Episode Summary
Jan Willem Doornbos, Chief Marketing Officer at Nomentia, explains why sustainable B2B growth starts with strong foundations. He shares how customer outcomes can align sales and marketing around a common direction. Jan Willem also outlines why companies must build trust with future buyers and create distinctive marketing before demand becomes visible.
Highlights
Introduction
YouTube Short
Episode Q&A Videos
3:04 | Build Future Demand Beyond This Quarter’s B2B Pipeline
“Our job as marketers isn’t simply to generate leads. Our job is to earn a place on that shortlist before a buyer even raises their hand. Focusing on the pain points and challenges. We are not just capturing demand; we are creating future demand.”
3:15 | Fix Growth Foundations Before Scaling Your B2B Business
“Growth isn’t created by doing more things. It’s created by doing the right things in the right order. Scaling a business without a strong foundation is like building a second floor before you’ve checked the foundations. You can grow for a while, but eventually you will hit limitations.”
2:08 | Make Customer Needs the Center of B2B Team Alignment
“Misalignment between marketing and sales isn’t really a process problem; it’s more like a human problem. The breakthrough happens when both teams stop asking what marketing needs or what sales needs and start asking what the customer needs. Once everyone rallies around customer outcomes, alignment becomes much easier.”
3:29 | Find Customer Patterns to Build Scalable B2B Solutions
“If you only listen to one customer segment, you risk building a solution that doesn’t scale. On the other side, if you ignore customers altogether, you build something nobody wants. The balance comes from finding patterns. Instead of listening to individual requests, we look for common challenges underlying those requests.”
2:05 | Use Internal Experts to Strengthen Buyer Understanding
“Really digging deeper, what are your real challenges? What is waking you up at night, and how can we help you solve those challenges? You can sound check that with your people internally; what we think from a messaging or language perspective will resonate within the business.”
1:32 | Bold Marketing Breaks Through the B2B Sea of Sameness
“The industry needs more big ideas again, more creativity, more personalities, more boldness. Because before someone becomes a customer, they first need to remember you, and people rarely remember the safe option. I take courage in marketing very seriously, and I try to challenge my team to challenge the status quo.”
Key Takeaways
Strong Growth Foundations
A shared ICP, value proposition, and customer focus create a scalable path for growth.
Align Around Customer Outcomes
Sales and marketing make stronger decisions when both teams prioritize shared customer outcomes together.
Build Future Buyer Trust
Long-term growth requires building trust and visibility before buyers begin a formal purchasing process.
About Jan Willem
Jan Willem Doornbos
Jan Willem Doornbos is Chief Marketing Officer at Nomentia, where he has focused on rebuilding the marketing foundation to support sustainable growth. His work spans strategy, team structure, ideal customer definition, value proposition, messaging, and stronger alignment between marketing and sales. He brings a practical perspective on balancing immediate demand with long-term brand building, particularly the challenge of reaching future buyers before they enter the market. His approach emphasizes customer problems over product features, consistent demand generation, and the patience required to turn a stronger marketing foundation into measurable growth.
From the Guest
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Full Episode Article
Title: "Why Long-Term Growth Requires More Than Demand"
This article is based on an interview with Jan Willem Doornbos, Chief Marketing Officer at Nomentia
Introduction
For many B2B leadership teams, growth pressure encourages activity before clarity. More campaigns, more outreach, more content, and more pipeline reviews can create the appearance of progress. Yet when the ideal customer profile is unclear, messaging is overly product-focused, and teams operate from different assumptions, additional activity often magnifies the underlying problem.
Jan Willem Doornbos, Chief Marketing Officer at Nomentia, has worked across sales and marketing leadership roles in B2B SaaS companies ranging from startups to enterprise businesses. His perspective is simple. Growth is not created by increasing activity. It comes from building the right foundation and then accelerating from it.
Build the Growth Engine Before Increasing Speed
A company can generate leads and still struggle to build durable growth. The issue is often not effort. It is the sequence of decisions that guide that effort. Jan Willem explains, “Growth isn’t created by doing more things. It’s created by doing the right things in the right order.” For B2B leaders, that means first assessing whether the commercial foundation can support the next stage of growth.
