Blair Naylor is Senior Vice President of New Business at The Marketing Practice, leading EMEA growth and selected global media agency-of-record pitches. With more than 15 years in B2B marketing, she has built her career on trust, honest conversations and bringing the right experts together around what a client actually needs. She has built growth departments from scratch at two agencies, creating the processes and onboarding programmes that turn wins into lasting relationships.

At Just Global she won more than $6.5 million in new revenue in fiscal 2023 and met the $7 million target the following year, work recognised with a Gold TITAN Business Award in 2024. She began her career across nearly a decade at WPP agencies.

Your career spans more than 15 years in B2B marketing, including nearly a decade at WPP agencies working across technology, financial services, consumer goods and gaming. What did that grounding in complex global accounts teach you about linking marketing strategy to commercials results. 

“It’s hard! The biggest thing I learned is just how complex it is to connect marketing strategy to commercial results. It is absolutely possible, but even in the most sophisticated organisations, you are trying to align marketing, sales, finance and senior leadership around the same priorities, timeframes and measures of success. Everyone may agree on the overall revenue goal, but that does not mean they agree on where marketing investment should go or how quickly it should produce a return.

“As an agency, we are often helping our clients sell the value of marketing internally so they can ultimately sell more effectively to their external audiences. That requires trust. The agency needs to understand the commercial pressures the client is facing, and the client needs to trust the agency enough to hear when the right answer may take longer than the next quarter.

“One of the biggest tensions is the pressure to demonstrate immediate results. Clients understandably need leads and short-term performance to protect or unlock budget. But if that pressure causes you to launch without the right foundations, clear positioning, audience understanding, measurement and brand investment, you can end up optimising for immediate activity at the expense of sustainable growth.

“The best relationships find a way to do both: identify what can deliver value in the short term while protecting the time, investment and stakeholder alignment needed to build the longer-term programme properly. When senior leaders are aligned and willing to invest in both brand and demand, marketing can do much more than generate leads. It can build recognition, preference and trust that eventually translate into pipeline, revenue and long-term customer value.

“So, for me, linking marketing to commercial results is not just a measurement challenge. It is an organisational alignment challenge and trust is what allows an agency and client to work through that complexity together.”

You have built a career on giving clients the honest answer about what will work for them, which has led to clients following you across agencies. How do you get to the right answer for a client, and what has that honesty built for you over time?

“I have never liked calling myself a salesperson. I spent much of my career in client service, building relationships, and solving problems. I’m good under pressure and comfortable when someone needs to make a decision and move things forward. That instinct has carried directly into new business.

“Getting to the right answer starts with listening – and not only to what a client says they want, but to what is happening around them. What pressures are they under? What are they actually ready for? Do they have the internal alignment, budget and resources to make the programme successful? If I don’t believe something is right for a client, I’m not going to push it simply because it creates revenue for the agency, which may make me the world’s worst salesperson.

“Same goes for the commercials. I have been in plenty of pitches where the mentality is, “Let’s win the logo and figure out how to deliver it afterwards.” That is an immediate red flag for me. If a client gives me their annual budget, I assume that is the budget, and not an opportunity for me to under-scope the work and ask for more money six months later.

“Poor scoping fails everyone. The client does not receive the service they were promised, and the team is expected to deliver more than it has been resourced to provide. I am fiercely protective of my clients, but I am equally protective of the people I ask to do the work.

“That may sound like a terrible sales strategy, but it means clients trust me when I do recommend additional work, a larger scope or even a fee increase. They know I am not pushing something that isn’t a valid need or recommendation. I had one of the most rewarding moments of my career recently, and it came down almost entirely to that trust.

“Several years ago, I led and won an agency-of-record pitch. The scope became smaller during the process, but we still treated it as an important relationship. I led the pitch and onboarding, built a strong relationship with the client and stayed in touch after moving agencies. Years later, I ran into her at an event and she mentioned that her organisation was preparing to review its agency support. I did not immediately turn the conversation into a sales pitch. We were catching up, and it was not the right moment. I followed up separately afterwards and asked whether my new agency could be considered.

