The thing I’ve realized about myself while doing this work is that I love coaching and teaching and I can’t turn off my coaching brain. I’ll sit through a presentation, browse a company’s website, or listen to someone describe their business at a networking event, and I’m automatically asking the same questions. Who is this really for? What does that actually mean? Why would anyone stop doing what they’re already doing to switch to this? What are you even talking about?

Now that I’m in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, I hear a lot of pitches. Last week I attended a startup pitch competition. It was ten founders with genuinely interesting solutions across healthcare, education, energy, and tech.

But about halfway through the pitches I started getting irritated. I kept hearing the same description for every product.

Six of the ten founders opened almost exactly the same way. AI-powered career guidance. AI-powered analytics. AI-powered healthcare. AI-powered this, AI-powered that. By the fifth pitch I was screaming in my head “STOP TELLING ME IT’S AI POWERED! NO ONE CARES.” Thank God it wasn’t out loud.

I don’t have anything against AI. Having an AI powered software is fine. What I kept thinking was “you have five minutes to convince a room full of people to invest in you, and you’re wasting precious time on the technology instead of the problem. Nobody in that room was sitting there hoping to hear about a new AI tool. They were waiting to hear something that made them lean forward and think, “wait, can you really fix that?“

And to be clear, this isn’t really just an AI critique. Five years ago founders led with blockchain. Before that it was cloud. Before that, machine learning. The technology changes yet the mistake stays the same.

Every founder who led with the technology that night was falling into a very common trap. And it’s not just founders who fall for these traps, they’re traps that most businesses fall into, even mature ones. And when I reveal what they are, you’re going to say “Oh no, that’s not me. I haven’t done that.”

Uh, ok. So before you keep reading, open your website, your pitch deck, or your LinkedIn in another tab. We’re going to look at your messaging together.

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Trap #1: You’re describing your market, not your customer.

A founder I mentored built a relationship intelligence platform, built to help businesses identify their key relationships, instead of wasting time on people who most likely won’t buy from them or invest in them.

Like many businesses, his first instinct was to describe the ideal customer in terms of markets. Small and medium-sized businesses.

I started to dig in and ask him about these businesses and the problems they experience. And the more we talk, the more obvious it became that the product was built for founders. The tool focuses on helping you raise capital, find new business and hire talent. All things founders spend the majority of their time doing. So, we had to shift the messaging towards the founder identity, not the SMB market.

I see this trap all the time. Businesses describe markets. Customers recognize identities.

Nobody wakes up thinking, "I'm part of the small business market." They wake up thinking, "I'm trying to hire my first salesperson." "I need to find investors who actually believe in what I'm building." "I'm spending too much time talking to people who are never going to buy."

Instead of describing who could use the platform, we described the person who would immediately see themselves in the message.

Weak Headline: AI-powered relationship intelligence platform for growing businesses.

Strong Headline: Relationships are the heart of your business. Stop wasting time on the wrong ones and invest in the ones that will help you grow.

The first one tells me what category your company lives in. The second reflects the life of the person it's written for.

Open your homepage and read the first headline. Really read it.

Try this: Does your headline describe your product, customer segment or audience category? If you’ve written an industry, a market segment, or a broad category, rewrite it. What is the problem and who are you solving it for, specifically.

Trap #2: You’re explaining the problem from your POV, instead of your customers.

Founders and people within the business know too much. That sounds like a compliment, but in marketing it’s genuinely a liability. Experts see root causes, but the customers experience symptoms. And those are not the same thing.

I’ll use myself as an example. I see a lot of businesses struggle with marketing because there’s a gap between how they describe their business and how customers actually understand it. But that’s now how the business owner sees it.

Almost nobody calls me and says, “Moni, I need help with my messaging architecture.” or “Help me understand marketing principles.”

They say things like, “I’m not getting new customers.” “My website isn’t converting.” “I have a new product launch and I need help getting it to market” Those are the problems they’re living with. If I open with how I see the problem instead of meeting them where they are at, I’ve already lost the them.

This is tricky because this is where people will often think they are doing the right thing. And it’s not glaring obvious what they are doing wrong because they’ve identify the right problem it’s just from the wrong POV.

Let’s go back to the founder with the relationship intelligence platform. His original positioning statement was around having a single intelligence layer that surfaces who is important to reach out to.

Original Statement: “Your relationship data is scattered across CRMs, inboxes, and your team's network. We activate every tool you already use into a single intelligence layer that surfaces who matters and how to reach them.”

Sounds solid and technically it’s right but it’s not compelling. Your messaging becomes much stronger when you focus on the customers POV of the problem.

New Statement: “Founders spend most of their time finding new business, raising capital and hiring talent. Not only do we give you the ability to find the right people in each area but also a plan to build the relationship.”

See the difference? Now go look at your website. Does your problem statement sounds like it came from an internal strategy doc rather than an actual customer conversation.

Weak Statement: Organizations struggle with fragmented workforce optimization and inefficient talent allocation.

Strong Statement: Your managers are stretched thin, your best people are quietly disengaging, and nobody has a clear picture of who’s actually thriving and who needs support.

One of those sentences is technically accurate. The other one makes someone feel seen. Your customer isn’t searching for your diagnosis. They’re searching for the frustration they’re carrying around right now.

Try this: Find the sentence on your site where you describe the problem you solve. Does it sound like it supports the product or the customer? Think about how your customer talks about the problem.

If it doesn’t reflect a specific scenario, rewrite it using words you’ve actually heard a real customer say out loud. Things you’ve heard in a sales call, a conversation, an email, or a complaint. If you have to think hard about whether a customer would ever say it that way, they wouldn’t.

Trap #3: You’re describing features. Your customer is trying to picture their life.

One founder in the pitch competition spent a solid chunk of their five minutes explaining how their technology dramatically improved electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The technical details were genuinely impressive. He was explaining the patented technology that reduces charging time and improved cost efficiency by 57%. But I kept waiting for the moment that would make it land.

What I wanted to hear was something like, “Drive from DC to North Carolina without stopping for an hour to charge your car in between.” I call it the “dummy proof” sentence. Explain it so any person off the street can understand.

So many businesses get stuck here because they think talking about features only means talking about specs.

When working with the founder of the relationship intelligence platform, he was talking about features and didn’t even know it. When describing the benefits of the product, he originally said “businesses would get a personalized relationship strategy, stronger signals, better match recommendations, or a smarter outreach plan.” These sound like outcomes, but they are still features.

Don’t tell me what the product does, tell what changes in my life because I’ve used it.

The real outcome is that a founder stops wasting hours chasing investors who were never going to invest, prospects who were never going to buy, and connections that were never going anywhere. They spend more of their energy on the relationships that can actually move the business forward.

Weak Product Description: AI-powered relationship intelligence platform with personalized connection strategies and investor match signals.

Strong Product Description: Stop chasing the wrong investors, convincing the wrong buyers and investing in the wrong talent. Our tool helps you know who is worth your time, so you don’t waste your time.

The first tells me what the product is. The second helps a founder picture what changes.

Go back to your site and find your first list of features. Read each one, and after every single one, ask yourself, so what? Keep going until you arrive at something that genuinely changes how your customer’s day, week, or quarter looks. That’s the answer they care about.

Try this: Take one feature from your homepage and rewrite it as a real-life outcome, something your customer could actually picture happening on a Tuesday afternoon or Monday morning.

Wanna see the final website for the relationship intelligence platform? Check it out here https://ourunlock.com/

Here’s what I kept coming back to sitting in that pitch competition. None of those founders had bad products. Most of them were building something that had real potential to be impactful. They just started the conversation in the wrong place. They started with themselves, their technology, their expertise. The best place to start is with customers and how they are experiencing the problem. Most businesses think they do this but they tend to revert to their experience because it’s what they know and what is easiest.

Your marketing has one job, help someone quickly answer three questions. Is this for me? Does it solve the problem I actually have? What does my life look like if it works? If you’ve answered those three questions clearly and honestly, then who cares if it’s AI-powered. Technology is what makes your product possible. Your customer is what makes your business matter.

The next time you sit down to review your website, resist the urge to ask whether you’ve explained your product well. Ask something simpler and harder, have I made it obvious why someone should care?

That’s the line between marketing that informs and marketing that actually moves people.

Want to deep dive into fixing your website? Check out this article to improve the traffic and engagement to any website https://momartech.com/blog/f/your-website-looks-right-so-why-isnt-it-working

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

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I was never dismissed in any organization that I was in. I want to be clear about that. However, I also didn’t feel like a member of the club either. I was genuinely respected, valued, and trusted member of team. And yet, there was always a door I could see clearly through but could never quite get open. I was in the room, but I wasn’t in the room, if you know what I mean.

People often referred to me as a computer, in one way or another. Not sure if that was a compliment or not. I guess it’s because I can be very analytical, in a Sheldon from Big Bang Theory kind of way. I sometimes speak very matter of fact’ly or in technical terms. I do tend to use big words for no good reason.

I’m a nerd in the sense that I love diving deep into problems. I find joy in identifying the things nobody else could find. Therefore, I loved being in marketing operations. My work matched my passion and skill, and I thought I was on a great career trajectory.

If you worked in B2B marketing operations during a particular stretch of years, there’s a decent chance you knew who I was. Not famous, nothing like that. But inside the niche world of MOPs, I had real credibility. I was invited onto podcasts, I wrote articles, I even got published in a peer-reviewed journal. Companies sought me out specifically because I was the person who knew how to walk into a marketing technology disaster and find my way out of it.

Did you have a broken lead routing system, where leads were falling into a black hole and nobody could explain why? An attribution model that hadn’t been touched since 2015, that was confidently lying to leadership every single week? Automation workflows stitched together with the digital equivalent of duct tape and prayers?

You get the picture. If there was a mess to clean up, I was your girl.

On paper, my career looked great. In reality, things were starting to feel…off.

I kept getting raises, recognition, and new titles. I worked my way up to Director of Marketing Infrastructure. But the title didn’t come with any real responsibility, just more work. What I wasn’t getting were direct reports, real managerial responsibility, or any meaningful proximity to the decisions that actually shaped the direction of the business. There was a seat at the strategic table somewhere, but I sure as heck couldn’t get near it.

Suddenly I looked up and fifteen years passed and I was still inside Marketo or HubSpot. Still building reports, fixing lead routing, and troubleshooting sync issues, just with a new title and a few extra bucks in my paycheck. The work I was once excited to dive into now started to feel like Groundhog Day.

I got bored. I was frustrated and I started to resent the work. Why am I not moving up? My peers are starting to pass me by. They are getting teams, working at bigger companies, seemingly getting more credibility. What am I doing wrong?

When you’re smart, and you know you’re smart, and the people around you know you’re smart, and you still can’t seem to break through, your brain doesn’t just accept it. It starts building a case and making excuses. You start looking for someone to blame, because the alternative is that it’s you. And that’s not something I was ready to accept at all. Instead, I thought…

They don’t respect marketing. They don’t understand what we actually do. They only care about numbers. They’re playing politics. They’re threatened by people who actually know things.

I ran through all of them. It was much easier to run with the narrative that I was competent and overlooked, rather than I was competent yet missing critical skills and fundamental business acumen.

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What I eventually came to realize is that I had become trapped by the very thing that made me successful. My expertise. I didn’t realize that I was only looking at problems through the lens that I knew best…Operations. Which was blocking from seeing things from the businesses POV.

When leadership asked marketing to prove ROI, I built more reports. They asked us to tie marketing to revenue, so I built attribution models. They wanted business impact, so I dove further into analytics. I thought I was becoming more strategic by becoming more precise. I was actually just digging myself the same hole but deeper.

There were two moments in particular that really represented my lack of ability to think beyond operations and become strategic.

The first was a reporting project for our private equity firm at the time. They had just acquired our company, and they wanted to understand the effectiveness of our marketing investments. A completely reasonable ask and exactly the kind of thing I was built for (or so I thought). I was excited because it gave me the chance to become more visible in front of leadership. It also kind of felt like a test (which it definitely was), but I was up for the challenge.

We spent weeks pulling the data apart. Everything from funnel performance to conversion rates, to lead quality, to sales handoffs, to pipeline creation. And we found something genuinely fascinating. There was a massive, systematic gap between MQLs and pipeline opportunities. Marketing would generate leads, sales would convert a solid percentage of those into meetings, and then somewhere between the meeting occurring and it becoming an opportunity, a large number of them just vanished. We didn’t have tracking on it. Anecdotally, there were a number of reasons for this. Prospects going dark, timing issues, job changes, follow-up that slipped, someone who said “call me in six months” and never got that call. The funnel had a massive hole in it, and I found it. I had mapped it precisely, and was genuinely excited to present it.

When I presented the news the room nodded politely and then went silent. And then immediately moved on to a completely different question. Ok…, but how much money are we getting back from the money we’re spending?

I stuttered. Embarrassed that I didn’t have the answer. Frustrated that no one seemed impressed by my findings. Confused that I didn’t get any praise for the work I just did. I just showed you where revenue is leaking. I just told you exactly where the funnel breaks down. Why are you asking me about something else?

