Over the years, I’ve seen marketing dismissed as the nice-to-have department—logos, brochures, social posts, maybe an event or two. But if that’s all you expect from marketing, you’re missing the bigger picture: marketing is one of the most powerful levers a company has to drive revenue.
When marketing is tied directly to revenue, it stops being an expense and starts becoming an investment. That shift in perspective changes everything from how you measure success to how your customers engage with you.
Clear Messaging That Drives Action
In B2B especially, products and services are often highly technical or complex. Without the right story, even the most innovative solutions can feel overwhelming. Effective marketing simplifies complexity. It makes the benefits obvious, relevant, and compelling.
Take Slack. Before Slack, “team chat” sounded like a productivity killer. With clear messaging around “making work simpler, more productive, and more connected,” Slack reframed its product from a distraction into an essential workplace tool. Clear, confident messaging doesn’t just attract attention, it builds belief, which is the foundation of revenue growth.
I’ve seen the same dynamic with clean energy companies. One client had groundbreaking technology but buried it under jargon. By reframing their value proposition around regulatory compliance and cost savings—rather than technical specs—we shifted the conversation. Suddenly, city officials and property owners understood the impact, and deals moved forward.
At Adeo, this is at the heart of our philosophy: bridging the gap between innovation and the market. We help companies take groundbreaking ideas—often technical, complex, or ahead of the curve—and translate them into narratives that resonate with customers, investors, and stakeholders. Innovation on its own isn’t enough. To scale, it needs a story that connects.
Events That Become Magnets for Influence
Events aren’t just about filling a room. When done right, they become magnets for visibility, credibility, and influence.
Look at Salesforce’s Dreamforce. It’s not simply a user conference, it’s a cultural event where city officials, industry leaders, and media make a point to be seen. That kind of marketing investment generates massive earned media coverage, strengthens partnerships, and drives pipeline long after the event ends.
Even on a smaller scale, the impact can be just as powerful. At an energy industry summit, we designed a panel that brought together policymakers, investors, and technology providers. The event didn’t just build awareness, it positioned the client as a convener of industry progress. Within months, that visibility translated into partnerships and new business opportunities.
Thought Leadership That Shapes the Conversation
Vanity metrics don’t close deals. True thought leadership is about influence.
When Satya Nadella reframed Microsoft as a “cloud-first, mobile-first” company, it wasn’t just a tagline, it was thought leadership that shifted how the market perceived Microsoft and positioned them ahead of competitors.
Smaller companies can achieve the same effect. One renewable energy client published a bylined article in a trade journal that quickly became a reference point for policymakers. That single piece of content created invitations to testify at hearings and speak at high-profile events, cementing their credibility as a leading authority.
Thought leadership isn’t about adding noise, it’s about shaping conversations that others follow.
Sales and Marketing: Equal Partners in Growth
Marketing and sales are equally important to revenue growth. Marketing is essentially pitching to all stakeholders—officials, media, industry leaders, communities, and prospects—setting the stage, creating awareness, and building credibility. Sales connects with prospects, leads discovery conversations, builds trust, and guides opportunities through to close.
The truth is, alignment doesn’t always come naturally. Marketing may create demand that doesn’t land as qualified opportunities. Sales may struggle to follow up consistently or to feed insights back into campaigns. Without shared timing, definitions, and goals, even strong demand risks slipping through the cracks. That’s why the most successful companies go beyond collaboration to alignment—tracking joint KPIs, sharing data, and unifying messaging so that both teams move in sync. In fact, research shows that 73% of fully aligned sales and marketing teams achieve their annual targets, a powerful reminder that growth depends on both teams working together.
When marketing and sales work together, revenue grows faster. Marketing arms reps with a consistent story and equips customer success with tools that enhance the user experience. Sales provides on-the-ground insights that help shape and sharpen marketing campaigns. Together, they form a feedback loop that makes both functions stronger.
HubSpot’s growth is a prime example. Marketing didn’t just generate leads, they educated the market with content, tools, and resources that prospects actively sought out. By the time those leads reached sales, they were already well-informed and predisposed to buy. Sales, in turn, fed insights back to marketing about customer pain points, which fueled even sharper campaigns. That loop is what helped HubSpot scale into a $30B+ company.
And when marketing is integrated across all departments—from sales and customer success to product, operations, leadership, and government affairs—it becomes essential to running the business.
Demand Generation That Creates Intent
The old model of lead generation was about volume—stuffing the funnel with names and hoping some convert. Demand generation flips the script. Instead of chasing prospects, you create conditions where prospects raise their hands to buy.
Consider Zoom during the pandemic. They didn’t just chase leads, they created such strong demand through clear positioning, ease of use, and word-of-mouth that prospects sought them out.
We’ve seen this play out in B2B campaigns, too. For a client in building technology, we designed a demand gen program around a looming regulation deadline. Instead of generic ads, we built messaging that spoke directly to property owners’ pain points about compliance and fines. The result? Prospects didn’t just download a whitepaper, they booked calls, ready to buy. That’s demand gen in action.
The Smarter Question
The smartest companies don’t ask, “What’s the ROI of marketing?” as if it’s separate from revenue. They ask, “Which channels and tactics can we optimize, and which strategies should we employ to increase revenue?”
That mindset shift is the difference between seeing marketing as overhead versus seeing it as a growth engine. Marketing and sales play different roles, but both are essential to the same outcome: revenue growth.
If your marketing isn’t tied directly to revenue, it’s just activity. But if it is? It’s one of the most powerful growth engines in your company—standing shoulder to shoulder with sales in driving pipeline, accelerating deals, and building customer loyalty.