“Then, lo and behold, another former client of mine turned out to be a key decision-maker in the RFP. He saw my name on the list, and long story short, they called me up and said “We both know you, we’ve both worked with you and we both trust you.” They cancelled the global RFP and awarded my agency the work.

“Let’s be honest: that is not normal, but it was one of those moments when I thought, “Oh wow, all of this relationship-building really does pay off.” That trust took roughly four years to build, but resulted in one of the most meaningful wins of my career. Honesty may not always produce the quickest sale, but it creates trust that compounds over time and that is far more valuable.”

In fiscal 2023 you won pitches worth more than $6.5 million in new revenue, including a win worth over $4 million a year that accounted for around 20% of the agency’s revenue at the time. What do you think made that pitch land?

“Good lord, that pitch was a lot of work. I definitely aged in a very short amount of time. But without question, the team won it. It was a global pitch involving people across the US and UK, so there were plenty of early mornings, late nights and competing perspectives to bring together. But we had a genuinely good team. We had great chemistry and enjoyed jumping into the fire together and everyone really wanted to win. Every person was willing to do what it took to produce the strongest possible response.

“My role is not to be the subject-matter expert on every aspect of a pitch. It is bring the right experts into the room and make sure they are aligned, motivated and able to do their best work together. It is the collective expertise of the team that demonstrates the agency’s value and ultimately wins the work. Where I add real value is in rallying those people and maintaining energy and momentum, even when a pitch is exhausting.

“A major pitch brings together strong personalities and conflicting opinions, and you are balancing more than the client’s expectations. You may also be responding to your own CEO, CFO and other senior agency stakeholders, all of whom have valid but sometimes competing perspectives. One of my strengths is navigating those dynamics without allowing the team to lose focus or momentum. Everyone needs to feel heard, but at some point, we also need to make a decision and keep moving.

“The moment that probably made the greatest difference came almost at the very end. We had built a deck of roughly 100 slides and printed the entire thing across the walls of a war room. It felt like a return to the old-school agency days. Then, together, we went through it slide by slide and cut it almost in half.

“It was a brutal editing process, but it forced us to answer the most important question: what does this client actually need to hear from us? And that led us to challenge the RFP itself. The client had given us a specific assignment, and the obvious approach would have been to answer it exactly as written. But we did not believe that completing the assignment in the conventional way would get them to the goals they had set. 

“So we told them that. We explained that before we could even get to the assignment, there were several fundamental pieces missing. If they genuinely wanted to achieve the level of change they had described, they would need to make some much bigger moves first. We outlined what those moves were, why they mattered and what the path forward could look like. That was risky. You never quite know how a client will react when you challenge the premise of their own RFP. But I think it demonstrated that we were not there simply to follow instructions and win the work. We were thinking about what it would actually take to deliver the result they wanted.

“By cutting the deck, challenging the assignment and building everything around one central thread, we gave ourselves the space to have a real conversation. We did not have to rush, and the client had time to ask questions, challenge us and experience what it would actually be like to work with the team.

“The most senior decision-maker on the call later said it was the best pitch he had ever seen. I think that was because we did more than give them a polished response. We showed them something they had not asked for but genuinely needed, and we gave them a view of how much further the business could go if they were prepared to make those bigger moves.

“So I think the pitch landed because the client saw the two things they needed to see: a highly capable, genuinely united team and a clear, ambitious point of view about the value we could create. We did not win by showing them everything we knew or simply giving them what they asked for. We won by having the discipline and the confidence to tell them what we believed they actually needed.

Your work earned a Gold TITAN Business Award in 2024 for business development, in a year that saw a new-business process introduced, win rates improve and the pipeline strengthen. Which changes or input do you believe made the biggest difference to the numbers?

“Dare I say process? When I first moved into new business as a full-time role, there was a surprising lack of structure around it. There was no consistent way to manage inbound opportunities, qualify them or decide which were genuinely worth pursuing.

“Then, once an RFP began, it became a chaotic exercise in pulling together different people, creating disconnected sections and trying to force everything into one coherent response at the end. Honestly, I think a lot of agencies still operate like that. An RFP arrives and it is an absolute mad dash to the finish line.

“If we won, there was no clear roadmap for handover or onboarding either. That created chaos across client service, finance, media and delivery—at the exact moment when we were supposed to be giving the client confidence that they had made the right decision. So I focused on building two connected systems: a pitch process and an onboarding programme.