What I didn’t understand then and what took me an embarrassingly long time to understand, was that I had answered a diagnostic question when they were asking a business question. They didn’t want to know where the funnel was broken. They wanted to know what marketing had produced with the money it was given. Now, they did care about the leak and wanted to fix the problem, but they were also frustrated that I spent all this time diving into data and had no answer for their original question.

It was critical to know where to allocate marketing dollars so they could get to the business outcome they needed. And I couldn’t answer that. Not only that, I came back with was an operational PROBLEM (without a solution, mind you) and that just doubled their frustration. I’ll see your business process and raise a process one. Yeah, not smart on my part.

The second moment was an attribution project for a CMO who had asked me to figure out which channels were driving pipeline. I spent weeks on it. I built a couple models, cleaned the data, traced the paths, and made sure everything tied together correctly. I presented it. I showed which campaigns influenced opportunities in the pipeline. He looked at it and essentially said, this is not what I asked for. What I want to know is where we’re getting the biggest return, where’s the best bang for our buck?

I remember feeling a flash of anger at that moment, I felt like he just moved the goal post right from under me. But sitting with it later, I realized we had been having completely different conversations the entire time. He thought we were discussing resource allocation. I thought we were discussing reporting. He was focused on a business outcome the entire time, I was executing a task. And I had never asked enough questions early enough to discover the gap. If I had actually understood what business decision, he was trying to make and not what metric he wanted to see, I would have built something entirely different. I wasted weeks because I assumed I understood the question when I really just relied on my own understanding.

That happened constantly. I kept asking leadership tactical questions that unknowingly exposed the strategic gaps in my own thinking. Questions like, how should we structure attribution, or should we optimize this campaign for demo requests or meetings booked, what do you want to see in the dashboard, MQLs sourced or MQLs converted. I thought I was being collaborative, but also exposing how much thought and work went into what they were requesting. But in reality, I was exposing that I didn’t yet understand the business well enough to already have a perspective on the direction we should be moving.

And boy, my arrogance, jeez. I really thought I had all the answers. My way is the best way, and I’ll argue you down until it’s my way. Looking back, I see how that can easily cause resentment and competition. The things silos are made of!

Nobody ever told me I didn’t understand the business. That’s not how executives communicate those things.

No one sits you down and says “Moni, you’re excellent at execution, but you don’t yet understand how businesses grow.”

Instead they say things like “We need someone more strategic.”

God, I hated that word. Strategic. What does that even mean? For years, I thought strategic meant proving marketing’s value and tying campaigns to revenue. So, every time I was told I needed to be more strategic, I responded by becoming even better at execution.

I eventually left corporate and started running a business of my own. And the world suddenly looked completely different from the other side of the table.

I learned what it feels like to have a month where the revenue coming in doesn’t line up with obligations going out. And you’re forced to make very difficult decisions. Really understanding margins and what they mean for which opportunities you can actually pursue and which ones would actually drain my business. Having to have sales conversations and the amount of context and trust that has to exist before someone is willing to make a real commitment. The experience of making decisions under uncertainty with incomplete information and real consequences, which is, I finally understood, exactly what executives are doing every single day.

All the things I had found irrational or frustrating or politically motivated when I was sitting inside those organizations, started making sense when I had my own business. I had been judging business decisions without understanding the conditions those decisions were responding to.

Strategic thinking is not just a more sophisticated version of operational thinking. It’s a different thing entirely. It’s about understanding how a business actually grows, how humans make decisions, what organizations optimize for under pressure, where the real constraints live, and how all of that context shapes what any given decision is really about.

Individual contributors often present information in a way that proves they did good work. Leaders present information in a way that helps the organization make good decisions.

For example an individual contributor would say “The project is behind schedule because the API integration took 17 days instead of 8. We encountered issues with the authentication layer and had to rebuild the token management framework.”

A leader would say “We’re approximately two weeks behind schedule. The root cause was an integration issue with a third-party API. We’ve resolved the technical problem and adjusted resources. The current impact is a two-week delay to launch, but no impact to annual revenue targets.”

But nobody’s teaching you how to make that distinction. You’re left to your own devices to try and figure it out. But if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong then you assume there is nothing to fix.

Ultimately, I wasn’t screwed over, I simply lacked understanding of business and how to communication in terms of business outcomes. Unfortunately, there was no training for that. I just kept getting patted on my head but no real leadership presence. I learned that you get to leadership by learning to see the whole business, not just the part of it you know best.

I just wish it hadn’t taken me fifteen years to learn it.

Want to see the other side of the coin? I wrote about how “being more strategic” is completely useless career advice

Marketing Accountability Council (MAC)

"Be More Strategic" Is the Most Useless Advice in Marketing

Apparently, you’re a peon in marketing until you’re seen as strategic. For years, it felt like everyone in my marketing circle was complaining about becoming more strategic at least once a quarter. A…

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2 months ago · 7 likes · Moni Oloyede

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

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I got the idea for the app from seeing founders experience a potentially detrimental marketing problem. Misunderstanding how people view their brand.

The founder sees and experiences their business one way, and the customer sees and experiences it a different way. For example, a founder sees themselves as a business that helps enterprise companies scale infrastructure, but the customer sees them as a business that helps government institutions implement procurement software. The business says we do way more than that. But the customers doesn’t know that.

I see it all the time. There is a foundational level of miscommunication between how a business presents itself and what the audience is understanding, and most businesses don’t catch this error until it’s too late.

So, in all my infinite wisdom, I built (aka vibe coded) something to measure it. I called it the brand gap app. All you have to do is provide your website URL and few other details, and it compares how you present yourself to what the internet actually says about you, then shows you exactly where the gaps are.

It worked perfectly. I was thrilled with myself for about thirty-six hours.

Then I put it out as a lead magnet, a few people played with it but absolutely no one scheduled a consultation with me for the service. After much mulling and some self-reflection, I figured it out. I probably should’ve asked an important question before building this app. Who the heck asked for this?

If someone found out their brand and their reputation didn’t match, what exactly were they supposed to do next? Business owners experience their brand as an extension of themselves. Am I asking them to change their entire brand or just update a logo and change some messaging? A better question is, what would someone realistic do with that information? Because if it requires some seismic shift in what they’re currently doing, it ain’t happening. And furthermore, if it isn’t directly tied to getting them more leads or customers, they’ll never do it.

I created something because technology made that thing easy to create. It has function, it has utility, it solves a problem, but it didn’t produce a solution for my customers. It just gave them more work to do. And not something anybody asks for.

That has nothing to do with AI, specifically. It’s a mistake I think we’ve been making with technology for twenty straight years, and AI just made it a whole lot easier to make faster.

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Technology has always been sold to us as the answer. Buy the CRM and build predictable pipeline. Buy the automation platform and generate predictable leads. Buy the project management tool and finally get organized. Now we’re doing it with AI. You can write your content, build your app, generate your strategy, and automate your business into shape. Looking back, it’s almost comical how often those promises never get met. They’ve just created more work for us to do.

Oh, I’m not blaming the tool. I’m blaming our overemphasis of the tool, so much so that we underemphasized what the human was actually asking for.

I’ve started to think that is the single biggest lie technology ever sold us. Technology changes how the work gets done but it shouldn’t decide if the work is worth doing or not. That’s when it becomes scary, because the result is that we play to the technology. And the customer gets the short end of the stick.

The naysayers will say “That’s not true! Technology supports the customer experience more than ever.”

Oh really?

Most customers hate this crap. It feels inhumane, it feels like nobody cares about you or your problems. It feels like you’re just another number with a dollar sign attached to it.

Self-checkout wasn’t put in place to make checking out convenient; it was put in place to save on labor cost. For the “convenience” of bagging my own groceries I get the pleasure of paying $.10 for the bag. It’s costing me money to bag my own groceries. Oh, but you can bring your own bags! Great, I get to invest in the cost of bagging my own groceries. That makes me feel better, thanks.

You see it in business too. When a business builds its systems around what the software needs instead of what the customer needs, the customer feels the negativity of the experience, even if they can’t articulate why. They fill out a form with twelve required fields because the CRM needs to route them somewhere. They get bounced to a chatbot because live support costs money. They receive five “just checking in” emails because a workflow flagged them as “engaged”. Who asked for this?

That’s not a failure of the technology. The software is doing precisely what it was built to do. There was simply no real customer led system underneath it for the software to support, so we end up with systems that support the technology and not technology that supports the human experience.

There are really two categories of work happening inside any business, and technology is spectacular at only one of them.

The mechanical work of sending the email, scheduling the meeting, updating the record, generating the report. Technology crushes this category. It doesn’t get tired, forget a step, or sigh audibly and roll its eyes when asked to do the same task for the four hundredths time.

Judgment work is about who we’re actually trying to reach, why aren’t they buying, what do they actually care about, should this thing even get built. They require context, empathy, scars from past mistakes, and occasionally the willingness to sit in a meeting and say “I genuinely don’t know yet,” which, incidentally, no AI model has ever once said to me.

That’s exactly the hole I fell into with my brand-gap tool. I got completely absorbed in what AI made possible and blew right past whether I should create it in the first place. And if I do, what solution will the customer want that will actually solve their problem? Somewhere out there, a business owner is building a chatbot right now because building a chatbot has become almost insultingly easy, and not because a single customer ever asked for one.

I use AI every day, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. It’s changed how I research, prototype, and think through a stuck problem. But I’ve gotten a lot more careful about exactly what job I’m handing it. I don’t ask it to tell me what matters or what to do next or what I should be doing instead. I ask it to help me move once I’ve already decided that for myself. That’s a genuinely different relationship than the one most people currently have with their tools. And the dynamic isn’t single threaded. You can come up with an idea, validate it with a human, build it with the tool, test with a human, update it with the tool, optimize the use case with a human, QA with the tool. Back and forth and back and forth.

As building tech gets cheaper and faster for literally everyone, the technology stops being anyone’s advantage, because everyone has access to the same tools you do. What doesn’t get commoditized is judgment and empathy. We have to prioritize understanding people over implementing technology. People who are making a real decision and will quickly tell you what shouldn’t get built even though it easily could. Those were never technical skills to begin with, and no version 2.0 update is coming to replace them.

We are producing technology faster than we are thinking. Technology changes how the work gets done. The people decide what work was worth doing in the first place. That job was always ours. Given how fast everything’s moving right now, it might be worth actually acting like it’s still ours, instead of handing it off one convenient tool at a time.

If this article made you question whether your tools are actually working together, read: Feeling Overwhelmed? Do This 60 Minute Marketing Audit. It's a step-by-step exercise to identify where your marketing system breaks down and what to fix first.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.

If you want to be a better marketer, do improv.

And believe me, I know how that sounds, especially if you’re anything like me. Because if you had told me that a few years ago, I probably would’ve looked at you like… girl, what?!? What are we even talking about right now? I’m not trying to be on a stage, I aint no comedian, I’m not doing any of that.

I never thought of myself as a creative person. I can’t draw, can’t act, can’t sing. My humor was dry and sarcastic. I wasn’t funny in “jokey” way.

I was the logical one, I thrived in structure. I’m the type of person who wanted the steps, the process, the clear path from point A to point B so I could just execute and move on. Your prototypical left-brain person. I liked knowing what “good” looked like and working toward that. I didn’t like putting something out there that might be wrong, or worse, might be judged.

So starting my career in marketing operations made perfect sense. It was systems, logic, if this then that, build the campaign, track the results, optimize, repeat. It was so comforting. It felt organized and controlled. There was always an answer if you just followed the process long enough.

As I got deeper into my marketing career I wanted to break away from just doing system work. So I started getting into foundational work and marketing principles.

The deeper you go, the less marketing is about logic and the more it’s about people. And people don’t behave like systems. They’re inconsistent, emotional, distracted, sometimes irrational, and somehow you’re supposed to understand them well enough to say something that makes them stop what they’re doing and pay attention.

There’s no clean formula for that.

Corporate marketing tries to convince you there is, though. Especially in B2B.

Most of my career was spent in the cybersecurity industry and SaaS technology, and if you’ve ever been anywhere near that world, you already know how this goes. There’s a language there that exists that is all its own. Zero trust, phishing attacks, threat detection, network security. You read the reports from Gartner and Forrester, you look at what competitors are saying, and your job becomes figuring out how to say the same thing just differently enough that it sounds like you. Basically, it’s BORING AF.

And if you go too far outside of that, people get uncomfortable. Will it rank? Will the market understand it? Are we saying it the “right” way? We have to show up in the magic quadrant!

You learn, very quickly, where the boundaries are. You understand what’s acceptable, what feels safe, and what won’t get questioned in a meeting. There is a box you operate within and there is no stepping out of it. At the time I didn’t realize that I was being conditioned to not think outside the box.

When you go to a brainstorming session you realize that there are limitations to any creative thinking.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in those rooms trying to come up with something, anything, that would make us stand out. The tradeshow planning session is a perfect example. You throw something out there, like maybe we do something interactive, maybe we create an experience instead of just handing out another t-shirt, maybe we even do something simple like a seltzer bar because at least it’s different and will attract a crowd.

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And it doesn’t even get a chance. Shot down immediately.

