Your priorities are set. Now what?

Every planning season sitting on a marketing leadership team, I'd watch the same pattern play out. Leadership would share their high-level priorities, usually some combination of growing key segments (never just one), strengthening our position in several categories, and increasing revenue for everything. They were always broad enough that almost any piece of work could claim to support them.

Over the next month or two, every marketing team would fill in a calendar of webinars, campaigns, events and thought leadership content, each one tagged to a priority and each one aligned to that team's own objectives. The end result was a list of 500+ activations with no through-line.

Nobody could say which customer a given piece was really for, what moment it was meant to meet them in, or whether it was building something over time or trying to close a deal this quarter. That's the problem with building a plan without a strategy.

It's also where most marketing loses its effectiveness. Between a business priority and a tactic sit three decisions that most plans skip: who we're focused on, which buying moments we want to own, and what job each piece of work is doing. Skip these decisions and every tactic becomes generic and forgettable, built to serve internal goals instead of a customer.

Making the connection from priority to work

The tool I use with clients is a simple framework with five layers. Each layer narrows the one above it, and by the bottom you can explain every piece of work in a single sentence.

1. Start with the business objectives you already have.

In most organizations, marketing doesn't set these, and it shouldn't need to rewrite them. The job is translation. "Grow enterprise pipeline" is a direction. The layers below turn it into choices.

2. Choose your audiences deliberately.

Research from Jenni Romaniuk and her colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, published in How B2B Brands Grow, found that B2B purchases typically involve somewhere between six and eleven people. Very few brands have the budget to build a relationship with all of them equally, and trying usually means reaching each one too thinly to matter.

Pick the two or three roles where being remembered changes the outcome, and accept that the rest will be served by the halo effect of broad-reach advertising, sales conversations, and the proof you put in front of them later. Focus decides who the message is written for, not how narrowly you buy media.

3. Name the buying moments.

Romaniuk calls these Category Entry Points (CEPs): the situations that prompt someone to think about your category in the first place. Buyers rarely remember brands in the abstract. They remember them in context, such as when the board asks a question current reporting can't answer, when a new leader inherits a system that isn't working, or when budget season demands proof that the current approach is paying off.

The moments worth prioritizing are the ones that matter to more than one of your chosen audiences. The same moment lands differently for a CFO than for a head of operations, so the message shifts by audience while the moment stays the same. That's where your budget does double duty. If you have the budget for research, you can assess, prioritize and size the CEPs most relevant to your brand.

4. Decide what job the work is doing.

Professor John Dawes has shown that at any given time, only about 5% of B2B buyers are actively in market. The other 95% will buy eventually, but not now. That gives marketing two distinct jobs: building memory with the people who aren't shopping yet, so your brand is the one they think of when a buying moment arrives, and making it easy to choose you for the people who are.

Les Binet and Peter Field's research suggests roughly 60% of investment should go to the first job and 40% to the second. Most B2B plans run close to the reverse, which is why so many teams feel busy and still watch pipeline flatten a year later.

5. Choose the work.

Now the tactics show up, and each one can answer three questions: which audience it's for, which moment it builds around, and which job it's doing. If a proposed piece of work can't answer all three, it probably belongs on someone's wish list rather than the plan.

Where industries fit

Enterprise sales teams usually organize around industries, and they'll want to see themselves in the plan. That's fair, and it matters for adoption. But in my experience, buyers across industries share far more than sales segmentation suggests. A manufacturing CFO and a retail CFO face many of the same buying moments; what changes is the example, the proof point, and the language that makes the story feel familiar to them. Let industries adapt the story. When they start to drive it, the strategy fragments into a dozen vertical campaigns that each build a little memory and none build enough.

A quick example

Say leadership's priority is to grow new enterprise clients. You choose two audiences, the CFO and the head of operations, because they're the roles where being remembered most often decides who gets a meeting. You identify a buying moment both feel acutely: when a supply chain disruption exposes a liquidity gap.

From there, the work becomes clear. On the memory side, you build a thought leadership series and a brand campaign around that moment, and you run them consistently across the year rather than in a single burst. Your goal is broad reach for the campaign, so rather than limiting it to a small set of industries or titles, you find relevant ways to show up wherever a CFO or head of operations would find you. On the easy-to-choose side, you publish a short guide for assessing liquidity exposure, a case study showing how a company answered that exact question in days, and a sales conversation guide that opens with it. Every piece traces back through the five layers, and everyone is clear on why it exists.

Clear choices give you permission to say no

The most valuable thing about this exercise may be what it removes. When every piece of work has to trace back through audience, moment and job, the requests that don't fit become easier to decline, and the team gets its focus back. Strategy is ultimately a set of choices about what you will and won't do, and this framework makes those choices visible enough to defend.

If you traced your big

gest campaign this year back up through those five layers, where would the line break?