Rewiring Marketing for Revenue with Zsuzsanna Blau

“For the C-Suite, the shift is about reframing marketing as a driver of both today’s pipeline and tomorrow’s market position.  

“In B2B, you’re not always triggering an instant purchase like in B2C. You’re influencing complex buying decisions, building trust, and creating demand that converts over months or even years.”  

Marketing should be seen as both a withdrawal and investment. “We fuel current growth, but we also invest in the future.” 

How she did it at Nokia and Vodafone: showing the link between long-term brand programs and future revenue resilience – how awareness today becomes demand tomorrow. “When marketing is trusted to play the long game and prove short-term impact, that’s when real transformation happens.”

Let’s start with the obvious but often overlooked: “No marketing magic can save a bad product or a broke proposition. Product-market fit is foundational. Marketing can amplify value, but we can’t invent it.”  

What’s needed:  

• A CEO who believes in marketing as a driver, not a decoration  

• One shared view of the funnel with sales 

• Clear customer segmentation and ICP definitions 

• A content and campaign engine that balances brand with demand 

“Without those, you’re not running a growth engine, you’re just throwing creative into the void and hoping for the best.”  

“Most marketing is obsessed with getting the lead. CVM flips that. It’s about growing the value of the customer after the first deal.”  

Zsuzsanna built CVM into campaign logic, messaging, and even her team’s structure – allowing them to shift from ‘launch-and-leave’ to ‘land-expand-renew-advocate’.  

“Revenue isn’t just about what you win, but more importantly about what you keep and grow.”  

In today’s economy, “not focusing on existing customers isn’t just a missed opportunity, but a waste of resources.”   

“Your choice of metrics influences strategic decisions and can lead to different interpretations of success and failure.”  

Leads are the perfect example. “Measuring the number of leads generated might sound business-centric, but if it’s not connected to win rates and revenue, it becomes a vanity metric in disguise. This is why Sales and Marketing alignment is still a problem in 2025.” 

“MQLs are marketing’s comfort metric. Revenue is everyone’s business metric.” Track buyer-led outcomes and co-own commercial performances with sales, product, and finance. Focus on how the buyer actually converted and entered the pipeline. That’s a more customer-centric view where you’re assessing outcomes based on buyer behaviour, not internal handovers. This way, you’ll all be speaking in the same language: revenue.  

Group the pipeline by source (how the buyer entered) and then focus on: 

• Deal size 

• Conversion velocity 

• Win rate 

• Investment per opportunity 

This not only shows impact – it helps you track buyers’ intent and optimise your ROI on activities based on understanding the patterns in their behaviour before they decide to buy. 

“It’s not just about showing that marketing works – it’s about showing how marketing wins.”  

“Align to business priorities and timing.” A well-executed campaign is meaningless if it’s not driving value where the business needs it. For example, a campaign that drives leads for a product the business isn’t ready to sell is wasted effort.

“Marketing transformation isn’t a new tech stack or a re-org. It’s a new promise to the business: we’re here to drive outcomes, not just output.”  

Startups have a huge (some may say unfair) advantage when it comes to demand gen: speed, personality, and focus.  

Personal branding – corporate branding 
In startups, founders are the brand. Their voices build trust and drive engagement in a way enterprises just can’t match. “It’s hard to form an emotional connection with a brand when you never hear from the humans behind it.”  
 
They are also agile: “Startups are just like jet skis: they can turn fast, test fast, and scale what works. Enterprises are cruise ships.” 

But corporates aren’t out of the game – they’ve got scale, data, credibility, and a broader platform. “The best-performing teams I’ve seen take a startup’s mindset and apply it inside the enterprise (if empowered). They move fast within the structure, stay close to the customer, and operate like a revenue team – not a service function.”  
 
In short, here’s the winning formula: “Startups teach us how to focus. Enterprises teach us how to scale. The magic happens when you can do both.” 

One of the toughest audiences for any marketing leader? The CFO.  

Zsuzsanna’s advice: “Don’t show them a deck, show them a number.” One dashboard and one clear insight. “Here’s what we spent. Here’s what we got. Here’s what we learned.”  

But getting finance on side takes more than a good dashboard. It’s about focusing on outcomes, not activities. “A CFO doesn’t care how many campaigns you ran or what your CTR was. They care about what it delivered. They care about how it connects to revenue and business outcomes.”  
 
That shift also means speaking their language – pipeline, CAC, CLTV, and forecast predictability – not impressions and engagement rates. “CFOs don’t care about CTRs. They care about pipeline.” 

Context is key, especially when finance isn’t close to marketing metrics. “Don’t assume your CFO audience knows what good looks like. A 10% CTR or 50 MQLs means nothing to someone outside of marketing. Instead, say ‘Our email campaigns generated $1M in pipeline last quarter, which based on historical conversion rates is expected to close $400k in revenue.’ Now you’re speaking their language.”   

KPIs need to map to business goals. “If the company is trying to grow sales in North America, your KPIs should be tied to pipeline generation, opportunity creation, or enablement tools that support that region. When you show marketing is solving business problems – not just running programs – you shift from cost centre to growth driver.”  

And above all, if the numbers aren’t looking great? Say so. “Don’t hide the truth. Even if the numbers aren’t great, be transparent. CFOs respect honesty and accountability far more than spin.”  

“AI is the new intern and the new strategist – if you use it right. It helps us scale personalisation, uncover patterns in data, and predict next-best actions across the lifecycle. In telco, where the volume is high and churn is real, AI lets us stop being reactive and start being predictive.”