“Too expensive.”
”Not aligned.”
”Sales won’t like it.”
”People are just going to come, grab the giveaway and leave.”
”Have we thought about how we’re collecting leads?”

There is not even a chance to see if the idea had something in it worth building on, because it gets shut down at the first sign of friction. After you get shut down enough times, you stop bringing ideas like that to the table, because you already know how it’s going to go.

Eventually, you don’t even need the room to shut you down. You do it yourself.

You think of something and before it even fully forms, you’re already running through the checklist. That’s not going to work. That’s too weird. People won’t get it. Someone’s going to have an issue with it. And just like that, it’s gone. You move on to something safer, something that sounds like what everyone else is already doing. BORING AF!

And then we all sit around wondering why marketing feels the same everywhere.

There are plenty of ideas, we just don’t let them live long enough to become anything.

So when I say improv changed how I market, I don’t mean it made me more creative in the way people usually think about creativity. I didn’t walk out of that class suddenly coming up with wild, out-of-the-box ideas.

It showed me how much I was getting in my own way.

I took a class at Washington Improv Theater on a random Saturday in April of 2021 because I was in that post-pandemic phase where you’re just saying yes to things you normally wouldn’t do. It was free for novices, and I figured it’s two hours, what’s the worst that could happen.

And almost immediately, you realize there’s nowhere to hide.

You’re in a scene, someone says something to you, and you have to respond. Not after you’ve had time to think through the perfect answer. Right then, in the moment. In front of everyone.

I had a blast; it was so fun. Not soon after I was taking a level 1 introduction to improv course.

And the rule that keeps everything moving is “yes, and,” which sounds simple until you actually try to do it.

Because what it’s really asking you to do is stop rejecting what’s in front of you. Stop editing it. Stop saying no because it feels uncomfortable. Stop trying to make it smarter or funnier before it exists. Just accept it and add to it.

I realized fairly earlier on that my instinct wasn’t to “yes, and.”

My instinct was to pause, evaluate, and quietly say “no” in my head before I even opened my mouth.

No, that doesn’t make sense.
No, that’s not good enough.
No, I can’t build on that.

It wasn’t just me. A lot of us in class had the same issue. In scenes, the first reaction was to reject what was given to you or question it, but definitely not accept.

Player 1: “Do you wanna go on a hike?”
Player 2: “No, I wanna dance!”

It would happen over and over again. Our instructor would have to coach us out it. “Don’t reject the offer, just go with it. No one wants to watch scenes of people fighting.”

We instinctually block ideas. Things we don’t like, things we’re not comfortable with, things we don’t have control over.

And that was definitely me. And I wasn’t just doing that in improv. I was doing that everywhere.

That even showed up in my own business in unexpected ways.

You would think once you leave corporate, all of that goes away. You’re free! You no longer need approvals, there are no guardrails, no one telling you what you can and can’t do. You can finally just create. I can do whatever I want.

Except… you bring all of that past conditioning with you.

I remember thinking about creating a mascot for my brand, an elephant personality, something that felt different and a little playful, and my first reaction wasn’t excitement, it was immediate resistance. This looks childish. People won’t take you seriously. This isn’t what “real” businesses do.

Nobody told me that.

That was just sitting in my head, ready to shut the idea down before I even explored it.

Same thing with how I write, how I speak, the way I show up. There’s always that voice trying to clean it up, make it more professional, not make too many waves or ruffle too many feathers. But what’s really underneath all of that is the same fear that’s always been there. What if people don’t like this version of you?

Improv doesn’t make that voice totally disappear, but it makes it a lot harder to blindly follow it. You’re aware now.

You start to see how fast you’re shutting things down, how quickly you’re defaulting to safe, how often you’re choosing something that feels acceptable over something that might actually be interesting.

Improv gave me a different POV on ideas. Not everything that is weird will inevitably become stupid or ridiculous. There is some real genius in there if it’s given space to come out and be explored.

So the biggest shift for me wasn’t suddenly becoming “creative,” it was learning how to give ideas space.

Improv helped me become freer in my own thoughts and ideas. I was able to explore them, shape them, and allow them to evolve naturally. Let them be a little messy and be incomplete without immediately deciding they’re not good enough. More often than not, the first version isn’t the thing, but there’s something inside of it that is worth pulling on, and you don’t find that if you kill it too early.

That applies to everything. Copy, content, campaigns, even how you talk to people.

You have to stop trying to get it right on the first pass, and you start working with what’s there.

Now I write everything down. When I come back to it, if I can expand on it or add to it, that’s the thing I work on.

When I look at marketing now, the gap is obvious. There are plenty of ideas, just a lack of trust in those ideas.

We’ve trained ourselves to filter everything so quickly that nothing new has a chance to develop. We default to what’s already been proven, what’s already been said, what already feels safe, and then we wonder why everything feels flat and interchangeable.

And then we blame AI for it, like this wasn’t already happening long before AI showed up.

If you really want to change how you market, pay attention to how you respond to your own thoughts.

Notice how fast you dismiss something or how often you edit yourself before anything fully forms.

Notice how quickly you reach for something that feels “right” instead of something that feels honest.

You can do that anywhere, at any time. Improv just makes it impossible to ignore.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.

The company had been acquired by a private equity firm. As you may know PE firms come into any organization with two things, matching fleece vests and a delusional level of confidence. They wanted to know where the marketing spend was going, so they put us through weeks of data analysis. Pull this data, compare these sources, look at it from this angle and so we did. We pulled everything out of Salesforce and Marketo. We cleaned data that hadn’t been touched since the first Obama term. We traced opportunities from first touch to closed revenue like we were solving a cold case.

And you know what we found? Marketing actually wasn’t the problem. Our conversion metrics weren’t pretty, but they weren’t the disaster everyone assumed. The actual breakdown was happening after the handoff. Sales wasn’t converting meetings into pipeline, therefore pipeline wasn’t becoming revenue. We had proof. The so called data everyone claimed they desperately wanted.

You already know what happened.

Nothing.

No accountability, no action, no “hm, interesting, maybe we’ve been looking at this wrong.” If the data showed marketing was the problem, you know heads would’ve rolled.

That was the day I understood the real rules of the game. Ya’ll want the truth until it points somewhere inconvenient. They really didn’t want the truth, they just needed a place to put the blame. Marketing is a very convenient place to put the blame.

We’ve all been there. Maybe it wasn’t private equity. Maybe it was a QBR where someone reframed a missed number as a “marketing awareness issue.” Maybe it was the annual planning meeting where leadership confidently declared that marketing should source $40 million in pipeline next year, right after cutting your budget, eliminating two headcount, and describing your biggest content asset as “the webinar thing.”

I didn’t sign up to be a punching bag. Sales misses quota? Go talk to marketing. Revenue is soft? Let’s get marketing to do more. New market to enter, more leads needed, better leads needed, same leads with half the resources? Marketing, marketing, marketing, and more marketing. Oh, but close a record quarter and watch how fast marketing disappears from the narrative. Suddenly it’s the sales team’s killer instinct and the CEO’s visionary strategy. Marketing who?

Every job I had. Same story, different leadership team with the same PowerPoint deck about pipeline efficiency. I got my master’s in marketing from Johns Hopkins in 2013 thinking I was going to help companies understand customers and communicate value. Instead I spent the better part of a decade sending content into the void and hoping it would turn into leads by the time someone ran the attribution report.

I came from marketing operations, so I genuinely loved the systems. But somewhere in year seven or eight of my career I had a realization. I wasn’t doing marketing. I was just managing distribution. At the time I couldn’t quite name it. I just knew something felt off.

If you spend five minutes on LinkedIn on any given Tuesday, you will find roughly four hundred posts diagnosing what’s wrong with corporate marketing. Marketing doesn’t have a seat at the table. Executives don’t understand us. Brand is back. Performance marketing is dead. Performance marketing is the future. Demand gen is broken. AI is coming for your job. AI is going to save your job. Every week there’s a new rant, a new hot take, a new “actually, the real problem is—” and underneath almost all of it sits the same tired premise. Marketing exists to drive revenue and the argument is only about whether it’s doing that well enough.

If you know me, even a little, then you know I don’t believe marketing should be tied to revenue (but those are separate articles, I wrote about it here and here). What I want to talk about is what’s underneath it. Because after twenty years, more platforms than I can count, and enough planning meetings to qualify as a recurring trauma response, I’ve come to believe that most of corporate marketing’s frustration keeps coming from the same three places. Nobody actually knows what strategy means. Marketing and the business are speaking completely different languages and both sides think the other one is being obtuse. And somewhere along the way we gave technology so much authority that we started designing marketing for the software instead of for the people.

No one is coming to fix this for you. No rebrand, no new tool, no organizational restructure is going to resolve it while you wait. But if you want to feel better about the work you’re doing and actually start moving the needle, these are the three places to start.

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Lesson 1: Nobody Knows What Strategy Means. Including, For An Embarrassingly Long Time, Me.

For a long time I thought marketing strategy meant a stronger campaign plan or a smarter nurture sequence. Maybe a more sophisticated demand gen program. I was wrong, and so was almost everyone else in those rooms. Let me explain it like this, if I asked you what your vacation strategy is, you wouldn’t tell me you booked a flight. Booking a flight is something you do because of the strategy. The strategy is that you want two weeks of real disconnection without bankrupting yourself, which is why you drive instead of fly and rent a house in September instead of a hotel in July. The activities exist because the thinking happened first.

Marketing almost always does this backwards. We start with we need more leads so “let’s run LinkedIn ads” and “let’s build an ABM campaign” and “let’s do a webinar” and when someone asks what the strategy is, we organize those activities into a slide deck and call it done. All we really did was create a prettier to-do list. A strategy deck that contains no actual strategy. And everyone in the room knows it feels off but nobody wants to be the one to say so because we have a campaign launch in three weeks.

There are four levels of strategy, and most marketers spend their entire careers living inside only one of them.

Operational strategy is where most marketing teams live by default, because it’s where the work is visible and the deliverables are tangible. Campaigns, channels, content, automation, creative, execution. It asks how we execute. It is necessary and completely insufficient on its own.

Functional strategy asks what role marketing is supposed to play in helping the business accomplish something that actually matters. Repositioning away from “cheapest option” toward “most trusted.” Shifting from acquisition to retention because the unit economics changed. Breaking into healthcare after a decade in manufacturing. These are strategic marketing decisions, not campaign decisions, and treating them like campaign decisions is how you end up with beautifully executed work that moves nothing.

Business strategy is where the real decisions live. Which markets to compete in, whether to move upmarket, how the company should be positioned in three years, etc. This is the table marketing desperately wants a seat at and never gets. The maddening part is that every one of those decisions directly changes what marketing should be doing, whether marketing knew about them or not.

Corporate strategy is mergers, acquisitions, restructuring, going public. Not a marketing conversation until suddenly, violently, it is.

Here’s what this looks like when it breaks down. Your executive team decides quietly that they’re acquiring a company in Europe within twelve months because international expansion is the fastest path to growth. Marketing doesn’t know this. Marketing spends six months building an excellent lead acquisition campaign for existing North American accounts because that’s where historical conversion is strongest. The campaign is genuinely good, strong creative, solid pipeline, great engagement metrics. Wrong direction entirely. Nobody was incompetent. Everyone was just operating from a completely different strategic layer with no map between them.

I eventually had to ask myself, if someone had invited me into those executive rooms fifteen years ago, would I have known what to contribute? Probably not. I was thinking like an operator. And getting better at operating by learning more platforms, getting more certifications, and knowing more sophisticated attribution, only made me a better executor. It did not make me a strategist. Those are different skills, and the profession doesn’t always make that distinction clear enough to be useful.

Lesson 2: Marketing Doesn’t Understand the Business. We Just Don’t Say That Part Out Loud.

Corporate marketing talks a lot about how executives don’t understand marketing. And we’re right, they think it’s advertising, or lead gen, or the team that makes the slides look nice before the board presentation. They want marketing to generate demand, own the brand, manage the CRM, improve retention, launch products, and also pull together a trade show presence by next Tuesday. The expectations are frequently absurd.

But if we’re being fair, marketing doesn’t understand the business nearly as well as we think we do. I certainly didn’t. I realized this when I left corporate and had to actually build a business, at which point I discovered that fifteen years of working inside companies had not fully prepared me to understand how they work.

Businesses don’t make money in the simple, linear way that most marketing thinking assumes. Some make money through licensing, like IBM or Disney. Some make money through owning infrastructure everyone else depends on, like NextEra Energy. Some run a division at a deliberate loss because another division prints money, like Amazon and AWS. A PE-backed company and a founder-led company can sell identical products and behave like completely different organisms because their incentives are totally different. A public company has constraints a family business has never thought about. A SaaS startup burning cash toward its next funding round is not the same animal as a hundred-year-old manufacturer protecting margin, even if both of them send you marketing emails that look exactly the same.

All of that changes what marketing should be doing. And most marketers never learn any of it, because nobody in marketing tells you that understanding your company’s P&L is part of your job.

