The Marketing Metric Most B2B Leaders Get Wrong — And What Catherine Aleksidze Tracks Instead

Most B2B marketing leaders can tell you their click-through rates. Fewer can tell you their event ROI from six months ago. Catherine Aleksidze, Head of Marketing at Radius, belongs firmly in the second camp — and she argues the gap between those two groups explains most of the credibility problem marketing has with leadership.

In a recent episode of The Marketing Front Lines, Catherine walked through the marketing philosophy she's refined across 12 years and two very different commercial environments: building monetized B2B advertising products at Zalando Marketing Solutions, and driving demand generation at Radius, a global fleet management and mobility company expanding into the German market.

The throughline isn't brand. It isn't content. It's revenue.

From Sales to Strategy: Why the Origin Matters

Catherine's marketing career didn't start in a campaign dashboard. It started in sales and account management — and that origin shaped everything that followed.

At Zalando Marketing Solutions, she moved from brand consulting into building B2B advertising products from the ground up: a proposition that gave fashion brands a native way to sponsor influencer content within the Zalando ecosystem. Her team owned the full commercial lifecycle. "We've done the overall from ideation to go to market, to iterations to actually selling the products, to improving it, user tests both on a brand and on the end consumer side."

What that experience embedded wasn't just process fluency. It was a specific commercial orientation: marketing exists to generate measurable business outcomes, not to produce creative work in isolation. That belief became the foundation for everything she built afterward.

The Attribution Process Most B2B Teams Skip

Catherine's ROI benchmark is a 1:4 return. Put in €1, get €4 back. Anything below that gets scrutinized. But the benchmark itself isn't the interesting part — the process she uses to actually measure it is.

In B2B, event ROI almost never closes in the same quarter as the event. The lead gets generated in October. The deal closes in February. Without a deliberate attribution process, that connection disappears entirely — and marketing loses the evidence it needs to defend future spend.

Her solution is operational, not technological. She works directly with the sales team to ensure every deal that originated from a specific event is logged and attributed correctly in HubSpot before the quarter closes. "I sit very closely with the sales team in order to attribute what leads actually generated from that event... me, I can come at the end of the quarter and say, something that we did four months ago has actually panned out."

The implication for founders building early marketing functions: the attribution process has to be designed before the event, not reconstructed afterward. If sales isn't logging source data consistently in your CRM, your marketing ROI calculations are fiction.

Why Data Consolidation Is a Strategic Problem, Not a Tools Problem

Catherine's critique of fragmented marketing data goes deeper than operational inconvenience. Her argument is that scattered data makes coherent strategy impossible — because you can't build a reliable narrative about what's working when your signals are split across five disconnected platforms.

"Don't leave your data spread out across different kinds of systems. Try to focus everything into one tool." She advocates for HubSpot as an all-in-one solution that connects campaign attribution, content performance, and CRM data — but notes there are dedicated aggregation tools that pull performance data alongside content and CRM inputs for teams that need more flexibility.

The real cost of fragmentation isn't the extra time spent pulling reports. It's the decisions that get made on incomplete information — and the inability to show leadership a clean, defensible line from marketing activity to pipeline.

The Content Hire Most Companies Get Wrong

When Catherine describes the content marketer she looks for, she's not describing a writer. She's describing a commercial operator who can also write.

For B2B specifically, she argues the content role requires genuine business acumen — the ability to internalize a buyer's KPIs deeply enough to write about calculators, workflow tools, and operational outcomes in a way that resonates with a sophisticated operator audience. "You need to be a very good business person to be able to write content about a B2B proposition."

The full profile she maps to: commercial understanding, analytical skills, project management, stakeholder management — alongside content craft. When her HR manager questioned whether that person existed, Catherine held firm and found them. The point isn't that the hire is easy. It's that settling for a narrower profile produces content that sophisticated B2B buyers see through immediately.

On AI: The Urgency Is Already Here

Catherine's team is actively using AI tooling to produce case studies, product tutorials, and video assets faster than traditional workflows allowed. Her framing on this isn't exploratory — it's a competitive warning. "If you're not on top of things when it comes to the automation, the AI functions, the different tools, and if you don't take the time to educate yourself, you're probably going to be left behind."

For founders, the relevant question isn't whether to adopt AI in marketing operations. It's whether the current pace of adoption is fast enough to keep up with peers who are already using it to compress content production cycles significantly.

The Structural Principle Underneath All of It

Everything Catherine described — the attribution process, the data consolidation, the content hiring bar, the AI adoption pace — flows from one structural conviction: marketing earns its influence when it speaks the language of the business.

"If you always tie your goals into the business goals and the revenue and commercial goals, this is what's going to enable you to get that buy-in from your peers and from your stakeholders and from management — because that's the language that they speak."

For B2B founders building or scaling a marketing function, the practical implication is this: the KPIs you report on, the attribution process you build with sales, and the profiles you hire for all either connect to revenue or they don't. The sophistication of your stack is secondary to whether the function is structured around commercial outcomes from the start.

Listen to the full conversation with Catherine Aleksidze on The Marketing Front Lines.