There’s a contradiction at the center of B2B marketing right now.
It began with a trend we noticed a few years ago. Marketers started recognizing the importance of measuring business outcomes, but struggled to move beyond channel and campaign performance metrics.
Our 2024 survey found 79% of marketing decision-makers felt more pressure to measure marketing success based on key business outcomes, yet nearly half struggled to translate marketing metrics into business insight. Most are still working on it.
Today, something similar is happening with AI. B2B marketers recognize the potential for AI to supercharge growth, but many are still stuck in experimentation mode, and adoption is tactical and limited to workflows at best.
The reason for both is the same: a weak underlying data foundation.
- Fragmented data across systems, with limited integration across marketing, sales and customer success
- Reactive analytics that tells marketers what already happened rather than looking ahead
- Lack of high-quality, structured data to power advanced AI applications
Most B2B brands are still early in their data maturity journey, despite seeing the power of outcome-based marketing and AI-driven growth. The tools exist. The intention exists. What’s missing is the connection between marketing activity and real business results — and that gap is quietly capping what B2B marketing can do.
Agencies aren’t immune. Clients aren’t just looking for campaign execution — they want partners who can help them make smarter decisions about where to invest, how to measure impact, and how to integrate AI into their marketing operations. In the next few years, it won’t be enough to shift from channel reporting to outcome-based measurement. The firms that win will be able to predict outcomes using advanced analytics and AI.
That gap is a big part of why we built our Outcome-Based Marketing approach. And it’s exactly why I’m excited to announce that Andrew Richardson is joining Walker Sands as Senior Vice President of Data & Analytics.
Deepening Our B2B Marketing Analytics Capabilities
In this role, Andrew will lead the continued evolution of our data, analytics, measurement and AI capabilities — strengthening how we embed rigorous B2B marketing analytics across strategy, execution, modeling and reporting for clients.
That means advancing our marketing attribution for B2B programs beyond last-click models into multi-touch frameworks that actually reflect how complex B2B buying decisions get made. It means building out more predictive B2B marketing forecasting so clients can make investment decisions ahead of results, not in response to them. It means sharpening audience intelligence, improving data governance, and accelerating our use of AI-powered tools to surface insights faster and more clearly.
The goal behind all of it is the same thing that drives everything we do at Walker Sands: giving clients the clarity to demonstrate how marketing drives outcomes in a measurable, indisputable way.
Why Andrew
Andrew brings more than 20 years of experience in data and analytics, including senior leadership roles at New Engen and Tinuiti. At Tinuiti, he built the Analytics and Marketing Science teams from the ground up and helped guide the company through its successful sale from Mountaingate Capital to New Mountain Capital in 2020 — the kind of high-stakes, board-level analytics work that only happens when measurement infrastructure is genuinely trusted.
What distinguishes Andrew isn’t just technical depth. It’s the combination of technical depth and practical judgment. He builds analytics systems that executives can actually use to make decisions — not dashboards that get reviewed once a quarter and quietly ignored.
When I asked him what drew him to Walker Sands, his answer reflected something we care about here:
“It’s rare to find a B2B agency that approaches its work more as an art form than as a checklist of actions to complete. I’m excited to help the team cut through the noise and uncover what truly drives growth for clients.”
That’s the right instinct. The data work only matters if it leads somewhere.
What This Means for B2B Brands Working With Us
The pressure on B2B marketing to demonstrate marketing ROI has never been higher — and the complexity of demonstrating it has never been greater. Longer buying cycles, multi-stakeholder decisions, fragmented attribution across digital and offline channels. The expectation from the C-suite is clear; the data infrastructure to meet it is still catching up at most organizations.
Andrew’s appointment is our investment in closing that gap for clients. More rigorous attribution. More credible forecasting. Deeper audience intelligence tied to real behavior. Measurement that holds up in a CFO review, not just a marketing dashboard.
This also accelerates the vision we’ve been building toward since our partnership with Mountaingate Capital last year — to become the preeminent data- and analytics-driven B2B growth agency. Andrew’s leadership of this practice is a significant step in that direction.
The Bigger Picture
Walker Sands has always grown deliberately. Every capability we’ve built — from strategic communications and digital marketing to GTM strategy, creative and content, and marketing operations — has been purposefully designed to offer B2B clients seamless, full-funnel, integrated programs that drive real business impact.
Andrew’s role is the next chapter of that. His technical rigor, leadership experience and practical approach to translating complex data into business decisions will advance our Outcome-based Marketing framework into the AI-driven era of B2B marketing.
We’re in building mode, and I can’t wait to share what comes next.
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