The question I wish I knew to ask early is “how does this business actually make money?” Try asking five marketers at your company tomorrow without giving them any hints. My prediction is you’ll get answers that describe the product catalog and not the business model. And if marketing can’t explain the economic engine it’s supposed to be supporting, it cannot align to it. It will keep optimizing in one direction while the business quietly moves in another, and everyone will be frustrated and nobody will be entirely sure why.

The fix requires some humility and some initiative. Ask your CFO or your FP&A team to explain the margin structure. Find out which revenue streams actually matter and which ones leadership is quietly deprioritizing. Learn what decisions are being made several levels above you that will eventually land on your desk as a messaging problem. Most finance people are genuinely happy to explain this to someone asking honest questions. They are not used to being asked honest questions by marketing.

Lesson 3: Technology Is a Tool. We Started Treating It Like a Boss.

Before this goes where you think it’s going, I just want to state for the record that I love marketing technology. I have built a career around it. I have implemented it, broken it, debugged it at 11pm, and argued with vendors about why their “seamless integration” was neither seamless nor an integration. I’m not here to tell you AI is ruining marketing. I have read enough of those posts.

What I will tell you is that somewhere along the way, the tool became the authority. And when it happened, the customer got moved out of the center of the conversation and was replaced by a dashboard.

You can hear it in how the questions changed. When technology is working for you, the questions were, what do our customers actually need, and how do we reach them more effectively? When technology took over, the questions were, what can HubSpot automate, what is the algorithm rewarding this month, how do we get the open rate up?

The pattern repeats on a reliable five-year cycle. A new platform arrives. Everyone talks about whatever that platform does best. Today it’s AI. Before that it was account-based marketing. Before that, machine learning. Before that, and I will never stop laughing about this, blockchain. Each one arrives carrying the same promise: this time we’ll finally make marketing measurable, efficient, and free of guesswork. The technology does things. Understanding what customers believe and why they do or don’t buy, remains the job of marketing, no matter if the tech is there or not.

We keep falling for it because technology offers something deeply seductive. The feeling of certainty. A conversion rate feels objective. An attribution report feels like truth. Customer trust, brand perception, the emotional texture of how someone experiences your company, none of those fit neatly into a column, so we fund the column instead. Nobody has ever walked into a board meeting and gotten budget approved by saying “our customers feel genuinely understood.” But that same room will spend forty-five minutes on whether click-through rate moved from 2.8% to 3.1%, what it means, who’s responsible, and what we should do about it.

Think about the last expensive thing you bought. You didn’t buy it because a subject line was optimized. You bought it because you trusted them. You trusted their explanation of the problem, their track record, the way they understood what you were trying to do. Technology may have delivered some of those moments, but it didn’t manufacture the trust. People did.

The discipline this requires is simple to describe and hard to practice when everyone around you is asking about efficiency. But you’re going to have to put your big girl panties on and push back. Develop the message that actually addresses what your buyer believes, not just what they’ve been observed clicking on. Build the offer around something people genuinely want. Then use technology to make all of that travel farther than it could without the machine.

When I look back at the years, I spent grinding through corporate marketing feeling like something was fundamentally broken, I wasn’t wrong. Some of it is broken. The incentive structures push against the right things. The measurement frameworks reward the wrong things. The planning cycles don’t leave room for the thinking that actually matters.

But most of the frustration I experienced and most of what I see in marketers who are done with the chaos, traces back to the same gaps. Confusing activity for strategy. Not understanding the business well enough to serve it. Letting the tools set the agenda instead of the customer.

Nobody is coming to fix the system for you. The website rebrand isn’t going to do it. The new attribution model isn’t going to do it. A better CRM is definitely not going to do it. If you want to take back your power and stop getting dumped, you have to be the one to change.

It’s a lot. But it’s also, genuinely, the most interesting version of this job.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.

Like the day-to-day of working in an agency is kind of crazy. You’re constantly swinging between two versions of the same job, and both versions are true at the same time.

One side is exciting, fast, and intellectually stimulating. It’s the kind of environment that makes you feel like you’re leveling up every week whether you’re ready or not.

The other side is draining, chaotic, and unforgiving, where you are held accountable for outcomes you don’t control while trying to keep up with expectations that were never based in reality to begin with.

And the hardest part is that you don’t get to choose which side you experience.

You get both, constantly. Over and over and over again.

I was naive when I went into agency life, I honestly didn’t think it would be that hard. I felt like it was the best way to take the next step in my career progression.

At my first job out of college, I was deep in the technical side of marketing, working inside marketing automation platforms like Eloqua and Marketo, building campaigns, managing data, understanding how these platforms actually worked to help support and accomplish business goals. That meant I had skills that were in demand, and when agencies started reaching out, I felt validated. I had skills that were valuable and transferable. Being in an agency would allow me to take my career further, faster.

I ended up at an agency that focused on marketing automation implementations. They pitched it the way agencies always pitch it.

You’ll get exposure and be able to work with different clients. You’ll grow quickly and become an expert. Nothing like a good ole ego stroke.

And none of that was a lie. That’s what makes this so tricky.

There is a very real high that comes with agency life, and if you’ve ever been in one, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

When you get a new client there’s this moment where everything feels open, like new possibilities and opportunities. There is a very real rush, a feeling of excitement. You’re learning a new business, trying to understand what they do, what they sell, who they sell to, what’s working, what’s broken. You get to poke through their systems, looking at campaign and workflows, trying to reverse engineer what they’ve been doing and why it hasn’t quite gotten them where they want to go.

If you’re someone who likes to learn and is a problem solver, like me, then a new environment like this is fun. It’s simulating in a way that’s hard to replicate anywhere else.

One week you’re helping a team think through how to structure a nurture sequence tied to a webinar funnel.

The next week you’re implementing an entirely new system for a company who bought into the hopes and dreams of targeting their ideal customer with the right message at the right time.

Then you’re in another environment entirely, where the problem isn’t technical at all, it’s messaging, email creative and landing page optimization.

You see all of it.

Creative, copy, systems, data, process, internal politics, decision-making, all of it layered together in real time.

It’s all different and yet the same in odd ways. You start to see that every company thinks they’re special.

They think their problems are unique, their situation is more complex than everyone else’s. If you just understood their business deeply enough, you would see why the normal rules don’t apply to them.

But they are all dealing with the same core issues.

Pressure to hit revenue numbers. Leadership pushing expectations down the chain. Teams that are siloed. Systems that are incomplete. Processes that don’t fully exist.

All tied together by a constant need to produce results now, not later when things are fixed, but right now.

The details change, but the pattern stays the same.

Seeing it, over and over again, accelerates your understanding of marketing and business in a way that’s nearly impossible to reproduce in a corporate environment.

In two years, I learned what probably would have taken ten years to learn if I had stayed in house.

But in an agency, nothing good last forever. Eventually, Mr. Hyde shows up.

That same client that felt exciting at the beginning starts to become a drain.

The honeymoon phase eventually ends and now you’re trying to execute. And that’s when the cracks start to show.

The data you thought you’d be able to rely on isn’t so easy to clean. The systems don’t connect the way they said they did.

The process for approvals is unclear, or worse, painfully slow because everything has to go through multiple layers of people who are not aligned with each other.

Your point of contact is constantly in meetings trying to get buy-in from stakeholders who either don’t understand the work, don’t agree with it, or don’t prioritize it.

As a result, timelines slip and information comes in late. Requirements change halfway through. But none of that changes what’s expected from you.

You’re still supposed to deliver. Everything constantly changes on their end, but nothing better change on yours.

This is where I started to really understand how agencies actually worked.

We would sell something like a platform migration, say moving from HubSpot to Marketo, and on paper, it sounds clean. There’s a scope. There’s a start and an end. We’re going to move everything over, get you set up, and you’ll be good to go.

But what does “good to go” actually mean?

Does it mean you can log into the new system and send a basic email? Does it mean you can build and run a full campaign with segmentation, automation, and reporting? Does it mean you have email sequences, landing pages, forms, tracking, lead scoring, attribution, and a process that your team actually understands and can use?

Those are completely different outcomes that are rarely defined clearly upfront.

And as a result, you’re never really done.

From your perspective, you’ve completed the migration. The system is set up. The core pieces are in place. From the client’s perspective, they’re looking at it thinking, “We still can’t do everything we want to do.”

And now you’re stuck. The project doesn’t end cleanly.

It lingers and stretches. Then turns into, “Can you also…,” and “We thought this would…,” and “Why isn’t it doing…”

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The thing that burned me out more than anything else wasn’t just the work itself.

It was the fact that I was always on. There was no real off switch.

Clients reach out when they need something, and because you are an agency, you’re job is to serve the client. There is an unspoken expectation that you ALWAYS respond.

That might be seven in the morning or seven at night.

That might be a “quick question” that turns into a thread you have to stay engaged in because ignoring it feels like you’re dropping the ball.

And your manager is not going to step in and say, “Hey, don’t respond, protect your time.”

That’s not how it works. The client relationship is priority and the money, so you stay on.

You check your email more than you want to, respond faster than you should, and Slack becomes your most used app.

It starts to feel like your time isn’t fully your own anymore, like you’re always available, always slightly waiting for the next ask to come through.

And over time, that stress becomes too much. You never really get to relax into your own life. You look up one day and the work is no longer fun, it becomes annoying. Campaigns aren’t interesting anymore, they’re a collecting of dumb insignificant ideas, that won’t make any difference in the long run.

There are smaller dichotomies that stack on top of the big ones.

You can be on a project you love, one that challenges you in the right way, where the team is supportive, the work is interesting, and you actually look forward to the meetings.

Or you can be on a project you hate, where every email from that client feels like a massive weight, where you see their name in your inbox and your first reaction is…ugh, because you already know it’s going to be another ask, another revision, another thing that wasn’t accounted for.

Let’s not even talk about the clients with the bad attitude and the nasty disposition. The ones that treat you like the help instead of a supportive extension of the team

You don’t want to be on the project you hate. But weirdly enough, you also don’t want to get kicked off it either.

Because getting pulled off a project doesn’t feel good. It feels like a judgment, or even worse, failure.

Maybe the client didn’t like your style. Maybe your skill set didn’t match. Maybe you weren’t “what they were looking for.”

Even if it’s not personal, it just feels personal.

So you’re stuck in this weird space where leaving feels bad, but staying feels worse.

Inside the agency, it’s not all one note either.

There are people who will go out of their way to help you, support you, jump in when things are getting heavy, the kind of coworkers who make the job bearable and, at times, genuinely enjoyable.

And then there are people who will absolutely protect themselves first, who will shift blame, who will position themselves in a way that leaves you exposed if something goes wrong.

There’s competition for visibility, for good projects, for proximity to leadership.

Being in an agency changed my career trajectory because it broken me. Broke me from a fantasy I had brought into.

There was a belief I carried into agency life that I didn’t even realize I had.

I believed that if you set the system up correctly, if you built the campaigns properly, if you followed the process, the results would come.

That these tools, platforms, frameworks, were a path to revenue if you just executed them the right way.

Agency life slowly broke that belief, as I saw it fail over and over again.

The system would get set up and the campaigns would go out. Then we’d run the reports. And the big, promised outcome, the clean line from marketing activity to revenue impact, never really materialized the way it was sold.

Too many of the variables that actually drive those outcomes were outside of what marketing alone could control.

Was the product even good, did it deliver on its promise? Did the offer make sense to the customer? Was the sales process constantly being redefined? Is there internal alignment on goals?

The answers didn’t matter, marketing was still expected to produce.

And as an agency, you were one step further removed from control, but still directly tied to the result.

I begin to question this 360 view of the customer theory. And starting to think that it was never going to happen the way we thought it would.

Ultimately I left agency life after 2 years. I could do the work, that was never the issue.

But the combination of constant pressure, no real off switch, being a road warrior and operating in an environment where every mistake felt amplified was not something I could sustain.

I don’t do my best work in environments where there is no room to be human and where your humanity isn’t seen or valued.

I left with more than I came in with though. A lot more.

I understood marketing at a much deeper level. I understood business dynamics and how pressure moves through organizations. Most importantly, I understood the difference between what companies say they want and what they are actually set up to achieve.

When I went back in-house, I was way ahead. Because I had seen the patterns play out across multiple environments I knew exactly what needed to be fix and what the approach should be to fix it.

If you want to learn fast, go to an agency. But if you do, go in with your eyes open.

Understand that you are stepping into a dual life. The same environment that teaches you quickly can also take a lot from you if you’re not careful.

Understand that you are not there to fix everything. You are there to learn, to contribute, and to navigate a system that is not always set up to make your job possible.

And most importantly, understand that marketing, on its own, is not the lever everyone pretends it is.

Agency life will show you that. Whether you’re ready for it or not.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.

Layoffs had been happening for months. People were dropping like flies around me, entire teams reshuffled, responsibilities stacked on top of whoever was left standing, and somehow I survived it all. Not only that, but I had been given a bonus to stay. In my head I thought I was needed. Thought I was safe.

So when HR called, I answered like it was just another call.

“Hello”, I said. “How are you?” Exchanging pleasantries, like we were about to a have a casual conversation. She let out a big sigh and said that they had to let me go. She said it like I should’ve known this was coming. It was my time to hit the guillotine.

