73 in 100 B2B websites fumble the enquiry

Hey, it's Christina,

Most of the founders I work with are making their big 2027 decisions right now, and the biggest ones usually involve a senior hire. This week I'm looking at why that instinct can backfire, plus a two-minute check you can run on your own website today.

Got a commercial growth question? Comment and I'll cover it in a future edition.

In this week's edition:

• The Headlines

• 73 in 100 B2B websites leave enquirers guessing

• LinkedIn's free guide to proving marketing's impact

• Hire the chef after you've chosen the restaurant

The Headlines

Half of UK business leaders expect the Budget to leave them worse off.YouGov polled 2,010 decision-makers ahead of Wednesday's Budget. 52% expect UK firms to end up worse off and only 15% expect an improvement, with SMEs gloomier still at 56% to 14%. Have your cost scenarios ready before Wednesday so you can make decisions on Thursday.

Your suppliers are about to put their prices up.ONS data shows 17% of UK businesses expect to raise prices in November, 7 points higher than a year ago, with energy the most cited reason. If your own 2027 price review hasn't started, you'll be absorbing their increases on this year's margins.

Salesforce pays $5.7bn to buy a rival.Salesforce is buying customer engagement platform Braze at a 58% premium, after a stretch of sluggish growth in its own marketing business. As martech consolidates into fewer, bigger platforms, buyers lose leverage at renewal, so check your contract terms before your next one comes round.

73 in 100 B2B websites leave enquirers guessing

Newcastle agency RD Marketing audited 100 UK B2B supplier websites to see what a prospect experiences when they try to get in touch. The result is a useful one to hold up against your own site.

92 of the 100 sites had a contact or enquiry form, but only 27 clearly explained what would happen after someone filled it in.

A prospect who has no idea whether to expect a call, a proposal or silence will usually keep browsing. One line under your form saying who replies, how quickly, and what the first conversation covers is one of the cheapest conversion fixes a B2B business can make.

Source: RD Marketing UK B2B Enquiry Experience Study 2026.

Read the study

LinkedIn's free guide to proving marketing's impact

If your board is asking what marketing delivered this year, LinkedIn's new B2B attribution guide is worth an hour of your time. It's free and runs to 18 pages.

It sets out five frameworks for connecting early buyer signals, including the ones that never show up as a click, to pipeline and closed deals, with a step-by-step breakdown for each. LinkedIn's own figures show why it's needed: only 33% of B2B marketers strongly agree they can prove marketing's impact to their C-suite, and 75% say their measurement is falling short.

Expect some promotion of LinkedIn's paid analytics tools along the way. Pick one framework, apply it to your biggest channel, and take what you find to your next board meeting.

Get the LinkedIn guide

Hire the chef after you've chosen the restaurant

Hiring a CMO before your positioning is sorted is like hiring a head chef before you've decided what kind of restaurant you're running.

Bringing in a CMO or growing the sales team makes sense for a business turning over £10M plus, as long as the investment is aimed at the right problem. What I see more often, when growth slows in a founder-led business, is money going into something new (a senior hire, a bigger agency, a rebrand) before anyone has worked out where the business is losing ground.

The CMO is the example I see most. Bring one in while the ideal client and the core message still live in the founder's head, and they'll spend their first six months trying to piece it together, still needing sign-off on most decisions and wondering why nothing is moving the way it should. Any good CMO would agree, because they're the one left doing the detective work.

Sometimes the hire is exactly the right answer, but more often the gap sits further back, in one of three places:

1. Positioning that isn't landing with the right people, so every campaign has to work harder than it should.

2. A sales process nobody has mapped out, so every deal gets handled a little differently.

3. A pipeline that still runs through the founder's own relationships.

Extra headcount won't close any of those, and neither will a bigger budget. Before your next big growth investment, it's worth knowing where your gap sits, so the money goes to the part of the business that's holding growth back.

Which of these have you seen in a business you've run or worked in? Hit reply with the one you recognise and I'll share what I'd fix first.

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