# 5 Things That Could Be Breaking Your Marketing *Locate the break before you prescribe the fix.* **Written by JD Prater — 3x VP of Marketing.** This piece is part of *Open Folders*, which sits at the intersection of marketing science, consulting research, and practitioner experience, opening the parts of the discipline most marketers never got taught, so they can lead the whole of it, not just the slice they came up in. Newsletter: https://jdprater.substack.com Website: https://jdprater.com Original post: https://jdprater.substack.com/p/one-of-these-5-things-could-be-breaking A few years ago I was brought in to consult with a B2B SaaS company that had missed pipeline for three straight quarters. By the time I sat down with the leadership team, everyone had already decided what the problem was. The head of marketing said messaging. The product had gotten harder to explain, she told me. The positioning hadn't kept pace with where the market was moving. She had a slide with a repositioning roadmap already built. The VP of sales said lead quality. Marketing was sending over the wrong companies. His reps were spending time on deals that were never going to close. He said it the way someone says something they've been saying for six months: patient, a little tired of repeating it. The founder thought the market had shifted. New competitors had come in cheaper, and the team had been slow to respond. He kept circling back to one deal they'd lost a few months earlier, a company he'd been certain they would close. Three people. Three different problems. None of them had looked at the same data. I spent the first hour asking questions instead of offering opinions. When were deals dying, early or late in the cycle? Were buyers disqualifying quickly, or going quiet after reaching procurement? What were reps actually hearing in the objections? Had the ICP criteria changed in the last year or two? The answers didn't point to messaging. They didn't point to lead quality or competitive pressure either. They pointed to ICP drift. Over about eighteen months, the sales team had gradually widened their qualification criteria to make quarterly pipeline numbers look better. The buyers coming in had less urgency, smaller budgets, and longer approval chains. Champions were too junior to move a decision past their VP. A repositioning project would have changed nothing. The team needed tighter segmentation and a cleaner qualification model. They rebuilt the ICP criteria, retrained qualification, and stopped taking meetings with companies below the threshold. Pipeline stabilized inside ninety days. Not because the product changed. Not because the positioning changed. Because they stopped chasing buyers who were never going to close. That's the cost of prescribing before you locate the constraint. The moves are reasonable on their own terms. They just get aimed at the wrong layer. Each of those three people in the room was pointing at a real layer. The head of marketing was in Message. The VP of sales was in Model. The founder was in Market. None of them had a diagnostic that told them which one was the actual constraint. That's what the framework below does. --- ## The 5Ms I use five layers to diagnose where a marketing system is breaking. Most growth problems live primarily in one of them. The layers interact, and a problem in one often points to something underneath in another. But the diagnostic starts by naming which layer you're actually in before you design any fix. **Market** is the first layer, and the one teams are most likely to skip. A Market problem means buyers don't recognize the problem your product solves. They're not choosing between solutions. They're deciding whether the problem is real, and concluding it isn't. The signal is conversations that start with "We don't really have that problem," long objection cycles about whether this is even a priority, and reps spending the first half of every call justifying the category before they get to the product. When this is the constraint, better messaging won't move the needle. The buyer needs to understand the problem before they'll care about the solution. The fix is category education, problem framing, and upstream content that makes the pain legible. **Model** is the economics layer. A Model problem means the unit economics of acquiring, converting, and retaining customers don't work at the profile you're currently targeting. The most common signal is deals that close but don't stick. Churn arrives inside ninety days. CAC looks acceptable. Retention doesn't. The customers who buy aren't the customers the product serves well. The fix is ICP tightening: finding the profile that churns less, expands more, and generates referrals, then rebuilding targeting and messaging around that profile. This is the layer teams most often confuse with a messaging problem, because the remedies overlap. A messaging problem has the right buyers in the pipeline. A model problem has the wrong ones. **Message** is where buyers understand the category and fit the profile, but the story isn't landing. The signal is long sales cycles, late-stage losses, and champions who go quiet. Buyers are reaching the final stages of a decision without the narrative clarity to defend the purchase in rooms you're not in. When a deal dies at VP approval without a competitor appearing in the conversation, that's usually a narrative failure. The champion couldn't carry the story forward. A secondary signal is every rep describing the product differently, and every department using different language. That's the same problem upstream: the core position was never tight enough to hold across teams, so people filled the vacuum with their own interpretations. **Motion** is the execution and coordination layer. A Motion problem means the parts of the machine work, but they're not synchronized. Marketing launches a feature; sales learns about it three weeks later. SDRs are qualifying with criteria from six months ago. Win rates vary thirty points between reps on the same product, and new hires take nine months to reach full productivity. These look like different problems. The common thread is a transfer failure: good