There was no long explanation, no drawn-out conversation. Just a clean, corporate sentence that ends a chapter of your life whether you’re ready or not.

And I said…“Okay.” I gave her the clean and corporate energy she gave me.

I didn’t give any pushback, I didn’t ask any questions. There was no emotion in my voice. I took it like a champ, the way I had handled everything in my career, composed, professional, agreeable, and then I hung up the phone and just sat there, staring at my screen like it might say something back to me if I waited long enough.

Wow. That just happened.

I remember looking around the room, almost expecting something to change physically, like in the movies when the lights go dark, the camera zooms in and the dramatic music starts to play, because something had clearly shifted. But everything looked exactly the same. Same desk. Same chair. Same laptop. Same half-finished thoughts sitting in tabs I would never go back to.

After a minutes the panic started to creep in. Then the questions started rushing through my head.

What am I going to do now? How am I going to tell people? What am I going to say?

Ugh, I already knew what was coming. The look of concern and subtle panic in their voice. The well-meaning but loaded questions. “So, what are you going to do?” “Are you okay?” “Do you have something lined up?” And underneath all of that, the thing no one says out loud but secretly thinks to themselves.

Something must have gone wrong. What did she do?

And I didn’t know if I was ready to sit in that, to explain that, no, it wasn’t performance, no, I didn’t mess up, no, I didn’t get pushed out for not doing my job well, but also… yes, I got fired.

Even now, that word still stings a little.

I had never been fired in my life. I’ve had a job since I was 14 years old. Sometimes multiple jobs. I was the job-hopping queen, leaving every 2 years like clockwork, strategically navigating higher salaries and better titles.

So I sat there for the rest of the day, not really knowing what to do with myself, which wasn’t all that different from how I had been operating toward the end of this job anyway. I had already checked out of that job long before they let me go.

The environment had been wearing me down slowly. The chaos was constant and the toxicity grew by the day.

I spent five years at that company, and in those five years we had five CEOs. Three CMOs. Two COOs. Three or four CFOs. Two different private equity firms. Acquired 2 companies and went through 2 mergers.

Constant change at the top means constant confusion below it. Every new leader came in with a new direction, a new priority, a new version of what “success” is supposed to look like, and you’re expected to pivot instantly and execute like none of the ground beneath you is shifting.

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At the same time, people are getting laid off, and when they leave, their work doesn’t disappear. It just gets handed to whoever is left. No additional resources. No real support. Just more responsibility and maybe a new title (which you should be grateful for).

I used to joke about it all the time. I would say getting promoted there felt like being handed a pile of shit and told to clean it up with a toothbrush, and when you couldn’t clean up the giant mess that was there long before you, they would turn around, look at you in disgust and be like, “Eww, you smell like shit.”

And people would feel bad. I could see it on their face and in their demeanor. They would carry that weight and feel like a failure. There was a culture of blame, so you were made to feel like you were terrible at your job even though you were completely set up to fail.

There was no budget and fewer people, yet higher expectations. More pressure to drive revenue in an environment that refused to give you the stability required to actually build anything sustainable. And somewhere in all of that, there was no culture of appreciation, no real acknowledgment of effort, not a moment where someone stopped and said, “Thank you.” The reward was always more work.

So by the time that call came, I was already mentally gone.

Which is why the relief was real.

But once the noise of that job disappeared, once the meetings and the emails stopped and the constant pressure was lifted, I was left alone with something I hadn’t had in a long time.

Quiet time and space.

And in that space, I became very uncomfortable.

If I’m not this… who am I?

Work had become my identity. It was how I understood myself and truthfully, how I understood other people. I hate admitting that, but it’s true. “What do you do?” wasn’t just a question, it was a way of placing people, of deciding how to engage, how to respect, how to relate.

And now I didn’t have an answer to this question myself.

Not a clean one, anyway.

“I’m a Director of Marketing” had been easy. It carried weight. It told people something about me without me having to explain it.

So what happens now? What do I say when someone asks what I do?

Do I tell them I got fired? Do I soften it? Reframe it? Avoid it completely? Will they respect me? Will they take me seriously?

Even now, I still catch myself saying I “left corporate” instead of saying it plainly.

Without a job, I felt exposed in a way I didn’t expect.

So instead of rushing to fill that gap, I did something that went against every instinct I had built over years of being productive, efficient, and always moving forward.

I stopped.

I gave myself about three months and decided I wasn’t going to jump into anything right away. I’m not going to apply to jobs or reach out to recruiters or reach out to my network and let them know I’m looking for new opportunities. I’m not going scrambling to prove I was still valuable.

And those three months were some of the best months I’ve had in a long time.

I traveled and visited friends. Went to concerts. I celebrated birthdays without checking my phone every five minutes. I sat in the middle of a weekday and realized I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be, no meeting I was late for, no deliverable hanging over my head. I enjoyed resting and letting my brain relax. I let myself exist without constantly having to produce something.

And at first, that felt strange. But once I let the trauma of toxic corporate environment wash off me, it started to feel like freedom.

However, underneath that freedom was still a question that hadn’t gone away.

What am I actually meant to do?

I wasn’t thinking about my next job or how do I get back to the top of the corporate ladder. I had to take a long hard look in the mirror and think about what do I want to build from here, now that I have a chance to choose differently? What do I want to do with the rest of my life?

So I started looking at myself more honestly.

What am I actually good at?

Not just looking at it through a lens of what have I been paid to do or the roles I’ve held or the titles I’ve earned, but what comes naturally to me, what do people come to me for, where do I feel like I make a real impact?

And the answer kept pointing me back to marketing.

Which annoyed me a little, because I thought I was done with it.

But the truth was, I wasn’t done with marketing. I was done with the version of marketing I had been stuck in. The corporate version that is obsessed with leads and analytics and short-term results, where humans get stripped down to numbers and lose all character, nuance and dimension.

At its best, marketing is not numbers.

At its best, marketing is understanding people so clearly that when you speak, they feel seen. It’s knowing what someone is thinking before they say it out loud and being able to reflect it back to them in a way that makes them pause and say, “Yes! That’s exactly it!”

It’s communication.

You know that feeling when you see an ad and it just hits you? The Budweiser commercial that reminds you of your “grown frat boy” uncle or the Progressive commercial that cracks you up because it showed you something your mom did just this morning or the Nike commercial that just nails a universal truth about perseverance we can all relate to. Great marketing gets inside you, like someone actually understood what you were thinking, or what you were going through.

And when I looked around, I realized there were a lot of people doing marketing who had never been taught that part. They knew how to create content. They knew how to run campaigns or how to generate leads.

But they didn’t understand PEOPLE.

They didn’t under consumer psychology, the power of cultural identity, the deep emotional pull that drives nearly all of human decision making. They didn’t understand people in a way that allows you to create something that actually resonates.

And I couldn’t ignore that.

So the next question became, how do I want to address it?

I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to be another consultant handing over a 50 slide strategy deck that would sit in a folder somewhere. I didn’t want to build an agency and tie my worth to client results that I knew were influenced by things outside of my control. I didn’t want to recreate the same pressure I had just escaped, just under a different structure.

But teaching felt different. Teaching is something I’m deeply connected to. All my closest friends are teachers in one way or another. I’ve always had an affinity for the profession.

When you teach, you don’t just give someone an answer. You give them understanding. You equip them to think, apply, and adapt.

What I appreciate about teaching is that it requires a different level of understanding.

You have to simplify concepts and subjects, without losing depth. You have to listen closely enough to know where someone is getting stuck and adjust how you communicate so they can actually move forward.

That felt aligned with how I wanted to show up. Making sure people understood and bringing them through the journey of learning.

And when I thought about the people who had actually changed me, who had left a lasting impact on how I see the world and operate in it, they were all teachers in some form. Coaches, mentors or instructors. People who took the time to explain something until it clicked in a way that stayed with me.

That is a different kind of impact, one that is lasting and that’s what I wanted to do.

I didn’t just want teach marketing as a function, but I wanted to teach people how to communicate, how to listen, how to actually understand the person on the other side of the message. Because in modern society, we are not great at that.

We don’t struggle to talk. We struggle to listen.

We hear words, but we’re missing meaning. We miss tone, hesitation, body language, the things that are being communicated without being said directly. And because of that, people don’t feel understood, they feel processed.

And you can feel that everywhere. It feels like companies are taking advantage of you, trapping you in a system designed to extort money from you. All for their gain and your loss, while they laugh and high five each other on their private yachts scheming to get even more money.

The moment someone actually feels heard is not when you repeat their words back to them. It’s when you reflect the emotion underneath what they’re saying.

That’s where connection happens and where trust is built.

And if you can do that, if you can consistently understand people at that level and communicate it to them in a way that reflects it back to them, everything changes. Your marketing changes. Even deeper than that, your relationships change and your ability to connect changes. You don’t have to chase leads or force people down a funnel. You can trust that the people will show up eventually.

That’s the work I wanna do. That’s my passion.

And I don’t think I would have found my way to it if I hadn’t been fired and forced to stop.

Because I would have stayed comfortably uncomfortable in an environment that was slowly draining me, convincing myself it was just part of the process, just something to push through on the way to the next title, the next raise, the next step.

Getting fired did something I wasn’t willing to do on my own.

It interrupted me, forced me to stop so I could break the pattern.

It took away the identity I had built around being the person who always had it together, who was always moving forward, who was always doing the right things in her career, always climbing and it left me with a version of myself that I had to actually get to know.

Not the title or the resume or the reputation.

Just me and who I really was deep down.

So if you are in that space right now, whether you chose it or it was chosen for you, where things feel uncertain and the identity you built around your work is starting to shift or fall away, don’t rush to replace it.

Sit with it longer than feels comfortable. Ask yourself the question that doesn’t have an easy answer.

Not “What’s next?” But “What actually fits me?”

When you find that, when your skills, your interests, and your desire to make an impact all line up, you gain access to real freedom. You start to build something that feels like it was yours all along.

And sometimes, whether you would have chosen it or not, it takes losing the thing you thought defined you to finally see who you really are.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.

Not physically, obviously. At 330 pounds, disappearing wasn’t exactly an option. But socially, emotionally, mentally, I found ways to make myself smaller in spaces where I felt too big. I learned how to stay quiet and avoid attention. I routinely kept interactions short so nobody had time to really look at me. I preferred being alone because it felt safe. If no one was around then no one could judge me.

Food filled that space.

It was my comfort, routine, reward, distraction, something to look forward to, something to rely on when everything else felt off. I got my first job at McDonald’s at fourteen, and it was like pouring gasoline on a fat girl fire. I would eat during my shift, even when I wasn’t hungry. It was just there, easy, constant. Then I’d go home and eat again. Pizza, KFC, whatever my mother could grab after a long day because she didn’t have the time or energy to cook as a single parent. There was no structure, no rhythm, just stuffing my face. Comfort stacked on top of comfort until you look in the mirror and can barely recognize the person you’ve become.

By the time I graduated high school, I weighed 330 pounds, and I knew it, not only as a number on the scale, but as my daily reality. I knew which chairs I could sit in without thinking about it, and which ones I had to approach carefully. I learned how to position myself in group photos so I wouldn’t be fully in frame. I got accomosted to laughing things off before anyone else could say anything, because if I’m in on the joke then it can’t hurt me.

And underneath all of that, there was this quiet, persistent voice telling me that I had done this to myself, that I lacked discipline and I just needed to try harder.

So I tried.

My mother took me to Weight Watchers the summer I graduated from high school, and for the first time, I followed a system which gave me some level of structure. I stopped eating like everything was a free-for-all. I ate three meals a day and two snacks and paid attention to calories. And the weight came off, fast. I lost about 100 pounds in eight months, which was a complete transformation, physically and socially. I could walk into stores and buy clothes without going to the plus size section first. I could exist in public without feeling like I had to manage how much space I was taking up. I felt “normal”.

But the story wasn’t finished. I was still over 200 pounds, and more importantly, I hadn’t actually changed how I lived. I had followed a plan. I had executed, but I had not understood anything about my body or what had just happened to me, physiologically.

So what happened next is what happens to most people.

I spent the next decade running the same loop.

Lose 20 pounds. Gain it back. Try something new. Lose it again. Gain it back again.

I remember phases of my life by the diet I was on at the time. There was the Atkins phase where carbs were the enemy, and I ate anything with a low fat label on it. Then there was the Mediterranean phase where I convinced myself I was now someone who enjoyed olive oil and discipline. I ate whole grains and oats that tasted like wood. Then came the cardio phase where I would force myself onto a treadmill for an hour, staring at the clock, bargaining with myself to just get through it. I got through it by telling myself that I was training for a marathon I was gonna run.

Never happened.

Every single one of those approaches worked just enough to keep me believing this time was gonna be the different. I would see progress, feel that rush, think this was it, and then it would start to slip.

Slowly but surely, the plan would fail. A missed workout. A “cheat day” that turns into a cheat weekend. You eventually return to habits that never really left, they were just waiting.

And every time I told myself the same thing.

You didn’t want it bad enough. You didn’t try hard enough. You failed again.

What I didn’t realize at the time is that I wasn’t failing the system. The system was failing me.

