Marketing Does the Work Before Anyone Knows a Deal Exists

By the time your company celebrates a closed deal, marketing has usually been working on it for months. Nobody saw it. That invisibility is not a bug in how marketing works. But it becomes a problem when the rest of the business starts believing the work does not exist.

Season 2 of The Oddinary is here. For the premiere I laced up my hiking shoes with Ellen Aas-Nilsen, Country Marketing Manager Norway and Partner Marketing Manager Northern Europe at Dun & Bradstreet, on the coastal paths of Jeløya in Moss. Twenty-plus years of B2B marketing, partner programs that have produced confirmed sales in the tens of millions, and zero patience for the PowerPoint stereotype.

The PowerPoint problem

I asked Ellen what piece of marketing advice makes her roll her eyes. She did not hesitate: the idea that marketing is really good at PowerPoints.

It sounds like a joke, but it points at something real. When people reduce go-to-market to a plan on a slide, they miss what it actually is: a complex system where product, sales, customer success and marketing have to pull in the same direction, every day.

"It's just not a simple plan that goes for one product. It's a thing that's constantly evolving all the time."

Here is the part that stuck with me: Ellen says most GTM plans break down in strategy, not execution. Teams never truly align on direction, then wonder why the execution feels like pushing rope.

The power of togetherness

Ellen has run joint programs with Salesforce, Snowflake, Databricks and Ivalua. Every partner has their own agenda and their own brand. Her way through it is a phrase she carries everywhere: the power of togetherness.

Find the joint messaging that fits the market. Make the program valuable for the partner, not just for yourself. And treat it as an ecosystem you strengthen layer by layer, not a logo swap.

"The message gets so much stronger if you do this together."

Her favourite work is building these programs from scratch. Where most people see a blank page as a burden, she sees the one situation where you get to shape the whole thing: the strategy, the incentives, the form that makes partners actually want in.

The infrastructure nobody talks about

Ellen describes marketing as the function that handles everything before the rest of the company hears about the company, the product, the service or the people. That work runs on infrastructure: CRM, marketing automation, analytics, data.

Her trick for making the internal case is simple and slightly devious: get sales on board first.

"If you get sales on board with your requests, you have a really strong case of convincing anybody. Because everybody wants to please sales."

And on data quality, she is refreshingly blunt.

"Even in the best of companies, it's bad."

The companies that make progress are the ones that admit it, then start listening to marketing operations and analytics in a much bigger way. The people who see what works and what does not are already on the payroll. Most companies just do not trust them enough.

Marketing operations, full circle

I asked Ellen where marketing operations ends and something else begins. Her answer: it does not really end. MOps runs through the whole campaign journey, with stops and pauses, from planning to the optimization work that everyone lists in the project plan and nobody assigns.

That matches what I see in my own work. Optimization is always a line item. It is rarely a person.

The bottom line

Marketing moves first. It does the work before anyone else in the business knows a deal is in motion, and the systems, data and partner relationships that make it possible are the engine, not a support function.

And if you are the marketer who feels invisible in all of this, Ellen's advice is the most practical thing in the whole episode: do not stand on a chair and shout. Start connecting. Take the coffee with the colleague you never talk to. Be interested in what other people do.

"If you're a marketer, you need to market yourself."

If this resonated, connect with me on LinkedIn. I am always up for a conversation about the work nobody sees.