The Marketing Mindset That’s Wasting Your Budget

Put a dollar into marketing, and get leads out. Put in more dollars, and get more leads. If the leads stop coming, change the campaign, increase the budget or try another channel.

This is how many companies expect marketing to work. I call it the “vending machine” mindset. It is also an easy way to waste a marketing budget.

That mindset is particularly damaging in B2B SaaS, where buying decisions can take months, involve multiple people and depend on circumstances outside a marketer’s control. Yet companies continue to evaluate marketing as though every campaign should produce an immediate transaction.

A better analogy is an investment account.

You make deliberate investments over time. Some produce an immediate return, while others gradually increase the likelihood that customers will remember, trust and choose you when the timing is right. If you invest consistently in the right things, those effects compound.

Eventually, you stop having to manufacture every sales opportunity, and more customers start coming to you.

Your customers aren’t always ready to buy

Imagine you sell software that helps companies improve employee onboarding. One of your ideal customers sees a LinkedIn post from your company explaining why new hires often struggle during their first 90 days. They read it, agree with it and keep scrolling.

Did the marketing fail? It might look that way if you measure success only through clicks, demo requests or leads generated that day. But consider what happens three months later.

The company begins to ramp up hiring. New employees aren’t ramping fast enough, managers are frustrated, and leadership suddenly has an urgent onboarding problem.

Your prospect remembers the company that has spent months helping them understand that exact problem. They visit your website, share your content with a colleague and add you to their shortlist.

That is marketing working. The difficulty is that the customer decides when the investment pays off. Not you.

The vending-machine model confuses attention with intent

Companies should expect accountability from marketing. The problem begins when accountability becomes an expectation that every activity can be connected neatly to an immediate lead, meeting or sale.

That expectation encourages marketers to focus almost entirely on people who are ready to act now. Not only does that group actively shopping today represent only part of your potential market, but they’ve also usually already made up their mind about which vendor they want to work with.

On the other hand, people can encounter your company repeatedly, and you can shape their perceptions even while they may not take an action you can track. They might read an article without completing a form, hear your CEO on a podcast without visiting your website or see a customer recommend your product without requesting a demo.

Those interactions can still influence what people know, believe and remember.

That matters because B2B buying doesn’t follow a linear sequence of trackable clicks. It is human behavior shaped by a messy mix of need, timing, trust and memory. An attribution report may capture a sliver of that behavior, but it cannot capture all of it.

Your marketing strategy has to account for what you can measure, but the “immeasurables” are usually the money-makers and where buying decisions are won or lost.

The alternative isn’t unaccountable brand spending

This is where the conversation often goes wrong. When marketers argue that every dollar should not be expected to generate an immediate lead, some executives hear, “Marketing shouldn’t have to prove that it works.”

That is not the message. Companies should be highly selective about where they invest. In fact, the long-term nature of marketing makes strategy more important, not less. Because these investments take time to produce lasting results, spending months reinforcing the wrong message can be expensive to correct.

The strategic question changes from “How do we generate more leads this month?” to “What do we want our target customers to think of us for, and how can we strengthen that association over time?”

Answering that question requires discipline. You need a clearly defined customer, a strong understanding of what matters to them and a problem worth becoming known for. Then you need enough consistency for customers to associate that problem with your company.

Find the problem you want to own

Strong marketing strategies often begin with a problem rather than a product — but not just any problem. Look for a problem with two characteristics: high awareness and high priority.

High awareness means customers recognize the problem when they experience it. You do not have to spend enormous amounts of money convincing them that it exists.

High priority means the problem becomes important enough that customers are willing to act.

Both characteristics matter. Customers may recognize an irritating problem but feel no urgency to fix it. They may also face an important problem without understanding it clearly enough to search for a solution.

Your opportunity sits where awareness and priority overlap.

Your product might solve 20 problems. Your website might describe 50 features, and your sales deck might make a dozen value propositions. But trying to become known for everything makes it harder to become known for anything.

Find the problem that matters disproportionately to the customers you most want to reach. Then build a clear connection between that problem and your company.

Create pull instead of constantly pushing

Most B2B companies spend enormous amounts of energy pushing. They push another email, ask for another meeting, place prospects into another nurture sequence and put another offer into someone’s feed. Sales teams follow up, marketing teams retarget, and both sides work to keep prospects moving.

Some of that will always be necessary. But good marketing creates something more valuable alongside it: pull.

A customer encounters a problem and thinks of you. They search for your company by name, recommend you during an internal conversation or forward your content to a colleague. When they arrive at your website, they already understand what you do and why it might matter.

Those prospects enter the buying process differently from people who clicked an ad for the first time five minutes ago. Why? Because marketing has already done part of the selling.

Sales does not have to manufacture as much trust from scratch. Conversion becomes easier because prospects arrive with context. Customer acquisition becomes less dependent on continually purchasing the next click.

Start with customers, not campaigns

This strategy depends on choosing the right problem, and you should not choose it in a conference room.

Talk to customers, prospects and people who considered your product but bought something else. Talk to companies in your ideal customer profile that have never heard of you.

Ask which problems occupy their attention. Find out what has recently become more important, what triggers them to start looking for a solution and how they describe those moments in their own words.

Then look for the intersection of three things:

• A problem your customers recognize
• A problem important enough to act on
• A problem your product is unusually good at solving

That is where I would build the marketing strategy.

The goal is not simply to make someone see an ad on Tuesday and request a demo on Wednesday. It is to earn a place in their memory before the buying process begins.

Then, six months from now — or perhaps six weeks — something changes. The problem appears, the stakes rise, and the customer decides it is time to act.

Before they search Google, ask ChatGPT, text a colleague or build a vendor shortlist, your company is already sitting at the top of their mind.

Put a dollar into marketing, and get leads out. Put in more dollars, and get more leads. If the leads stop coming, change the campaign, increase the budget or try another channel.

This is how many companies expect marketing to work. I call it the “vending machine” mindset. It is also an easy way to waste a marketing budget.

That mindset is particularly damaging in B2B SaaS, where buying decisions can take months, involve multiple people and depend on circumstances outside a marketer’s control. Yet companies continue to evaluate marketing as though every campaign should produce an immediate transaction.