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Most companies I work with are not short on marketing activity. They have campaigns…
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Articles by Eric
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Curing Random Acts of Marketing
Curing Random Acts of Marketing
Your marketing team is busy. Your agency is producing deliverables.
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Don't Wait: Why Q4 is Critical for Your 2025 Marketing Success
Don't Wait: Why Q4 is Critical for Your 2025 Marketing Success
As another year draws to a close, many businesses are caught in the familiar rush of holiday preparations and year-end…
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Why Fishing with a Net (Not Just a Pole) is the Key to Marketing Technical Products and Services
Why Fishing with a Net (Not Just a Pole) is the Key to Marketing Technical Products and Services
As a fractional CMO specializing in B2B companies, I often encounter a common misconception among businesses that sell…
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The Smart Path to Fractional CMO Engagement
The Smart Path to Fractional CMO Engagement
In my role as a Chief Marketing Officer, I have seen how an effective marketing strategy can make or break a company's…
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Marketing as a Service: How to Simplify Marketing Strategy and Execution
Marketing as a Service: How to Simplify Marketing Strategy and Execution
If you're a business owner or a leader in a small to medium-sized company, you know how challenging it can be to create…
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The Perfect Time to Plan Your New Year's Marketing Strategy
The Perfect Time to Plan Your New Year's Marketing Strategy
As the year draws to a close, many businesses find themselves caught in the whirlwind of holiday preparations, often…
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Overcoming Reluctance: Why Businesses Hesitate to Invest in Marketing
Overcoming Reluctance: Why Businesses Hesitate to Invest in Marketing
In today's competitive business landscape, growth is essential for survival. Yet, despite the clear benefits of…
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Why is a Fractional CMO Right for Your Business?
Why is a Fractional CMO Right for Your Business?
Business leaders are challenged to grow revenue but face obstacles when implementing marketing activities that produce…
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My Next Chapter
My Next Chapter
After more than 30 years working for companies both large and small, I’ve decided to wade into the waters of…
27 Comments
Activity
6K followers
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Eric Dickmann shared thisFor a lot of companies, marketing doesn’t fail because people aren’t working hard. It fails because everyone is working hard on different things. - The website gets redesigned. - A new CRM is implemented. - Content is published. - Campaigns launch. - An agency delivers another quarter of activity. Individually, each initiative makes sense. Collectively, they often have very little to do with one another. I call these random acts of marketing. It’s like a car with the engine revving and the gears spinning, but the transmission never engages. Plenty of activity. Very little forward motion. The answer usually isn’t another campaign, another platform, or another agency. It’s stepping back and asking a more fundamental question: What business problem is marketing actually supposed to solve? I explore that idea in more depth in my latest LinkedIn article, Curing Random Acts of Marketing. If you’ve ever wondered why a busy marketing organization can still struggle to move the business forward, I think you’ll find it worthwhile. I’d love to hear your perspective. Have you seen organizations mistake marketing activity for marketing progress?
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Eric Dickmann shared thisSales says the leads are bad. Marketing says sales doesn't follow up. I've walked into this argument at more companies than I can count. And the conversation always goes the same way. Sales pulls up a list of leads that went nowhere. Marketing pulls up a report showing how many leads they generated. Both sides have data. Both sides are frustrated. And nothing changes. The problem is that nobody in the room agreed on what a good lead actually looks like. No shared definition of "sales-ready." No alignment on which signals matter, or what common language the two teams use about where a prospect is in their buying process. Marketing is counting one thing. Sales is valuing something completely different. And the CRM is full of records that fall into the gap between those two definitions. This gets worse as buyers do more of their research on their own before ever talking to a salesperson. By the time a lead shows up, they may have already compared options and narrowed their list. If marketing doesn't understand that shift, they're still scoring leads based on outdated criteria. And if sales doesn't understand what marketing is actually measuring, they dismiss everything that comes in. So the meeting keeps happening. Every quarter. Same arguments, same data, same stalemate. Getting both teams in a room and answering one question first is what actually changes this: what does a qualified opportunity look like for us, specifically, right now? Not in theory. Not based on a template from three years ago. Based on what's actually converting today. Once you align on that, the arguments tend to get a lot quieter.