“Every opportunity is different, and somehow every RFP finds a new way to ask a familiar question. Every. Time. But that does not mean the entire process needs to be reinvented. We created reusable frameworks, clearer stages, defined responsibilities and a consistent approach that could be adapted to each opportunity.

“My goal during a pitch is to remove as much unnecessary work from the specialists as possible. They are usually contributing alongside their billable client responsibilities, so their time should be spent on the strategic, creative and technical thinking only they can provide. I take ownership of the structure, communications, timelines, commercials, resourcing and overall narrative so the experts have space to do their best work.

“That changed the experience of participating in new business. People knew my pitches would be organised, what was expected of them and how their contribution connected to the wider story. Process did not make the work formulaic, it gave everyone more space.

“I applied the same approach to onboarding. We developed internal win briefings, client orientation materials, kickoff frameworks, discovery sessions, checklists and clear handovers. These were not generic timeline slides we showed during a pitch and never looked at again. They were the actual tools we used after the win. Onboarding can be an anxious period for both sides. Everyone is excited, but everyone is also thinking, “Okay, now we actually have to do this.” A visible, repeatable process gives the client confidence, gives the team clarity and helps the relationship begin in the right way. RFPs are inherently insane, but they don’t have to be run that way.”

Your view is that growth cannot rely on a few people pulling everything together at the last minute, and that it needs a repeatable operating model behind it. What are the essential components of that model for any leader building a growth function?

“Three things. First, a repeatable growth model begins with internal alignment. Before you brief the wider team, the organisation needs a clear view of what the opportunity is, why it is right for the agency, what it will take to win and whether it is commercially viable. That can be difficult when an RFP has a short turnaround and senior calendars are full, but skipping that alignment usually creates much more work later.

“I try to distil every opportunity into a simple narrative: this is what the client is asking for, this is why we are well placed to deliver it, and this is how we intend to approach it. Early alignment means senior stakeholders are not surprised later, the pitch has visible backing, and really important leaders can help remove barriers or make resources available when needed.

“Second, Finance should be part of that conversation from the outset. Too often, finance is consulted at the end, once the scope and solution have effectively been decided. By then, the team may have developed something the client cannot afford or the agency cannot deliver profitably.

“I am not a CFO, nor do I pretend to be. I rely on finance and resourcing specialists to help create a model that works within the client’s budget while providing the agency with healthy revenue and margins. They need to understand the full opportunity, the delivery requirements and any deliberate investment the agency is making. A commercially sound model should be built alongside the solution, not applied to it at the last minute.

“Third is essential: a proper team brief. I have seen entire RFPs copied into a Slack channel or emailed to a group with little more than a deadline attached. That transfers the burden of interpreting the opportunity to every individual and almost guarantees that people will begin with different assumptions.

“I create a briefing deck for every significant RFP. It requires more work from me upfront, but it forces me to digest the brief, identify the key issues and translate it into something the team can use. I then bring everyone together, talk through the opportunity, clarify roles and record the session so there is one consistent source of direction. People know what we are trying to achieve, what they own and how their expertise fits into the whole.

“More broadly, a sustainable growth function needs clear qualification criteria, defined decision-makers, realistic timelines, accountable owners and a consistent path from opportunity through contracting and onboarding. It also needs a learning loop: after a win or loss, the organisation should capture what worked, what did not and what needs to change next time.

“The objective is not to make every pitch identical. It is to make the operating environment consistent enough that the team can focus its energy on the thinking that should be bespoke. Align the leaders, involve finance early, brief the team properly, establish clear ownership and carry that discipline through contracting and onboarding.”

As Senior Vice President of New Business at The Marketing Practice, you lead growth across EMEA alongside selected global media agency-of-record pitches. Where do you see the greatest opportunities emerging in B2B marketing and media over the next few years?

“That’s a difficult question because the goalposts are moving constantly. B2B marketing teams are being asked to do more with less, while AI and increasingly sophisticated platforms are changing what clients actually need from their agencies.

