The Missing Sixty
A B2B marketing leader whose career runs from sound engineering into agency demand generation, now CEO of Ledger Bennett, arguing B2B must stop measuring the wrong 40%.
"Our job as B2B marketers is to try and simplify the complex"
Andrea Sexton is CEO of Ledger Bennett, a Havas company, and a B2B marketing leader known for her focus on demand generation, pipeline and revenue growth, and for arguing that B2B has become obsessed with the small part of the funnel it can measure at the expense of the part where deals are decided.
Sexton originally trained as a sound engineer and, by her own account, fell into marketing completely by accident, drawn by the same mix of art and science that had pulled her towards her first career. She entered the discipline through sales, a route she says is common, and gravitated to B2B because it is a sales-led environment she found comfortable to work in. Her career has been spent inside B2B marketing agencies, focused on demand generation, pipeline and revenue.
Now leading Ledger Bennett as CEO, Sexton has long pushed against the quarterly campaign, telling clients to move to an always-on model 12 or 13 years ago. She frames brand in B2B as a targeted, always-on discipline rather than a scaled-down copy of B2C, argues that LLM search has changed how buyers compare vendors before they ever make contact, and insists that AI will raise, not remove, the premium on human instinct, critical thinking and storytelling.
Deals are being won and lost without you even getting a seat at the table
"Salesforce is a great example of a brand that turned their brand into a career path"
Sexton believes B2B brands are finally becoming braver about identity, pointing to Salesforce as her go-to example. In her telling the great B2B brands understand not just what they do but why they exist and why an audience would trust them for the long term. Finding the one answer to so what, she says, still counts for an awful lot.
"The, the, the brands that will win will be the ones that really understand that balance between human and, and machine"
Sexton is optimistic about AI's efficiency but insistent that the read on human behaviour remains instinct, not data signals. She argues the winners will hold the delicate balance of art and science, using automation for value while protecting the creativity, ideation and critical thinking machines cannot replicate. Far from destroying marketing jobs, she expects AI to increase the need for those human skills.
"You need to be ready, and you need to be ever present, and you need to be confident in what you stand for"
Sexton has argued against quarterly campaigns for over a decade, favouring a layer of always-on plus deliberate moments. Because buying journeys stall and restart for reasons outside a marketer's control, she says a brand has to be consistently findable and clear about what it stands for. Run only spikes, and you will miss buying groups forming and lose your seat at the table.
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