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That realization didn’t come from another diet. It came from understanding.

I came across a podcast called Mind Pump, a fitness podcast focused on providing truthful fitness information and debunking mainstream myths. And for the first time, someone wa explaining what was actually happening inside my body. Why crash dieting makes you hungrier. Why overdoing cardio teaches your body to adapt and conserve, not to burn calories.. Why relying on willpower is a losing strategy when your biology is working against you.

Finally, I got it! I understood what I was doing wrong and what I needed to do moving forward. They taught me the philosophy of fat loss.

It removed the shame.

Suddenly, this wasn’t about me being broken. I was operating in a system I didn’t understand.

So I stopped chasing outcomes and started building structure. I started resistance training and took to it immediately. I loved it! I made small changes, not dramatic ones, because I wanted something I could sustain without negotiating with myself every day. I stopped trying to force discipline and started designing a life that made better choices easier.

And over time, my body changed. Not dramatically. I wasn’t going to be in anyone’s made for TV, before-and-after infomercial. But I got more tone, my clothes fit better and I could move a lot easier. I got to a place where I could go out, enjoy food, be social, and not feel like I was constantly either “on” or “off.”

There is still a part of me that can slip into old patterns if I’m not paying attention. Control, for me, has never been about restriction. It has been about balance. Structure gives me freedom. Without it, I drift.

The true freedom came from understanding. Understanding my body, understanding how fat loss really works and know the process to make it happen.

I realized that if things feel chaotic, it’s usually from a lack of true understanding. There is a philosophy, a set of structured principles that is being missed.

Marketing, especially right now, feels exactly like that version of me stuck in the cycle.

You’re trying everything. Posting more content, testing new formats, chasing whatever the latest advice says will work. One week it’s short-form video. The next it’s long-form thought leadership. Then it’s AI tools, then it’s SEO, then it’s AEO, then it’s something else entirely. You’re constantly adjusting, optimizing, wondering why nothing seems to stick for very long.

And just like I did with my weight, you start to internalize it.

Why is everyone better at this than me? Maybe my company isn’t interesting enough. It’s all my fault nothing is working.

You think I just need to push harder. So you post more. You try to be more consistent, more creative, more visible.

And for a moment, it works. You get engagement. Maybe even a few leads. The chart spikes and that feels like progress.

But the spike fades just as quickly. And you’re back where you started, looking for the next thing.

The marketing world is full of these things. Tactics packaged as solutions. Tools that promise results without requiring understanding. They are the equivalent of fad diets. They give you just enough to keep you in the cycle, but not enough to get you out of it.

It’s not that tactics don’t work. It’s that they don’t last. Because they are built on execution, not understanding.

What actually changed my life was learning the philosophy behind the result. Marketing works the same way.

At its core, marketing is not about how much you post or which tool you use. It starts with something much simpler and much harder at the same time. You have to understand the person on the other side.

And I’m not talking about the surface level understanding, we’re all accustomed to. Not “financial analyst, 35 to 50, looking for growth.” That’s a label, not a person.

You have to understand how they think when nobody is watching. What they worry about when they close their laptop at night. What they are trying to avoid just as much as what they are trying to achieve.

Financial analyst are people who hate looking uninformed so they over prepare and obsess over details. They tend to equate mistakes with personal failure, because mistakes could cost millions of dollars. Image your job is is literally to predict the future with incomplete information while being punished for being wrong.

Now what could you do with that information versus “data driven, analytical and reads the Wall Street Journal”.

Communication is not about saying the right thing, at the right time, to the right person. It’s about mirroring back to the audience how they see themselves.

Most marketers think they are communicating because they are producing content, but real communication is reflective. It takes what your audience is experiencing and gives it back to them in a way that feels uncomfortably accurate.

For example, the problem isn’t “lack of time.” It’s sitting at your desk at 9:47 p.m., researching fact sheets, reading reports and compiling years of data into one spreadsheet, knowing that you need to know the answer to every question before it’s asked.

The problem isn’t “need better leads.” It’s explaining to your team, again, why the pipeline “looks good” but nothing is actually closing and feeling that quiet panic that maybe you don’t have a real answer.

It’s not “wants efficiency.” It’s wanting to finish your work at a reasonable hour and not carry it with you into every conversation, every meal, every moment that’s supposed to be yours.

When you can see the real moment your marketing changes. Suddenly you are finally speaking to something real.

The same goes for outcomes. People don’t want features. They don’t want “AI-powered” anything. They want relief and confidence. They want to feel like they are back in control of something that currently feels chaotic.

That is the philosophy of marketing.

And just like with my weight, once you understand it, you stop chasing fixes.

Losing 150 pounds didn’t make me disciplined. It made me aware. It showed me that effort without understanding is just another loop. A loop that feels productive while simultaneously keeping you exactly where you are.

Marketing is no different.

You can keep chasing the next tactic, the next tool, the next strategy that promises to unlock everything, or you can step back and actually understand the system you are operating in.

And if there’s anything I’ve learned, in both health and marketing, it’s that thing that truly works is rarely the thing that’s being sold the loudest.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.

Then the CEO at the time, leaned back, paused for a second, and said something that, in the moment, didn’t even feel that shocking to the people in the room. “I think the new brand colors should be Michigan colors.”

He said it casually, almost proudly. He went to Michigan. He LOVED Michigan. The room went quiet for a beat, then everyone nodded. People even started rationalizing it out loud, connecting dots that were never there to begin with. “Yeah, blue means strength and yellow means bold.” “I mean, it does give us a sense of spirit and legacy.” “I think we could make it work.”

And I remember sitting there thinking, not even angry, just… confused. None of that shit is even true!?!

How did we get here?

How did a conversation about rebranding turn into a conversation about what the CEO likes?

Who cares what he thinks?? He’s not the target audience.

That moment has stuck with me for years because it wasn’t just about colors. It encapsulates something deeper that has changed the way a lot of marketing departments operate. CEO’s becoming the face of marketing. And the resulting effect is that leadership no longer protects the brand, they have become the brand.

And because of it, every downstream decision is screwed.

There was a time when most people didn’t know who the CEO of a company was. Who the heck was the CEO of McDonald’s in the 80’s? If the current CEO of McDonald’s didn’t embarrass himself by taking a nibble of his latest “product” on the internet, I wouldn’t know who he was either. Needing to know who the CEO was isn’t a problem anyone felt the need to solve. If you were deep in the business world, sure, you knew. But for everyone else, the relationship was with the brand, not the individual leading it. The brand carried meaning and built trust. The brand stood on its own.

Now it’s flipped.

We’ve told leaders they need to have a voice and be visible. For the business to scale quickly, leaders need to build a personal brand alongside the company. And because we’re marketing, we’ve wrapped it in language that sounds reasonable. Terms like human connection, authenticity and thought leadership. And in certain contexts, especially early-stage companies or service based businesses, there is truth there. People do connect with people and a visible leader can build trust faster.

But what started as a useful tactic has turned into an expectation, and that expectation has reshaped the role of leadership in a way that I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with.

Once you tell someone they are the face of the company, it doesn’t just change how the outside world sees them. It changes how they see themselves.

Now the company feels personal and every decision feels like a reflection of them.

The brand is no longer something they are responsible for stewarding, it becomes something that represents them.

Houston, we have a MAJOR problem. Leadership, at its core, was never meant to be about self-expression. It’s supposed to be about responsibility. It’s a selfless position when you think about it, the needs of the business are supposed to come first, not your own.

A CEO’s job is to set direction, allocate resources, protect the organization, and create the conditions for each function to do its job well. Creating the conditions to do a job means trusting the people you hired to do the work you hired them to do. It means knowing when to step in, but more importantly, when to step back.

When you’re leading a company, it is not about what you like, what you prefer or what you feel drawn to. It’s about what the business needs to succeed and what the market is responding to. You’re responsible for moving the entire organization forward, which means making sure the people closest to the problem have the space and authority to solve it.

Marketing is one of those functions.

And marketing breaks down very quickly when leadership forgets where its lane ends and starts meddling in marketing decisions. Or worse, believing that their opinion is the best.

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Marketing’s job is to serve the customer. We’re supposed to cater to the needs, wants, desires of the audience. Marketing is not about internal preferences. It’s certainly not about what sounds good to a room full of executives. Marketing is about understanding the customer deeply enough to create something that resonates with them.

This becomes hard for many leaders to accept, especially in an era when they’ve been told their voice matters everywhere.

I’ve seen this play out in more ways than just brand colors. I’ve watched messaging shift because a CEO didn’t like a word, even though that word came directly from customer interviews.

I’ve seen pricing strategies get pulled apart because investors need to “see growth” and the business has targets it needs to hit. I’ve sat in meetings where campaign ideas were reshaped because we had to highlight new product features that would be great for a press release.

None of those decisions happen in isolation. And over time they create a pattern. Ignore the audience and instead seek validation from the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (aka the HiPPO).

Once that pattern sets in, marketing can quickly become hierarchy-driven and not market driven. Nothing can move forward without getting the CEO’s approval. We become so desperate to show our worth we end up giving them too much influence and their opinions too much weight.

Teams learns quickly what matters and what doesn’t to leadership, so the marketing get shaped without any marketing validation, only leaderships expectations.

Marketing learns which battles are worth fighting and which ones aren’t. They learn how to translate leadership’s opinions into something that looks like strategy, but is just gut instinct and personal preference. Suddenly, we’re now catering to the whims of someone who doesn’t know marketing, but signs our paychecks. Not a great place to be.

What gets lost is marketing’s ability to hear the market clearly, if they are even listening at all. Market knowledge gets filtered through leadership and product, who are smart but not the best communicators. The signal gets distorted and the feedback loop weakens. Decisions become more about alignment with leadership than alignment with reality.

The effects on marketing can become catastrophic. Messaging that no longer lands and campaigns that feel flat and redundant. A brand that seems to shift depending on what leadership is focused on that quarter. Customers who end up feeling like logs on a conveyor belt and not humans whose needs are a priority.

There’s another layer to this that doesn’t get talked about enough, and it’s the emotional side of leadership in this environment.

When a CEO becomes the face of the brand, the pressure changes. It’s less about about leading the business. It’s about being seen leading the business. Every decision, every public statement, every outcome feels like it reflects on you personally.

That does something to people.

Even confident leaders start to feel the weight of that visibility. Mistakes feel riskier and missteps feel more exposed. The line between business failure and personal failure starts to get blurry.

As a result, leaders become more controlling because it’s the only way to feel safe.

They get more involved and weigh in more often. They start tightening their grip, because the cost of being wrong feels higher than the success of being right. Their failures will be public. They’ll start to think, my friends and family will see it. My colleagues will talk behind my back. What are the chances I’ll get another opportunity to lead a company?

From the outside, that controlling nature can look like ego. Sometimes it is ego. But often it’s insecurity dressed up as decisiveness and fear disguised as conviction.

Either way, the impact on the organization is the same. People feel it and it sucks.

Employees become more cautious and less willing to challenge authority. Less likely to bring forward ideas that go against the grain. Functions like marketing, which rely on interpreting external reality and sometimes pushing back internally, start to lose their voice. Once that happens the brand loses its anchor.

This is why the distinction between representing the brand and becoming the brand matters so much.

A leader who represents the brand speaks on behalf of something larger than themselves. They reinforce it and align with it. A good leader helps bring the brand to life in a way that feels consistent and grounded.

A leader who becomes the brand pulls everything toward themselves. Their personality, their opinions, their preferences start to shape decisions that should be shaped by the market. See, Elon Musk for an example.

One creates stability. The other creates dependence.

And dependence is fragile. Now the brand is tied to a single person’s behavior, judgment, presence. Every public moment carries more weight than it should. Every internal decision carries more bias than it should.

That is not a stronger brand. It is a brand that become more vulnerable and weaker over time.

So where do we go from here?

Marketing does not fix this by fighting leadership for control. That battle is unwinnable and, frankly, not the point.

The way forward is to reestablish what marketing is responsible for and go back that up with evidence that is hard to ignore.

Bring the customer into the room in a way that is tangible. It’s not done with abstract personas and dashboards, but with real language, real feedback, real patterns. Validate decisions with audience research. What did they say they preferred, how do they talk about the problem, what did they say hindered decision making?

Make the logic visible and the tradeoffs clear. When something is based on market insight, say that directly. When something is based on internal preference, call that out for what it is, respectfully but clearly. Over time, that shifts the center of gravity back toward reality instead of a leaders emotions.

It reminds the organization that while leadership sets direction, it does not define truth. The market and the customer does that. And marketing’s job is to interpret that truth and translate it into decisions the business can act on.

When that balance is established, the decisions are now grounded and the team feels trusted. The brand can stabilize because it’s no longer being pulled in different directions based on who has the strongest opinion in the room.

And then leadership starts to look like what it is supposed to be. The function that ensures the right voices are heard, the right work is protected, and the company moves forward in a way that actually reflects the people it is trying to serve.

That is the job. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of it.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.

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I didn’t think I was the problem.

I thought I was the clearest thinker in the room. I was someone who was objective. I could see what was broken, and say it out loud without dancing around it. I thought that was my role. That was my value.

