Revenue Marketing Sucks. Here’s Marketo’s Co-Founder on How We Fix It
Jon Miller founded Marketo nineteen years ago with one goal in mind: help marketing teams earn a seat at the revenue table. B2B marketing was faced with a reputation crisis. Marketers were the team that designed those colorful brochures you threw into the bin after a conference and threw parties.
So, Miller and his co-founders decided, ‘let’s make marketing more measurable, more accountable, more strategic.’
It worked. Sort of.
Fast forward to 2025, and the playbook meant to elevate marketing has instead reduced the profession to what Miller calls “the lead-gen department.” What went wrong, and how can we fix it?
I sat down with the Martech pioneer to expand on a rabbit hole he burrowed in my brain some weeks back with this LinkedIn post.
The Three Fatal Flaws in Today's Revenue Marketing
Flaw #1: We've Overused Tactics Until They Became Toxic
The modern revenue marketing playbook is familiar: create gated content to capture leads, email them relentlessly through “nurture” campaigns, score their behavior, and pass them to SDRs when they cross an arbitrary threshold.
But as Miller explains, we’ve committed a “marketing tragedy of the commons. Everyone is like, ‘oh, email nurturing works.’ So everyone does email nurturing, and all of a sudden it doesn’t work anymore.”
Miller shares a telling example: “I spoke to a company recently. Webinars were one of their best performing tactics a couple of years ago. When they previously ran webinars with Forrester, they got about 200 registrants. Last week, they did a similar webinar with Forrester. They emailed their database and got 80 registrants.”
We've pushed our tactics too far, and buyers have tuned us out.
Flaw #2: We've Treated Marketing as a Machine, Not a Stochastic System
“Marketing isn’t a gumball machine. It’s not a thing where you put a quarter in and get a gumball out or an MQL out,” Miller says.
This deterministic view of marketing assumes linear, predictable buyer journeys that rarely exist in reality. Miller references the work of Kathleen Schaub, former CMO and author of Marketing in the (Great, Big, Messy) Real World, on nonlinear complex systems: marketing is more like weather patterns or stock markets than assembly lines. It is “unpredictable and sensitive dependence on initial conditions.”
Claiming, “I sent out this email and that’s why they closed the deal” misses the nuanced nature of the buyer’s decision-making process. Our obsession with attribution models that neatly divide credit between marketing and sales worsens the situation.
“That’s like saying that a touchdown was scored only by that one player,” Miller says. “It wasn’t.”
Flaw #3: We've Sacrificed Long-Term Value for Short-Term Metrics
In seeking measurability, we've underinvested in harder-to-measure brand efforts. We've ignored what's right for a long-term relationship with our customer versus just driving short-term metrics.
This has created what Emma Clayton, Founder of the Marketing Revolution community, calls “pipeline-obsessed hamsters on a quarterly wheel,” chasing MQLs at the expense of meaningful customer relationships.
We’ve also narrowed our focus. “We’ve gotten too focused on net-new opportunity creation, when so much of revenue comes from post-sale retention, expansion, advocacy,” Miller explains.
How Should We Redefine Revenue Marketing in 2025 and Beyond?
Miller offers a compelling alternative:
“Revenue Marketing isn’t about MQLs. It’s about driving sustainable revenue growth through market understanding, differentiated positioning, and brand preference.”
Here's what marketing that drives real, sustainable revenue looks like:
- It shapes market perceptions, so you're the first one buyers contact when they're ready.
- It crafts positioning so compelling that your competition becomes an afterthought.
- It builds strong brand equity that you don't need to discount to win deals.
- It focuses on the entire customer journey: create, close, renew, and expand.
A New Approach Needs New Metrics
If we're moving beyond MQLs and pipeline attribution, what should we measure instead?
#1. Engagement from the Right People
“I’ve always liked engagement, especially engagement from the right people at the right companies,” Miller explains. Before spending money with you, they often need to spend time with you.
#2. Brand Perception
If we agree that brand is “what people think and feel about you when you’re not in the room,” we need to articulate what we want our target buyers to think or feel about our brand.
“An example that’s really stuck with me came from Grammarly’s CMO, Lena Waters. Too many of their buyers see Grammarly as the little widget people use to edit emails. For her and her company, they want to be seen as enterprise-class AI content generation,” Miller adds.
This clarity gives them a metric to track through brand studies: what percentage of their target audience perceives them correctly?
#3. Customer Satisfaction Metrics
Miller shares an interesting finding from unpublished Marketo research. “I did some research back then that showed the companies that tied their CMO’s compensation to NPS grew faster than others,” he explains.
The research wasn’t published because the findings weren’t statistically significant, but Miller maintains it was “directionally important.”
“It implies that when marketing considers post-sale metrics like customer satisfaction, it can dramatically impact growth and overall business success,” he continues.
This highlights a shift in how we view marketing’s role — from lead-gen campaigns to owning the entire customer relationship cycle.
Taking First Steps Toward Change
Better revenue marketing begins with putting the customer first, not just as a slogan, but as an operating philosophy. When evaluating any campaign or tactic, the must-answer question should be: “Is this good for the customer?”
While answering that question forces us to think more long-term, Miller acknowledges it poses a fundamental challenge.
“Some of these long-term investments that are right around brand and doing right by the customer... in many cases, those things have a longer time horizon to impact the business than the average CMO tenure,” he explains.
This creates a misalignment of incentives. The approach that would benefit the organization long-term might not show results quickly enough to benefit the person implementing them.
There’s no easy answer to this dilemma. But as Miller points out, “What’s the alternative? Just keep doing more of the broken stuff that doesn’t work?”
What’s Next?
Ready to keep growing? We've got a couple of other resources you might find helpful, such as:
- The marketing funnel is entirely in your head
- Why brand marketers and product marketers need to be best friends
You should also subscribe to The CMO newsletter to stay on top of trends and get the latest tips, resources, and guides from our community of seasoned marketing leaders straight to your inbox.
