Marketing creates demand long before a deal reaches the pipeline. It builds awareness, trust, credibility and buying intent—often months or even years before sales gets involved. Yet when revenue finally arrives, credit usually goes to the teams closest to the sale.
Our latest CEO Blind Spot research with Wildfire PR found this disconnect is widespread. Most business leaders recognize marketing matters, but far fewer see it as the function driving commercial growth. That creates what we call ghost revenue: revenue marketing creates but rarely gets recognized for.
Marketing creates growth. CEOs don’t always see it.
Our research reveals a worrying pattern.
- 75% of business leaders believe marketing matters but doesn’t actually drive growth.
- 77% think sales is a bigger driver of growth.
- 73% believe sales leaders contribute more strategic value than marketers.
The issue isn’t that CEOs dismiss marketing altogether. Rather, they tend to credit growth to the functions closest to the sale, even though marketing has often spent months creating the awareness, trust and buying intent that made that sale possible.
By the time revenue appears, marketing’s contribution has become invisible.
Why this matters
This perception is becoming even more pronounced in today’s economic climate. More than three-quarters of CEOs say hard leads are now more valuable than brand awareness, while 81% believe performance marketing matters more than storytelling.
Unsurprisingly, budgets follow the same logic:
- 81% say marketing budgets are harder to justify than sales budgets.
- 76% will only invest in marketing that’s directly tied to lead generation.
The danger is that businesses start investing only in the point where revenue appears, rather than the activities that created it. Over time, demand creation receives less attention, making sustainable growth harder to achieve and even harder to repeat.
Making ghost revenue visible
Marketing’s challenge isn’t simply proving that it creates value. It’s making that value visible in commercial terms, before the conversation defaults to a sales scorecard.
That starts with how marketers frame their contribution. Three shifts tend to move the needle:
- Connect activity to pipeline, not just awareness. Brand building and demand generation don’t exist in separate worlds. When marketers can show how early-stage content or campaigns influenced accounts that later converted, the narrative changes.
- Speak the language of the boardroom. CEOs respond to revenue, margin and growth. Translating marketing metrics into those terms, rather than defending impressions and engagement rates, is what earns a seat at the strategic table.
- Make the timeline visible. Ghost revenue often disappears because the gap between marketing’s contribution and the eventual sale is too long for anyone to connect the dots. Showing that journey, even at a high level, closes that gap.
None of this requires a complete overhaul of how marketing operates. It requires a shift in how marketing communicates what it already does.
Because until ghost revenue becomes visible, marketing will continue creating commercial value that someone else gets credit for.
Ghost revenue is just one of three blind spots we uncovered. Download the full CEO Blind Spot report to see what else is holding B2B marketing back from the recognition it deserves.
Ready to go further? Propolis AI is our AI-powered B2B marketing advisor, built on two decades of verified intelligence: benchmarks, frameworks and award-winning case studies. It’s designed to help marketers do exactly what this post is about, connecting activity to commercial growth in terms the boardroom understands.
