A guide to the many roles (and harder truths) behind B2B marketing for small teams.
It’s 7:58 on a Tuesday morning. Liv’s inbox is already groaning.
Liv embodies a modern paradox in small B2B marketing teams: she’s the campaign manager, strategist, copywriter, data analyst, and, by the looks of her incoming messages, today she’s a therapist too. Her Slack pings:
“Board meeting tomorrow – need pipeline forecast looking sharp.”
What follows is a day characterised by martech glitches, overlapping priorities, and a 40-tab browser session that ends not in resolution, but in resignation. Liv is not a poor planner, nor is she underperforming, and she certainly isn’t alone. She is, however, operating in a system that has yet to reach a level of maturity where she, and the business, can thrive.
That’s because the majority of small B2B marketing teams face what might be the most paradoxical brief in contemporary business: Operate with the agility of a startup, deliver with the output of a scaled enterprise, and report with the rigour of a public company… on a budget best suited for coffee and a Canva subscription.
Frankly, that’s enough to leave even the most hardened marketing folk wound up and worn out, heading for the proverbial medicine cabinet to bandage the problem with some sort of flash tool or new tactic that might finally be the answer. Or at the very least, buy a bit of time.
This is your essential guide to the seven roles every B2B marketer in a growing SME will inevitably master – whether they planned to or not.
Aim: Tactical clarity
Mantra: Work smarter, not harder
The Cleaner’s job is to achieve tactical clarity; the ability to decide what to do, when, and why, without having to derail the day with yet another strategy alignment meeting every time something comes up.
It’s knowing what good looks like right now while navigating the ubiquitous chaos that life throws at you. In smaller B2B marketing teams, that means setting (and, inevitably, resetting) priorities that shape your week whenever necessary, for all the right reasons. It’s as much about what gets done as what doesn’t.
Tactical clarity effectively enables you to be agile, properly. It empowers you to respond to curveball moments ad hoc without losing sight of the big picture.
When it’s lacking, it’s easy to spot. Your answer is always “yes,” you’re quickly executing, and you have absolutely no idea what any of it actually means. You report on metrics that don’t link to any decision you’ll ever take. You give stakeholders exactly what they asked for, even though you know they don’t need it. Then stuff like this starts happening:
It’s a culture that celebrates output over outcomes. Which, if it runs for too long, leads to people being wound up and worn out.
Tactical clarity is a discipline. It demands that you take responsibility for understanding the business strategy deeply, becoming intimately familiar with the goals, and taking the time to understand what has to be achieved, all the way up the chain of command.
How to fix it:
Start small, stay sharp. Keep a short list of “must-do this week” priorities and make sure they actually tie back to outcomes. Before you launch anything, run a quick pre-mortem: what could break this? When the ambiguity creeps in (and it will), define what “done properly” looks like, and only then move forward.
Often, the problem isn’t the team, it’s what’s being asked of them. If you’ve got leadership layering on requests without visibility of the load, clarity starts with reframing.
Bring leadership with you by showing the cost of ‘yes’ and moving away from just delivery to decision-making.
Aim: Data fluency
Mantra: Fewer dashboards, greater conviction
There’s no shortage of data. Every campaign, channel, and platform is fully instrumented. There’s a dashboard for everything, and sometimes several. Alas, volume is not value. More data always brings more metrics to sift through, rarely greater clarity.
So you track all of it, report a lot of it, and present most of it – just in case. And here lies the trap: everything is visible, but nothing is agreed. In that fog, data fluency becomes essential. It’s the confidence to block out noise and trust the signal, to say “this is the number that matters, and here’s why.” A lack of data fluency often looks something like this:
How to fix it:
The only way out is to choose less and stand by it. You have to become The Data Whisperer. And oddly, that doesn’t mean attempting to educate yourself in the hellscape that is the world of analytics platforms. Rather, it’s about being clear on what is relevant, and why, and communicating that effectively. If you’ve already played The Cleaner, you have some advantage.
Pick your three measures of progress and stick to them like gospel. Report them consistently until everyone knows them by heart. Don’t let numbers just sit there, tell the story that goes with them.
Data fluency is built through repetition and intent – the same measures, repeatedly, until they become second nature. Conversely, much of what passes for reporting most of the time is ritual. If that’s what your leadership expects, then reframe it. Remember, fewer metrics bring more precision to their meaning. Tell them that.
Aim: Keep it grounded
Mantra: Ambition requires perspective
Small marketing teams are often told to operate like they’re running a $50 million budget. Category-defining creativity and full-funnel strategies to be delivered by a team that could fit on a park bench. Drive growth like an enterprise and prove value like a public company, both at the same time, if you don’t mind.
Sure, it’s exciting to be on board with such a big mission. But a gargantuan gap between ambition and capacity can be devastatingly corrosive. It’s what causes campaigns to be cut short and sends brand work to gather dust. Over time, it creates a burdening sense of underdelivery, even though everyone’s doing three (or more) jobs brilliantly.