And to be fair, it worked. It got me in some important rooms and it lead to trust. It got me labeled as smart, capable, reliable. The person you call when things are messy and need to get fixed quickly.

But there’s a version of that story I didn’t understand while I was living it.

The chapter where people don’t just hear what you say. They feel how you say it.

There are moments I can playback now that I wish I could take back.

Sitting in a conference room with the VP of Sales, who was walking through a campaign plan that, to me, clearly wasn’t going to work. I could see the gaps immediately. The metrics were too rigid, the messaging was basic and boring, the timeline was unrealistic, and the expectation for leads felt like it came from a completely different universe than the resources we actually had.

Instead of asking a question or trying to understand how we got there, I leaned back in my chair, rolled my eyes, and let out one of those exhaustive little exhales. You know, the kind that signals annoyance.

I remember him pausing his presentation for a second to look at me. Not long, but just enough. Then continuing. But the energy had shifted. The room got tighter. Less open and less collaborative.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. In my head, I was just reacting to something that didn’t make sense.

In reality, I was telling someone, without saying a word, that what they were doing was beneath consideration.

That stays with people.

There were other moments too.

Getting feedback like, “You’re doing great work. You’re sharp. We trust you.”

And then in the same conversation, “We’re not ready to give you a team yet.”

At the time, it felt personal. I felt like they were holding me back. Like they saw something in me they didn’t want to elevate. It felt political and unfair. There were times I questioned if there were other dynamics at play. Race. Gender. Bias. “Men just can’t handle when a woman is strong and confident”, “You have to diminish yourself as a black woman in a predominately white organization.” All of that is very real in corporate environments, and I’m not dismissing it AT ALL. But I also had to sit with my own truth.

If every room you walk into feels tense after you speak, if people start asking you to go last instead of first, if your ideas are respected but your presence feels heavy, there is probably more than just politics at play.

It could be your energy and your impact. And my impact was off.

I used to think people just didn’t get it.

They were moving too slow. I thought they were over complicating simple problems. They were choosing the wrong priorities.

Ugh, why are they chasing shiny objects instead of fixing the real issue sitting right in front of them?

OMG, we are changing priorities AGAIN?!? Don’t they know consistency breeds success??

If you’ve been in B2B marketing long enough, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The meeting where someone says, “We need more leads this quarter,” and you’re thinking, with what budget, with what team, with what strategy, based on what audience?

The executive who says brand matters in one conversation and then cuts ad spend the next week because pipeline looks soft.

The sudden obsession with a new channel because a competitor mentioned it on LinkedIn, so now everyone wants to pivot, even though you haven’t even finished executing the last three things you committed to.

And when these things happen over and over, it’s very easy to slip into a mindset where you think the problem is everyone else.

I kept thinking, I don’t get it. I thought these people went to Harvard and Yale. Why don’t they see this? Why am I the only one saying this? How many times do I have to explain basic logic?

That voice in your head gets loud. And if left unchecked, that voice comes out, EVEN LOUDER.

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What I didn’t understand at the time was the pressure.

Not mine. Theirs.

The VP who is getting a call every week about pipeline gaps. The CMO who has to explain to the CEO why growth isn’t where it needs to be. The CEO who is sitting in front of a board that doesn’t care about your campaign timeline, your resource constraints, or your carefully thought out strategy. The private equity firm who wants to know exactly how they are going to their $500 million investment back, RIGHT NOW.

Everyone is carrying something.

And when you walk into that environment with sharp directive and no empathy, it doesn’t feel like leadership. It feels like exposure.

You’re pointing at a problem they already know exists but don’t have the freedom, time, or support to fix in the way you’re suggesting.

Imagine someone already drowning and you lean over the edge and say, you should just swim better.

You’re not helping.

I also misunderstood the game we were playing.

I thought we were all aligned around serving the customer better, building something meaningful, fixing what was broken.

That’s not always the game.

Sometimes the game is getting acquired.

Sometimes the game is hitting a number to justify a valuation.

Sometimes the game is surviving the next quarter.

Those are very different objectives, and if you don’t understand which one you’re in, everything will feel irrational. Decisions will look short-sighted and conversations will feel disconnected. You’ll push for things that make sense in your world but don’t align with the incentives driving the business.

You start pushing harder and try to force solutions into a system that is not optimized for it.

And that’s where I lost people.

Looking back, my career is full of contradictions.

I was trusted but not always followed. I was respected, but not always included. Valued for my thinking but not seen as someone who could lead people.

At the time, I thought that gap was about them. It wasn’t though; it was about how I showed up.

Luckily, around the time of the pandemic, I started my recovery process. The first thing I had to do was slow down.

My delivery. Whew chile, my tone could come off very harsh at times. Cutting. Biting, even.

Because I was moving at the speed of my own understanding and expecting everyone else to already be there, my words would come out like criticisms, not statements.

I thought I was stating the obvious, something we all knew and agreed upon. But they didn’t all know and they certainly didn’t all agree.

It almost doesn’t matter how you say it, it matters how people feel it.

What you say and what people hear can be two different things. And they aren’t going to tell you that you hurt their feelings. They are going to carry it, bury it and hold the resentment.

I had to change. I had to ask questions first, not just assume we are all on the same page and at the same level of understanding. I learned that I needed to validate people’s emotions, not logically justify my ideas.

Being empathic is not easy, it takes practice.

Real empathy, not the version where you nod, say you understand and then go right back to your point. The version where you actually acknowledge what someone is carrying before you try to change anything.

“I know you’re under pressure to hit this number.”

“I can see how many moving pieces you’re managing right now.”

“I understand these are the constraints you’re working within.”

Then pause, let the acknowledgement breath, give them space to respond or add context. Don’t just jump to your point. That changes the conversation immediately.

Now you’re not challenging them, you’re not in combat mode. You’re standing with them. They know that you can see their point of view, therefore they are more apt to hear yours.

When I wanted to get my ideas across I had to meet people where they were at.

Before, I would just drop conclusions. “This isn’t working. We need to change the strategy.”

To me it felt efficient and decisive. But it was ineffective.

Now, I take people through it.

Here’s what I’m seeing in the data. This is how the audience is responding. Here’s where I think the disconnect is.

If we keep going this way, this is what is likely to happen. And then, here’s another way we could approach it.

I almost always end with a question, “what do you think?”, “would you add anything here?”

This invites them into the solution, it’s not just their idea or my idea. It’s ours that we are working on together.

Then I had to discipline myself to reflect before responding. Especially if felt attacked or criticized.

This is where I used to fail consistently.

I would hear something, process it quickly, and jump straight to the answer.

If I think I have the answer, now I will repeat back my understanding first before I give my solution.

“So what I’m understanding you say is that you need to show progress on pipeline this quarter, but you don’t have additional budget or headcount, and this campaign is the fastest path you see right now. One question, what happens if this doesn’t happen?”

I make sure I actually understand and it makes the other person feel heard and acknowledged. But most importantly the answer to the question tells me what the stakes are for them. What is the emotion driving the words. That’s the energy I need to acknowledge. The frustration, the hesitation, the panic, the stress, etc.

Only after that do I offer something.

“Got it. I understand that you’re under a lot of pressure right now. Maybe could we try a version of this that gets you a quicker signal without overcommitting resources?” What if we adjusted this piece so we can still move fast but reduce the risk?”

If I feel criticized or undermined, I state my feelings now.

“When you said I shouldn’t talk to the product team after telling me to work on the new product release strategy, it feels like you don’t trust my judgement. It felt like you were undermining me and trying to control the project after giving me ownership of it.”

I’m not accusing them of anything, I’m saying how they made me feel. This gives them the opportunity to explain their intent.

The point here is not to solve every problem. Not to, never have an argument or disagreement. You’re certainly not going to make everyone feel good and happy. The point is to understand. Once you understand you can decide how you want to move forward. You can accept that we’re gonna do what they want to do. You can choose to minimize your interactions or only deal with them at a certain level. You have the power to make whatever decision feels best to you, you aren’t trapped.

You’re not going to change anyone. Let me say that again. YOU’RE NOT GOING TO CHANGE ANYONE. What you’re doing is learning how to control yourself and your actions better.

Oh, you’re not done. Now comes the repetition.

The part I hated.

You think you’re having these types conversations one time?? Hahahahaha. Think again.

People need to hear things more than once. They need to see it from different angles. The emotions around the topic evolve and change. They need time to let it settle.

And you need to practice having these conversations more than once. It’s not magic, it probably won’t work the first time or fifth time. But you’ll learn and keep going. Try a different tone, come at it from a different angle.

But that’s how we as humans process information. It isn’t on a specific timeline.

And that was the biggest lesson.

The hardest realization in all of this was looking in the mirror. A lot of what I didn’t like in others was showing up in me.

I thought they weren’t listening. I wasn’t listening.

I thought they were rigid. I was rigid.

I thought they were dismissive. I was dismissive.

I was just doing it in a way that felt justified to me and that’s a tough thing to sit with, especially in the beginning. But self-reflection is necessary if you actually want to grow.

At the end of all of this, the answer wasn’t to be less direct.

It was to be a better marketer. Because marketing is not about being right.

It’s about being a mirror. Helping someone else see, feel, and understand something in a way that moves them. Telling a story that meets people where they are, painting a picture they can step into.

Marketing is about guiding, not dragging.

I was stating facts and expecting alignment. That’s not marketing.

If you see yourself in this, and I know some of you do, here’s what actually helped me.

Slow down your delivery.

Ask more questions than you make statements.

Reflect what you’re hearing before you respond.

Name the emotion you’re feeling from the other person, i.e. stress, frustration, anxiety.

Acknowledge the pressure and constraints people are operating under.

And then guide people to your solution instead of dropping it on them.

You don’t need to shrink your thinking. But if people shut down when you speak, your insight never even enters the room.

And being right, alone, doesn’t move anything forward.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.

If you’ve ever worked inside a platform like Marketo, you know the feeling. It’s not just a tool. It is it’s own world. There’s a language to it, a logic to it, a kind of quiet prestige that comes from being the person who knows how to make it all work. People rely on you. You’re the one who understands the system. The one who can turn chaos into structure.

Before we go any further, this is not an article bashing Marketo (That’ll be another article for another time, lol).

But I leaned into that identity.

I became immersed in the community. I studied the platform and went to the user groups. I learned how to build lead scoring models that looked sophisticated enough to impress a room full of executives and built nurture programs that stretched across weeks, sometimes months, consisting of carefully timed emails designed to guide someone from curiosity to consideration to conversion. I could map a lifecycle, define an MQL, explain attribution models with confidence.

And I believed in it.

I believed that if we built the system well enough, tracked the right behaviors, fed the right content into the right sequence at the right time, we could understand our customers deeply and guide them, almost predictably, toward a decision.

That belief carried me for years and heavily shaped my early career in marketing.

It started in a way that felt almost serendipitous.

Back in 2007, I wasn’t aiming to become a marketing operations professional. I worked for a cybersecurity company straight out of college as a marketing coordinator. I was doing events, some coordination work, trying to find my footing. At the time, the company was using Eloqua, and the person who managed it left for another opportunity. I had logged into the system a few times before, mostly to clean up data, fix email records, do basic maintenance.

It was more than anyone else in the marketing department had done, so that was enough. I inherited it.

And without realizing it, I stepped into a career path that would shape the next decade of my life.

From there, it only got deeper. Eloqua turned into Marketo. One company turned into another. In-house became agency work, then back in-house again. Different industries, different teams, different leadership styles. I was learning new skills and deepening my knowledge.

But the same patterns kept showing up.

At first, it was easy to dismiss, easy to explain away. Then it became impossible to ignore.

The data never told a clear story, like we were told it would. “Data doesn’t lie” is the montra.

On paper, things looked active. Campaigns were running and emails were going out. People were engaging. But when you actually looked closer things didn’t make sense.

You turn on a lead scoring campaign and saw that most of the database was inactive or completely dormant. You analyze the leads and find that people entered at some point and then disappeared, sitting there like antique artifacts we kept hoping would come back to life.

The people who were active weren’t necessarily buyers. A lot of them were browsing. Curious. Sometimes students or competitors, sometimes people researching for reasons that had nothing to do with actually purchasing the product.

We would score them anyway.

We would assign meaning to behaviors because the system required us to. Three email clicks, a webinar attendance, a whitepaper download, and suddenly someone was “qualified.” It felt precise and seemed scientific. But underneath it, there was a question we rarely asked.

What makes an email click 5 points? Are all event registrations created equal? Better yet, does this person actually want what we sell?

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Then there was attribution.

I went deep into it, the way you do when you think the answer is just one layer further down. Multi-touch attribution models, campaign influence reports, trying to map every interaction to revenue as if the journey could be reconstructed after the fact.

I remember creating buyer’s journey reports where we tried to show the sequence. First touch, middle touch, last touch. It looked clean on the slide. It told a story that made sense to leadership.

Then I would go back and look at individual records.

One person attended a webinar, maybe because their boss forwarded it with a note that said, “You might find this useful.” They ignored every subsequent email for ten months. Then one day, a completely different person from the same company searched for the company directly, landed on the website, and filled out a demo form.

