Marketing Departments Should Be Suicide Squads

Last month, a CMO told me this:

She was asking the wrong question.

The question isn’t “which channels work?” It’s “which channels haven’t been destroyed yet?”

Here's what's happening across B2B right now:

Andrew Chen wrote about this in 2012: "Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates." Not because marketers get worse. Because channels get saturated.

At RevSure, we analysed 100+ GTM motions last quarter. Every dying channel followed this exact pattern.

But here's what shocked us: The companies that win aren't the ones finding new channels first. They're the ones killing successful channels before market forces them to.

One of our customers faced a clear choice two years ago.

Their attribution model showed a 4x ROI difference between LinkedIn and Google. The incrementality test was statistically significant. The recommendation was obvious: cut $2M from LinkedIn, move it to Google.

The CMO cut $200K.

We asked why? He replied,"LinkedIn is strategic."

Six months later, pipeline was down 23%. That "strategic" decision cost them $1.8M.

Here's another example of how this became expensive: a different organisation, also with access to similar data, had $800K in LinkedIn spend generating $12M in pipeline, showing beautiful ROI. Their initial inclination was to double this investment.

Our model said: "You're already past optimal spend. Cut to $600K, get 95% of the pipeline, deploy that $200K somewhere better."

They tripled spend to $2.4M instead. Pipeline went down.

This chart illustrates the diminishing returns: despite a significantly higher spend, the actual pipeline generated way less than what could have been achieved with optimal allocation.

This isn't about LinkedIn being bad. It's about markets having carrying capacity. You exhaust your best audience first. Then lukewarm prospects. Then people who'll never buy but happen to match your ICP on paper.

The uncomfortable truth: you probably passed optimal spend 6 months ago.

When does your team kill a channel?

The only right answer: before any of those things happen.

The channel lifecycle follows a predictable curve: ROI rises through discovery and early growth, peaks briefly, then declines through saturation. The optimal exit point is just after peak - while performance is still strong but before the inevitable drop. Most teams wait until saturation or decline, missing the window to reallocate resources effectively.

But nobody does this. Why?

Because your board rewards current returns, not future resilience. Your CFO looks at a $5M channel delivering 3x ROAS and asks: "Why would we kill this?"

The answer - "Because in 6 months it'll deliver 0.5x ROAS, and we'll have no runway to test alternatives"

There's a deeper problem though.

Someone who spent five years mastering SEO or performance marketing has career capital locked into a depreciating asset. They'll resist channel migration because it destroys their expertise advantage.

This is why "centres of excellence" fail. You don't need people who've perfected a system. You need people who get excited about starting from zero.

What if you redesigned marketing around a different principle?

Instead of building centres of excellence that master specific channels, what if marketing functioned like special forces units - rapidly deployed, mission-specific, designed for extraction not occupation?

Your team's core competency shouldn't be "we're great at paid social."

It should be:

Stop measuring channels by current ROI. Start measuring them by predicted future ROI based on saturation curves.

Kill channels at peak performance, not after decline.

Hire for learning velocity, not domain expertise. Someone who can master a channel in 90 days is more valuable than someone who's mastered one channel for 5 years.

Every channel needs two metrics: a success metric (when to scale) and an exit metric (when to kill).

No channel is permanent. Every channel has a shelf life.

For each of your top 5 channels, answer:

For every active channel, define:

These won't scale to millions. They scale to relevance. And relevance is what you need sometimes.

Over the next 3 years, marketing will split into two groups.

Perfects channel execution. They hire specialists, build centres of excellence, optimise existing playbooks. They get incrementally better at dying strategies.

They will have prettier dashboards.

Systematically destroys their own tactics before market saturation forces them to. They hire for learning velocity, build for temporary exploitation, extract before competitors flood in.

They will have predictable pipeline.

Marketing channels don't fail because they're bad.

They fail because they work too well.

When everyone floods in, novelty wears off, customers develop immunity, and intermediaries jack up prices.

Your biggest competitor isn't the company across the street. It's the natural decay of marketing effectiveness itself.

The companies that win won't be the ones who find channels before others. They'll be the ones with the organisational courage to kill successful channels before the market forces them to.

P.S. If you're a CMO who's actually scaled back a successful channel before saturation forced your hand, I want to hear your story. What did it take - organisationally, politically, personally - to reduce investment while it was still working and reallocate to new channels? Reply and tell me. I read every response.

P.P.S. At RevSure, 58% of Pipeline Powerhouses use 4+ paid media channels compared to 43% of their peers. But that's just paid ads (Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Bing, X, Reddit). Growing B2B companies with $100M+ ARR typically run 10+ total channels which includes, conferences, field programs, content syndication, ABM, Connected TV, OOH, and more. They're not perfecting one channel - they're systematically diversifying before saturation forces them to. That's the difference between optimisation and resilience.

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