And it’s here where perspective needs managing in every direction that matters. When misalignment is frustrating and wasteful, when resources are spread too thin, and when KPIs look strategic on paper but lack any real meaning. Playing The Anchor can be a bit stressful, because you might have to say things that people don’t want to hear. Particularly when:
You don’t have to lower the ambition to manage perspective, you need to anchor it. Constructively, positively, and with focus.
How to fix it:
Bring ambition down to sea level without killing it. Translate the big-company KPIs into goals your team can actually hit and still prove progress. Keep a visible backlog of the good ideas you’ve parked so leadership knows the ambition hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just sequenced. And when trade-offs come up, show them what saying “yes” really displaces – but be sure to demonstrate why clearly.
When expectations start to slide, pull the conversation back to reality.
From wherever you sit in the team, managing perspective means creating the space to do the right work well without burning the team down in the process.
Aim: Sanity
Mantra: So many hats, so little time
If The Cleaner makes decisions, The Data Whisperer finds the signal, and The Anchor holds the ambition to account, then The Chameleon is the reason those roles are so hard to play in the first place.
‘Team’ is often a generous word. ‘Team’ is often one person, two if you’re lucky. ‘Team’ often refers to full-sized expectations: campaign strategy, content ops, lead nurture, web analytics, LinkedIn ads, CRM admin, stakeholder reporting. Squeezed into a gapless calendar and a to-do list that never ends.
Being thinly spread across disciplines is damn tough, but rarely recognised in smaller teams because often, you’re the only one who is really aware of exactly how many disciplines you’re carrying.
You can’t clone yourself. But there’s more chance of that happening than hiring someone else. You need to think fast, adapt, and do your best when:
How to fix it:
Stop sprinting between hats and start batching them. Group similar work into themed blocks, an “ops day,” a “content day”, etc. so you’re not constantly switching gears. Kill off new tools you don’t have the bandwidth to own. And make the invisible visible: show just how many disciplines you’re carrying so no one mistakes “one marketer” for “ten specialists.”
The Chameleon adapts – that’s the job. Though the real skill is knowing when to stop flexing and start protecting your focus.
Aim: Internal alignment
Mantra: Strategy shouldn’t be an internal tug of war
Everyone wants marketing to work, they just want it to work for them. Sales wants qualified leads, product wants more visibility, finance wants savings. Meanwhile, marketing is left refereeing the fight while trying to hit KPIs that no one else has even read.
You become the negotiator, the translator, the diplomat, and you might even have some spare time for marketing work. The Peacekeeper steps in when:
How to fix it:
Don’t let the tug-of-war stay invisible. Get sales, product, and finance in the same room at least once a quarter and plan together. Turn competing asks into a single campaign calendar everyone can see. And agree on one shared language for funnel stages: if “MQL” means five different things, it means nothing.
Misalignment is drift. The longer it goes unspoken, the longer the journey back to shore.
Aim: Stay in control
Mantra: Don’t fear the gear
For all the talk of partnership, most vendors (and agencies) aren’t incentivised to simplify your life. They’re incentivised to sell tech. It’s convenient for them if it fits your needs, but it’s not essential. There’s a fairly high chance that will involve you changing your processes one way or another, too (and to be fair, that can be a great opportunity for change, if it’s on your terms).
You don’t get plug-and-play, you get plug, configure, integrate, troubleshoot, escalate, lie down, close eyes, and wish it was all a bad dream. Before long, your small team is managing a stack better suited to a multinational (cough … Salesforce… cough). Without the support, and far too many dashboards that don’t tell you anything useful.
Tell-tale signs of vendor misalignment:
How to fix it:
Outsourcing is supposed to reduce complexity, not exacerbate it. If you’re spending more time managing your vendors than your own work, the value’s gone walkabout.
Aim: Cut the crap
Mantra: Cut the crap
Exactly when you’ll need to play the Complexity Killer depends on where you are in your journey. But you can be sure it’s on the cards sooner or later.
Sometimes you inherit it – a stack of tools nobody trusts with enough “process” to strangle your entire operation. You walk into the role and the symptoms are already there.
Other times, it creeps in slowly with new platforms and temporary fixes that become permanent. Perhaps that process was borrowed from someone’s last job, which was never right in the first place. It all felt sensible until you look up and realise the system is more complex than the problems it’s meant to solve.
Or maybe you were just promoted and you see it all clearly. Well, congratulations. Your first job is to unblock the toilet.
The Complexity Killer steps in with a sharp pair of scissors (or plunger, depending on your particular scenario) when:
How to fix it:
Complexity doesn’t always look messy. In fact, it is most dangerous when it appears impressive and sophisticated and unquestionable. The Complexity Killer knows the difference and has the permission (finally) to do something about it.
Ready to master these roles? The hardest part isn’t learning to play them, it’s knowing when to switch between them. But that’s what makes great B2B marketers in small teams: the ability to be exactly who the situation needs, when it needs it most.
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