Good Tech Needs Good Planing…
B2B tech founders pour themselves into building the best tech they can with the available resources and are often driven by technical vision and innovation. This is a commendable vocation, but any tech solution must be aligned with a workable business strategy. Unfortunately, this is often not the case, and even the cleverest founders with the most advanced technologies can lack direction and planning. It all starts with understanding the market by having an accurate definition of who the customer is and their specific needs.
Marketers Are Not Magicians
It’s no good if, after months or years of product development, founders then turn to marketing as a kind of magic wand, hoping that a brilliant campaign or viral launch will generate leads, convert interest and unlock growth. I have seen this all too often, but no amount of clever copy, sleek branding or paid ads can save a poorly developed strategy. If your product doesn’t solve a real-world problem that businesspeople are actively trying to fix, no amount of marketing can make leads magically materialise. If market demand doesn’t exist, then nothing can save a founder who, beyond building great tech, doesn’t really know what to do. The number of times I have been asked to pull leads out of a hat emphasises this is a real and common problem for small tech businesses.
Do You Need a Megaphone or a Compass?
Too many B2B tech startups treat marketing as something to bolt on after the product is built and the strategy set. The usual course of events is that a product is created, followed by some idea of pricing and then it’s thrown over to marketing with the instructions to make it fly. This is totally backwards. The marketing function must start with product and market analysis to gain sufficient knowledge if it is to stand a chance of successfully promoting a solution. Setting the direction correctly from the start must be a priority before any outreach campaigns are created. Working blind, without proper knowledge of what the solution is, who it’s for and why the customer should care is a futile exercise.
Market First Approach
Your marketing team must be at the table when strategy is being created, not just when it’s time to execute. Why? Because your positioning, messaging and go-to-market (GTM) decisions must be rooted in how real people understand and value what you’ve built. This isn’t fluff; it’s fundamental to understand the market before unleashing your promotional activity. If marketing is isolated from strategic thinking and planning, you end up with noise and there is more than enough flatulence in the tech industry already. Your campaigns may even sound good, look good and get traffic, but you will fail to connect with buyers who have real buying intent.
The Cost of Building in Isolation
Founders with a strong technical background often suffer from what we might call cool tech syndrome. You build something powerful, elegant and even revolutionary, but then what? Crickets. A few pats on the back from beta testers and even some early success with visionary customers, but it just never quite gets off the ground. After a while and much unrewarded effort, it’s clear no one’s buying. Why? It’s not because your salespeople are bad or can’t handle objections; it’s because people may admire novelty, but they will only pay for real solutions.
What, Who and Why
Your product may be smart, and it may be cutting-edge, but if you’re not communicating why it matters to the right buyer, you’re dead in the water. You must hit your prospects between the eyes with a clear value proposition about your solution, stating in simple terms:
- What it is and who it’s for
- Why it matters to them
- How will it positively change the lives of the people who use it
*Notice that none of the above talks about ‘how’ the solution works or requires any technical explanation or architecture details.
This information must form your top-level messaging, not next week, not in a whitepaper buried three clicks deep in your website, but immediately, on your homepage, your presentation decks and in your demos. It must be consistently and relentlessly across all your communications. You cannot have one version of your story on your website and then say something different when you present your sales deck. Everything you say and do must align and be a constant reinforcement of your story. If your sales opportunities are not converting, then your team must be asking daily: who is this for and why do they need it? Don’t stop asking until you have better answers.
Customer Conversations Are the Source of Strategy
Forget perfection and forget product polish. In the early days of your startup, the best strategy is listening, and to do this, you must get in front of the right people:
- Listen to prospects.
- Listen to lost leads.
- Listen to those who chose a competitor.
Most importantly, when you have them, listen to your customers and make sure you know the reasons:
- Why they ‘really’ chose you.
- What they believe the true business benefits are.
- What is it you do well or better than anyone else.
- What needs improving or is missing.
Marketing teams must lead or sit in on these conversations, as they are goldmines of information and will teach you more than you could ever learn running campaigns. This is how you understand the following key factors:
- The important words real buyers use to describe their pain.
- The stakes of solving (or ignoring) their problem(s).
- What they’ve tried and failed at to fix the problem.
- What success looks like for them.
- Who they need to convince internally.
Armed with this rich market intelligence, your messaging becomes sharper, and your use cases align with real-world business goals. This is the process that helps you to understand what buyers want to hear, not just what you want to say. It’s not about selling harder; it’s about resonating deeper.
Marketing’s Role in Defining Product-Market Fit
Product-market fit is not just a technical achievement; it’s a strategic one, and marketing is central to it. When you collaborate with marketing early, you avoid building features no one cares about and can prioritise messaging and positioning based on real customer input. This makes it possible to develop use cases and GTM plans around actual demand, not imagined excitement. The job of marketing isn’t just to go get leads, it’s to help define the right customer and create the right context for how your solution fits into their world. Generating leads is not that difficult; you can always buy traffic or build a list. However, generating intent-driven, qualified leads is strategy in action, positioning in action, and that’s marketing done right.
Clarity Always Beats Cleverness
Founders often want to sound disruptive, next-gen, game-changing or anything that they believe elevates their ego and status. This can be very unhelpful when crafting your messaging, because if a buyer needs to read your website twice to figure out what you do, they’re already gone.
Your messaging must be:
- Clear – instantly understandable
- Focused – aimed at a specific problem
- Outcome-oriented – showing the business result
- Relevant – tuned to the buyer’s role and responsibility
This clarity is what drives effective and high-converting campaigns, with shorter sales cycles and promotes trust early in the engagement.
Strategy and Marketing Are One Conversation
The most successful B2B tech startups don’t separate strategy from marketing because they weave them together. They know that good marketing is the expression of a great strategy, not a patch for a weak one. All founders and marketers at a B2B tech startup must ask themselves if they have talked to customers lately. It’s imperative that you continually reflect on the following questions:
- Do we know what problem we solve?
- Is the customer willing to pay to solve that problem?
- Do we speak in the customer’s language and connect with them emotionally?
- Does our messaging demonstrate how we make organisations that use our solution perform better?
Putting it simply, you can’t fix a bad strategy with good marketing, and many startups have tried and failed. Strategy and marketing are built together. They must be evidence based, grounded in reality, tested using customer interaction, developed using insights from the market, and driven by defined business goals. The result is not just that you will gain market traction for your solution, but you will transform your business.
You may want to read: “How to Define Your Target Market.”
