Marketing for B2B businesses in London, the UK, Europe and the USA.
In B2B businesses, marketing is easy to overlook. Either there’s nobody dedicated to it, or there’s a team stretched thin with nobody setting direction.
Without a clear plan, it’s easy to lose visibility, miss opportunities and find that competitors who aren’t better than you are simply more present.
What’s different about marketing a B2B business?
B2B sales cycles are long and the decision usually involves several people rather than one buyer, each caring about something different. The product or service often needs translating from what it does into what it’s worth. And marketing only works when it’s connected to sales rather than running alongside it. Volume and reach matter far less than precision.
The challenges B2B businesses face
Founder-led sales that can’t scale. Your founder or CEO is your best salesperson, knows the product inside out and can win any room they’re in. They can’t be in every room, and nothing has been built to work without them.
A technical product and a commercial audience. Your people can explain exactly what it does. What’s missing is the translation into what it’s worth to a business, which is the bit a buying committee actually needs.
No agreed picture of who you’re for. Ask five people in the business who the ideal customer is and you’ll get five answers. Every marketing decision after that is a guess.
Marketing treated as production. Someone asks for a brochure, a deck, a LinkedIn post. Nobody’s deciding what any of it is meant to achieve, so it gets judged on whether it looks nice.
Sales and marketing running as separate functions. No shared definition of a lead, no agreed handover, and a quiet mutual suspicion that the other one isn’t pulling their weight.
Launches with no route to market. You’ve built something new. The plan for getting it in front of people is essentially to announce it and hope.
A junior marketer expected to be strategic. You hired a marketing executive because you needed marketing done. What the business actually needed was someone to decide what marketing to do, and that isn’t a fair thing to ask of someone two years in.
How I can help
If you’re a founder, CEO or leadership team without marketing expertise
You’re running the business and marketing is the thing you know matters and keep postponing.
- Build a marketing plan tied to your commercial goals, not a list of activity.
- Work out who you’re actually for, and what you can credibly claim that competitors can’t.
- Get your proposition clear enough that someone else can sell it, not just you.
- Work out what marketing resource you need, in what order, and help you recruit it.
If you’ve got a junior or mid-level marketing team
They can execute. What’s missing is someone senior deciding what’s worth executing.
- Give them a plan with priorities, so effort goes where it generates pipeline.
- Mentor and upskill them so their judgement grows.
- Provide senior oversight without the cost of a full-time hire.
If you’re a marketing director or head of marketing
You know what needs doing and haven’t got the hours.
- Extra senior capacity on campaigns, launches or a new market.
- A second experienced view on strategy, and someone who’ll constructively challenge it.
- Support making the case to a board that wants to see the link between spend and revenue.
Services I offer B2B businesses
Marketing planning and strategy
A written plan covering positioning, audiences, messaging, channels and sequence, with priorities and owners attached. Built around the team and budget you’ve actually got.
Fractional and outsourced marketing
Senior marketing leadership one or two days a week, for businesses that need someone owning marketing at leadership level without a full-time salary.
Marketing audits
An independent look at what you’re doing, what it costs and what it’s generating. Ends in a prioritised set of recommendations you can take to your board.
Go to market and campaign sprints
For a new product, service or market. Positioning, messaging, audience, channels and a launch sequence, so the launch is a plan rather than an announcement.
Why work with me
I’ve been running Helen Cox Marketing since 2016 and have worked with clients across B2B and professional services, from insurtech and cyber security to global inventory management, energy and mortgage businesses. Before that I was in-house.
What that means in practice is that I’ve been through the same conversation in a lot of different industries, which is usually enough to recognise your version of it quickly. I’m also not going to pretend to understand your product better than you do. My job is working out how it reaches the people who need it.
I’m a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing (FCIM) with Chartered Marketer status.
Who I work with
Businesses: technology and SaaS, insurtech and insurance, cyber security, energy, health and social care, manufacturing and industrial, inventory and logistics, and mortgage and financial services businesses.
People: founders, CEOs, COOs and CROs, leadership teams, marketing directors and heads of marketing, marketing managers, and marketing executives and assistants.
If you’re a consultancy, a recruitment agency, a property firm or a corporate finance adviser, I’ve written separately about how I work with consultancies, recruitment agencies, property firms and M&A firms and corporate finance advisers.
Who this isn’t for
I’m not a B2C marketer. If you’re selling to consumers at volume, someone else will do a better job than me and I’ll say so on the call.
I’m also not the right fit if what you need is delivery: someone to run the campaigns week to week, manage the ad accounts or produce the content. An agency or a freelancer will do that better and cost you less. I’m brought in to work out what should be happening and to lead the pieces that need senior ownership.
Get in touch
If your business is growing and you couldn’t confidently explain why, or what would make it grow faster, that’s the point at which this conversation is worth having.
Book a discovery call and tell me where you are.
I work with B2B businesses, law and solicitors firms, accountants and consultancies in London, the UK, Europe and the USA.
Happy clients
Organised and insightful approach to understanding the business
It was a pleasure working with Helen on PGI’s corporate marketing direction. Her organised and insightful approach to understanding the business made it clear she was invested in the success of the project. Helen drew from her experience across a range of B2B professional services firms to provide us with different perspectives on how we could improve and build on our existing marketing and business development activities
Karis Bouher, Marketing Manager, PGI
Pivotal role in shaping our marketing strategy
Helen has played a pivotal role in shaping our organisation’s marketing strategy, exhibiting a comprehensive understanding of our goals and market dynamics. She meticulously crafted an overarching marketing plan that spans 1 to 18 months, providing a roadmap for our marketing initiatives and campaigns.
Her strategic vision encompassed various aspects, including market analysis, and the selection of appropriate marketing channels. Helen demonstrated her proficiency in developing a cohesive and integrated approach that aligns with our business objectives.
Stuart Dewhurst, Client Relationship Director, RDT
B2B firms I’ve worked with
Case study highlight
Elevating an insurtech firm: A comprehensive marketing review
Discover how I collaborated with an InsurTech firm to lead a comprehensive marketing review. The CEO sought my expertise to help them acquire new clients, build a marketing team, and launch an innovative new offering into the market.
FAQs
Longer sales cycles, fewer buyers, and a decision usually made by a group rather than an individual. That makes precision matter more than reach. A campaign that reaches a hundred thousand people and none of the twelve who could actually buy has done nothing, which is why B2C tactics tend to disappoint when they’re lifted straight across.
By getting out of their head what they say in the room and onto paper, so someone else can say it. That’s the proposition, the messaging and the objection handling. It sounds obvious and it’s the single most common gap I find in founder-led businesses.
Usually that growth is repeatable rather than lucky: a defined market, a clear proposition, some idea of what it costs to acquire a customer and where the pipeline comes from. You don’t need perfect attribution. You need to be able to explain how it works.
Start with a shared definition of what a lead is and what happens when one appears. Most alignment problems are actually definition problems wearing a disguise. After that it’s shared targets and one plan rather than two.
For doing marketing, often yes. For deciding what marketing to do, usually not, and it isn’t reasonable to expect it of someone early in their career. That gap is what fractional support and mentoring exist for.
No. Consumer marketing is a different discipline and there are people who do it far better than I would.
No. Some clients have a team, some have one person, some have nobody. Working out what you need and in what order is often part of the job.
It’s a free 30 minutes for me to understand what you’re dealing with and work out whether I’m the right person to help. If I’m not, I’ll tell you and point you somewhere better.
Let’s talk…
For more information on any of my services, get in touch and let’s talk.