Is PE killing the ROI imperative in B2B?

Is the marketing ROI conversation dying? In one corner of B2B — private equity-backed firms — it already has, and what’s emerging in its place looks set to spread well beyond PE-owned businesses. That’s the argument made by @Nick Eades, five-time CMO, three-time CCO and now Chief Strategy Officer at PE-backed payments network Free Market, on the latest episode of the Trust & Influence in B2B podcast.

Nick has spent more than three decades in senior B2B marketing roles across publicly listed, venture-backed and PE-owned businesses, with stints at IBM, Dell, BT, Fujitsu and Siemens along the way. He has lived through accelerated growth, turnarounds and exits, and he is unambiguous about which environment has taught him the most — and which is, in his view, the one shaping the next three years of B2B marketing practice. “What happens in PE will pervade other areas,” he argues. “If you haven’t got it, you need to get it.” Is interviewed him for an episode of the Trust & Influence in B2B podcast.

It’s worth saying upfront: this isn’t an anti-measurement argument. The return on marketing investment hasn’t disappeared in PE — it’s been absorbed into the operating model so completely that the question of ROI no longer needs to be asked. But to understand why, we have to start with what PE is actually trying to do.

What PE actually wants

The popular caricature of private equity ownership is growth-at-all-costs, with marketing as a quarterly ROI casualty. Nick’s reframe is sharper and more useful: PE isn’t chasing maximum growth. “It’s about predictability,” he says. Returns typically sit in the two-to-four-times-money range across a portfolio, with a clear-eyed acceptance that some investments will fail and some will deliver outsized returns. What investors are pricing in at the point of acquisition is not a gamble on a unicorn, but a calculated bet on whether the three things that matter — “product, market and team” — can deliver against a well-defined investment case over a three-to-five-year horizon.

For marketers, the implication is significant. Being “outcome-driven” in PE means something more specific than the term usually carries elsewhere. Every milestone matters; every quarter counts; every investment of time, budget and attention is assessed against whether it directly contributes to the investment case. As Nick puts it, the marketer in a PE-backed firm has to understand the CEO and CFO’s expectations in as much detail as the C-suite themselves — “you need to understand what the expectations are at the CEO level so that when you’re delivering, driving, creating, writing, whatever, it’s in that frame.” Not because the discipline of marketing is being demoted, but because it is being asked to operate at a different cadence.

Why the ROI question went away

Which brings us to the headline claim. For years, B2B marketers have been asked to prove their ROI — usually quarterly, usually defensively, usually as a translation exercise between marketing’s view of value and finance’s. In PE-backed environments, Nick argues, that conversation has stopped happening. “I never have that conversation now. Never,” he says. “Because we iterate every single day.”

The mechanism behind that claim is operational, not philosophical. At Free Market, Nick runs a daily 30-minute go-to-market stand-up with sales, marketing, the GTM engineer, all the SDRs and the BDs on the call. They look at pipeline, ICP fit, and execution every single day. The team only counts closed-one SQLs sourced by the GTM function — MQLs are explicitly out, on the basis that, in his experience across multiple PE-backed firms, MQL-led marketing leaders have repeatedly been found chasing volumes that never converted to revenue. “We’re adjusting ICP calibration. We run things and tune things every day until we get it right. Even when we get it right, we say, OK, what can we do better?”

What this produces is something close to continuous calibration. The lag between marketing activity and the assessment of its commercial contribution collapses from a quarter to a day. The question “what was the return on that?” gets answered before anyone thinks to ask it.

This is the nuance the headline hides. ROI hasn’t died in any meaningful sense. The debate about ROI has died — because the cadence of measurement has changed so fundamentally that the debate no longer fits.

Evidence is confidence

If daily iteration is the operating mechanism, evidence is the cultural one. PE board meetings are not narrative-driven; they are inspections. “Evidence builds confidence,” as Nick puts it. “Nobody in PE believes anything. They see evidence of something, and then it’s confidence.” The marketer’s job, in his framing, is to “present the evidence, know your numbers inside out, expect to be inspected” — and to be unflinchingly commercial about what the evidence shows.

That commercial orientation is a meaningful shift. The instinct in many marketing functions is to build the marketing function — to grow the team, the budget, the toolset, the share of voice. Nick’s argument is that PE forces a different orientation entirely: the marketer’s job is to build the business, with marketing as one of the disciplines through which that gets done. “It focuses you on building a business, not a marketing function,” he says. Reputation, positioning, lead generation, pipeline acceleration and customer retention all sit inside that broader brief.

The trust dimension here is implicit but unmistakable. Trust in PE-backed environments isn’t asserted; it’s earned through demonstrable evidence, repeatedly, across every board meeting and every stand-up. Marketers who can operate that way are trusted. Marketers who can’t — because they’re presenting narrative where evidence is expected — find that the trust simply isn’t extended.

