84% of B2B CEOs think marketing is a support function; 75% say marketing does not drive growth; let’s stop guessing and design a test that provides a definitive answer
More than 4 out of 5 (84%) of CEOs “think marketing is a support function, not a commercial growth driver.” That’s according to a survey published in late July called “The CEO blind spot: How B2B marketers prove, protect, and grow their commercial impact.”
A UK-based B2B marketing agency conducted the survey in July 2026. It polled “150 [B2B] CEOs and senior business leaders responsible for companies with annual revenues exceeding £20 million.”
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It’s been a minute, but I’ve done quite a bit of work with tech startups in the UK over my career. In my experience, UK business leaders have always been far more engaged with marketing, compared to US executives.
Accordingly, this is a more common problem in the US, because most C-suite business leaders and board members have little experience in marketing. That’s not merely an educated guess; it’s been well studied and shown to be highly probable.
This survey had more eye-popping findings: “Three-quarters (75%) of business leaders think that while marketing matters, it doesn’t actually drive growth.”
If you aren’t a growth driver, you’re a cost center – at least in the eyes of the C-suite.
How CEOs can definitively test their assumptions
There is a definitive way for CEOs to test their marketing assumptions: turn marketing off and see if there’s any effect on business results.
What do I mean by turning marketing off? Cut the budget to 0% of revenue and lay off your entire marketing team.
If the sales team objects, and they will because they’ll lose their favorite excuse, that can be resolved by putting the budget savings to sales enablement. Hire some former marketers to be order takers for sales. They can write emails, make shadow enablement tools, or whatever sales might need.
Give the website and marketing technology to IT to manage. Sales can manage configurations with a technical administrator. Sales ops handles lead routing.
The benefit? Instead of guessing what marketing brings to the table, you can know with certainty. If you cut marketing out of your organization and business growth continues, then you know for sure that marketing is indeed an unnecessary support function.
On the other hand, if growth stalls, then you know marketing did in fact have an influence, despite the challenges of proving it.
One caveat to turning marketing off
There is one caveat that CEOs should know before choosing to engage this experiment: Marketing follows Newton’s Laws of Motion.
It takes a lot of marketing energy to overcome inertia, and marketing in motion tends to stay in motion. If you stop everything, it takes a while – 6-12 months at minimum – to regain that momentum.
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