel, it’s about fueling the pipeline. It’s about accelerating deals already in motion, influencing the decision-makers who matter, and tying every effort back to revenue.

The problem isn’t that marketing doesn’t create ROI. The problem is that we’ve been looking at the wrong scoreboard.

There are really three levels of marketing ROI:

• Activity metrics. The easy stuff. Emails sent. Impressions served. Followers gained. These are vanity metrics that make us feel busy, but they rarely tell us if the business is growing.

  
  

• Influence metrics. More useful. How many leads entered the pipeline. How many opportunities were touched by marketing. It shows that marketing played a role, but it still stops short of the finish line.

  
  

• Revenue metrics. The gold standard. Deals closed. Revenue generated. Pipeline velocity accelerated. This is where marketing speaks the CFO’s language because it proves contribution, not just activity.

  
  

Stop treating marketing as a cost center and start treating it as a revenue driver.

That means executives have to demand a new kind of reporting. Less “look how many clicks we got.” More “here’s how much revenue moved because of what we did.”

How exactly do we do that? 

3. How can we prove ROI in B2B marketing?

By building a direct line between activity and business outcomes.

Here’s how that works in practice:

• Define the pipeline clearly. Break the buyer’s journey into stages: awareness → lead → qualified opportunity → closed-won. Then mark where marketing has influence. That executive dinner? It didn’t create the deal, but it accelerated it from stuck to moving. That matters.

  
  

• Connect systems. CRMs (like Salesforce) and marketing automation (like HubSpot or Marketo) have to talk to each other. If they don’t, you’ll never see the chain of touchpoints that led to revenue. Integration turns anecdotes into data.

  
  

• Adopt multi-touch attribution. First-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay—none are perfect, but they’re better than pretending only the final handshake mattered. The goal isn’t to crown a single hero; it’s to show the ensemble that moved the deal forward.

  
  

• Measure pipeline influence, not just leads. A dinner with the CFO may not create a new lead, but if it shortens the sales cycle of a $2M opportunity, that’s ROI. Marketing has to claim its role in velocity, not just volume.

  
  

• Track customer lifetime value (CLV). The first sale isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. If marketing attracted the kind of customer who buys again and again, that influence compounds over years.

  
  

This is how marketing moves from “we ran some ads” to “we influenced $5M in pipeline and shortened the cycle by 20%.”

And that’s a number every CEO understands.

4. If we cut marketing tomorrow, would revenue really drop?

It’s the same question a farmer might ask:“If I stop watering the fields today, will the crops die tomorrow?”

Of course not. Tomorrow, the plants will look fine. Next week, maybe too. You could even convince yourself that water was optional. But wait a little longer, and you’ll see what happens. The soil dries. Growth slows. The harvest never comes.

That’s what happens when you cut marketing.

Marketing isn’t an on/off switch. It’s a compounding investment. It’s the water that seeps into the soil, building roots you can’t see until the day they stop holding you up.

So how do you answer the question?

• Scenario modeling. Imagine skipping this year’s industry event. That’s not just a calendar hole, it’s $5M of pipeline that never starts growing. Imagine cutting content. The deals already in motion, the ones hanging by a thread, don’t move forward. They stall. How much of that harvest are you willing to sacrifice?

  
  

• Investment framing. Marketing is never about today. It’s about tomorrow, and the quarter after that. Stop it now, and yes, you’ll look good on paper this month. But by next year, you’re running on fumes. Ask yourself: do you really want to build a company on last season’s soil?

  
  

The illusion is that cutting marketing saves money. The reality is that it starves growth. You’re not just trimming expenses, you’re trading next year’s harvest for today’s comfort.

So the better question isn’t, “Can we cut marketing and still make it through this quarter?”The better question is, “Without planting, watering, and feeding tomorrow’s pipeline, how long before we run out?”

5. If marketing is oxygen, can you afford to hold your breath?

When you treat marketing like overhead, it behaves like overhead. When you treat it like fuel, it drives revenue farther than you thought possible.

This is the decision in front of every CEO. You can cut marketing, treat it as an expense, and watch your business slowly suffocate. Or you can see it for what it truly is, oxygen. Invisible at times, hard to measure, but absolutely essential for growth.

No one notices oxygen until it’s gone. And no one doubts its power when the room starts to feel empty. The same is true of marketing. Without it, your pipeline slows, your brand weakens, and your competitors pull ahead.

At Craft (Strategic Marketing & Branding Strategies), we help leaders like you stop starving the business of air and start fueling it with measurable, growth-driving marketing strategies. Because thriving isn’t about shaving lines off today’s spreadsheet, it’s about ensuring you can breathe tomorrow.

Don’t let your business run out of oxygen. Let’s talk.