Get the business decisions in writing
before you plan the campaign
A 30-minute course for marketers who keep being handed tactics. Answer the next request with a Business Strategy Brief the business completes, review it in 20 minutes, and turn it into a campaign brief that ties every tactic to the business objective.
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The request arrives with the answer already chosen
It is 4pm on a Thursday. "Can we get a campaign live for the new product by the end of next month?"
You get a channel and a date. You do not get the revenue the product has to bring in, the customers who should buy it, the budget, or how anyone will judge whether it worked. Those decisions sit in someone's head and were never written down, or they were never thought through at all.
So you build the campaign. Three months later the leads are the wrong size of company, the target you are measured against appears for the first time in the review, and the conversation turns to whether marketing is doing its job.
You already know the answer is to ask better questions first. What stops you is not knowing how to ask without sounding like you are blocking the business.
- You are handed tactics, then held to results you never agreed.
- You write the business brief yourself, so you own a guess about what the business wants.
- The budget is set before anyone has costed the goal.
- Every request starts from nothing, because no agreed strategy sits behind it.
Give the business the pen
That is why we built Before You Say Yes: a 30-minute course that shows you how to answer a tactic request with a brief the business completes, so the strategy decisions belong to the people who own them.
You agree to help. You send the brief. You review their answers in 20 minutes. Then you write the campaign brief, and every tactic in it can be traced back to a business objective with a number on it.
Six lessons, 30 minutes, three tools you keep
Each lesson runs four to eight minutes, as a written lesson and a short video. Do the whole course over a coffee, then use it on a live request the same week.
Why tactic requests arrive with the answer already chosen
Spot what a request leaves out, and name which decisions belong to the business and which belong to you.
The Business Strategy Brief
Send a stakeholder eight questions they can answer without marketing jargon, covering objectives and KPIs, markets, audience, positioning, timing, budget and review.
How to ask for the brief without saying no
Write the reply that gets the brief completed, in the language of a sales leader, a founder or a product lead.
The 20-minute brief review
Run six checks on a completed brief, including the budget test that shows whether the money can reach the goal.
From business brief to campaign brief
Turn their answers into a campaign brief, then into the media, creative, content, offer or event brief the work needs.
What to do next
Put the brief into your planning process, so it arrives completed instead of being chased.
The three tools, yours to keep and reuse
The Business Strategy Brief
The one your stakeholder fills in. Eight questions, each with a worked example.
The Brief Review Checklist
The six checks, what to ask when a check fails, and the budget arithmetic to work through with the stakeholder.
From Business Brief to Campaign Brief
The translation sheet: how clear business priorities become marketing decisions, and where each one lands in your campaign brief.
Who this is for
This course is for marketers who want to deliver more business impact, and to be seen as a strategic business partner, not just executing someone else's tactics.
- You take marketing requests from sales, product, finance or a founder, and they arrive as tactics.
- You are measured on results you did not set, and want that to change without a fight.
- You brief agencies or suppliers and want every brief to trace back to a business number.
Short course
Before You Say Yes
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- Six lessons, about 30 minutes in total, self-paced and yours to return to.
- The Business Strategy Brief, the Brief Review Checklist and the translation sheet, as PDFs you can reuse on every request.
- One worked example carried the whole way through, from a A$1.5 million target to a campaign brief.
- A knowledge check to confirm what you will do differently.
A single payment, no subscription, no renewal fee. Less than an hour of an agency's time, for a method you use on every request that follows.
Already an annual member? This course is included with your membership.
Want the full strategy behind the briefs? B2B Marketing Fundamentals is US$199 at the founding price until 31 December 2026.
Evidence informs. Judgement decides.
Back2Marketing teaches marketers to make decisions they can defend. Every claim in this course is grounded in named research or in practice, and where the evidence is an estimate we say so on the page.
The briefing problem is well documented. The BetterBriefs Project surveyed more than 1,700 marketing and agency professionals across 70 countries. 80 per cent of marketers said they write good briefs. 10 per cent of agencies agreed. On strategic direction the gap runs 78 per cent against 5 per cent, and respondents estimated that a third of marketing budget is wasted through poor briefing. That waste figure is their estimate rather than a measured number.
The brief in this course is built on the same structure the IPA, ISBA, MCCA and PRCA set out in their joint briefing guide, in language a business stakeholder can answer.
Back2Marketing is new, and we would rather say that plainly than manufacture social proof you cannot trust. What you can judge is the work: the named evidence behind every claim, and a 14-day money-back guarantee on every course.
Questions, answered
Lesson 3 is written for exactly that. You agree to the request first, then ask for the brief with a reason that serves them: the work gets aimed at their number instead of your guess. The course also covers what to do when someone refuses, which is to write down the risk and the goal you will be measured on, send it, and agree a review date. Most people who will not write a brief will correct a number they disagree with.
The three tools come with the course, and you could copy the questions from this page. The course teaches how to ask so the brief comes back completed, how to test the answers in 20 minutes, and what to do when the budget cannot reach the goal.
Each lesson runs four to eight minutes. Lesson 2 gives you the brief and Lesson 3 gives you the email that sends it, so you can send a brief to a stakeholder today and take the rest of the course while you wait for it to come back.
One campaign built against the wrong goal costs more than this course, usually by a factor of hundreds. For the price of a couple of coffees you get the method and three tools you will reuse on every request, and a way of working that delivers more business impact and has you seen as a strategic marketing partner rather than a tactical execution arm.
Short courses are included with the annual membership at US$290 a year. They are not included with the monthly plan, where they are bought separately. If you are already an annual member, open it from your library rather than paying again.
It is designed for B2B marketers, and consumer marketers can use it too, because the questions are about business decisions rather than channels. The worked example is a software company, and the method fits any business where someone outside marketing asks marketing for work.
No. Fundamentals is where you build the agreed strategy that makes each brief faster to complete, and it is the natural next step if you find yourself rebuilding the strategy for every request.
A 14-day money-back guarantee applies. Email hello@back2marketing.com within 14 days and we will refund you.
Use it on the next request
In 30 minutes you get eight questions to send, six checks to run, and a campaign brief that starts from a revenue number the business has signed off. The three tools are yours to reuse on every request after that.
Handle the next request this way and the conversation moves from which channel to use to what the business needs and what it will pay for.
Evidence informs. Judgement decides.
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