Meet Madeline and Simon: the reality of marketing inside an industrial business

By Jacqui Daley

Over the years I have worked with versions of the same two people in industrial businesses across Australia. I’ll call them Madeline and Simon.

Madeline is young, capable and enthusiastic. She may be recently graduated, in her first substantial marketing role, or have inherited marketing alongside administration or business support. She cares about doing a good job, wants to prove herself and is usually carrying far more responsibility than her experience would suggest.

Simon is the owner or senior leader she reports to. He is experienced, technically strong and commercially focused. He knows his products, his customers and his industry deeply. He is also a good person who cares about his team and genuinely wants Madeline to succeed.

Marketing, however, is a blind spot.

Simon’s business may have grown for years through technical capability, long-standing relationships, referrals and repeat work. Marketing has never been central to that success, so his understanding of it is understandably practical. He knows they need a brochure for the next show. He wants the merchandise ordered. He knows the website could do with an update.

What he does not necessarily see is marketing as something that should influence the direction of the business.

So when Madeline joins, she is given the visible work. She is asked to organise the collateral, update the website, manage the social content and make sure the team has what it needs for the next exhibition.

She adds value in all of those things.

The problem is that this is often where the role stops.

Madeline is not in the sales meetings. She does not have access to the CRM. She cannot see the pipeline. She is not hearing the recurring customer objections, the conversations about why an opportunity was lost, or the early discussion around a new product, new market or new commercial opportunity.

That means she is expected to communicate the business without access to the information that would help her understand it properly.

And even if she were invited into those conversations, there is another reality at play.

Madeline is young. She may be sitting in a room with men who are twenty or thirty years older than her, who have spent their careers inside the industry and who speak with enormous confidence about customers, products, sites, contracts and markets she is still learning to understand.

She may not yet feel confident enough to ask the question that needs to be asked.

What did the customer actually say?

Why are we launching this product now?

Who is the buyer?

What has changed in this market?

What do we know about the competitors?

Why did we lose that opportunity?

What is the commercial objective here?

Those are the questions that start to connect marketing to the business, but asking them requires confidence, context and a sense that she has permission to speak up.

That does not always come naturally when you are early in your career and still trying to prove that you belong in the room.

She is learning two things at once

Madeline is not simply learning how to become a marketer.

She is also learning how to operate inside an industrial world with its own language, hierarchy and commercial logic.

She may need to understand mine sites, engineering consultants, defence primes, procurement processes, tenders, technical specifications, supply chains and buying cycles that can stretch over years.

At the same time, she is trying to build capability across brand, content, digital, events, websites, campaigns, analytics, CRM, automation and everything else that now sits under the marketing umbrella.

In a larger organisation, those responsibilities would be shared across several people and supported by senior marketing leadership.

In Madeline’s business, they may all sit with her.

That is a significant ask.

Simon can teach her a great deal about the business. What he cannot necessarily do is teach her how to become a stronger marketer, because that is not his area of expertise.

And Madeline may not yet have enough experience to know which parts of the role she should be challenging, which questions she should be asking, or where the business is underusing marketing.

That is where both people can get stuck.

Simon thinks he has invested in marketing

From Simon’s perspective, the business has hired a marketer. It is spending money on trade shows, brochures, merchandise, websites and perhaps advertising.

That feels like an investment.

The reality is that most of it sits at the execution layer.

Strategy is often skipped altogether.

There may be little investment in research, positioning, messaging or the thinking that should happen before the activity begins. Madeline may also have very little authority over budget. There may be no dedicated marketing card, and a paid campaign can stop simply because the shared company card has reached its limit.

That practical reality reflects the bigger one.

The business has invested in marketing tasks, but not yet in a fully enabled marketing function.

This is not because Simon is trying to hold Madeline back. He simply has not had to build marketing capability before, because the business has historically grown without it.

That is why the merchandise gets approved more easily than the messaging work.

The merchandise is obvious. Simon knows what it is for.

Reworking the positioning feels less tangible, even when Madeline may already see that the real issue is not the brochure itself, but the fact that the business sounds exactly like its competitors.

If the positioning is unclear, the brochure can be redesigned and still fail to make the business more compelling.

If Madeline cannot see the CRM, she cannot identify patterns in the market.

If she is not in the sales conversations, she cannot hear what customers are actually saying.

And if she does not yet have the confidence or experience to challenge what she is being asked to do, the work stays tactical.

That is where both of them miss out.

The business misses the opportunity to use marketing more commercially.

Madeline misses the opportunity to develop the judgement, confidence and influence that would allow her to become a much stronger marketer.

Neither of those outcomes is inevitable.

They simply require more support than “we hired a marketer” suggests.

The support around Madeline matters

This is one of the realities I have seen repeatedly in industrial businesses, and one of the reasons BRAG exists.

Madeline does not need to be replaced. She needs to be developed.

She needs access to better information, more exposure to the commercial side of the business and the confidence to participate in those conversations. She also needs experienced marketing guidance around her while she builds the judgement that only comes with time.

That is what we want BRAG.CLUB to help provide: practical tools, industrial context, support and a community that helps marketers like Madeline become more confident and capable in the environments they work in.

And sometimes the business also needs senior marketing leadership around her.

That is where fractional CMO support can be genuinely useful. At The Measured Marketer, we often sit between Simon and Madeline, helping Simon understand where marketing should contribute and helping Madeline build the strategic capability to execute with more confidence and commercial relevance.

But the larger point is not about BRAG or TMM.

It is about recognising the situation for what it is.

Madeline is already adding value.

Simon is already trying to support her.

The opportunity is to give both of them a better understanding of what marketing could become inside the business, and to create the conditions that allow Madeline to grow into it.

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About the Author:

Jacqui Daley  AMAMI CPM
Founder + Head Bragger
CMO | Industrial Marketing Strategist 

Jacqui is a marketing strategist, author and founder of The Measured Marketer, with more than 25 years in marketing and the past decade spent working alongside Australia’s industrial B2B businesses. She created BRAG to help manufacturers, engineers, defence suppliers, energy and resources businesses turn strong technical capability into clear commercial value.