When Jan Willem joined Nomentia, he listened, learned, and assessed the business before making major changes. That process surfaced familiar issues. The ICP was not consistently defined, messaging leaned too heavily on product capabilities, and different teams carried different assumptions about the market. These are common challenges, but they have serious consequences because they make it difficult to create one clear, credible story for buyers.
Jan Willem compares scaling without a strong foundation to “building a second floor on the house before you’ve checked the foundations.” The business may grow for a period, but the limitations eventually become visible. Marketing teams may create demand that sales cannot convert efficiently. Sales teams may pursue accounts that are not a strong fit. Product messaging may explain what a platform does without showing why the buyer should care.
The practical response is to make foundational work visible and measurable. Leadership teams should routinely revisit the ICP, clarify the value proposition in customer language, and identify where messaging changes across regions, segments, or teams. Those conversations can feel slower than launching a campaign, but they give every future campaign, sales conversation, and customer interaction a stronger commercial purpose.
Make Customer Outcomes the Shared Operating Model
Sales and marketing misalignment is frequently discussed as a process issue. Leaders redesign handoffs, reporting structures, dashboards, and service-level agreements. Those steps can help, but Jan Willem believes the core issue is more human. “Misalignment between marketing and sales isn’t really a process problem. It’s more like a human problem.”
Marketing builds future demand and strengthens market perception. Sales is responsible for creating opportunities and closing revenue today. Both priorities are valid, but they naturally produce tension when teams are evaluated separately. That tension becomes more complex as companies add regions, acquire businesses, or bring together teams with different cultures and experiences.
The way through is not to declare alignment complete. Jan Willem says, “Alignment isn’t a project you complete once. It’s something you continuously work on.” This is an important leadership distinction. Alignment is a business discipline, not a one-time initiative. It requires teams to revisit shared priorities as markets, buyer expectations, and company strategies evolve.
The most useful question is not what marketing needs or what sales needs. It is what the customer needs. “Once everyone rallies around customer outcomes, alignment becomes much easier,” Jan Willem says. When the customer becomes the shared reference point, internal discussions shift from defending functions to improving the buyer’s ability to understand, trust, and choose the company.
Turn Customer Input Into Scalable Market Insight
Customer insight is valuable only when a company can distinguish between isolated requests and recurring needs. B2B companies often serve multiple industries, regions, and maturity levels. Each group may describe its challenges differently and ask for different features. Responding to every individual request can lead to a fragmented strategy. Ignoring customer feedback can lead to offerings that miss the market entirely.
Jan Willem explains the balance clearly. “If you only listen to one customer segment, you risk building a solution that doesn’t scale.” He adds, “If you ignore customers altogether, you build something nobody wants.” The goal is to identify the common challenges beneath individual requests. At Nomentia, those recurring issues include visibility, automation, control, and efficiency.
This approach also creates more effective marketing. Instead of leading with a static list of features, teams can show how a capability helps a buyer solve a real operational challenge. That shift matters because buyers do not purchase features in isolation. They purchase improved outcomes, reduced risk, stronger control, and a clearer path to business value.
Internal expertise is part of this process as well. Long-tenured employees often understand the market, customers, and language that resonates, but leaders may not ask them to share that knowledge. Jan Willem encourages leaders to use internal teams to sound-check messaging, then complement that knowledge with direct customer conversations that go beyond product roadmaps and feature requests.
Conclusion
Sustainable growth is not built through more activity alone. It starts with a clear ICP, a customer-centered value proposition, and sales and marketing teams that share responsibility for customer outcomes. When leaders create these foundations first, every campaign, conversation, and investment has a stronger purpose.
The companies best positioned to grow, listen for recurring customer challenges, turn those insights into relevant messaging, and build trust before buyers are ready to engage. Growth becomes more durable when the entire business is aligned around helping customers succeed.
ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.
Steven MacDonald
Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.
Steven MacDonald
Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.
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