The Friction Finder
Jen Brown is Director of Engaging Interactions. Two decades inside B2B tech scale-ups (Webtrends, Tealium, Sprinklr, GoTo) building the case for horizon thinking, audience-centric marketing, and the environment sales needs to feel confident.
“Where’s the friction preventing great engagement?”
Jen Brown is a B2B marketer through and through. Two decades of senior roles inside tech and SaaS scale-ups (Webtrends, Tealium, Sprinklr, GoTo) taught her that channel marketing is seductive and audience marketing is durable, that lead volume is a vanity number and account penetration is the real one, and that the best B2B marketing is the work sales never sees happening, 12 to 18 months before the deal.
Brown runs Engaging Interactions as an independent consulting practice. Her working offer is to get up to speed inside a B2B organisation quickly and help it identify the blind spots, the friction that is preventing great engagement with its best accounts. She is commercially savvy, understands the sales process closely, and has spent years advocating for audience-driven marketing (the who and the why) over channel-driven marketing (the what and the how).
Across her in-house career she has led marketing teams responsible for ABX programmes that lowered acquisition costs and raised conversion rates, rebuilt attribution away from last-click, introduced the contact-to-account ratio as a penetration metric, and reshaped event strategy around pre-booked meetings rather than post-show hopefuls. She is also a long-standing advocate of sales-marketing empathy, arguing that marketing’s job is to create the environment sales needs to feel confident across a long cycle, and that EQ sits above IQ for the next generation of B2B leaders.
Brown sits on a Customer Experience advisory board. Her current consulting focus spans agentic AI, customer engagement and the organisational change required to move B2B marketing from vertical silos to horizontal, audience-aligned teams. She is an unapologetic believer that community and belonging are core to today’s B2B brand building, citing Notion and Slack as category examples.
“Attention is in deficit. Listening is the skill.”
“The who and the why. The what and the how is the easy bit.”
Brown regards channel-centric marketing as the most seductive trap in B2B. It is easy to decide where to advertise; every conference hall is full of ways to spend media money; AI is fuelling endless permutations of programmatic and persona-driven execution. The cost of leading with channel is that teams lose the audience-first discipline and organisations end up looking internally (at a product roadmap or a quarterly revenue target) to decide what to say outside. Audience-first requires reorganising marketing around the journey and the account, not the discipline or the asset.
“You cannot move the needle in the quarter. Work the horizon.”
Every large B2B SaaS deal has a 12-to-18-month pre-deal window during which a brand earns its place as a trusted advisor. When marketers are forced off the horizon to deliver revenue contribution this quarter, organisations sacrifice the business of the future for the pipeline of today. Brown’s argument (and the 95-5 rule behind it) is that great B2B marketing creates the environment that gives sales the confidence to close, and the brand presence that earns the meeting in the first place.
“Ten contacts in a multinational? You have not scratched the surface.”
Brown reframes the demand metric. Account-based experience treats the buying committee, not the individual, as the unit of marketing. Her working measure is the contact-to-account ratio: how many people inside a target account can marketing reach directly, versus how many the BDR team has to cold-call? Attribution becomes a signal for the next best action, not a race for credit between sales, partner and marketing. The consumer mental model still applies: no one engages a brand through a single channel alone.
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