Another downloaded an ebook, maybe because they needed a statistic for a presentation they were giving internally. They were never a buyer and they were never going to be a buyer. But they showed up in the system as engaged.

Another clicked through three emails in a week, maybe because they were job hunting and had an interview with our company coming up next week. Their activity spiked. Their lead score went up. They were flagged as ready.

We turned all of that into a “journey.”

But it wasn’t a journey. It was noise that we were organizing into a narrative because we needed it to make sense.

Nurture was the one I held onto the longest.

Because on the surface, it felt the most human. The idea of building a relationship over time, providing value, guiding someone through a journey instead of pushing them to a sale aggressively.

I wanted that to be true.

So I built the programs that were comprised of painfully crafted structured sequences. I built different tracks based on behavior. Created dynamic emails based on industry and persona. Emails spaced out over days and weeks, each one meant to move someone a little closer.

Then you start looking at the numbers.

Open rates below ten percent. Click-through rates below one percent. And not just once. Everywhere I worked. Consistently. Across companies and industries.

Why is this never working? You start to ask yourself a question that is uncomfortable because it has an obvious answer. Who is this actually for?

Because it doesn’t feel like it’s for the customer.

For a long time, I thought the issue was execution.

Maybe the segmentation wasn’t sharp enough or the messaging needed refinement. Maybe the scoring thresholds were off.

It’s the data, the data is always a mess. So, I cleaned it up. I kept optimizing.

New company, new system, same structure. Rebuild the lifecycle. Redefine the stages. Adjust the scoring. Rewrite the nurture.

Again. And again. And again.

There is a phase you go through where you dive deeper and go harder instead of stepping back. You double down because admitting the premise might be flawed is too big of a leap.

Grad school is where something finally broke.

They didn’t teach tools or digital marketing at all really. They taught me fundamentals.

Consumer behavior, decision-making, psychology. The messy, non-linear, deeply human side of why people choose one thing over another.

And I remember sitting there, looking at what I had been doing for years, and suddenly realizing “Oh, shit”. This isn’t marketing.

It’s adjacent to it and supports it. It helps execute parts of it, but it isn’t marketing.

It wasn’t marketing because none of it starts with the customer. It starts with the system.

We weren’t asking what people needed or what they were trying to solve or what was actually driving their decisions. We were asking how to move them down a funnel. How to get them from one stage to the next. How to increase conversion rates. How to turn them into revenue.

We built entire strategies around feeding a machine.

We designed processes to keep the system running. The data was structured in a way the platform could understand. Content was created to trigger workflows.

And the kicker? We then looked to the platform to tell us if we were successful. Not people.

There is a subtle but important distinction here that took me years to articulate clearly.

There is nothing inherently wrong with marketing operations. There is nothing inherently wrong with platforms like Marketo. They are powerful tools and necessary for execution at scale.

The problem is what we turned them into.

We took a support function and treated it like the center of marketing. And as a result we let the system define the strategy instead of letting the customer define it.

And there is a cost to that.

When you’ve been inside the system too long without the promised results, you start to question things. You vocalize the issues and bring up the gaps you’re seeing. You try to steer the conversation back to the customer, to the messaging, to the misalignment.

The first time, it feels productive.

The fifth time, it feels tense.

By the tenth time, you already know what is going to happen before you speak.

So eventually, you shut up. It becomes too exhausting to fight the system AND do your already overwhelming job.

You just do what is asked. Build the stupid campaign, set up the dumb workflow and run the ridiculous report.

You sit in meetings where you know the audience definition is off, the messaging is weak, the plan is disconnected from the “strategy” that was set at the beginning of the year, and you let it go because you understand the system now. You vent to your colleagues and have a laugh over Slack, then go about your day, half checked out.

You understand the system, what it rewards and what it ignores.

And slowly, almost without noticing it, you change.

The person who once cared deeply about getting it right becomes someone who just gets it done. You become efficient, predictable, reliable.

You become a very well-functioning part of the machine.

I remember sitting in a quarterly review once, walking through MQL numbers, conversion rates, campaign performance. Everything looked solid on the surface. The slides were clean. The story made sense.

And I had this quiet thought in the back of my mind.

Does everyone here know this is all BS? Do they know about all the data pulling, cleaning, massaging, fudging, borderline made up BS that is on these slides. Do they even care?

I didn’t ask it out loud. I just moved to the next slide.

That’s when had my real A HA moment. The system is not broken.

It’s working exactly as designed.

It produces activity, reports and the appearance of progress. What it doesn’t always produce understanding.

At some point, I had to accept that I was not going to change that from the inside alone.

Because the structure itself rewards a certain way of operating.

So I stepped outside the system.

Not in a dramatic, burn-it-all-down kind of way (although, that’s what I really wanted to do). More like a perspective shift.

When you step outside, even a little, things start to look different.

You talk to people without a form in front of you, without trying to categorize their behavior, and you realize how messy and contextual their decisions actually are.

You tests messaging that would never make it through an internal review process because it feels too direct, too specific, too human, and you see it resonate in ways the polished version never did.

You look at your last few customers and ask how they actually found you, why they chose you, what problem they were trying to solve in that moment, and the answers don’t map cleanly to any funnel you’ve built.

You can’t fight the system, you have to work outside of it.

I’m not telling anyone to quit their job.

The point is that if you want to change how marketing works, you need a perspective that the system itself cannot give you.

And sometimes that starts small.

Have five real conversations with prospects where your only goal is to understand, not to qualify.

Look at your last ten deals and ignore the touchpoints, ask Sales what actually triggered movement.

Write one piece of messaging using the exact language your audience uses, it could be slang, or colloquialisms, even if it feels uncomfortable internally.

Do it quietly if you have to. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

And once you understand your customer in a real way, the rest of it starts to feel different.

The system doesn’t go away, it just stops being the center.

If you’re in it right now, trying to make it make sense, feeling like you’re doing everything “right” and still seeing gaps you can’t explain, you’re not alone.

You’re not crazy. You’re seeing something real.

The moment you start looking outside the system for answers instead of inside, is the moment you start getting closer to what marketing was supposed to be all along.

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.

And I know that sounds dramatic. I know people will read that and immediately think, “That’s not true. Of course you can do both.” Because that’s what we’ve all been taught. The philosophy of modern marketing is about balancing the two. Understanding your audience while also optimizing for platforms. Being human but also strategic. Caring about people but still playing the game.

I don’t believe that anymore.

And I didn’t always feel that way.

I’ve spent my entire career in marketing. Almost 20 years now, which is wild to say out loud. This is the only profession I’ve ever known. And I didn’t start with this perspective. I started in the place most marketers start, on the technology side of things, learning the systems, the tools, the frameworks that promised to turn marketing into something predictable, measurable, and scalable.

I worked with HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, etc. I drank the Kool-Aid hard. I built campaigns the way you’re supposed to build them. You create content for conversions. You write blogs for SEO. You develop downloadable guides. You run ads. You host webinars. You nurture them with email. You qualify them. You pass them to sales. You track everything. You feed that funnel!

It’s clean. It’s logical. And makes complete sense on paper.

And if you’ve been in marketing for any amount of time, you’ve probably done some version of this yourself. You’ve probably sat in meetings or heard some “expert” talk all about dashboards and conversion rates and pipeline velocity and lead quality. You’ve probably felt that pressure to prove that what you’re doing is working, to show the numbers, to justify the spend, to explain why something didn’t perform the way it was supposed to.

I believed in that system.

I believed that if you just did it well enough, consistently enough, if you optimized the right things and followed the right process, the result would be revenue. That was the promise. And for a while, it feels like it works, because you can see movement, the activity. You can point to something and say, “Look, this is happening.”

But over time, the holes started to show until they became craters. If you start to poke at the logic, eventually the whole house of cards falls down.

Not in a dramatic, everything-is-broken kind of way. More subtle than that. Like small moments, over years, that didn’t quite add up.

Like running a campaign that looked great on paper. Strong open rates. Solid click-through. People downloading your content. Everything you were told to look for. And yet, it never really seemed to translate to revenue. Or when you could somehow translate activity into revenue yet the sales team said marketing didn’t deserve that credit. Or when you tried to map the buying journey of a “marketing sourced” opportunity, but you realized that prospect had been in the system 3 years and the only marketing touchpoint was a webinar registration 2 years prior.

Or what about when the opposite would happen.

Someone would come up to me and say, “I’ve been seeing your stuff. I really like what you’re putting out.” And I’d go back to the dashboard, curious, trying to find them in the data. No clicks. No downloads. No clear trail that said they had “engaged.” According to the system, they were invisible. According to reality, they were paying attention.

That gap kept showing up. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The truth holds up under scrutiny, it’s doesn’t crumble under its weight. I realized something was fundamentally wrong here.

The system we’ve built around marketing reduces people down to data points. First name, last name, job title, company, lead score. It turns behavior into metrics. Impressions. Open rate. Click rate. Conversion rate. It gives you something you can track, something you can optimize, something you can report on.

But people are not flat and static.

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They are not stale records sitting in your CRM waiting to be moved from one stage to the next. They are emotional and inconsistent. They are context-dependent. They are influenced by things that have nothing to do with your campaign and everything to do with their life.

A business owner might download your guide on a Tuesday afternoon because it feels productive, because they’re in “work mode,” because they want to feel like they’re making progress. That same person might ignore every follow-up email you send because by Thursday they’re overwhelmed, distracted, dealing with something else entirely. Then two months later, they have a conversation with a peer who mentions your name, and suddenly everything clicks. Now they’re interested and ready.

Tell me where that shows up in your funnel.

It doesn’t.

People don’t move in straight lines. They don’t behave consistently or rationally. They don’t always act on what they say they want. They contradict themselves and change their mind. They respond to emotion, timing, context, and to trust that has been built in ways you can’t always measure.

And yet, we built an entire industry around trying to make them behave in predictable ways.

That was the realization for me.

Not all at once, but slowly, through experience. Through seeing the cracks. Through watching marketers, including myself, chase performance metrics while missing the actual human in front of us. Through realizing that we were getting really good at feeding the machine, but not necessarily getting better at understanding people.

And that’s when the question changed.

It stopped being, “How do I make this perform better?” And started becoming, “Do I actually understand the person I’m trying to reach?”

Because if I don’t, no amount of optimization is going to fix that.

That’s why you have to pick a side.

If you serve the technology, you need immediate feedback. You need to see something happen. Likes, clicks, shares, downloads, conversions. You build systems that can scale. You create consistent output. You rely on analytics to tell you what’s working and what isn’t. You make decisions based on what performs. You trust the machine to guide you.

And there’s a comfort in that. It feels like control. It feels like progress. It gives you something to hold onto.

You start creating for the metric instead of the person. You start optimizing for visibility instead of understanding. You start chasing response instead of building relationships.

Serving human works differently.

You don’t expect immediate validation. You don’t assume that silence means failure. You start paying attention to different signals, the ones that don’t always show up in a report.

A conversation after a workshop where someone says, “That made me think differently.”
A message from someone who says, “I’ve been following you for a while.”
A client who comes in already trusting you because of the accumulation of many small moments.

You can trust your marketing because you know to ask better questions before you create any content.

You don’t ask yourself, “What content should I post this week?” but “What is this person actually trying to figure out right now” or “What would make someone feel understood?”

You listen more closely. You pay attention not only to what people say, but how they say it, what they avoid, where they hesitate, where they light up. You start to see patterns, not only in behavior, but in language, in emotion.

Your job is no longer to push people through a system. It’s to reflect them back to themselves. You become their mirror through your messaging and positioning. Through the way you frame problems and solutions. Through the stories you tell and the language you choose.

So when someone encounters your work, it doesn’t feel generic. It doesn’t feel like it was written for “an audience.” It feels like it was written for them.

That is a completely different level of marketing. It’s much slower.

It requires more patience. More attention. More humility. You don’t get instant feedback. You don’t always have clean numbers to point to. You have to trust what you’re seeing and hearing, even when it’s not easily measurable.

But it’s also more real. Because it’s built on something that doesn’t change every time a platform updates its algorithm.

It’s built on people.

This Substack is where I’m going to go deeper into that.

Not just the idea of “human-centered marketing,” because that phrase gets thrown around a lot and rarely unpacked. I want to get into what that actually looks like in practice. How you ask better questions. How you understand motivation. How you translate what you’re hearing into messaging that resonates. How you build something that people trust over time.

I’ll share what I’ve learned. I’ll challenge a lot of what’s considered normal. I’ll probably say things that make people uncomfortable, not because I’m trying to be provocative, but because I’ve seen how much confusion this current approach creates.

And I don’t think we fix it by staying on the surface.

We fix it by going deeper.

So yes, I’m picking a side. I choose people.

If you’ve been feeling that disconnect, if you’ve been doing everything you were told to do and it still doesn’t quite feel right, there’s a reason for that.

And we’re going to figure it out. Together.

Teaching tip: Before you write your next piece of content, write down:
“What does this person want to feel before they ever click?”

Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/

If you want help reconnecting to your marketing, sign up for MOM’s Weekly Newsletter Let’s bring the soul back to your strategy.