Spotlight on B2B Marketing

If your buyer is a CIO or CTO, why does so much marketing never land? In this episode, host Karen Lloyd puts that question to the person best placed to answer it: a technology leader who has sat through decades of sales and marketing pitches aimed at him.

Simon Ratcliffe is a fractional CIO and technology advisor who has spent his career at the intersection of technology, sales and marketing, and he's blunt about what makes him switch off, and what actually gets him to pick up the phone.

Simon is also the CIO that guest Serena Walker referenced in Episode 43, where she shared how she built a peer to peer engagement programme between her marketing team and senior technology buyers. This episode is that same story told from the other side of the table, and it's a useful one for marketing leaders trying to close the gap with a technical, often sceptical buying committee.

From building and losing his own technology businesses to advising CEOs today, Simon offers a rare, candid account of what it actually takes to earn attention from a CIO or CTO, not just what marketers assume will work.

What You'll Learn in This Episode: 

✔️ Discover Simon's "so what" test, and what happens when marketing fails it
 ✔️ Why Simon objects to marketing "weeing" on him
 ✔️ The difference between finding a problem and genuinely understanding it
 ✔️ How a fractional CIO built and lost a technology business by focusing on the product instead of the need
 ✔️ Why creating a need beats "flogging the product," and the ad man who taught him this
 ✔️ Why Simon trusts a CTO's peer to peer view more than a vendor's marketing department
 ✔️ How precise ICP targeting (down to "what pub I think they drink in") sharpens messaging
 ✔️ Why chasing AI hype misses the point, and his mantra: people, process, technology, in that order 

If you're trying to win the attention of a technical, sceptical buying committee, this episode makes the case for what actually earns it, straight from the person on the other end of your pitch. 

Connect with Simon and Karen on LinkedIn 

Karen Lloyd is the host of Spotlight On B2B Marketing and Managing Director of Armstrong Lloyd, a specialist sales and marketing headhunting firm. To discuss your hiring needs of the current market, contact Karen at [email protected] 

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk

Every technology company is chasing the same handful of senior decision makers right now, and their inboxes are full. So how do you actually get through, and how do you turn your own senior leaders into part of the answer rather than a name on a slide?

In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Serena Walker, a commercial marketing leader who has spent her career driving enterprise growth for large corporate tech companies. Serena shares how she has moved C-suite executives from occasional guest appearances into active participants in the sales process, building peer-to-peer engagement that gets real traction with the hardest people in the building to reach.

Serena also unpacks what actually cuts through the noise before a peer-to-peer relationship even begins, from the role brand and PR play in shaping how senior buyers see you before sales ever gets a call, to how ABM and demand generation work together rather than as separate strategies. All of it points back to the same conclusion: the strategy only works if your senior leaders are actually part of it.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:
✔️ Why cutting through C-suite inbox noise takes more than a good subject line
✔️ How peer-to-peer engagement builds trust faster than any sales outreach
✔️ What an executive engagement programme actually looks like in practice
✔️ How ABM and demand generation work together rather than as separate strategies
✔️ How sales and marketing collaboration actually works day to day, not just in theory

If your C-suite is still sitting on the sidelines while sales does all the reaching out, this episode makes the case for why that has to change, and exactly how to do it.

Connect with Serena and Karen on LinkedIn

Karen Lloyd is the host of Spotlight On B2B Marketing and Managing Director of Armstrong Lloyd, a specialist sales and marketing headhunting firm. To discuss your hiring needs of the current market, contact Karen at [email protected]

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk

What would happen if your top salesperson walked out tomorrow?

If your pipeline depends on one person's relationships and reputation, you have built sales success, not a scalable growth engine. 

That is exactly the position Steve Rudd found himself in. As Exquitech's account director, he built the company's entire UK presence from nothing, largely on the back of his own network. It worked, until it didn't. That is when Nikki Stenson came in as interim CMO.

In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Steve and Nikki to explore how they turned that dependency into a repeatable growth engine that took the UK business from zero to £3 million in under three years.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

✔️ Why a founder or salesperson's personal network can get a business started, but cannot scale it alone
 ✔️ The moment a sales leader knows it is time to bring in a marketing hire
 ✔️ How to translate an existing brand and playbook for a new, more crowded market
 ✔️ Why defining your ICP has to come before campaign activity
 ✔️ How to approach CRM data cleansing and GDPR as an ongoing discipline, not a one off task
 ✔️ How to decide which events are worth the investment, using data over instinct
 ✔️ Why sales and marketing need to challenge each other without confrontation
 ✔️ How a sales led business builds the infrastructure to become repeatable and scalable

Whether you are the CEO relying too heavily on one salesperson, the sales leader who built the pipeline yourself, or the marketer walking into a business that has never had a proper go to market plan, this episode is packed with practical takeaways you can apply straight away.

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk

There's no silver bullet in marketing. No quick win, no hack, no one dashboard that fixes everything. Marketing leaders know that. The hard part is getting a CEO chasing this quarter's numbers to believe it too.

