Many manufacturing CEOs take the view that because their product is so great, everyone will love it and there won’t be any need to invest in marketing.

This can work, up to a point. Relationships and reputation can absolutely carry a manufacturing business in its early stages. But marketing has to be put in place for true growth scale, even if a company believes that it has superior products.

A tendency of manufacturers is to look at marketing-led systems as optional. There are usually one or more of six key habits mastered by the best technology companies that manufacturing companies miss.

If you've been following this blog series, you know I come back to one idea constantly: marketing has to be built according to a strategy, and executed as a system that drives profitable and sustainable revenue. The move from small to mid-market is where the absence of that system shows up most painfully. 

Here are the five most common reasons why revenue growth stalls as companies move from small to mid-market, and how to address each one. 

The software market is being heavily disrupted by AI, but I believe that the most dire predictions for software are overstated.

Great software, with AI as a genuine enhancement, is going to continue to have opportunities in the market. Mediocre products will lose share, and many will disappear. And so will companies that miss the mark on how they go to market in this new environment.

AI is a powerful enhancement when it solves a real customer problem, improves the user experience, or creates efficiency that the customer can measure. The challenge is in marketing those enhancements honestly in a marketplace that has been burned by overblown claims.

The decision to bring in a marketing strategist, whether as a fractional CMO, a consultant, or a full-time hire, is a significant one. The right person can change your growth trajectory. The wrong one can cost you months of time and thousands of dollars in misdirected effort.

So how do you decide who the right hire is? Here are five questions every small and mid-sized business leader should ask before making the hire.

For business owners and CEOs in Greater Atlanta and throughout the state of Georgia, growth is real and visible. But many of the companies riding this growth wave are not equipped with the marketing strategy they need to sustain growth in all market circumstances.

The Customer Journey is how you understand the path your Ideal Customer Profile takes from operating in the status quo all the way through signing a contract and beyond. In business-to-business (B2B) marketing, it's the most important exercise you can run, because almost every downstream decision depends on what you find.

Voice of Customer (VoC) is the discipline that turns customer conversations into organizational intelligence. It’s a structured, ongoing practice of collecting, analyzing, and acting on what your customers think, feel, need, and experience. When done well, VoC feeds directly into your ICP refinement, your positioning, your messaging, your product decisions, your demand generation strategy, and your customer expansion efforts.

Software as a Service (SaaS) companies rode broad digitization trends at exactly the right time, and built a powerful economic model based on subscriptions.

After the initial sale, onboarding period, and consistent quality of service delivery, SaaS buyers continue to pay recurring fees, usually on a monthly basis. That recurring revenue compounds over time and scales growth faster than most equivalent businesses that depend on one-time transactions.

Not every business has a built-in subscription model, but the philosophy behind subscription applies to nearly every company: build a loyal customer base and retain it through a "subscription-like" approach that fits your business.

Every CEO says, "we need more leads," but this is often not the real marketing problem.

The larger issue is related to demand generation, and the reason many companies struggle with it is that they treat it as a single activity when it’s actually two.

Demand generation is the practice of building sustained, repeatable interest in your offering, and converting that interest into sales pipeline. Importantly, it has two distinct components: demand creation and demand capture.

“We need more leads.”

It’s the most common request I hear from CEOs and business owners when revenue isn’t growing the way they want it to. It makes sense on the surface, but in many cases, lead volume isn’t actually the problem. There are times when it’s a symptom of something deeper and more strategic, and pouring more leads into a system that isn’t working only amplifies the underlying issues.

Your Point of View (POV) is the articulation of how a specific problem for your customers gets solved, told from the perspective of someone who fully understands the scope and impact of the problem.

A strong POV gives you credibility with your target customers, and over time it becomes the foundation of your company’s brand and content engine.

If your ICP tells you who to pursue, and your offering alignment tells you what to lead with, your POV tells you how to talk about it in a way that earns trust, creates differentiation, and drives action among your buyers.

In our last post, we walked through what an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is, how to build one for B2B and B2C businesses, and where many companies go wrong in the exercise.

But defining your ICP is only the first step in developing a marketing strategy. The next question is just as critical, and it’s one that many companies spend very little time on:

Do your offerings actually meet the needs of the customers you’ve identified as ideal?

Understanding your customer is the single most important foundational decision in marketing. Every decision that follows — your messaging, your content, your channels for lead generation, and your sales process — is contingent on getting this right.

This is where the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) comes in.

In this post, I’ll define what an ICP is, walk through how to build one for both B2B and B2C businesses, explain where most companies go wrong in the exercise, and share how to keep your ICP sharp over time.

Many small and mid-sized businesses struggle with marketing leadership, but can’t afford to bring in an expensive full-time leader. Some CEOs have heard about the fractional model, but aren’t sure if it is right for them. In this post, I’ll explain what a fractional marketing leader does, why the model works so well for small and mid-sized businesses, and how to know if hiring one is the right move for your company.

Go-to-market (or GTM) is not a department. It’s not a launch plan. And it’s not a buzzword reserved for B2B SaaS and other technology-forward business models. It’s both the design and execution of a business’s system to generate revenue. The practice of GTM is for companies that want revenue to come in consistently, predictably, and at scale.

Three important observations for both executive and revenue leaders to take heed of as they assess their go-to-market efforts.

2026 will be the “prove it” year for businesses. I examine some recent lessons from setbacks and how you can define and measure value for your customers.

Five things I learned.

Reviewing a flood of economic data, perceptions on AI comments, PepsiCo’s coming changes, and unique holiday gift ideas for your customers.