Your competitor has three marketing people. You have a sales director who posts on LinkedIn when he remembers, a web developer on retainer, and an agency invoice you approve without reading. So you assume the gap is headcount. It is not. You can run a working B2B marketing function without a full team, and the reason it feels impossible is that nobody has ever written down what the function actually does.
Most established B2B companies between five and fifty staff sit in this position. Revenue is fine. Referrals still arrive. Marketing happens in bursts, usually after a quiet quarter. The instinct is to fix it with a hire, or with a bigger agency retainer. Both skip the step that makes either one work: designing the function first, deciding who fills each seat second.
This post gives you the design. Six jobs, a coverage map, the real cost comparison against an in-house team, the cadence that keeps it running on a few hours a week, and the signals that tell you when a full-time marketer is finally worth it.
Why the headcount question is the wrong question
Think about your last management meeting. Marketing comes up. Someone suggests hiring a marketing manager, someone else mentions the agency you stopped working with in 2023, and the item moves to next month. Nothing gets decided, since nobody in the room can describe what that hire or that agency would own on a Monday morning.
That is the actual problem. Marketing in your company is not understaffed. It is unowned.
Unowned work shows up in patterns you will recognise:
- The website was updated eighteen months ago and nobody can say who is responsible for it now.
- Two people have partial access to the CRM. Neither trusts the data.
- Case studies get discussed after every good project and written after none of them.
- Ad spend continues since switching it off feels risky, and nobody reviews the return.
- Sales asks for a one-pager. Somebody builds it in PowerPoint that afternoon. It is never used again.
Each of those is a job with no name attached. Hiring one generalist marketer does not fix it either. A single hire inherits all six jobs at once, drowns in the two most urgent, and quietly drops the rest. Eleven months later you conclude that marketing does not work for your kind of business.
The cost goes beyond wasted spend. It is lost compounding. A B2B company that publishes and follows up consistently for two years builds pipeline that arrives without asking. A company that starts over every eight months pays full price for attention every single time.
Design the marketing function, then staff it
Conventional advice tells you to hire a marketer and let them figure it out. Spijker en Co works the other way round. Write the org chart of jobs before you decide which are internal, which are bought, and which are rented.
A B2B marketing function, at your size, is six jobs. All six exist whether or not anyone is doing them.
1. Direction. Who we sell to, what we claim, which two channels we commit to, what a win looks like in numbers. This is a decision job, not a delivery job. Two to four hours a month, and it belongs to a director or owner permanently.
2. Demand. Getting the right companies to notice you: campaigns, advertising, outbound support, events, partner activity.
3. Production. Articles, case studies, landing pages, video, design, email. The visible output, and the job most often mistaken for the whole function.
4. Sales support. Proposal templates, pricing pages, objection documents, follow-up sequences. Work that turns interest into conversations and conversations into signatures.
5. Data. One report that shows source, qualified leads, proposals sent, revenue won. Somebody has to produce it monthly and be allowed to say a campaign failed.
6. Operations. CRM hygiene, forms, tracking, automation, account access, the asset library. Unglamorous, and the reason the other five stay reliable.
Now the part that changes your staffing decision. Only two of those six need to be inside your company: direction and operations. Direction cannot be outsourced. It requires knowledge of your margins, your best clients, and where you refuse to compete. Operations cannot be outsourced. It holds your data and your access, and an external party leaving with either sets you back a year.
Demand, production, sales support, and data are skill jobs. Skill jobs can be bought by the month from specialists who do them daily and are better at them than any generalist you could afford full time.
How to build a B2B marketing function without a full team in five moves
1. Make the coverage map
One page, six rows, one column for the job and one for a first name. Fill it in honestly for this month, not for the version of your company you plan to be. Blank rows are your priority list. Rows with the same name three or four times explain why that person delivers nothing well.
Most companies find that production has two owners, direction has none, and data is a spreadsheet nobody has opened since spring.
2. Name the internal coordinator and give them eight hours
Not a marketing manager. A coordinator with a fixed weekly allocation, formally protected in their workload. Often this is your best operations person, an office manager with an eye for detail, or a junior commercial hire.
Their remit: hold the calendar, brief the external specialists, chase the case study interview, keep the CRM clean, publish what comes back, produce the monthly numbers. They decide nothing about direction and everything about whether the week’s work happens.
Eight hours a week is the number that works in practice. Below four, the function stalls between meetings. Above sixteen, you are paying for a part-time marketer without the specialist skill that justifies it.
3. Buy skill in narrow slices
Three or four suppliers, each with one job and one deliverable, beat one full-service retainer that reports on activity.
