Built to Stall

When the Problem Is Marketing Department Structure

Built to Stall, an e-book by Marketri founder Deb Andrews, starts with a familiar call. A CEO has been through two or three marketing leaders in a handful of years, each arriving with a strong résumé and leaving quieter than they came in. By then the CEO has usually decided that either the company keeps hiring the wrong people or marketing is simply a cost the business carries. The book argues that in most cases both explanations are wrong, and that the real issue is marketing department structure.

Its starting point: when several capable people struggle in the same seat, the seat deserves a closer look. Often the job was designed so success was unlikely, the team grew one urgent hire at a time, and the budget was set when buyers bought differently. Each choice was reasonable when it was made. Together they produce a department that works very hard and moves the business very little.

Why Naming the Pattern Comes Before Fixing It

The book grew out of Deb's LinkedIn writing, where the posts that traveled furthest named something readers had lived through but couldn't describe. One, about senior marketing leaders stuck writing blog posts, reached more than 250,000 people.

A name turns a vague frustration into a specific problem a leadership team can point to and fix. Without one, the company blames the person in the chair and swaps the person, the agency or the tactics. Those changes rarely hold, because the structure that produced the last result is still in place when the new person arrives. The book assigns no blame: most of these structures were built for sensible reasons by smart people under real pressure. What they lack is a design.

Inside the Book: 37 Patterns in Seven Parts

Each part covers one place where marketing's ability to drive growth breaks down, and each chapter ends with a first move a company can make. Readers can go front to back or turn straight to the part that sounds most familiar.

• The Seat (patterns 1 to 6): how the leadership job gets designed to fail, including the Seniority Inversion (a senior leader hired with no team, who ends up doing junior work), the Title Raise and the Reporting Ceiling.
• The Team (7 to 15): how departments get assembled one hire at a time, from the Accidental Org Chart and the Missing Middle to the Mid-Market Squeeze facing companies between $20 million and $200 million in revenue.
• The Workload (16 to 21): how strategy loses to the inbox, through Random Acts of Marketing, the Junk Drawer and the Intake Tax, and the Approval Bottleneck.
• The Scoreboard (22 to 26): how measurement shapes what leadership believes, from the Visibility Paradox and Motion Is Not Marketing to the Reclassification, where marketing becomes overhead for lack of proof.
• The Money (27 to 29): the budget as a statement of belief, covering the Marketing Discount in pay plans, the Inherited Budget and the First-Cut Reflex.
• The AI Era (30 to 35): how AI magnifies old structures, including the Bolt-On Trap, the AI Alibi and the Phantom Funnel, where buyers build their shortlists inside AI tools before they contact anyone.
• The Cost (36 and 37): what these structures do to the people inside them, through the Gratitude Trap and the 18-Month Clock.

What the Research Says

The book backs its patterns with recent research, and its sources page lists every statistic with the chapter where it appears, flagging vendor-produced and secondhand studies. Among them:

• In Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders, 56% said their organization lacks the budget to deliver its strategy.
• In a 2026 Boathouse study of 150 CEOs at large U.S. companies, only 13% were very confident their marketing organization could demonstrate the added business it produced.
• In 6sense's 2025 study of nearly 4,000 business buyers, which the book flags as vendor-produced, buyers first contacted a seller about 61% of the way through their buying process.

The Path Forward: From Overhead to Engine

The closing chapter offers three practical steps.

1. The Engine Test. A worksheet of ten statements a leadership team reads aloud and marks true, partly true or not true in a single meeting. Each statement points to the chapters to read, and the score places the company in one of three bands: funded like an engine, real potential held back, or run as overhead.
2. The Staffing Sequence. Cover, assess, then staff to the plan: keep essential work moving with interim leadership or outside support, spend sixty to ninety days diagnosing which patterns are present, then build the team the plan requires. Companies that staff before they assess tend to rebuild the structure they already had, with new names in the boxes.
3. Fund the path your clients take. Before approving next year's budget, look at your five most recent new clients, what each buyer knew about your company before your team spoke with them, and where they learned it.

For cover, the book points to interim help from a fractional leader or an outside team, the role a fractional CMO or a fractional marketing team plays. It also points readers to Marketri's online B2B Growth Bottleneck Assessment as an interactive companion.

Who Built to Stall Is For

The book is written for CEOs and leadership teams of mid-market B2B companies, especially those that have replaced their marketing leader more than once in a few years or whose team is busy while the strategy still isn't getting done. Part Seven also speaks directly to marketers offered a promotion without the resources to make it work.

Most mid-market companies have already invested in marketing: the salaries are being paid and the budget is being spent. As the book puts it, the return is waiting on the design. If your marketing works hard but moves the business too little, book a free 30-minute Growth Diagnostic. We'll follow up with the constraint we'd fix first and one to three next moves.