Joliene van Grieken has the same conversation almost every time a new client signs with The Growth Syndicate. It’s either a marketing problem, a campaign underperforming, or a soft pipeline. They want her team to come in and fix the channel: often LinkedIn, sometimes paid, sometimes SEO, sometimes outbound.

She fixes the foundation before she touches the channel.

At the 2025 SaaS Awards, where she was on the jury, Joliene walked through the foundation problem she sees inside almost every B2B SaaS company that hires her firm — and the LinkedIn strategy that finally works once the foundation is in place.

A lot of times when we enter companies, there are a lot of things foundationally that are just not right. The ICP is not set up correctly. The data is not tracked correctly. And they focus on the wrong things.

The Growth Syndicate is a full-service B2B marketing agency.

They embed directly into B2B companies and operate as the missing link both on the strategy and the execution fronts, providing services like paid ads, SEO content, growth leadership, ABM, though leadership, and more. Joliene is one of the co-founders.

The three foundation failures that break every marketing campaign

Most scaling B2B companies have a marketing team that knows what to do in theory and a marketing function that struggles to deliver in practice.

Joliene’s diagnosis is consistent across companies and stages. She names three things that are usually missing, and the absence of any one of them undermines every campaign built on top.

1. ICP defined precisely enough to act on. 

ICP work in most companies ends with a single slide in a deck. Getting it specific enough to drive targeting and messaging without further interpretation is actually rare, but it’s key to building any other marketing material on top.

2. Data tracking that connects marketing to revenue. 

The funnel is dark. Conversion paths are non-linear. If the company can’t see which marketing activity correlates with closed-won pipeline, the team ends up doubling down on the wrong things.

3. Marketing and sales operating from the same playbook. 

When two teams hold different definitions of qualified and different views of what the ICP wants, the handoff fails before any campaign reaches the prospect.

What we help to do is really first set that foundation level very strictly. And then we go into actually working on initiatives to start growing the business

The sequence sounds obvious when you read it. In practice, founders rarely sign off on three weeks of unsexy foundation work when the board is pushing for a Q3 lift in the pipeline. Joliene’s job is to hold the line on that sequence anyway, and the data, after the foundation work, makes the argument retroactively.

Why embedded beats advisory

Most marketing problems in B2B SaaS are execution problems at root. The team already knows the ICP is fuzzy. They don’t fix it because the campaign that needs to ship this week takes priority every week.

The embedded model turns the foundation work into the campaign — for a few weeks, that is what the team is delivering. The team doesn’t have to choose between today’s urgency and tomorrow’s quality.

ABM and thought leadership — the only LinkedIn combination that works for enterprise

Once the foundation is in place, Joliene has a single recommended LinkedIn strategy for the enterprise B2B segment her firm tends to serve.

It’s always thought leadership at the moment. ABM and thought leadership combined.

Either half on its own underperforms. ABM without thought leadership becomes a cold outreach programme: you hit the right accounts, but when the prospect checks the LinkedIn presence before replying — and they always do — they find a thin profile and zero credibility signal that kills the outreach.

Thought leadership without ABM becomes brand building with no pipeline mechanism — the right people see good content sometimes, and no system exists for converting that attention into account-level conversations.

The combination works because the thought leadership warms the accounts that the ABM targets.

By the time the personalized outreach arrives, the prospect has already seen content from the company. The outreach lands as the next step in an existing relationship rather than as a cold message from a stranger.

Personal opinion, with named faces

The content has to come from named people inside the company. Joliene is explicit about this.

“People want personal stories, personal opinions. Focus on that. That’s where you can get the gold. No fluff. Real stories.”

That means a real CEO or head of sales or CTO putting their actual view on the market into LinkedIn, even if it’s sometimes a contrarian view the market would push back on. Or a bold statement that will ruffle some feathers.

Brand pages underperform here for the same reason. The real impact-making mechanism on LinkedIn is human, and it pays attention to people first and companies second.

Get close to where the action happens

The line from Joliene that the rest of the playbook hangs from is the one about silos.

A lot of marketing people live in their silo. You need to get close to where the action happens.

For a B2B (SaaS) company, the action happens on sales calls and in the customer conversations where the real objections from deal reviews surface. The marketer who sits in on five sales calls a week for two months learns things about the ICP that no survey, no Gong dashboard, and no positioning workshop could surface.

What that looks like operationally

Joliene’s team makes the marketing function shadow sales:

• Interviewing existing customers
• Sitting with reps on calls
• Reading closed-lost notes

The content that comes out of that work hits differently because it is built on the buyer’s own words and the problem they are trying to solve.

It is also the place where the ICP definition gets tightened from “mid-market SaaS revenue teams” to something specific enough to act on: the industry, the deal size band, the trigger event that creates urgency, the title of the person signing the contract.

You really start with first selecting what is the industry you want to go after. Picking that list. Then building out what are their pain points. You need to interview them. You need to sit with them. You need to talk to sales.

Joliene van Grieken built The Growth Syndicate on a conviction most B2B founders don’t want to hear: the LinkedIn campaign breaks because of the three weeks of foundation work nobody did before it launched.

The channel takes the blame for a problem upstream of it.

If you want to speak to growth leaders like Joliene directly, join the GTM Society — where the operators doing the unsexy foundation work share what they find when they get close to where the action happens.