What would happen if marketing stopped chasing everyone for a month?
Here’s a slightly uncomfortable question for marketing and BD teams.
What would actually happen if you stopped chasing everyone for a month?
No reminders to partners to follow up after an event. No third email asking for comments on a campaign. No chasing people to complete their BD actions. No nudge about the introduction someone promised to make. No repeated requests for input into a sector plan that everyone agreed was a priority three months ago.
Would everything grind to a halt?
If the answer is yes, you’ve probably got a bigger problem than a busy inbox.
How marketing and BD end up as the reminder service
Most marketing and BD people are naturally helpful. You want things to happen, so when something stalls, you chase. Then you chase again. Eventually the action gets done and you move on to the next thing.
Over time that creates a strange dynamic. Your team becomes responsible not only for strategy, insight, opportunities and delivery, but also for making sure everyone else does what they said they would do.
And because you’re good at it, the firm starts relying on you for it.
The sector meeting happens because marketing organised it. The target client gets contacted because BD reminded someone four times. The event follow-up happens because you circulated the attendee list and asked everyone what they were doing with it. The BD plan stays vaguely alive because you keep putting it back on the agenda.
At some point it’s worth asking who actually owns this.
Support and ownership aren’t the same thing
There’s absolutely a role for marketing and BD in making business development easier. You can provide client and market insight. You can spot opportunities, help prioritise targets, build campaigns, prepare people for meetings, run planning sessions and turn vague ideas into actions.
But supporting someone to do BD is different from being responsible for whether they do it at all.
If a partner has agreed that a particular relationship matters, you shouldn’t spend six months persuading them to pick up the phone. If a sector has agreed three priorities for the year, you shouldn’t be the only person asking whether anything has happened. And if someone comes back from a conference with five good conversations, the follow-up shouldn’t depend on your reminder.
Wanting to be helpful can quietly remove accountability from everyone else.
Start with a chase audit
Before you change anything, find out what you’re actually dealing with.
For the next two weeks, ask everyone in your team to log every chase. Keep it simple. Date, what was being chased, who it went to, and how many times you’d asked already. A shared spreadsheet takes about twenty seconds per entry.
Then sort each entry into one of three buckets.
- Yours to own. The deadline sits with marketing and the consequence of missing it is external, for example a directory submission, an award entry, a tender return or an event booking. Keep chasing these. That’s the job.
- Yours to support. Someone else owns the outcome, but they genuinely need something from you first, such as a target list, a draft or an approval. If you’re chasing these, check whether you gave them what they needed in a usable form.
- Not yours at all. Someone agreed to do something and hasn’t. Nothing is blocking them except time and attention.
Most teams are surprised by the size of that third bucket. That’s your reminder service, and it’s the bit you can hand back.
Make ownership explicit
Every meaningful BD action needs a named owner. Not “the sector team”. Not “marketing”. A person.
While you’re at it, get specific about three things: who owns it, by when, and what “done” looks like. “Reconnect with the client” is impossible to track. “Email to arrange lunch, sent by 30 September” isn’t.
Record it somewhere everyone can see. A shared tracker, a section of the sector plan, the standing slide in your monthly meeting pack. It doesn’t matter which, as long as it isn’t a private list living in your notebook that only you ever look at.
Change what happens when actions slip
You default to chasing because there’s no alternative. So build one.
Instead of a fourth reminder, make progress visible. If an action hasn’t happened, record it as outstanding and bring it to the next review. Two lines in the meeting pack showing which actions are complete, in progress or not started will do more than a month of polite emails.
The wording matters here, and it can stay entirely friendly. Something like: “I’ve marked this as outstanding for the October review. Let me know if the timing has changed and I’ll update it.”
That’s not passive aggressive. It’s just accurate. And it shifts the conversation from a marketing manager quietly nudging behind the scenes to a group of peers looking at the same list.
Give the review some teeth by keeping it short and regular. Fifteen minutes a month is plenty. Go through the actions, note what’s moved, and ask anyone with a stalled item whether it’s still a priority or whether it should come off the list. Both answers are useful.
Stop rescuing every activity
This is the hardest one.
Here’s a test. If you did nothing at all for four weeks, would this campaign, initiative or priority still be alive? If it wouldn’t, that tells you something important.
When nobody will invest time in something without you pushing, the question probably isn’t “how do we get people to engage?”. It’s “is this genuinely a priority?”.
Real priorities have owners, time and attention attached to them. Everything else is a plan somebody agreed to in a meeting because saying no felt awkward.
Being willing to let something stop is one of the more valuable things you can do. It frees up your budget, your team’s hours and your own attention for the work that people actually want to happen.
September is a good time to reset
After the summer, marketing and BD teams come back to a long list of plans, campaigns, events and activities that all need restarting.
Before you start chasing everyone again, take an hour to look at what you’re chasing and why. What genuinely needs your support? What should sit with someone else? And what are you keeping alive simply because nobody has made the decision to stop it?
Then pick one thing to hand back this month. Not everything at once, just one. Tell the owner it’s theirs, put it on the review list, and resist the urge to rescue it.
Sometimes the most useful thing marketing and BD can do isn’t another follow-up email. It’s handing the responsibility back to where it belongs, and trusting that it will be picked up.
Need help?
If you would like help with your marketing and business development, bringing on a marketing consultant with a fresh pair of eyes can make all the difference. I work with B2B businesses and professional service firms in London, Kent, the UK, and Europe, specialising as a legal marketing consultant. Please get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.
