The Great 8 Pillars: A C-Suite Guide for Optimizing B2B Marketing Operations

copyright © 2025 christopher peer

All rights reserved.

the great 8 pillars

A C-Suite Guide for Optimizing B2B Marketing Operations

First Edition

This book is subject to the condition that no part of this book is to be reproduced, transmitted in any form or means, electronic or mechanical, stored in a retrieval system, photocopied, recorded, scanned, or otherwise. Any of these actions require the proper written permission of the author.

isbn

978-1-5445-4757-2 Hardcover

isbn

978-1-5445-4756-5 Paperback

isbn

978-1-5445-4758-9 Ebook

isbn

978-1-5445-4759-6 Audiobook

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I: Challenging Your Marketing Paradigm

1. Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

2. What Is an ROI-Driven Marketing Operation?

3. Executive Perspectives

Part II: Building an ROI-Driven Marketing Operation

4. The Diagnostic and Roadmap

5. The Great 8 Pillars of ROI-Driven Marketing

6. Pillar 1: Goals, KPIs, and Industry Benchmarks

7. Pillar 2: Value Proposition, Messaging, and Branding

8. Pillar 3: Marketing Strategy

9. Pillar 4: Marketing Team Structure

10. Pillar 5: The Almighty Website

11. Pillar 6: Analytics and Reporting

12. Pillar 7: Technology Stack

13. Pillar 8: Templates and Guides

Conclusion

Appendix

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface

This book is written for marketers and business leaders looking to attain or improve marketing’s return on investment (ROI). Since writing my first book on ROI-driven marketing, I have recognized a disturbing trend in how executives value marketing based only on revenues derived from lead generation. This is a dangerous misunderstanding of marketing.

It is important to state that most marketing efforts cannot be tied directly to ROI and likely never will be. You cannot quantify the value of a buyer’s positive experience with your organization due to your branding, website, social media presence, or other point of marketing communications. Don’t dismiss marketing as ineffective because you can’t tie your investment to sales revenue. Think about marketing as communications. Well-crafted communications with customers, prospects, vendors, partners, employees, and the public are essential for every B2B company.

However, the principles outlined in this book can help you attain a solid ROI from marketing communications.

For the past two decades, I have owned and operated a marketing agency called SyncShow. At SyncShow, we work exclusively with B2B companies, primarily in manufacturing, professional services, distribution, warehousing, transportation, and logistics. We have served hundreds of B2B clients over the past two decades.

Why B2B versus B2C? Business-to-business marketing is very different from business-to-consumer marketing. B2B companies have a very unique challenge when developing marketing strategies. They need to attract buyers who rely less on emotion and more on value, partnership, price, and risk mitigation. B2C marketing typically focuses on selling a product or service to one buyer, whereas B2B marketing focuses on selling a product or service to a company with multiple buyers (Financial Buyer, End-User Buyer, and Strategic Buyer).

B2B marketing is not taught in schools, and marketers learn their craft on the job. The learning curve is significant, and even some of the most experienced B2B marketers don’t understand how to move the needle and propel growth for their companies effectively.

Having worked with hundreds of companies over the past twenty-plus years, we researched why some companies experienced incredible growth from marketing while others failed miserably. Our research surprised us. We thought success or failure was primarily due to marketing tactics and execution. To our surprise, we found that success has little to do with tactics and mainly relies on your marketing’s operational infrastructure.

This is where the Great 8 Pillars framework comes in. We set out to define a framework for marketing success, where marketers can prove their value and companies can attain a 5X, 10X, or more return on investment.

What Is the Great 8 Pillars?

The Great 8 Pillars is a framework for attaining ROI from marketing, specifically designed for B2B companies. It consists of 8 core areas marketers must focus on within their marketing operations.

It’s not about tactical marketing or how to implement best practices in marketing. It’s about how to structure your marketing operations into an ROI-driven machine.

What Are the Benefits of Implementing the Great 8 Pillars Framework?

For marketers:

Prove marketing’s value to executive leadership.

Attain clarity and focus on what matters most in marketing.

Improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Reduce stress.

Attain knowledge on how to build an ROI-driven marketing strategy that executives love.

Learn how to set ROI-driven marketing goals.

Learn how to set and leverage your marketing budget.

Get executive leadership behind the marketing effort.

Learn how to align your sales and marketing teams.

Learn how to build a marketing team, when to hire, and who to hire based on your marketing budget.

Evaluate your value proposition, messaging, and branding.

Evaluate your website for lead generation and how to improve it.

Gain access to G8P’s proprietary tools and templates.

For executives:

Stop wasting time and money on marketing that does not work.

Attain clarity on how to hold your marketing team (internal or agency) accountable and what questions you should be asking.

Learn how to build a marketing team that fits your budget.

Understand which key performance indicators you should care about and which are vanity metrics.

