Three months in: what we've learnt building Spanb2b

We went public with Span in July.

There had already been a few months of work behind the scenes by then. We’d spent time shaping what we wanted the agency to be, where we thought we could add value, and talking to B2B marketers about the problems they were actually trying to solve.

Before launch, we also ran our 2026 State of Marketing survey with a small group of senior B2B marketers, followed by another looking at supplier partnerships and what people want from the agencies and partners they work with.

By late May, we’d made our way onto a couple of RFPs, won some early work and had a few more conversations starting to turn into something.

Then we launched.

Things moved pretty quickly. So did the learning curve.

We’ve made mistakes in the last three months, some fairly basic ones.

Some have been in how we’ve run Span. Some have been in the work itself. There are things we should have asked sooner, things we should have challenged harder, times we should have been clearer and decisions we would make differently now.

Some of it was probably legacy agency thinking creeping into a business we were trying to build differently. We’ve had to unlearn a few things, tighten others and get much clearer on what we wanted Span to be.

A couple of those lessons have cost us.

That stings when it is your own business, but there is no value in pretending otherwise. The important bit is what happens next: fix it, learn from it and make the next decision better.

The result has been a better business and, more importantly, better work for our clients.

Span is new. Our experience isn’t.

Between the three of us, we’ve spent years agency-side, in-house and across media, strategy and demand. That gives us a good base, but running your own business still finds new ways to teach you things. Processes have changed, boundaries have got clearer and we ask certain questions earlier now.

We’ll probably get other things wrong over the next three months too. The aim is to get better each time.

At the same time, a lot of what we thought would matter before launch does seem to be holding up.

A lot changes by market. A lot doesn’t.

One thing the work has reinforced is how much nuance there is in B2B.

Different markets have different levels of maturity. Products and categories come with their own context. Technical audiences consume information differently from commercial ones, and buying groups vary.

So do the messages, content, channels and amount of education needed.

Those differences matter because they change the plan.

You cannot lift something from one market, drop it into another and expect the same result. But beneath that, we keep finding ourselves back at a familiar set of questions: who actually matters, what do they care about, where should we focus, what needs to change between different account groups, how do brand, demand, media and sales work together, and what are we going to measure to know whether any of it is moving?

That has been useful validation for us.

We built Span around the idea that strategy should connect those decisions rather than sit in a deck before everyone goes off and does their own bit. Three months of client work has made us more confident in that.

The work has taken a few different shapes

Media has moved faster than we expected.

We’ve made the cut on opportunities we weren’t sure we would and won work in places we thought might take a little longer.

Some of that work has meant supporting an enterprise endpoint security platform globally, helping a global corporate and legal services provider sharpen its positioning, account for regional nuance and turn that strategy into more distinctive activation, and building a market-entry campaign with a tailored ABM approach for a consumer finance platform.

One programme has taken us into planning a competitive takeover in Sydney, while other conversations have pulled us into areas like GEO, AEO and employee advocacy.

There’s been a good mix of scale and specificity. Some problems need a global view; others need you to get very close to a relatively small group of accounts and understand what will actually move them.

That mix suits us.

Connecting the dots has mattered

Some of the feedback we’ve been happiest to hear has been about our reporting.

Reporting in B2B can get very busy very quickly. Lots of channels, lots of numbers, lots of dashboards. Most platforms are already perfectly capable of telling you what happened inside that platform, so repeating those numbers in another deck does not add much.

We’re more interested in what happens when you put the pieces together.

Which accounts are we reaching? Where is engagement changing? Are we getting into more of the buying group? What are we seeing across different channels and audiences? What looks useful, what looks like noise, and does any of it mean we should change what we’re doing?

The data is rarely perfect. Sometimes there’s CRM data, sometimes there isn’t, and sometimes several systems each hold one bit of the answer.

The value is in making sense of what you do have and turning it into something a marketing team can use.

The feedback we’ve had so far has given us confidence that we’re taking that in the right direction.

Span has started to exist outside the client work too

Outside the client work, a few things have made Span feel more established.

We put some of our own money behind a playful DOOH campaign, held our first Span summer drinks in a pub garden with nearly 100 people, and had a student join us for a summer placement.

We’ve also started interviewing people from very different corners of B2B for a new editorial series, which has already taken us into conversations around publisher audiences, regional differences, leads, intent, data and what happens after marketing hands something over.

We’ve spent time talking to other founders and business owners too, and people have been generous with their advice. They’ve been open about where they got things right, where they got caught out and what they’d do differently if they started again.

We’ve already used some of it.

Three months is three months

There are still plenty of things we need to work out.

Former colleagues have introduced us to people, friends have recommended us, and partners and suppliers have opened doors and helped when we’ve needed it.

That support matters, but it does not remove the hard parts of building a business. You still have to pitch, deliver, chase things, make decisions, deal with contracts and cash flow, have awkward conversations, and work out what deserves your attention and what doesn’t.

Above all, we’ve had B2B marketers willing to back us early and trust us with work that matters to their business.

That trust raises the bar for us, and we know we have to keep earning it.

It means being clear when something isn’t working, fixing things when we get them wrong, and getting better as the work develops.

Three months in, that responsibility matters more to us than the list of things we’ve done.

There is a long way to go.

The next three months already include new programmes, more things we want to test and a few trips in the diary, including Singapore.

We’ll keep doing the work, tightening the bits that need tightening, and see where the next three months take us.