Daniel Fox

I can’t help but feel that some marketers are increasingly obsessed with how leads are generated, but oddly uninterested in how money is actually made.

They can tell you the CPL down to the penny, recite attribution models, and proudly announce they’ve “smashed the MQL target”.

Ask them about gross profit, or where margin is actually won or lost, and you’ll be met with a polite smile and a swift change of subject.

Marketing is not support function. It’s a commercial one.

Early in my career, I didn’t have the luxury of seeing marketing as “the fluffy bit at the top of the funnel”, and I suppose that could be why it annoys me when it is treated that way today.

As a product and brand manager, I carried responsibility for profitability, not just positioning and promotion. That meant understanding:

• The cost price of every component
• Time costs on the production line
• Manual labour inputs
• The financial drag of SKU complexity
• The impact of volume growth on GP%, not just revenue

Put simply, we had to make money, not just noise.

You wouldn’t get a pat on the back for Increasing market share if it diluted margin.

I wasn’t running the factories, but I understood them. And that understanding made me a far better marketer and business manager.

Commercial curiosity changes how you make decisions

When you understand how the parts of a business fit together, you stop making bad marketing decisions.

You stop pushing low-margin products just because they’re “hero SKUs”, you don’t find yourself with endless line extensions that look good on a brand deck but murder operations, and you don’t celebrate volume-led promotions that spike revenue while quietly eroding profitability.

Instead, you start asking better questions:

• Where is profit really made in this portfolio?
• Which customers grow us – and which simply keep us busy?
• What complexity are we adding, and who’s paying for it?

Our goals at the time (profit growth, market share gain, SKU rationalisation) weren’t achieved through creativity alone. They were achieved through visibility and through understanding how cost, operations, pricing, and demand interact. Not just activity.

Why some Marketers avoid commercial reality

Commercial curiosity requires effort.

It means sitting down with finance.
It means walking the production line.
It means learning things that sometimes don’t feel like ‘Marketing’.

And worst of all, it means accepting that some marketing activity (often the fun stuff people love most) simply doesn’t make financial sense.

Commercial curiosity cuts through that. It forces evidence, trade-offs, and uncomfortable truths.

B2B Marketers: You’re not off the hook

If anything, B2B marketing is worse for this. Pipelines are celebrated. Leads are worshipped.
Revenue is assumed to magically follow.

But few marketers can explain:

• The cost to serve different customer segments
• Where margin is lost in discounting and customisation
• Which deals look great in the CRM but terrible in the P&L

If you don’t understand the commercial engine, you’re a passenger.

The Marketer’s job is not “Doing Stuff”

Marketing is not about campaigns, content calendars, or dashboards. It’s about creating and capturing profitable demand.

That requires commercial awareness. It requires curiosity about how money flows through the business. And it requires marketers to stop hiding behind metrics that feel impressive but say very little about actual value creation.

The best marketers I’ve worked with share some common traits, one of them is that they care about how the business makes money, not just how marketing spends it.