Know your marketing and sales teams are working together in a manner that will drive increased sales.

Attain reporting on the marketing effort and transparency into marketing effectiveness.

Gain the ability to forecast future sales and marketing performance.

I highly recommend that you download the FREE G8P toolkit from our website at www.G8P.co/B2Btoolkit.

We have compiled our most critical tools and templates that will help you through each chapter of this book. You may also find our advanced templates and tools quite valuable for a small fee.

Introduction

As humans, we all want to do things faster, with less effort. That’s why the diet and exercise industry sells billions of dollars’ worth of fad products. This book is not about secret marketing tactics or shortcut remedies to improve metrics. The methodologies included in this book are based on building a professional marketing infrastructure that is scalable and predictable. It’s about creating a well-oiled machine that continually delivers.

For the past twenty-plus years, I have owned and managed a successful marketing agency driven by a passion for helping my clients thrive. I wanted to make a difference in our clients’ growth and knew marketing had to drive sales. When I started writing this book, people asked me why I was willing to share our proprietary processes and methodologies openly. Why was I giving away the secrets of our success?

I started my company, SyncShow, in 2002, and since then I have tirelessly worked to hone our marketing methodologies to ensure our clients get a return on their investment. My goal is to help them avoid the mistakes that so many others have made while allowing them to scale faster and more efficiently. Just as they work so hard to serve their customers, I feel it is my job to deliver for them.

Over the years, I’ve found that B2B companies have unique challenges when it comes to marketing that B2C companies do not have:

There are multiple buying influencers in a B2B sale.

B2B buyers make decisions with less emotion and focus more on value, price, and risk mitigation than B2C buyers.

B2B buyers can take months and sometimes years to commit to purchasing.

As a B2B seller, you must demonstrate that you can be trusted and will deliver on your promises. You must overcome the buyers’ fears and prove that you understand their business and, perhaps more importantly, their customers and how they make purchasing decisions.

Through my deep relationships with my B2B clients, I recognized that most lacked the exact operational requirements for driving a marketing return on investment. Of the hundreds of clients my company has served, not a single one had an existing marketing strategy documented in writing before our working relationship. Most did not have the basic foundational elements of a marketing program, such as defined goals, correlating key performance indicators, defined buyer personas, or ideal customer profiles. Some of our clients are small businesses securing $10 million in revenues; others are billion-dollar enterprises. After seeing the pain and frustration shared by many marketing leaders and executives, we decided to do something about it.

This book outlines my years of marketing experience and explains how to structure your marketing operation using proven strategies, methodologies, and tools to deliver a 10X return on marketing investment (ROI). The Great 8 Pillars of ROI-Driven Marketing framework is based on a system consistently delivering outstanding results for my clients. Using this system, my clients earn an ROI from their marketing spend, many of them over 10X; one even attained a 27X return on investment in just twelve months. This system drives marketing ROI while reducing marketing output, stopping work on vanity projects, and measuring the outcomes.

My company, SyncShow, honed its methodology, compiled research, and tested, tweaked, and formalized a tried-and-true approach for twenty-plus years. We assessed exactly what worked and what didn’t. We documented our findings and continually refined them. The result is a marketing framework built to deliver a 10X return on investment from marketing spend, and you can do it, too.

The Great 8 Pillars offers leaders a helping hand in achieving real results and peace of mind from their marketing efforts. It is written for those stuck in a world of whack-a-mole-style tactical marketing, where more blogs, videos, SEO, and effort are not working to move the needle.

This book is for you if you are a marketing leader or B2B executive who is:

Investing in growth and looking to scale

Frustrated that your marketing efforts are not producing the desired results

Sick and tired of wasting time and money on marketing that does not work

Confused about knowing what to do, and when and how to do it

Burned out from long working hours and continually reinventing the marketing wheel

Tired of the monotony of developing more, more, and more marketing collateral

Frustrated by the continuous turnover of your marketing team members

This book outlines exactly how you can do it—every step—including building marketing strategies, crafting standout value propositions, establishing ROI-driven marketing goals, defining key performance indicators, setting up reporting, acquiring data, and proving that what you do matters.

This is a book for B2B marketing and executive leaders who are looking to drive increased performance and a measurable return from marketing. It’s for marketing and sales leaders who are looking for a proven system for delivering real ROI from marketing. It’s for anyone who is sick and tired of wasting money on marketing that does not work and for anyone who wants long-term results. It’s not for marketers who are looking for a quick fix. There is no magic bullet in ROI-driven marketing.

You, too, can drive real change and growth at your company, and I will help you drive a 10X return on marketing spend! It won’t be easy—it’s hard work—but following the process will significantly change how you look at marketing and define success.

I am excited to guide you through this process!

I have included Lesson Learned sections throughout this book, where I share some