Why Your Marketing Team Is Failing You (A Letter to PE-Backed CEOs)

There’s something many PE-backed CEOs have felt gnawing at them for months:

You’re not imagining it. Something really is broken.

You have a marketing team that looks busy - constantly busy. Campaigns are launching. Content is being produced. Events are being planned. Social posts are going live. Marketing leaders bring reports filled with metrics: impressions, engagement rates, leads generated, pipeline influenced.

And yet, when you look at the revenue trajectory your PE partners expect, something doesn’t add up.

The disconnect isn’t a personal failing. It’s not a lack of understanding of marketing. And in most cases, it’s not even a lack of talent or work ethic on the marketing team.

What’s actually happening is more fundamental - and once you see it, it’s hard to unsee.

The Brutal Truth About Traditional Marketing in PE-Backed Environments

Here’s what often goes unsaid when PE firms acquire companies: the marketing infrastructure that comes with the deal was built for a completely different game.

Most established B2B marketing teams were designed in periods of stability. They were built to maintain market position, nurture existing relationships, and support steady, predictable growth. The playbook centered on brand building, thought leadership, and long-term relationship marketing - strategies that work well when time is abundant.

But PE-backed companies don’t have time. They have 3–5 years to accelerate revenue, expand EBITDA margins, and position the business for a strategic exit.

That’s not just a shorter timeline. It’s a fundamentally different operating environment.

Marketing approaches that made sense for founder-led growth or long-horizon public companies often become misaligned under compressed PE timelines.

Activity Versus Strategy: The $500K Question

This pattern shows up repeatedly.

Marketing teams produce content at scale: blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, webinars, social updates. They attend trade shows, host events, refresh websites, and run nurture campaigns.

All legitimate activities. All potentially valuable in the right context.

But the critical question remains: Is any of this architected to aggressively capture market share within your specific competitive landscape and timeframe?

There’s a significant difference between marketing activity and marketing strategy.

Marketing activity is execution - content, campaigns, events, and channels.

Marketing strategy is architecture - competitive positioning, target segment prioritization, acquisition economics, and market penetration plans aligned to aggressive growth targets.

Most teams are strong at activity. What’s missing is strategic design built for compressed timelines and EBITDA-driven outcomes.

The Inherited Team Problem

Many PE-backed CEOs inherit marketing teams built for brand maintenance, not market capture.

And in some cases, they don’t inherit much of a marketing function at all. Marketing is often underinvested in mid-market businesses prior to a PE transaction, treated as a support function rather than a growth engine.

When a team does exist, this isn’t an indictment of talent. It’s a misalignment of purpose.

Marketing leaders who came up through traditional B2B environments were trained where brand awareness was the north star, relationships matured over quarters, and extended buying cycles were expected.

They often know the fundamentals well: content calendars, marketing technology stacks, lead handoffs, and campaign coordination.

What they may not have is experience architecting acquisition engines designed for PE-backed velocity. Many have never had to evaluate marketing through an EBITDA lens or operate under exit-driven pressure.

Those are different skill sets entirely.

The Gaps That Surface Under PE Ownership

Certain gaps tend to emerge consistently in PE-backed environments:

Gap #1: Competitive Positioning for Market Capture
Traditional differentiation focuses on messaging refinement. PE-backed growth demands sharper competitive intelligence - where to win quickly, which competitors are vulnerable, and how to claim market share fast.

Gap #2: Customer Acquisition Economics
Pipeline metrics alone aren’t enough. PE-backed environments require leaders who understand unit economics, payback periods, and EBITDA impact, not just MQLs and SQLs.

Gap #3: Speed and Iteration Under Constraint
Aggressive targets paired with controlled spend require rapid testing, ruthless prioritization, and decisiveness. Leaders trained in stable environments often struggle with this pace.

Gap #4: Cross-Functional Revenue Alignment
Marketing can’t operate in isolation. It must integrate tightly with sales, product, and customer success to drive revenue velocity, requiring a different leadership posture altogether.

What’s Really Happening

The frustration many CEOs feel isn’t because marketing is broken as a discipline. It’s because a PE-backed growth playbook is being run with a team designed for a different context.

This is why marketing can feel like a black box. Why activity metrics don’t map to outcomes. Why confidence in marketing investment erodes.

The disconnect is structural.

Marketing teams are often optimized for stability while PE ownership demands acceleration, accountability, and exit readiness.

What Fixing It Actually Looks Like

Once the problem is understood, it becomes solvable. But the solution isn’t always intuitive.

Replacing the marketing leader with someone who has “done PE before” can work - but it’s expensive, disruptive, slow, and risky. Success in one PE-backed environment doesn’t guarantee success in another.

Doubling down on sales alone may feel safer, but it leaves scalable growth on the table and weakens the company’s appeal to strategic acquirers.

A third path is emerging: executive-level marketing leadership that brings immediate strategic clarity without requiring a full-time hire.

The need isn’t for someone to manage activity. That capability often already exists.

The need is for someone who can architect strategy for PE-backed growth, operate credibly at the executive and board level, and move fast enough to matter.

That’s a strategic leadership role, not an operational one.

The Real Question

What would change if marketing leadership truly understood PE-backed growth dynamics, could architect strategy at speed, and had the authority to drive alignment immediately?

The CEOs who solve marketing challenges in PE-backed environments aren’t smarter or luckier. They simply stop trying to fix strategic architecture problems with operational solutions.

They recognize that PE-backed marketing requires specialized expertise - expertise that often makes more sense to access strategically rather than hiring and hoping it works out.

The frustration is valid. The disconnect is real. And the good news is that it’s solvable once the problem is framed correctly.

Bottom line: When marketing underperforms in PE-backed companies, the issue is rarely effort or talent. It’s misalignment between what marketing teams were built to do and what PE-backed growth actually requires.

Once that distinction is clear, everything changes.