- A copywriter for two articles a month, briefed by your coordinator.
- A designer for campaign visuals and sales documents, hourly or in blocks.
- One paid channel specialist, on your accounts, with a monthly budget cap.
- A partner for the website and technical work, on call rather than on retainer.
Each supplier gets a written brief, a deadline, and a standard for review. None of them holds an account in their own name. That last rule matters more than the price you negotiate.
4. Install a cadence with three fixed artefacts
The function runs on three meetings, and each one produces a document. No document, no meeting.
- Quarterly, 90 minutes, directors only. Choose the theme, the two channels, and three numbers for the quarter. Output: a one-page quarterly plan.
- Monthly, 45 minutes, directors plus coordinator. Read the numbers report. Kill one thing, keep two, start one. Output: the decision log entry, dated, with the reason.
- Weekly, 20 minutes, coordinator and one salesperson. What published, what is stuck, which leads need follow-up. Output: an updated calendar.
The decision log is the piece almost nobody keeps. Twelve entries later, it is the most valuable marketing asset you own, tracking what you tried and why you stopped.
5. Write the four documents that hold the memory
External suppliers rotate. Employees leave. The function survives that only if it is written down somewhere other than one person’s head.
- The message bank. Your claim, the three objections you hear most, and the proof for each.
- The campaign log. Every campaign, what it cost, what it returned, one paragraph on why.
- The asset library. Current logos, photos, case studies, templates, in a folder your suppliers can reach.
- The access register. Every account, in whose name, with which admin. Review it twice a year.
None of these takes longer than an hour to start. All four make onboarding a new supplier a two-day exercise instead of a two-month one.
What a marketing function without a full team costs
A modest in-house B2B marketing team in the Netherlands is a marketing manager, a content person, and a designer. Loaded salary cost lands somewhere near 210,000 euro a year, before tools, recruitment fees, and the six months of ramp-up you pay for twice if the first hire is wrong.
The coverage model looks different. Eight coordinator hours a week inside an existing salary is roughly 12,000 euro of internal time. Copywriting at two articles a month, design in blocks, one paid specialist, and a technical partner on call typically runs 3,000 to 5,000 euro a month. Tools sit around 200 euro a month for a CRM, email, and analytics.
Call it 60,000 to 75,000 euro a year for the same six jobs covered, with specialist skill on each and no severance risk. You keep the option to reallocate any single supplier next month, which no employment contract gives you.
The trade-off is real and worth stating: you carry the coordination load internally, and direction has to actually happen. A function designed this way fails in exactly one way, when the quarterly meeting gets postponed twice and the suppliers start guessing.
Start with the coverage map this week
Do not restructure anything yet. Block 30 minutes before Friday, open one page, and write the six jobs down the left side. Put a name against each one. Where you cannot, leave it blank.
Then take the blank rows to your next management meeting and ask one question: who owns this by the end of the month, and how many hours do they get?
That single page usually reveals that you do not need a marketing department. You need two named owners, three suppliers with clear briefs, and a meeting that happens whether or not the quarter was busy.
Frequently asked questions
Which marketing jobs should stay inside the company?
Direction and operations. Direction needs your margin data and your view on which clients you want. Operations holds your CRM, tracking and account access. Demand, production, sales support and reporting can all be bought from specialists.
When should we hire our first full-time marketer?
Hire when the system already produces leads consistently and your coordinator is at capacity for three months running, or when supplier coordination exceeds 16 hours a week. Hire into a working function, never to invent one.
Is an agency retainer cheaper than building internal marketing capability?
Not usually. Retainers bundle work you may not need and leave no internal knowledge behind. Narrow suppliers with defined deliverables, coordinated internally, cost less per output and keep your data and accounts in your own name.
What should a B2B marketing coordinator actually do?
Brief suppliers, hold the content calendar, keep CRM data clean, publish approved work, and produce the monthly numbers report. They execute and coordinate. Positioning, budget, and channel choices stay with the directors.
How many marketing channels does a mid-sized B2B company need?
Two, done every week, beat six done occasionally. For most Dutch B2B firms that means the website plus LinkedIn, or the website plus targeted outbound, with email supporting both.
Cover the jobs, not the seats
You do not have a headcount problem. You have six jobs, and probably four of them have nobody’s name against them. Write the map, protect the coordinator’s hours, buy skill in narrow slices, and keep the quarterly meeting sacred. That is a marketing function, and it fits inside the company you already run.
Want a second pair of eyes on your coverage map before you commit budget to a hire? Book a consultation and we will go through it together.