“I do think the traditional agency model is under pressure. If your value is based mainly on producing outputs or completing tasks that technology can now automate, you are going to struggle. Agencies need to be much clearer about where they add value and how they work alongside the technology their clients are already adopting.

“But I don’t buy into the idea that agencies are dying. They’re evolving. There may be fewer of them in the future, but the strongest will combine deep specialism, strategic judgement and the ability to connect different parts of a client’s organisation. Technology can make things faster, but it cannot always make sense of the complexity. And B2B is complex. Our clients are often selling highly specialised products through long buying cycles involving multiple decision-makers, global teams, different systems and layers of governance. Adoption can be slower than in B2C, not because B2B organisations are less sophisticated, but because there are simply more moving parts.

“Many businesses have invested significantly in AI and are now asking, “Okay, but how do we actually use this, and where is the return?” That creates a real opportunity for agencies to help clients move from experimenting with the technology to applying it in a meaningful way. AI can analyse information, create efficiencies and support optimisation. What it cannot do on its own is align brand, demand, media, sales and measurement around one commercial goal. Clients will still need experienced B2B partners who understand their market, can simplify a complex proposition and know how to get different teams moving in the same direction.

“I also think there is a huge opportunity for B2B brands to be more ambitious about brand-building. One area I am particularly excited about is sports marketing. B2B brands are already spending significant amounts on sports partnerships, but those investments often sit in a silo. The sponsorship may be owned by one team, paid media by another, customer hospitality by a third and sales by someone else entirely. They all have different budgets, objectives and ways of measuring success.

“Signing the partnership is really only the beginning. So what happens next? How will you reach the right audience? How does it support your wider campaign? How will sales use it? What experience are you creating for customers and prospects, and how will you know whether that very large investment actually worked?

“At TMP we’re building a more connected approach across B2B marketing, media and sports partnerships. It is a newer capability for us, but it is one I am super excited about because it brings together areas that have historically been treated separately.

“So, for me, the greatest opportunities will be for agencies that can embrace technology without allowing it to commoditise their value – and that can connect specialist capabilities that have traditionally operated in silos. The winners will be the partners that combine new technology with human judgement, deep B2B expertise and a real understanding of how their clients’ businesses actually work.”

You believe the experts in the room win the business rather than any single individual, and that your job is to connect them, create clarity and keep everyone moving in the same direction. What advice would you give to organisations looking to take that next step in growth leadership?

“I have lovingly been called “the velvet hammer,” and it may be one of the most accurate descriptions of how I approach growth leadership. Depending on the week or how many hours I’ve slept, there may be slightly more hammer than velvet, but you genuinely need both.

“The velvet is the ability to bring together different personalities and disciplines, create excitement and make people want to contribute. Most of the experts you need already have demanding client roles, so your job is to give them clarity: why the opportunity matters, what they own and how their expertise fits into the wider story.

“I do not need to be the expert on every aspect of the pitch. My strength is bringing in the right people, giving them space to do their thing and making sure all of that brilliant thinking comes together as one clear response. The team wins the business; my job is to keep them aligned, motivated and moving in the same direction.

“But motivation only gets you so far, and sometimes we need the hammer. Also known as Business Blair (lovingly). If new business is genuinely an agency priority, it cannot continually be treated as secondary work. People need to arrive prepared and deliver what they have committed to. Equally, if someone does not have the capacity, you need to work with resourcing and leadership to create it. You cannot call something a priority and then expect people to deliver it around the edges of their day jobs.

“That balance also applies externally. I see myself as both a client advocate and an agency advocate, because unlike the slogan we’re all taught, the customer isn’t always right! When I am negotiating scope, fees, hours, SLAs or contract terms, I am not simply trying to get the deal signed. I am trying to create the best possible conditions for the relationship to succeed. I want the team inheriting the account to know I have their back. I will not agree to unrealistic expectations, cut the fee without adjusting the service or make commitments that put them in an impossible position. Protecting the agency team also protects the client, because a properly resourced and supported team is far more likely to deliver what was promised.

“So my advice is to choose a growth leader who can do both: rally people and build trust, but also create accountability, make difficult decisions and hold the line when necessary. Growth leadership is not about winning at any cost. It is about knowing when to use the velvet, when to use the hammer and how to set both the client and the agency up for success.”