In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Emma Davies, Founder of Advocitude and CEO of Thesmia.ai, and Ruta Sudmantaite, Fractional CMO at Sudmant, two fractional CMOs who have built their careers on telling founders what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. 

Between them they've been part of successful B2B SaaS exits, and their unfiltered marketing takes have made their podcast, Blame It on Marketing, a favourite with senior marketers who want the truth over the theory.

Emma and Ruta share real case studies on connecting disparate marketing data ahead of an exit, what happens to inbound demand when a business switches its marketing budget off overnight, and why treating other fractional marketers as collaborators rather than competitors has been core to how they've built their careers.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:
✔️ Why there are so few genuine quick wins in B2B marketing
✔️ How to build a business case for data investment when founders want to hear something else
✔️ What happens to inbound demand when marketing spend is switched off
✔️ Why word of mouth is never really a free channel
✔️ How to use podcasting as a hero piece of content for demand generation
✔️ What makes a client relationship worth taking on, and when to walk away
✔️ How to build the resilience needed to work for yourself long term

Emma and Ruta's honest, first-hand account offers a masterclass as Fractional CMOs in building marketing that lasts, without the shortcuts.

Connect with Emma and Ruta

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk

A Mini Cooper convertible. A surgical robot strapped in the back. And a photographer sworn to secrecy.

In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Patrick Pordage, former Head of Marketing and Steve Bell, former Chief Commercial Officer at CMR Surgical, to share the real story behind one of the most disruptive challenger brands in surgical robotics.

Taking on a competitor with 100% market share, on a fraction of the budget, Patrick and Steve rebuilt the entire commercial model from the ground up, treating sales and marketing as one function rather than two. 

From a BBC launch that reached over 100 million people, to a velvet rope strategy that made surgeons desperate to get into the room, this is an unfiltered account of the bold decisions, the friction, and the commercial results that followed.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

✔️ How a shared mission aligned an entire company, from the CEO to the factory floor 

✔️ Why leaving ego out of disagreements is what makes a sales and marketing partnership work 

 ✔️ How deliberate exclusivity created a "brand of desire" among key customers 

✔️ Why B2B buyers are consumers first, and post-rationalise their decisions with data afterwards 

✔️ Why incentivising a commercial team on customer happiness, not commission, changed the culture 

This episode is the second in our sales and marketing mini-series. Whether you're a marketer trying to prove your value, a commercial leader wanting more from your marketing team, or a business tired of playing it safe, this one is for you.

- Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn

- Connect with Steve on LinkedIn

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk

What can happen when sales and marketing stop pointing fingers and start working as one team? 

In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Nick Jones, founder of Glendower Advisory, and Max Childs, Fractional Marketing Director, to explore just that.

Nick and Max discuss their journey at Lucidworks where they took an EMEA pipeline that was close to zero to a record year with 250% growth.

No theory, no framework, just the decisions, the near misses, and the culture shift that made it happen.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

✔️ The commercial results of getting sales and marketing to work as one team
✔️ Why asking "why" matters more than chasing the numbers
✔️ How a blame-free culture turned a frustrated team into top performers  
✔️ Why logos from one region often mean nothing to buyers in another
✔️ How a single clause in a master contract was quietly killing case study opportunities
✔️ Why the team pivoted from B2C e-commerce search to B2B manufacturing
✔️ How to tell the difference between the wrong leads and the wrong market
✔️ Why one big trade show will never be enough to build a market presence

- Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or find out more about Glendower Advisory
- Connect with Max on LinkedIn or find out more about Technology Marketing Europe 

About the Host:
Karen Lloyd is the host of Spotlight On B2B Marketing and Managing Director of Armstrong Lloyd, a specialist sales and marketing headhunting firm. To discuss your hiring needs of the current market, contact Karen at [email protected]

Connect with Karen on LinkedIn

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk

What does a Chief Product and Technology Officer know about marketing? More than you might expect. And that is exactly the point of this episode.

Host Karen Lloyd is joined by Gareth Lockwood, Chief Product and Technology Officer at TrustLayer, a scale-up cybersecurity firm, to explore why siloed thinking between marketing, sales and channel quietly kills commercial performance, even when every team is working hard.

Gareth shares what it really takes for smaller businesses to compete and win against far bigger, better-funded rivals.

The thread running through this conversation is simple but powerful: small companies do not beat large companies by copying them. 

They beat them by changing the game. And the only way they can change the game is when product, marketing, sales, customer success and partners all move together.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:
✔️ Why siloed marketing, sales and channel teams create activity but not momentum
✔️ How "positioning debt" builds up inside growing tech businesses and what it costs you
✔️ Why marketing sets the commercial North Star, not just the creative output
✔️ What a minimum viable go-to-market plan looks like in practice
✔️ Why smaller companies should never try to out-Goliath Goliath
✔️ How to win on speed, simplicity and focus against bigger, better-funded competitors
✔️ Why partner-led growth is the smartest route for smaller tech companies right now
✔️ How the partner marketing model is shifting from resale to co-selling, influence and integration

Connect with Gareth on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/garethlockwood/ or find out more about TrustLayer at trustlayer.co.uk

 About the Host:
Karen Lloyd is the host of Spotlight On B2B Marketing and Managing Director of Armstrong Lloyd, a specialist sales and marketing headhunting firm. To discuss your hiring needs of the current market, contact Karen at [email protected]

Connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lloydkaren/ 

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk

The pressure on B2B marketers to prove commercial value has been building for years. But what does it actually take to step up, earn a seat at the board table, and lead marketing as a genuine revenue driver?

