Marketing Strategy | Podcast
At the start of every year, marketers set ambitious goals. Build more pipeline. Generate better leads. Improve conversion. Prove marketing’s impact. Then reality kicks in.
Priorities shift. Budgets change. AI evolves. Buyer behaviour continues to transform. Suddenly, the strategies that looked right in January don’t always work in July. If you’re heading into Q3 and feeling the gap between where your marketing plan said you’d be and where you actually are, you’re not alone. And more importantly, it’s not too late.
The good news? The core levers that drive B2B marketing performance haven’t changed. What’s changed is how precisely you need to pull them. We recently sat down with Sophie Neate, Global Head of Digital Marketing and Content at ABB Electrification, a company that markets across 100+ countries with some of the most complex industrial buying cycles in the world, on the Supercharge Marketing podcast. Her perspective is a powerful reminder that course correction isn’t failure. It’s strategy.
The Mid-Year Reality Check Most Marketers Skip
It’s easy to keep executing against a plan that no longer fits the market. The campaigns are already built. The KPIs are already set. Changing course feels like admitting something went wrong.
But the best marketing teams treat mid-year not as a checkpoint, but as a recalibration moment. Sophie frames it this way: her team’s entire campaign planning starts with understanding the buyer’s journey as it exists right now, not as it existed when the plan was written. When those two things drift apart, performance drifts with them.
One of the most significant shifts she’s seen recently is where buyers are doing their research. Today, roughly 80% of buyers complete their research before they ever visit your website and with AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews reshaping that research, many aren’t arriving at your site at all. If your content strategy was built around capturing people when they arrive, you may already be a step behind where buyers actually are.
The question to ask yourself heading into Q3 isn’t “are we behind?” It’s: is our marketing still aligned with how our customers actually buy today?
Stop Chasing Lead Volume. Start Chasing Lead Quality.
One of the most common places mid-year marketing plans break down is in how success gets measured. Pipelines that looked strong in Q1 dry up. MQL volume looks fine on paper but conversion to closed revenue is soft. Sales says the leads aren’t good. Marketing says sales isn’t following up. Everyone points at the gap, and no one agrees on how to close it.
Sophie’s team at ABB faced this exact tension and made a decision that was, as she describes it, “nerve-wracking.” They moved away from marketing-qualified leads entirely, shifting their KPIs toward marketing-qualified accounts and deal attribution. They removed the ability for prospects to submit personal email addresses (Gmail, Hotmail) on contact forms, forcing anyone who wanted to engage to use a verified work email.
The result: lead quality improved by 33%.
“Even though it may seem nerve-racking,” Sophie says, “we got to focus on lead quality. And we are a pure example that it works.”
If your mid-year pipeline review is showing volume without velocity, this is the question worth asking: are you optimizing for the number of leads, or the quality of the accounts behind them? Removing friction in the wrong places, places that are also removing the signal of genuine intent, can make a pipeline look healthy while quietly hollowing it out.
Rethink When You Gate Content
Closely related to lead quality is the gating question and it’s one most marketing teams revisit mid-year when conversion numbers aren’t meeting expectations.
Sophie’s team operates on a clear philosophy: give value first, gate later. During the awareness phase, they keep content ungated. White papers, technical documents, thought leadership, all available without a form. The logic is straightforward: if 80% of buyers are researching before they reach you, you need to be present in that research phase without friction. Gating awareness content doesn’t protect you from unqualified leads, it just removes you from the conversation happening before anyone identifies as a lead.
Gating comes into play later, at the consideration stage, as a signal of intent. When a prospect fills in a form at that point, they’re telling you something real. That’s worth capturing.
If your H1 content strategy was built around gating everything to drive MQL volume, a mid-year adjustment here can meaningfully improve both the quality of your pipeline and the trust you’re building with buyers before they ever raise their hand.
Precision and Scale Aren’t a Trade-Off
Another place mid-year plans often stall is in the perennial ABM-versus-demand-gen debate. Teams that leaned heavily into account-based marketing in H1 sometimes find they’ve built great relationships with a small number of accounts but haven’t created enough top-of-funnel momentum to sustain pipeline through the year. Teams that ran broad demand generation find plenty of activity but not enough precision to satisfy sales.
Sophie’s answer is that it doesn’t have to be either/or. At ABB, her team blends account-based precision for their most strategic accounts with broader cross-functional campaigns that generate scale. The two motions reinforce each other rather than compete. ABM creates the depth and relationship quality that converts high-value accounts. Demand generation creates the volume and visibility that keeps the funnel moving.
The mid-year calibration question: which motion is underweighted for you right now, and what’s it costing you in the second half?
Content Velocity Is the Infrastructure Behind All of It
None of this works without content, and lots of it. Full-funnel marketing requires different content for different buyers, different stages, different geographies, different channels. For a company like ABB operating across 100+ countries, the challenge of producing locally relevant content at global scale is significant.
Sophie’s team addresses this through a combination of centralized messaging frameworks, regional adaptation, and increasingly, AI-assisted localization that lets them scale without rebuilding everything from scratch. The goal isn’t to produce more content for the sake of volume, it’s to ensure the right message reaches the right buyer at the right stage, in a format they’ll actually engage with.
This is where tools like Lumen5 come in. For B2B marketing teams trying to course-correct in Q3, one of the fastest levers available is accelerating content production without proportionally increasing cost or headcount. Video, in particular, plays an outsized role in both awareness-stage content (where ungated, high-value material builds trust) and consideration-stage content (where product explainers and customer stories move buyers toward a decision).
Lumen5 customers consistently see video production costs drop by up to 95% and content output increase by 10–15x — not by replacing strategic thinking, but by removing the production friction that slows it down. If your H2 plan calls for more content, faster iteration, and better performance across channels, reducing that friction is where execution capacity gets unlocked.
Aligning Sales and Marketing Before Q3 Closes
One more area where course correction pays dividends in the second half: the sales-marketing handoff. Sophie’s team has invested in using AI to automatically summarize sales conversations and feed insights directly into Salesforce, giving sales richer context without adding to their administrative burden, and giving marketing a clearer picture of what’s actually happening in real buyer conversations.
The practical takeaway isn’t that you need the same technology stack. It’s that the gap between sales and marketing is usually an information gap as much as a process gap. The teams that close it by creating shared visibility into what buyers are asking, where deals are stalling, and what content is actually moving conversations forward, are the ones that use Q3 and Q4 to recover ground that Q1 and Q2 didn’t deliver.
It’s Not Too Late
The strategies that produce results in the second half of the year aren’t fundamentally different from the ones that produce results in the first half. But they require sharper execution: cleaner signals, better content, closer sales alignment, and a willingness to make the kind of bold calls, like removing personal emails from your forms, that feel risky but reflect a mature understanding of what quality actually looks like.
Sophie’s advice for any marketing team reviewing their plans right now is simple: ask whether your strategy is aligned with how your customers actually buy today. If the answer is anything other than a confident yes, Q3 is exactly the right time to change course.
Ready to dig deeper into what full-funnel B2B marketing looks like at global scale? Listen to the full conversation with Sophie Neate on the Supercharge Marketing podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Listen on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/supercharge-marketing/id1597823763
Lumen5 helps B2B marketing teams produce more video content faster and at a fraction of traditional production cost. Learn more or book a demo →
