Why Your B2B Marketing Agency Is Not Working (And What to Do About It)

The strategy-execution gap that agencies cannot fill

The fundamental problem with most B2B agency engagements is a mismatch between what the company needs and what the agency provides. The company needs someone to figure out the right go-to-market strategy and then execute it. The agency provides execution of tactics within their specialty — SEO, content, paid media, social, or some combination.

This gap is not the agency's fault. Agencies are structured to execute. They have specialists in specific channels and deliverable types. What they typically do not have is someone who deeply understands your specific buyer, your competitive position, your sales process, and how all the marketing pieces should fit together. That is a strategist's job, and most agencies are not built to fill it.

When you hire an agency without a clear strategy, the agency does what any rational organization would do — they default to their standard playbook. They produce content on a schedule, run ads to generic audiences, and report on the metrics they know how to move. The problem is that their playbook was not designed for your specific market situation.

Five root causes of agency underperformance

If your agency engagement is not delivering pipeline, at least one of these five structural issues is usually the cause.

1. No positioning foundation. The agency inherited messaging that does not resonate with your actual buyer. They are writing content, running ads, and building campaigns on top of weak positioning. The tactics are competent, but the message does not land because the foundation is wrong.

2. Wrong success metrics. The agency reports on what they can control — traffic, rankings, impressions, content volume. You care about pipeline and revenue. When success is defined differently by each side, the engagement drifts. The agency hits their targets while your pipeline does not improve.

3. No feedback loop with sales. The agency produces leads, but nobody is tracking which leads actually convert to opportunities. Without closed-loop reporting between marketing activity and sales outcomes, the agency cannot optimize for lead quality. They optimize for lead volume instead, because that is what they can measure.

4. Misaligned incentives. Most agencies bill on retainer or by deliverable. Their incentive is to produce more of what they sell — more content, more campaigns, more hours. Your incentive is pipeline growth. These goals overlap sometimes, but they are not the same. When budget gets tight, the agency's incentive is to demonstrate busyness, not to cut underperforming activities.

5. No strategic owner on your side. Someone inside your company needs to translate business objectives into marketing direction, evaluate agency output against pipeline goals, and make course corrections. When that person does not exist — which is common for B2B companies without a marketing leader — the agency fills the vacuum with their own judgment, which may not match your market reality.

Signs your agency engagement is failing

Some of these signals are obvious. Others are subtle. If you recognize three or more, the engagement is likely underperforming.

Reports focus on activity, not outcomes. You receive monthly reports showing blog posts published, social posts created, and ad impressions served — but pipeline contribution is absent or vague. When you ask about revenue impact, the answer is some version of it takes time.

The strategy never changes. The agency proposed a plan in month one and has been executing the same approach for six months. Markets shift, competitors move, and buyer behavior evolves. If the strategy is static, the agency is on autopilot.

You cannot explain what they are optimizing for. If someone asked you what specific business outcome your agency is working toward this quarter, could you answer clearly? If not, the engagement lacks focus.

Lead quality complaints from sales are growing. Your sales team is getting more leads but describing them as low quality. The agency claims the leads are solid. Nobody has defined what qualified actually means. This is a measurement problem that compounds over time.

You feel like you are managing the agency more than they are managing your marketing. If you are spending significant time reviewing deliverables, redirecting strategy, and answering basic questions about your buyer, you are providing the strategic leadership that should be coming from a marketing leader — and paying the agency to execute your thinking.

What to do when your agency is not delivering

Firing the agency and hiring a new one rarely solves the problem if the root cause is structural. Here is a more effective approach.

Step one: Diagnose the real problem. Is the agency executing poorly, or are they executing well on the wrong things? Review the last six months of deliverables and ask: Which of these activities generated a qualified lead that became a sales conversation? If the answer is unclear, the problem is measurement. If the answer is none, the problem is strategy.

Step two: Define pipeline-connected success metrics. Replace activity metrics with pipeline metrics as the primary measure of agency performance. This means agreeing on specific targets: number of MQLs per month, MQL-to-SQL conversion rate, and cost per qualified opportunity. The agency may resist this shift because it makes their performance more transparent. That resistance is informative.

Step three: Add strategic leadership. If you do not have someone who can set marketing direction, evaluate agency output against business goals, and make strategic adjustments, the agency engagement will always underperform. This is the role a fractional marketing leader fills — providing the strategy layer that the agency can then execute against.

Step four: Create a feedback loop with sales. Schedule a monthly meeting between your agency, your sales team, and your marketing leader. Review which leads converted, which did not, and why. This single practice improves agency performance more than any other tactical change.

Step five: Set a 90-day evaluation window. Give the restructured engagement 90 days with clear, pipeline-connected targets. If the agency adapts and pipeline metrics improve, the engagement is worth continuing. If the metrics remain flat, you have clear evidence to make a change.

When an agency is the right choice and when it is not

Agencies are not inherently the wrong choice for B2B marketing. They are the wrong choice in specific circumstances — and the right choice in others.

An agency works well when:

• You have clear positioning and a defined go-to-market strategy.
• You need execution capacity in a specific channel — SEO, paid media, content production.
• You have a marketing leader who can direct the agency and evaluate their output.
• Success metrics are defined in pipeline terms before the engagement starts.

An agency does not work well when:

• You need someone to define your marketing strategy, not just execute it.
• You do not have anyone internally who can manage the agency's direction.
• Your positioning is unclear and you are hoping the agency will figure it out.
• You expect the agency to own your entire marketing function end-to-end.

For B2B companies between $1M and $15M in revenue without a marketing leader, the most common mistake is treating an agency as a substitute for strategic leadership. An agency is a set of hands. A marketing leader is the brain that directs those hands. Without the brain, the hands stay busy but the work does not connect to revenue.

Building a marketing function that works

The pattern that produces the best results for B2B companies at this stage is straightforward: strategic leadership first, then execution capacity.

Start with someone who can audit your current state — your positioning, your funnel, your channels, your sales process. Build a go-to-market plan that connects every marketing activity to pipeline outcomes. Then add execution capacity — whether that is an internal hire, an agency, or a combination — to carry out the plan.

This sequence matters. Strategy before execution. Direction before activity. When you reverse the order — hiring executors before defining strategy — you get exactly what most founders experience: busy marketing that does not move the pipeline.

If your current agency engagement is not delivering and you are not sure whether the problem is the agency, the strategy, or the measurement, a GTM diagnostic conversation can help you sort it out. It is a structured assessment that identifies the actual bottleneck — not a pitch to replace your agency, but a clear-eyed look at what needs to change.