How the work looks in practice.
What follows are examples of recent engagements: the situation, the problem behind the presenting problem, and what changed.
A CMO had identified AI enablement as a priority for her marketing team but wasn't sure how to approach it. The brief wasn't a training programme or a governance document. It was to help the team have a better conversation about AI than they would have had without external structure, and to turn that conversation into something the business could act on.
What the work involvedSteve worked with the CMO to design the session: objectives, flow, a pre-session framework, and a facilitation guide. The session itself was run internally. His role was to design the thinking environment, not to lead the room.
The session brought together the full marketing team and surfaced real use cases, honest frustrations, and a clear set of priorities, including a data governance gap that needed resolving before anything more ambitious could be attempted.
The engagement then expanded. The CMO had an upcoming meeting with the head of IT and asked Steve to help her prepare, aligning on priority framing and producing a requirements document that could form the basis of the conversation.
What it deliveredTwo documents: a working brief for the CMO mapping the original priorities against what the session had actually surfaced; and a formal requirements document for IT, structured around use cases, infrastructure needs, and a proposed pilot with marketing as the first team in the business to trial it.
Marketing went into the IT meeting not as a function asking for tools, but as the team pioneering the business's broader AI programme.
"Marketing went into the IT meeting not as a function asking for tools, but as the team pioneering the business's broader AI programme."
The value was not AI expertise. It was structured thinking applied to an ambiguous situation, helping a capable leader move from a general sense that something mattered to a concrete plan she could take into a senior meeting.
A B2B sales and marketing team were generating activity data but struggling to act on it consistently. Lead quality varied. The two functions used different language for what a good lead looked like. There was no shared framework for deciding what to prioritise.
On the surface, the request was buyer intent modelling. The real problem was signal interpretation, and alignment between two teams reading the same data differently.
What the work involvedSteve conducted structured interviews with sales leadership across multiple product lines. One thing kept coming up: sales could always tell the difference between prospects who were interested and those who were commercially ready, and it had almost nothing to do with engagement volume.
High activity (content downloads, website visits, form fills) rarely meant someone was ready to buy. A small number of specific signals consistently mattered far more: a request from someone who could articulate a business need, commercial urgency, an existing process problem to solve.
What it deliveredA signal hierarchy that gave both teams a shared framework for interpreting buyer behaviour, not a scoring system, but a common language for the handoffs between marketing and sales.
The clearest immediate application was a small operational change: adding profiling questions at key conversion points to distinguish genuine intent from general interest. A minor change with a real impact on how the team handled inbound.
"Most B2B companies don't lack data. They lack a consistent way to interpret it."
Most B2B companies don't lack data. They lack a consistent way to interpret it. The challenge here wasn't generating more leads. It was building the shared understanding that let both teams act on the right ones.
A B2B FinTech company had a strong technical product and a clear ambition. What it didn't have was a marketing function, a commercial proposition its buyers could easily understand, or a narrative for the category it was trying to create.
Steve came in as the only marketer, working directly with the founders.
What the work involvedThe engagement started with the fundamentals: understanding the product, the buyers, and the gap between them. Enterprise buyers in regulated markets don't adopt new technology on capability alone. They need confidence: in governance, compliance, and the stability of the provider. The early work focused on building that credibility before it tried to build pipeline.
The work developed across the full marketing function: go-to-market strategy, value proposition, website messaging, thought leadership, campaigns, press, and partner co-marketing. A recurring thread was translation, taking complex technical capability and reframing it in terms of the problems it solves and the risks it removes.
What it deliveredA clearer commercial proposition, for buyers, investors, and the team. A consistent sales narrative. A website that reflected the company's ambition without outrunning what the market was ready to absorb. A thought leadership programme that built category authority in a space still forming.
A marketing function that didn't exist before, built on solid editorial and strategic foundations.
"The challenge here wasn't solving a defined problem. It was building the conditions for marketing to work."
The challenge here wasn't solving a defined problem. It was building the conditions for marketing to work. The kind of work that doesn't produce a single deliverable. It produces a function.
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