Why B2B marketing leaders don't trust their own numbers

This isn't just anecdotal - Forrester's Marketing Survey 2024 found that 64% of B2B marketing leaders don't trust their organisation's marketing measurement for decision-making. That’s nearly two thirds; in a discipline whose credibility depends on data and evidence. And it's what happens when the pressure to prove ROI outpaces the ability to measure what's driving it. And right now, that gap is getting harder to close.

The environment has changed faster than the measurement

Brands have always needed to stand out and be found. And of course, we know that hasn't changed – what’s changed is the environment in which both have to happen, and we all know well that it's changed faster than most measurement frameworks have been able to keep up with.

Channels are multiplying. AI is reshaping how buyers discover brands, ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI-generated answer pages are handing buyers a shortlist before a search result even gets considered. Buyer journeys that used to be relatively linear are now fragmented across platforms, devices and touchpoints that are difficult to track end to end. And through all of this, leadership wants evidence of return, not a summary of 'everything that’s happening’.

The traditional metrics – traffic, leads sourced, pipeline attributed – were built for a different version of how buyers behave. They still have value, but they don't tell the whole story. A brand can have healthy traffic and a thin pipeline. It can generate leads that never convert. It can show up in search and not show up at all in the conversations buyers are having with each other. The numbers look fine on a dashboard, but the results don't match.

McKinsey's State of Marketing Europe 2026 surveyed 500 senior marketing leaders across 14 industries and found branding ranked as the number one priority for the year, valued specifically for its ability to drive distinctiveness. Yet 72% of those same CMOs acknowledged they're under pressure to better explain marketing's ROI to their boards. They believe in brand, they're increasing budgets for it, but they can't yet show what it's doing.

McKinsey's data shows companies with a consistent, well-executed brand strategy achieve 20-30% higher long-term ROI. That advantage is real, but it requires tracking the right things, and many organisations aren't tracking them yet.

Where brands sit

Part of the problem is that most brands are measuring activity rather than relative position. How much went out, not where they stand among their competitors. When we score both Distinctiveness and Discoverability in our Multiplier Audit, four common positions emerge and, in our experience, most brands aren't where they think they are.

These are the positions we commonly see, and what that says about the brand’s activity:

The gold-standard – a Market Authority is high on both metrics: seen, remembered and found. The position every B2B brand aims for, and fewer reach this position than should, because it requires both forces to be consistently working and measured together. These are the brands that show up over and over in the right conversations, get cited as category leaders and convert at a rate that reflects their reputation.

A brand that is a Best Kept Secret has strong positioning but low Discoverability. The work is good, the thinking is sharp, the team is talented, but the brand never quite reaches the people it needs to reach. The pipeline is thinner than it should be, and referrals carry more weight than any marketing leader is comfortable admitting to their board.

A brand that is just Empty Noise is the inverse with strong digital presence but low Distinctiveness. The brand shows up but nobody stays, traffic numbers look reasonable until you examine what that traffic is doing – high volume, low resonance with plenty of activity, and not much impact.

Ghost brands are low on both. Spend is going out, something is coming back, but there's no clear line between cause and effect and no obvious place to start. These are often the organisations where the measurement anxiety runs deepest because without a clear picture of position, every decision feels like a stab in the dark.

Most brands know something isn't working. Fewer know which of these positions they're actually in and that's where the confidence problem really starts. You can't fix what you can't see clearly.

Clarity before confidence

The solution isn't piling on more measurement; most B2B marketing teams already have more data than they can reasonably interpret or act on – more dashboards, more reports, more weekly updates that take hours to compile and minutes to skim and reject.

That's what a KISS Multiplier Audit delivers: a measurable way to track Distinctiveness and Discoverability, scored, benchmarked against competitors, with a clear picture of what's hindering success. It’s not a creative opinion or a traffic report in isolation, but an evidenced, holistic view of where a brand stands across both dimensions and a prioritised plan for what to do about it.

Confidence follows clarity. And clarity, in this context, is a number you can point to.

Find out where your brand stands with a Multiplier Audit.

If you want to understand why the gap between Distinctiveness and Discoverability exists in the first place, and what's changed in B2B marketing that's made it so hard to close, Sarah's piece The gap in B2B marketing that nobody owns is worth a read alongside this one.