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Eric Dickmann shared thisMost companies build their marketing plan like this: 1. How much budget do we have? 2. What did we do last year? 3. What can we afford to do again? That is a habit with a spreadsheet attached. The sequencing should be the opposite. You start from what you are trying to achieve. You define how you will measure whether you actually achieved it. And then you figure out which tactics will get you there most effectively. Budget comes last. But here is what happens in practice. The budget number lands on someone's desk. They look at what they spent last year. They adjust a few line items up or down. And they end up recycling the same marketing activities from one quarter to the next, one year to the next. No experimentation. No connection to business objectives. Just rinse and repeat. And the CEO wonders why marketing feels like a cost center instead of a growth engine. The companies I work with that actually see marketing produce business results are not the ones spending the most. They are the ones who got the sequence right. Objective first, measurement second, tactics and budget after that. Almost nobody does it that way. Marketing is iterative. You test and you learn and you refine. But you cannot iterate toward a goal you never defined. And you cannot define a goal if you started with a spreadsheet full of budget buckets. So before you finalize next quarter's marketing plan, check whether you started with what you are trying to accomplish or with how much money you have. If you started with the money, you are planning to repeat last year. If your marketing plan starts with budget instead of objectives, the seven questions in my Growth Clarity Diagnostic will reorder the conversation. DM me "CLARITY" and I will send them to you.
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Eric Dickmann shared this"We help businesses grow." I see this on websites every single day. And every time, I think the same thing: so does the company right next to you. And the one next to them. Here is the problem with messaging like this. It says nothing that would make a buyer stop and think, "These people understand my situation." And the noise is relentless. Social media, email, events, ads, content. Everyone is competing for the same attention. Your messaging has to cut through that noise in a way that resonates with your ideal buyer. Not with everyone. With the right someone. But most companies resist getting specific. They are afraid that narrowing the message means narrowing the market. So they keep it broad. They describe what they do in terms so generic that a prospect cannot tell them apart from three competitors. I see this a lot with technical companies. They assume their audience only wants deep technical content. And that is partly true, but not every prospect is at the same stage. Some are just beginning to recognize they have a problem. They are not ready for a walkthrough of your architecture. They need to understand that you get their problem before they care about your product. Until you get very specific about who that buyer is and what niche you are serving, it is very hard to craft a marketing program to reach them. And it is very easy to overspend because you are casting too wide a net trying to reach too broad an audience. If a stranger lands on your website and cannot answer "what do they do and why should I care" in ten seconds, it does not matter how much you spend to drive traffic there.
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Eric Dickmann shared thisMost marketing "plans" I see are really just budgets. A spreadsheet with line items. Trade show: $15K. Google Ads: $8K. Content agency: $4K/month. Maybe a column for Q1 through Q4. You end up recycling what you did last year. Same line items, same spending. Rinse and repeat, one quarter to the next. And the problem with starting from a budget is that cost becomes the overriding consideration. How much money do I have? What can I do with those specific dollars? You never ask the harder question: what are we actually trying to accomplish? A plan starts with an objective. Then it asks how you are going to measure whether you achieved it. Then, only then, do you figure out which tactics will get you there and what those tactics cost. That sequencing matters. Because when you work backwards from a number, you skip experimentation. You skip the question of whether last year's tactics even worked. You just do them again because they fit the template. A marketing plan without a budget will not help your business grow. But a budget without a plan is just organized spending.
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Eric Dickmann posted thisThe most counterintuitive advice I give companies: stop doing so much marketing. Doing more of the wrong things makes the problem worse. I see it constantly. A company isn't getting results from marketing, so the instinct is to add. Another campaign. Another tool. Another agency. More content. More spend. The gears spin faster, but the transmission is still in neutral. Nobody stops to check whether anything is connected. More campaigns without a strategy means more disconnected effort. More tools without clarity means more dashboards nobody looks at. I didn't come to this from a traditional marketing background. I came from banking technology, software development, systems analysis. And in systems work, you learn something early: adding complexity to a broken process doesn't fix the process. It makes the failure harder to diagnose. Marketing works the same way. Before you add another campaign, ask whether the ones you're running connect to a business objective. Before you hire another agency, ask whether the last one failed because of execution or because nobody gave them a clear strategy to execute against. Ask what you'd cut if the budget got halved tomorrow. The companies that get results aren't doing more marketing. They're doing less, with more clarity about why each piece exists. Sometimes the most strategic thing a CEO can do is stop, look at what's running, and figure out whether any of it is connected to what the company is actually trying to accomplish.