In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by David Rowlands, Head of Product at B2B Marketing, providers of Propolis, the go-to community and intelligence platform for B2B marketers globally. Propolis has spent hundreds of hours in real conversations with senior B2B marketers to understand what is keeping marketing leaders up at night, and the result is a framework they call the Commercial Marketer.

David shares the research behind that framework, what the six skills of a commercial marketer actually are, and why financial acumen is the single widest gap holding B2B marketers back right now. He also gives a direct assessment of what the next 12 months hold: two paths, and a clear warning about what happens to those who sit still.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

✔️ Why the pressure on B2B marketers has reached a critical mass and what is driving it
✔️ What the commercial marketer framework is and why it matters now
✔️ The six skills every B2B marketing leader needs to operate as a commercial function
✔️ Why AI amplifies a poor strategy as easily as a good one
✔️ How the best marketers are using AI to rebuild their function, not just produce more content
✔️ The two paths marketers face in the next 12 months and what each one means for your career

Find out more about Propolis and connect with David on LinkedIn

About the Host:

Karen Lloyd is the host of Spotlight On B2B Marketing and Managing Director of Armstrong Lloyd, a specialist sales and marketing headhunting firm. To discuss your hiring needs of the current market, contact Karen at [email protected]

Connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lloydkaren/

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk

In a world flooded with AI-generated content, click-through rates are falling and every brand is starting to sound the same. So what actually cuts through?

In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Chrissie Bardwell, Global Vice President of Marketing Strategy at Aveva, to explore why experiential marketing is having its moment right now and what B2B marketers can do about it.

Chrissie draws on her background in omnichannel retail analysis and enterprise B2B marketing to make the case for putting real-world human experience back into the marketing mix. This is not about ditching AI. It is about understanding where human connection still wins and building a strategy that uses both.

What You'll Learn in This Episode
✔️ Why experiential marketing is rising as a direct response to AI content saturation
✔️ How post-COVID consumer behaviour has shifted the way B2B buyers expect to be engaged
✔️ What B2B marketers can learn from retail brands like Apple, Nike and Hermes
✔️ How Aveva built its Porsche Formula E partnership around shared values and customer experience
✔️ How to build a commercial business case for experiential marketing using pipeline data
✔️ The KPIs that actually matter when measuring experiential activity
✔️ Why human creativity and distinctive brand identity are becoming a competitive advantage in an AI-saturated world

Whether you are a marketing leader trying to differentiate in a crowded market, a business leader wondering whether experiential activity is worth the investment, or a CMO looking for a fresh perspective on the AI and human balance, this episode is for you.

Connect with Chrissie on LinkedIn

About the Host:

Karen Lloyd is the host of Spotlight On B2B Marketing and Managing Director of Armstrong Lloyd, a specialist sales and marketing headhunting firm. To discuss your hiring needs of the current market, contact Karen at [email protected]

Connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lloydkaren/

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk

Most AI companies think they have a positioning problem. They don't. They have a translation problem.

In this episode of Spotlight on B2B Marketing, host Karen Lloyd is joined by Stephen Christou, a B2B marketing leader with experience across HPE, TIBCO, and Cohesity, who has spent the last year building a repeatable demand engine inside an early-stage AI company.

From navigating the AI adoption gap to rethinking how buyers discover products, Stephen shares what he learned on the ground about why buyers stall and what marketing can do about it.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:
✔️ Why the AI adoption gap is the defining challenge for B2B marketers right now
✔️ How to turn complex AI capability into narratives buyers can actually absorb
✔️ Why broad transformational positioning is losing deals and what to do instead
✔️ How AI SEO is changing the way buyers discover products
✔️ Why your ICP is your anchor when the market is changing weekly
✔️ How to help buyers make the internal case upward to budget holders
✔️ The difference between AI that transforms organisations and AI that augments individuals
✔️ What senior marketers need to focus on to stay commercially relevant

Whether you're marketing an AI product and trying to cut through the noise, or a business leader trying to understand why buyers keep stalling, this episode is essential listening.

Connect with Stephen: linkedin.com/in/stephenchristou

About the Host:
Karen Lloyd is the host of Spotlight on B2B Tech Marketing and Managing Director of Armstrong Lloyd, a specialist sales and marketing headhunting firm. To discuss your hiring needs or the current market, contact Karen at [email protected]

Connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lloydkaren/

Brought to you by Armstrong Lloyd - your go-to solution for recruiting marketing, sales, and business leaders in B2B.

Want to know more?
Discover more at armstronglloyd.co.uk