Every function in the business has its own soft language. HR has alignment. Finance has headwinds. Legal has evolving frameworks. Sales has pipeline volatility and macro headwinds. Marketing has its own version, but with a difference.
“Directional progress.” “Leading indicators.” “Great learnings.” “Strong signal.” “Right trajectory.”
When sales says they missed the number but blames pipeline volatility, the CFO asks what closed. When marketing says it generated significant top-of-funnel signal, the room nods and moves on.
That’s the asymmetry. Marketing’s soft language survives scrutiny in a way other functions’ don’t.
I’ve spent more than 20 years watching this play out across retail, business technology, and financial services. It’s not new. It’s not anyone’s specific fault. And once you start hearing the pattern, you can’t unhear it. Let me try to explain why we got here.
Marketing metrics really are harder to nail down than sales quotas or engineering ship dates. Lead quality is subjective. Attribution is contested. Brand impact takes years to register. When the underlying measurement is this slippery, soft language is what naturally emerges. Over time, the language becomes habit. The habit becomes culture.
That’s the first piece. The second is cohort.
Most marketers shaping today’s vocabulary came up professionally in an era when “optimize the funnel” was a real discipline and “crush Q4” was a real ask. The tactics worked. Then somewhere in the 2010s, the tactics got copied widely enough that the edge faded. The playbooks that worked for the early HubSpot or Marketo era stopped paying off when everyone was running them.
Marketers in that gap had a few paths. Reinvent. Abandon. Hybridize. Or quietly develop a vocabulary that let the old playbook keep running while sounding like it was producing results. The system rewarded that last path more than the others.
Which brings me to the third piece. From what I’ve watched, marketing leaders who insisted on hard metrics got fired faster than the ones who used soft ones. The average CMO tenure is 4.1 years now, the shortest in the C-suite. There’s a survival logic to soft vocabulary. Smart people in any system optimize for the system, and this one rewarded the soft talk.
None of this is anyone’s fault. All of it is everyone’s problem.
You can see the asymmetry most clearly in the QBR itself.
Picture the same meeting with sales and marketing both presenting.
Sales VP: “We hit 87% of plan. The miss was new logos in mid-market. We need to fix outbound or accept a smaller forecast.”
That’s a person taking accountability, even with the macro caveats sales always includes.
Marketing VP, immediately after: “We had a strong quarter on top-of-funnel. MQLs are up 22%, but conversion is a leading indicator we’re still optimizing against. Significant directional progress.”
That’s the same underlying business reality, described in a way that doesn’t commit to anything.
The point isn’t that marketers are dishonest. They aren’t. They’re talking the way the system trained them to talk.
There’s another way to do this. It doesn’t start with a new playbook.
It starts with marketing using the same vocabulary as the rest of the business.
The teams I’ve watched compound over years had this in common, though I’d be cautious about turning observation into rule. When they missed, they said they missed. When they hit, they explained why with specificity. When something was working, they could trace it to revenue. When something wasn’t, they killed it.
Sounds simple. It isn’t. Most marketing departments have spent 20 years building measurement systems that make accountability optional. Changing the vocabulary is the easy part. Changing what you measure, and how, is the actual work.
There’s a framework that cuts through this. Five principles, briefly:
Understand how customers actually decide. Not how you assume they do.
See your market as a system. Feedback loops shape outcomes more than competitor lists do.
Connect marketing to value. If it doesn’t tie to cash flow, it isn’t yet creating value.
Strategy is what you choose not to do. Focus beats breadth every time.
Ask better questions. The quality of marketing starts with the quality of thinking.
None of these are radical. What’s interesting is how rarely they show up in a quarterly review.
A QBR that used first-principles language would sound like this:
“We invested X last quarter. Roughly 60% we can trace to revenue we expect to close in the next two quarters. The other 40% we can’t yet trace, and three specific tests are running to figure out whether it’s working. Here’s what we’re going to do about the untraced 40%.”
That’s a different conversation than “we generated significant signal across the funnel.” The first is a finance discussion. The second is a vocabulary problem.
One thing to try this week.
Open your most recent results discussion. Could be a formal QBR, a Friday team update, a board deck, an internal Slack thread. Find what summarized how marketing performed.
Read each bullet point and ask: would a salesperson, an engineer, or a CFO use this language to describe their own performance?
If the language sounds plausible coming from those mouths, your measurement culture is healthier than most. If it doesn’t, if it’s full of “signals” and “directionals” and “learnings,” that’s worth knowing. The people writing the deck aren’t doing anything wrong. The system has trained them to write it that way.
What you do about that is a longer conversation. Noticing is half the work. The other half starts with one question you should be able to answer in under ten seconds: what is the one number marketing owns this quarter that the CFO is tracking? If it takes longer than that, the vocabulary problem is the least of it.
That’s the first cold take.
The pattern, for future issues: take one widely-held assumption about marketing and look at what’s actually underneath it.
This first one’s assumption was that marketing has a unique relationship with results, and that’s just the way things are. What’s underneath: a system that trained marketers to talk softly about results, because it’s what the system rewards. The vocabulary is the visible artifact of that system. But that makes it the easiest thing to start noticing.
If you want a more concrete diagnostic of where your marketing actually stands across these five principles and a few others, there’s a free workbook at marketingsystemsguild.com.
See you in two weeks.
— Bill