If Your Marketing Isn’t Generating Revenue, Here’s What May Be Missing

There are more ways to market a business today than there have ever been.

You can automate outreach. You can build targeted prospect lists. You can use AI to research potential clients, optimize your website, create content, build spreadsheets, write emails, and handle work that used to take hours—or days.

And yet, plenty of businesses are still asking the same question:

Why isn’t our marketing actually generating revenue?

That was the conversation I had with Dolores Hirschmann of Masters in Clarity during our latest Ask the CFO session.

Dolores specializes in relationship-based marketing, particularly for consultants, fractional executives, advisors, thought leaders, and other professionals who are ultimately selling expertise rather than a physical product.

And I think that distinction matters.

Getting Leads Is Easier. Building Trust Is Not.

One of Dolores’s points that stood out to me was that generating a list of potential leads is not particularly difficult anymore.

AI and automation have made that part much easier.

The harder part is getting someone from:

“I know who you are”

to

“I trust you enough to have a conversation.”

And then ultimately to:

“I want to work with you.”

That middle ground is where a lot of marketing falls apart.

Someone might find you through LinkedIn, a conference, a podcast, a referral, an email, or a Google search. But before they ever schedule a call, there is a good chance they are going to look you up.

What does your LinkedIn profile say?

What kind of content are you publishing?

Do you seem knowledgeable about the problem they are trying to solve?

Do they get a sense of how you think?

Most importantly: Do they trust you?

For businesses like mine—and probably for many people reading this—that relationship matters tremendously.

Consistency Is Part of the Strategy

I have seen this firsthand with my own marketing.

For the last several years, we have consistently invested in LinkedIn, content, Ask the CFO, newsletters, conversations, and staying visible.

There have been times when I have walked into a room and had someone say, “I know you,” even though I had never met them.

They knew me because they had seen the content.

That doesn’t happen after two LinkedIn posts.

It happens because you stay with it.

One of the biggest mistakes I see with consultants and fractional executives is treating marketing like something they can turn on and off.

They get busy with a client and stop marketing.

Then the engagement ends and suddenly they need business again.

Unfortunately, by then the pipeline has gone quiet.

If you are building a consulting, advisory, or fractional business, marketing cannot only happen when you need a client.

You have to keep building relationships while things are going well.

Pick a Lane and Commit to It

Dolores pointed out something about my own strategy that I think is worth repeating.

I picked a lane.

For me, that lane has largely been LinkedIn.

That does not mean LinkedIn is the answer for everybody. It means you probably do not need to be everywhere.

You need to figure out where your people are and then show up there consistently.

For one business, that might mean LinkedIn.

For another, it might mean conferences, trade associations, webinars, speaking engagements, podcasts, or industry events.

During the session, we talked about how powerful speaking can be—even if it is a breakout session with a relatively small audience.

When someone hears you speak intelligently about a problem they are already dealing with, the distance between stranger and trusted advisor gets much shorter.

Your Targeting Has to Be Better Than Your Automation

We also spent some time talking about LinkedIn lead generation.

There is no shortage of automation tools promising thousands of connections and leads.

But a bigger list is not necessarily a better pipeline.

The targeting matters.

If you are sending messages to the wrong people, automating the process just allows you to reach the wrong people faster.

Dolores’s approach is much more specific: identify exactly who you want to talk to, build outreach around that audience, and make the first interaction about them—not about you.

That includes something counterintuitive: don't immediately sell.

The first objective is simply to start a relevant conversation.

That seems obvious, but spend five minutes looking through your LinkedIn inbox and you will see how rarely people actually do it.

AI Should Handle the Grunt Work

The conversation eventually moved from marketing into AI more broadly, particularly how Sandra, Dolores, and I are using tools such as Claude and ChatGPT.

I have become increasingly comfortable letting AI handle work that I used to do manually.

For example, I recently used it to help build a complicated debt covenant spreadsheet involving multiple agreements.

Something that might have taken me a couple of days to build manually came back largely completed in a fraction of the time.

Was it perfect?

No.

And that is the important part.

I still had to know enough to recognize what was right, what was wrong, and what needed to be changed.

That is where I think professionals need to pay very close attention.

AI can eliminate a tremendous amount of grunt work.

But if you do not understand the work in the first place, how do you know whether the answer it gives you is correct?

That is going to become a much bigger question for finance, marketing, operations, and almost every professional field.

The Last Mile Has to Be Human

At the end of the session, I asked Dolores for one piece of advice about AI.

Her answer was simple:

The last mile is human.

I think that may have been the most important point of the entire conversation.

Automate the repetitive work.

Use AI to research.

Use it to organize information.

Use it to help build content, analyze data, improve your marketing infrastructure, and make your team more efficient.

But when someone responds to you?

When a client has a difficult question?

When judgment is required?

When trust needs to be established?

When you are making an important financial or business decision?

That is where the human being still matters.

I have talked before about the book Humans Are Underrated, which was written before the current explosion of generative AI. The core idea feels even more relevant now.

Technology will continue to get better.

The businesses and professionals who win will not necessarily be the ones who resist it.

They will be the ones who learn how to use technology aggressively while knowing exactly where the technology should stop and the human being should take over.

That is a balance every one of us is going to have to learn.

If you are trying to generate better leads, build a stronger presence, understand where AI belongs in your marketing, or simply figure out how to keep the human side of your business intact while everything around us becomes more automated, I think you will get a lot from this conversation.

Are you simply generating activity?

Or are you actually building relationships that can become revenue?