Expert Q&A: Lessons in marketing leadership from Andrew Soane

Behind every successful B2B organisation, there’s an elite marketing team dedicated to building the brand and driving revenue. And behind every elite marketing team, there’s an inspirational leader.

Andrew Soane has decades of marketing leadership experience, and he knows what it takes to lead and scale high-performing marketing teams. We sat down with him to get to the heart of what great marketing leadership looks like.

Radix: What are the hallmarks of a successful marketing team? What are they doing that other teams aren’t?

Andrew: The strongest marketing teams are commercially obsessed. They operate as true revenue partners to the sales team, not as an internal service function. And that means having shared accountability (with sales) for pipeline quality, deal progression, and growth – and a relentless focus on building a repeatable revenue engine, not just running campaigns.

High-performing teams are also cross-functional by design. And the best marketers act as connectors, bringing together sales, product, partnerships, and delivery to create alignment around customers, value propositions, and go-to-market execution.

They’re also systems-driven, not hero-driven. Exceptional individuals matter, but it’s not scalable. The most effective teams embed marketing into the organisation’s operating model through clear business processes, shared data, and repeatable programmes, so impact isn’t reliant on a handful of people

Part of this systems-driven approach is having a programmatic balance of brand and performance marketing. Clearly, you’re not going to succeed if you’re over-indexing on brand and under-investing in performance, or vice versa. It’s left- and right-brain thinking; successful teams invest in long-term brand and trust while building demand engines that convert attention into measurable revenue.

And lastly, these days, truly effective teams are using AI and automation to build their insights, inform their planning, and handle repeatable tasks.

Radix: How do you define ‘success’ for a marketing team – and how do you measure it?

Andrew: For me, success comes down to revenue impact, and there are three outcome areas every marketing leader should track.

The first is about marketing’s contribution to growth. If marketing is truly a revenue partner to the business, then success is measured by growth contribution. Pipeline creation, win rate, and revenue influenced. These are the metrics that matter most at board and executive level.

The second is brand strength. That’s about indicators such as share of voice, inbound lead quality, brand searches, and so on. Signals that tell you whether the market understands who you are and why you matter.

And the third is execution health. Metrics like web traffic and engagement, MQLs, event performance, and conversion rates. The specific KPIs will vary by organisation, tactics, and channels, but the underlying principle remains the same. They should be seen as performance indicators, not end goals.

The mistake I see too often is marketing teams over-indexing on execution metrics when talking to the board. The C-suite cares less about MQL volume or funnel size, and far more about how marketing is accelerating pipeline and driving revenue growth.

Strong marketing leaders translate performance into a language their CRO, CEO, and other executive leaders understand. Today’s technology has given us is the ability to do this through shared dashboards and aligned reporting across marketing and sales. Investing in that transparency is critical to building trust and credibility at the top table.

Radix: As a leader, how do you nurture motivation and engagement across the team?

Andrew: Motivation starts with clarity of mission. Teams need to understand where the business is going, what it’s trying to achieve, and how each individual contributes to that journey.

People are far more engaged when they feel part of the plan, not just recipients of it. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to share wins, celebrate successes, and ensure teams get visibility with senior leadership so their impact is recognised.

Clear career pathways and opportunities to learn and develop are also critical. But perhaps the most important leadership skill is creating a culture of honesty and openness.

Truly effective leaders build 360° feedback into their teams. If I’m doing something that frustrates or slows you down, I want to hear about it so I can change my behaviour. Ultimately, I try to treat people the way I’d want to be treated myself. If you get that right, you can’t go far wrong.

I learned this early in my leadership career – sometimes the hard way. In my first big role as Managing Director, I was responsible for multiple UK teams, and I had to oversee a significant downsizing, visiting each office to make the announcement.

At the first office, I moved too quickly through the context and focused on the outcomes. I thought they would be more interested in the impact of what I was announcing – the planned redundancies themselves.

That evening, the local manager called to tell me the team were upset because they didn’t understand the reasoning behind the decision. So that night, I prepared like crazy, so I could answer every possible question anyone could have.

The next day, I returned to the same office, apologised and explained the full context, and answered each and every question openly. While people were still understandably unhappy about the redundancies, they felt respected, informed and able to participate in the consultation process in an informed way.

I learned a big lesson that day: in any change, transparency matters more than comfort. When people understand the why, they’re far more likely to take ownership, contribute constructively, and stay engaged even in difficult moments.

Radix: What are the building blocks of an effective marketing strategy?

Andrew: There’s a famous quote from Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

I love that idea. For me, strategy starts with absolute clarity on what the business is trying to achieve. That usually means beginning with revenue goals, then layering in ICPs, buyer personas, customer journeys, competitor gaps, market dynamics, and so on.

Very often, the hard work is going back to basics, with clearly defined offerings, sharp propositions, and a coherent product or services strategy. Without that foundation, it’s almost impossible to build an effective marketing strategy; you’re simply amplifying ambiguity.

Once you have that clear, customer-centric proposition and narrative in place, building the strategy becomes a collaborative exercise. The strongest strategies are built in partnership with sales, product, and partner teams, tailored to how the organisation actually goes to market.

When marketing plays that connective role, aligning stakeholders around clear choices and priorities, marketing and GTM strategy stops being a document and becomes a shared operating model for growth.

Radix: One final question – if you could give a marketer stepping into a leadership role just one piece of advice, what would it be?

Andrew: I’d encourage leaders to stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking like a CRO. The real job of marketing leadership is to build marketing systems that drive sustainable growth, not just run activities.

That mindset shift is already changing the shape of senior marketing roles. I’m seeing more CMOs step into broader roles spanning strategy, growth, and commercial execution, in some cases evolving into Chief Strategy Officer or Chief Growth Officer roles. That’s a healthy and important development, because it positions marketing where it belongs, at the centre of business decision-making, with a clear line of sight to growth

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