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Eric Dickmann shared this"VP of Sales and Marketing." I see that title on org charts. One person, two functions. And the assumption is that combining the title somehow combines the strategy. What actually happens is that sales gets the attention because sales has a number. Marketing becomes the thing that gets squeezed in between pipeline reviews and forecast calls. It becomes the thing that "somebody on the team handles." So marketing ends up without an executive presence at the leadership table. Nobody is asking whether the campaigns connect to the business strategy. Nobody is challenging the messaging. Nobody is looking at the full buyer journey and asking if marketing and sales are even telling the same story. The person holding that combined title is usually capable and stretched thin. They are doing the best they can with a structure that was never designed to give marketing the strategic attention it needs. Giving marketing its own seat at the leadership table changes that. Someone whose job is to connect strategy to execution, not squeeze marketing in between sales calls. That is a leadership structure decision. And most companies never make it until they have already wasted a year of budget on disconnected tactics.
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Eric Dickmann shared thisI was reviewing a company's marketing recently. They had 14 active campaigns running. Email sequences, social ads, a webinar series, content partnerships, SEO initiatives, a trade show coming up. The team was busy. The agency was producing deliverables. The calendar was full. So I asked a simple question: which of these is tied to a specific business goal? Nobody had an answer. Not because they didn't care. They cared a lot. They were working hard. But nobody had stopped to ask what all this activity was actually trying to accomplish. There was no shared objective connecting the campaigns. No way to measure whether any of it was moving the business forward or just keeping people occupied. The company is not doing nothing. They are doing plenty. Running campaigns, hiring agencies, posting content, experimenting with tools. But the pieces are not connected. That's what random acts of marketing looks like. You cannot fix this by adding a fifteenth campaign. You fix it by going back to the beginning. What are we trying to achieve? How are we going to measure if we've actually achieved it? And then what are the tactics that are going to help us get there? That sequencing matters. Objective first, then measurement, then tactics. Most companies run it in reverse. They start with tactics, hope the measurement sorts itself out, and never really define the objective beyond "grow." Fourteen campaigns is not a marketing strategy. It's a to-do list with a budget attached. I see this more often than I should.
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Eric Dickmann posted thisMost companies that reach out to me already know something is wrong with their marketing. They can feel it. The spend is up, the team is busy, the agency is producing deliverables. But the results are not there. Pipeline is flat. Sales is frustrated. The CEO is starting to wonder if marketing even works. So what do they want? They want me to tell them what to do. Run LinkedIn ads. Redo the website. Fix the funnel. And when something is broken, you want a fix. You want tactics. But here is the problem with jumping straight to tactics: you might be solving the wrong problem. I have seen companies pour money into demand gen when the real issue was positioning. Teams that rebuilt their entire website when the actual gap was that sales and marketing had never agreed on who the ideal customer was. Agencies running beautiful campaigns that generated leads nobody wanted. All that activity and all that spend, aimed at the wrong target. So I start every engagement the same way. With questions. What is the business actually trying to accomplish? Who are we really trying to reach? What does the buyer need to believe before they will act? Where is the real friction, in awareness, in messaging, in the sales handoff, in the product itself? Most companies cannot answer more than two of these clearly. That is the diagnosis, not a criticism. Once you can answer them, the strategy becomes obvious and the budget makes sense. But you have to do the diagnostic work first.
Eric Dickmann replied to a comment
19h
Ibtisam Ali too often, activity is measurement many organizations gravitate towards rather than outcomes.
Eric Dickmann replied to a comment
19h
The budgeting process is often a sequencing problem in business planning. It’s a prerequisite for creating a business plan, rather than a deliverable of the planning process.
Eric Dickmann replied to a comment
21h
Ibtisam Ali Marketing is frequently asked to drive the messaging, but it’s actually the leadership’s responsibility to solidify the value proposition across the organization and then allow marketing to amplify it.