The two horses

This is also where one of the more contested marketing tensions surfaces in a very particular form. Most senior B2B marketers are familiar with the brand-versus-pipeline debate. Nick comes at it from an unusual angle, and uses a metaphor that sticks. “You do have to ride two horses at the same time,” he says. “And that’s why it gets tough — because one horse is more attractive than the other.” The easy-to-ride horse is brand-building for long-term growth: hire the agency, run the campaign, sit back and admire the work. The harder horse is the one that turns reputation and positioning into pipeline and profitable growth at the right pace. Both have to be ridden, but only one of them actually grows the business.

He goes further than most senior marketers would on the language. “I never talk about brand. I talk about reputation and positioning, particularly these days.” The reasoning is that brand has become a permission slip for activity that doesn’t connect to commercial outcomes — what he half-jokingly calls “colouring-in department” work. Reputation and positioning, by contrast, are systematised through every customer-facing role: SDRs, BDs, account managers all telling one story, anchored in the same evidence base, calibrated daily. “If you don’t turn that positioning and reputation stuff into lead gen — and into profitable growth, quickly and at the right pace — then you have a problem.”

Some readers will push back on this — and reasonably. There are situations and categories where brand investment is the engine of long-term commercial value, and where the slow accumulation of reputation does eventually translate into pipeline. Nick’s framing is shaped by the PE context he operates in, where time horizons are compressed and execution is the dominant value driver. But the underlying point — that positioning and reputation only matter to the extent they show up in the commercial outcomes the business is being measured on — is one that travels well beyond PE.

GTM as the operating model

If there’s a single concept that ties this together, it’s go-to-market — not as a buzzword, but as an operating model. “It’s a silo buster,” Nick says. “You and I, for many years, decades, have talked about the sales and marketing divide. It wipes it out.”

The components are familiar: sales, marketing, RevOps, product, all working from the same data, all accountable to the same outcomes. What’s different is the cadence and the absence of internal politics. “If we’re winning, we’re all winning. If we’re losing, we’re all losing.” Nobody’s defending their own metric because there isn’t a “their own” — there’s the metric.

The AI stack supporting this is significant — HubSpot, Clay, HeyReach, multiple agentic models, n8n, Glyphic as a digital sales coach, increasingly glued together with Claude Code — but the technology is downstream of the operating model, not upstream of it. “If you don’t have the people working in zero-ego, high-cadence function,” Nick warns, “the AI is wasted.” GTM, in his framing, is “the ultimate form of alignment, aligned execution.”

So is PE killing ROI in B2B?

Probably not in the form the headline implies. The ROI imperative isn’t dying so much as being replaced — by an operating model in which return on marketing investment is continuously demonstrated rather than periodically debated, and in which the marketer’s contribution is visible in the daily flow of pipeline rather than the quarterly review of attribution.

What’s worth taking seriously is Nick’s broader claim: that what’s happening in PE-backed marketing now is heading for the rest of B2B. Not every marketer will want to operate this way, and not every business is structured to accommodate it. But the direction of travel — toward continuous iteration, demonstrable evidence, GTM as a unifying discipline, and the collapse of the brand-versus-pipeline debate into a single commercial conversation — is hard to ignore. “Done well,” Nick argues, “this is where you’ll learn the most, fastest, about what B2B marketing will be in the next three years.”

That’s not a death notice. It’s a forecast.

Five questions to ask yourself

Whether or not your business is PE-owned, the operating model Nick describes raises some uncomfortable questions for any senior B2B marketer. Five worth sitting with:

1. What’s the cadence of your marketing iteration? If the honest answer is monthly or quarterly, ask why. The technology, the data and the operating models now exist to make daily calibration realistic in most B2B contexts. The barrier is usually organisational, not technical.

2. What single metric does your sales team genuinely believe in — and is your function aligned to it? If sales is counting closed-one SQLs and marketing is counting MQLs, you have a translation problem. Translation problems don’t survive an evidence-led environment for long.

3. How much of your time goes to brand-building work that isn’t connected to demonstrable pipeline? This isn’t an argument for abandoning brand. It’s an argument for being able to defend the connection. If you can’t, you’re riding the easy horse.

4. Could you walk into your CFO’s office tomorrow with the evidence to back every claim your function makes? “Evidence is confidence” is a useful litmus test. If your function relies on narrative where evidence should be, the trust deficit will catch up with you eventually — PE-owned or not.

5. If your business were acquired by PE in six months, which of your activities would survive the first review? A useful thought experiment. The activities that wouldn’t survive aren’t necessarily wrong — but they are the ones you’d struggle to defend on commercial grounds, and that’s worth knowing now rather than later.