Guest · B2B brand and storytelling
Chris Bagnall
Chief Executive Officer, Transmission
Nearly three decades in B2B, founder and CEO of Transmission, making the case that brand, not the lead funnel, drives growth.
About
Chris Bagnall is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Transmission, a B2B marketing and creative agency he started twelve years ago. It now runs close to 250 people across eight offices, and Bagnall describes it as the largest independently owned B2B agency in the world. He is known for arguing that B2B should be brand-led, culturally relevant and commercially fluent, and against the volume-driven lead funnel.
Bagnall has spent nearly three decades in B2B marketing. He began client side for five or six years before moving into agency land around 2000 to 2001, joining a small media agency that grew fast into what he calls the world's largest B2B tech media agency. There he came to see a gap for a B2B marketing and creative agency that understood execution in the round, not just media, at a time when creative and marketing shops leaned on outside PR, social and media agencies for execution.
He founded Transmission on that premise: clients want specialism and generalism connected at global scale. Under Bagnall the firm has built a reputation for research it publishes each year at Cannes, from the power of B2B brand awareness to the CMO to CFO divide, a board-ready CMO diagnostic and what he describes as the first behavioural science study in B2B. His work spans culturally relevant brand building, including bringing HP's business-to-business side back into sponsorship through a deal with Wrexham, and a persistent case that marketing must speak the commercial language of the board.
Career26 years
- 2013 to now Transmission CEO & Founder
- 2001 to 2013 DWA Media Managing Director, EMEA
- 2000 to 2001 Cable & Wireless Advertising and Sponsorship Manager
How Chris thinks3 convictions
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Customer obsession over CRM
Bagnall frames customer obsession as sitting in the customer's seat rather than optimising for your own sales pipeline. He contrasts it with CRM, which he calls inherently inward-facing, built to store and report for internal needs. For him the Amazon and Netflix habit of predicting what someone wants next belongs in B2B.
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Generalists over specialists
Bagnall argues the old career advice to specialise no longer holds, because no single skill looks the same in one to five years. He tells new marketers to become generalists and to think like entrepreneurs who understand how business works. The same logic drives his agency model, specialism and generalism connected at scale.
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Brand beats the lead funnel
Bagnall calls the MQL to SQL machine outdated and fundamentally flawed, pointing to the 95 to 5 rule as proof that volume-led demand generation fishes in a tiny bucket. He believes chasing a predictable funnel drives bad behaviour and stagnates potential. Long-term brand building, he says, lifts every other facet of marketing and decides who gets considered at all.
