Louis Gudema
Most B2B companies spend marketing budget on long-payback brand activity while their pipeline is starving. Programs that could close revenue inside a quarter, search, retargeting, account-based outreach, customer expansion, are run lightly or not at all. The tension is sequencing: growth-stage leaders need a defensible order of operations that funds the brand work the CFO wants from the demand work the sales team needs.
Louis Gudema is a fractional CMO and the author of Bullseye Marketing, and he helps B2B companies sequence their marketing so the fastest-payback programs fund the longer brand bets.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Louis Gudema
- He has published an award-winning framework for the order in which B2B marketing should be built. The Bullseye Marketing model, set out in a 400-page second edition that won the 2023 Goody Business Book Award for Best Marketing/Branding Book, sequences fast-payback demand programs before brand investment rather than running them in parallel.
- He has run the playbook himself at scale. Gudema founded Magic Hour Communications, pivoted it from services into an early SaaS business with a Web CMS product, grew it into one of the top firms in its national market, and exited in 2009, so the operating advice is tested against a P&L he owned.
- He has worked across roughly 200 organisations from IBM down to early-stage MIT spin-outs, which means a CMO or founder gets advice calibrated to the actual stage of their business rather than a generic enterprise template.
- His MIT Venture Mentoring Service work, including ten consecutive years of the MIT marketing boot camp, gives him pattern recognition on what actually moves revenue for a young technology company versus what wastes founder time.
- He brings a behavioural-economics layer that most B2B marketers ignore. His brain-science talk applies seven named heuristics (anchoring, authority, availability, liking, loss aversion, reciprocity, scarcity) to live sales and marketing decisions.
Biography highlights
- Author of Bullseye Marketing: How to Grow Your B2B Business Faster, second edition 2023.
- 2023 Goody Business Book Award winner for Best Marketing/Branding Book; finalist at the Book Excellence Awards; named to Book Authority’s Best Marketing Plan Books of All Time.
- Founder and former CEO of Magic Hour Communications, an early SaaS firm with the MagicWand Web CMS, sold in 2009.
- Founder of Revenue & Associates, LLC, a fractional CMO practice for B2B startups and growth-stage companies.
- Mentor with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and leader of the annual MIT marketing boot camp, tenth edition in 2024.
- Contributor to Harvard Business Review, MarketingProfs, HubSpot, VentureBeat, Content Marketing Institute, Chiefmartec, and TechTarget.
Biography
Most B2B marketing budgets are spent in the wrong order. Brand campaigns get funded before the demand-generation programs that would have paid for them, and the pipeline arrives late. Bullseye Marketing, the book Louis Gudema published in its second edition in 2023, exists to fix that sequencing problem.
The framework is built around three concentric rings. Start with the customers and prospects already in the system, where conversion is fastest. Move outward into demand capture and active-buyer programs, search, retargeting, and review sites. Then, with cash flow funding it, invest in the brand and awareness work that compounds over the years. The book won the 2023 Goody Business Book Award for Best Marketing/Branding Book and a Book Excellence Awards finalist nod, and was named one of the Best Marketing Plan Books of All Time by Book Authority.
Gudema runs the playbook for a living. He founded Magic Hour Communications, pivoted it from a marketing-services agency into an early SaaS firm built around a Web CMS product, grew it into one of the top three or four firms in its market, and exited in 2009. He now operates revenue & associates as a fractional head of marketing, and has worked with roughly 200 organisations from IBM to early-stage MIT spin-outs.
The MIT connection runs deep. Gudema mentors through the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and led the tenth annual MIT marketing boot camp in 2024. His writing in Harvard Business Review, MarketingProfs, HubSpot, and VentureBeat extends the same operating thesis: B2B growth comes from disciplined sequencing of programs with measurable ROI, not from creative reinvention.
Key speaking topics
- B2B marketing strategy and demand generation
- Bullseye Marketing framework
- Startup and scale-up growth marketing
- Behavioural economics in B2B sales and marketing
- Fractional and interim marketing leadership
- Account-based marketing and pipeline acceleration
Ideal for
- CEOs and founders of B2B technology and SaaS companies under $50m in revenue
- CMOs and heads of marketing at growth-stage businesses need to defend program spend to a CFO
- Investor-backed startup cohorts and accelerator programs looking for a sequenced go-to-market playbook
- Sales leaders responsible for the pipeline who want to align marketing programs to revenue-cycle reality
Audience outcomes
- A defensible order in which to run B2B marketing programs, with the fastest-payback work first
- A working knowledge of the three-ring Bullseye Marketing Framework and how to apply it to an existing budget
- Specific demand-generation tactics, search, retargeting, ABM, customer expansion, that map to short payback windows
- A view of how seven behavioural heuristics change conversion in real B2B sales and marketing assets
- A shared vocabulary for marketing, sales, and finance to evaluate program ROI on the same terms
Talks
A working session on the three-ring Bullseye Marketing Framework and the order in which B2B programs should be built.
Key takeaways:
- Why fast-payback demand programs should be funded before brand investment in most B2B contexts
- The specific programs that sit in each ring of the Bullseye model and how to sequence them
- How to evaluate marketing spend against payback windows the CFO will accept
A startup-focused application of the Bullseye Marketing Framework for founders and early commercial leaders.
Key takeaways:
- The marketing programs that move revenue inside a quarter for an early-stage B2B company
- How to combine immediate-impact tactics with the longer-term brand work that compounds
- Where founder-led marketing breaks down as a company moves past its first ten customers
A talk on applying behavioural economics to B2B commercial decisions.
Key takeaways:
- How seven named heuristics, anchoring, authority, availability, liking, loss aversion, reciprocity, and scarcity, change buyer behaviour
- Where to apply them in pricing pages, sales emails, and proposal documents
- How to test behavioural changes without rebuilding the funnel