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Eric Dickmann liked thisEric Dickmann liked thisYou can spend years building expertise, delivering results, and refining your approach — yet a potential client discovering your work may still not understand why you are the right person to help them. By the time someone visits your website or LinkedIn profile, they are often trying to answer one question: "Is this the right person to help me?" If that answer is not clear, they leave with uncertainty. Not because your expertise is lacking. But because they could not quickly connect your experience to the problem they need solved. The strongest consultant websites help visitors understand: → Who you help → What problems you solve → Why your approach is different → What they should do next Unclear messaging creates friction. And friction has a cost. A referral becomes a missed opportunity. A LinkedIn visitor leaves without taking the next step. A potential client keeps searching because they are still unsure. For consultants, credibility is not built only through years of experience. It is also built by making that experience easy for the right people to recognize. The goal is not simply to have a professional website. The goal is to make the right clients quickly understand: "This is the person who understands my problem." #Consulting #PersonalBranding #ProfessionalServices #ConsultantMarketing
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Eric Dickmann liked thisCongratulations to these ten podcast guests!! (Thank you for the work that you do!)Eric Dickmann liked thisI'm really excited to announce that our next "top 10" podcast guests post is now LIVE!!! Because June is Environmental Awareness Month, we decided to highlight 10 podcast guests who specialize in sustainability! Here are the 10 podcast guests (sustainability experts) featured in this post: Courtney Barriger, David Gottfried, Eric Klos, George Mazzella, Hank Dearden, Joshua Harrison, Laurel Colless, Marcy Twete, Thomas Schueneman, and Tom Raftery! Thank you, each of you, for the way you show up to serve listeners (and the world) by talking about preserving Earth through sustainability efforts!!! Congratulations to these 10 individuals. At PodMatch, we're so thankful for the work that they do! :)
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Eric Dickmann liked thisEric Dickmann liked thisEveryone who breathes dies. So stop breathing and live forever. Sounds stupid, but I see this error all the time in business. People see correlation between two things and link one to the other. But correlation is not causation. You notice that ad spend went down and pipeline went up. You conclude reducing ad spend increases pipeline. You miss the real lever was improved targeting. So you drop ad spend and your pipeline disappears. Same logic as eternal breath-holding. Just less obvious. Conflating correlation and causation... It happens all the time, and it's costly.
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Eric Dickmann liked thisEric Dickmann liked thisHe rebuilt the onboarding flow three times that year. Every dropoff point mapped. Every edge case handled. Every screen tested against every kind of user they could think of. By the third version, there was nothing left to fix. Sign-ups still stalled at the same rate. Just at a step no one had thought to map. 𝘍𝘶𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘄.
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Eric Dickmann liked thisEric Dickmann liked thisMy service costs $299/mo. And this pricing goes against what everyone preaches which is “charge a lot of money”. But it’s intentional. Before starting this business, I defined a few non-negotiables: 1. No sales calls 2. Semi-automated delivery 3. Promising less, so there is less scrutiny At this price point, people feel safe to buy whenever they want. I don’t even have a website and people purchase from a simple google doc. And yet, I got 100+ paying clients since March 31. Yes, some of them churned but that’s expected — we are not even 4 months old. The entire purpose of this business is to solve the nuisance of content creation. So I am clearly setting the expectations that “my offer solves content” and “you will need to do other things as well”. My clients don’t want to be influencers. They don’t want to learn the hooks and all the tricks. They don’t want to read algorithm updates. But they know they need to post and don’t want to figure out how. They are usually older, very experienced, and don’t want to build complicated claude code workflows. These are my best clients. What’s tough about this situation is that there’s almost no info on a model like this: aka charging under $500/mo. So everything I do is an experiment. High-ticket advice doesn’t translate here. Alex Hormozi talks about this sometimes but very sporadically. If you guys know anyone who built a high-volume, under $500/mo ai-enabled service (not saas), please send them my way. Happy to pay for a consultation. Have a good weekend.
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Volunteer Experience
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Board of Directors
Zebra Coalition
- 3 years 6 months
Human Rights
▪️ Providing services and stability for LGBTQ+ youth
Collaborated with a range of stakeholders to develop services for vulnerable youth within the community as part of a not-for-profit organization; this involved preparing grant proposals, ensuring governance, compliance with regulations, and developing, managing, and executing fundraising events. -
Digital Marketing Advisory Board
University of South Florida Muma College of Business
- 1 year 7 months
Education
▪️ Advising program development for the graduate business school
In response to the growth of a unique program teaching the tools for business success in the age of Digital Marketing, I provided strategic advice and guidance to Muma College of Business as it expanded operations, as an industry advisor and specialist expert.
Publications
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The Virtual CMO Podcast
The Five Echelon Group
See publicationThe Virtual CMO podcast is a weekly show for marketing professionals working at SMB's (small and midsize businesses) and looking for strategies to grow their businesses. We focus on what it takes to build an overall strategy and how to execute successful marketing plans.
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