strategy, positioning, or training exists somewhere in the organization but doesn't reach the person who needs it at the moment they need it. This is easy to misread as a messaging problem because inconsistent storytelling is a symptom, but the root cause is structural: the launch workflow, the enablement system, and the feedback loop between functions are broken. Good positioning doesn't transfer when Motion fails. Strong reps end up succeeding despite the system rather than because of it. **Measurement** is different from the other four Ms in one important way: it doesn't describe a place where the machine is broken. It describes how clearly you can see the machine at all. A Measurement problem means the team is optimizing the visible metric instead of the causal one. Last-touch attribution credits the conversion and ignores the brand touchpoints that preceded it. Strong ROAS coexists with rising CAC. Channel metrics are green while business outcomes lag. Teams stop investing in work they can't measure, which means effort concentrates in the visible slice of what drives growth. The fix is rebuilding clarity about what the measurement model is actually answering, and separating metrics that describe activity from metrics that describe causation. When Measurement is broken, it distorts your read of every other layer. Diagnose it first when the data feels wrong, not just when the metrics are flat. --- ## Reading the signal The diagnostic gets faster once you know what to look for. The patterns separate fairly cleanly across the five layers once you're looking at the right data. If win rate is low and sales cycles are long, you're almost certainly looking at a Message problem. Buyers are reaching late stages without the narrative clarity to make an internal case. The champion is sold. The committee needed a clearer story. If win rate is low and sales cycles are short, the problem is Model. Buyers are disqualifying fast because the fit was never there. The pipeline has the wrong profile in it. If win rate is strong but pipeline is thin, the constraint is at the top of the funnel inside Market or Message. The conversion engine works. The audience is too narrow, or the targeting is pointed at a segment too small to build pipeline volume from. If win rate is high but customers churn fast, that's Model again, downstream. The acquisition motion is winning deals it shouldn't be winning, and the retention data exposes it after the fact. Every team describes the product differently. The website, the deck, the sales demo, and the onboarding sequence all tell slightly different stories. That's Message upstream. The position was never sharp enough to hold across functions. If product launches feel flat, if sales pickup is slow despite strong creative and good timing, look at Motion. Marketing and sales are operating in disconnected sequences. A new campaign won't transfer if the launch operating system is broken. If channel metrics are consistently green but the business is flat, the problem is Measurement. Strong ROAS while CAC climbs. High MQL volume while pipeline doesn't move. The instruments are optimized. The outcomes aren't. The team has gotten very good at measuring the thing it already decided to measure. --- ## Where to actually start Before you can fix the right layer, you need to identify it. The fastest path is the closed-lost call data. Pull the last ninety days from Gong or your equivalent call intelligence tool. If you don't have call intelligence, do structured interviews with five reps: ask each one to walk through their last ten losses and describe what the buyer said, not what the rep typed into the CRM. The CRM field captures what reps type when they want to move on. The call or conversation captures what buyers actually said. Sort by three variables: the deal stage when the conversation ended, when in the call the objection surfaced, and whether a competitor was mentioned. Late-stage losses where the champion went quiet point to Message. The internal story didn't hold. Early-stage losses with fast disqualifications point to Model. Slow cycles with no competitor mentions usually point to Market. The buyer isn't choosing someone else. They're not choosing at all. High competitor mentions in late stage point back to Model. A competitor had better fit for that buyer profile. The patterns surface quickly. Thirty minutes with the call data ends most arguments that would otherwise run three hours in a planning meeting. --- ## The Monday Version The call data is the entry point every time. Pull it, sort it, identify the layer. Then go there. **If Market:** Find three churned customers from the last year and ask one question: when they bought, was there internal pressure to solve this problem, or did someone have to sell them on it first? If they're describing an internal sell job, you have a demand problem, not a positioning problem. **If Model:** Pull cohort retention by ICP score and deal source. The profile you're targeting should retain better than the profile you're closing. If it doesn't, your qualification criteria and your product fit don't match. **If Message:** Run the 7-bucket test on your current homepage: Company Types, Persona, Product Category, Problem, Capability, Feature, Benefit. Each bucket is a question a buyer asks when they arrive. Any bucket that's missing or vague is where the message leaks. If Company Types is absent, your ICP isn't on the page. If Problem is fuzzy, you're offering a solution to a pain buyers can't yet recognize in themselves. Map those gaps against what the call data shows you. When the same layer appears in both, that's where to start. **If Motion:** Map your last three product launches or campaign releases. When did sales get the brief? When did SDRs update their qualification criteria? More than a week after launch is a Motion problem. The positioning transferred late, or didn't transfer at all. **If Measurement:** List the five biggest marketing decisions from last quarter. Write down the metric that drove each one. If you can't trace the decision to a metric, or the metric doesn't match the decision it was supposed to inform, you're flying on bad instruments. --- Opening Folders, JD