There is a problem inside many energy businesses that rarely gets discussed openly, and almost never gets named as the real cause of underperformance.
Marketing and business development often sit close to each other on the organisational chart, but operate from entirely different assumptions about what the business needs to communicate, who it is speaking to, and what actually moves opportunities forward.
Both functions are trying to support growth. But in many North Sea and broader energy businesses, they are doing it in parallel rather than in partnership. And that gap has a commercial cost that is much larger than most leadership teams realise.
Why Energy Businesses Are Particularly Prone to This
This is not a generic business problem. It has specific roots in how the energy sector evolved.
Business development in oil and gas grew up around relationships, networks, approved supplier lists and tenders. It was, for a long time, largely a people discipline. You knew the right people, you were in the room when decisions were made, and marketing was largely irrelevant to how work was won.
Marketing came later. Often as a support function rather than a commercial one. Someone to manage the website, produce capability statements, organise exhibition stands and write press releases. Useful, but not central.
That legacy still shapes how the two functions operate today, even in businesses that have invested significantly in both. Business development thinks in terms of relationships, timing and procurement cycles. Marketing thinks in terms of visibility, messaging and market presence. Neither is wrong. But when they are not working from a shared understanding of how buyers actually decide, the output of both suffers.
And in a sector where shortlisting often happens before any direct engagement, where trust is built over months rather than meetings, and where multiple stakeholders shape a decision simultaneously, that misalignment is increasingly expensive.
What Business Development Knows That Marketing Never Hears
Here is where the practical cost sits.
Business development teams in energy businesses are having conversations every week that contain extraordinarily valuable commercial intelligence. They hear what buyers are concerned about. They know which objections are slowing decisions. They understand what competitors are saying and where they are gaining traction. They know which case studies land and which fall flat. They know what questions come up in every first meeting and which parts of the proposal always get challenged.
In most businesses, that insight stays in the heads of the BD team or in meeting notes that nobody else reads.
It rarely reaches marketing in a structured way. So marketing continues producing content, updating websites and building messaging based on what the business wants to say, rather than what buyers need to hear. The result is collateral that looks professional but does not support the actual conversations happening in the market.
The BD team creates their own decks because existing materials do not quite fit. Marketing produces assets that go largely unused. Case studies emphasise delivery credentials when buyers care more about risk reduction, operational impact and commercial outcomes. The website presents the business one way. Sales conversations reveal something slightly different.
None of this looks catastrophic in isolation. Together, it creates friction. And sustained friction affects growth.
The Cost Is Usually Invisible Until It Isn’t
This is precisely why misalignment so often goes unresolved. Its impact rarely shows up clearly enough to be attributed to the right cause.
It appears in slower sales progression. Proposals that do not land as well as they should. Opportunities that seem promising and then stall. Differentiation that feels thin despite genuine capability. Buyers who cannot quite articulate why your business is different from the three other suppliers they are evaluating.
Leadership often interprets these as market conditions. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they are direct symptoms of marketing and business development operating from different assumptions, and those are very different problems requiring very different responses.
In a tighter market, where winning work is harder and every touchpoint with a buyer matters more, the cost of getting this wrong compounds.
Why Culture Makes It Harder to Fix in Energy
Structure explains part of the problem. Culture explains the rest.
In many energy businesses, marketing is still primarily seen as communications and business development as revenue generation. Separate disciplines, separate priorities, separate conversations. Marketing is asked to “support sales.” Business development is measured on pipeline and wins. Neither function is fully accountable for the space in between.
That framing creates a quiet tension. BD teams can be protective of client relationships and reluctant to share commercial intelligence with people they see as sitting outside the commercial function. Marketing teams can feel removed from the reality of how work is actually won and end up defaulting to brand and awareness activity that feels safe but lacks commercial connection.
Senior leadership often assumes the two functions are aligned because they attend the same meetings and share the same broad objectives. In practice, alignment rarely happens without deliberate structure to create it.
What Alignment Actually Changes
When marketing and business development are genuinely working from the same understanding of how buyers decide, the difference is tangible.
Messaging reflects the concerns that are actually slowing decisions rather than the capabilities the business is most proud of. Content answers the questions buyers are really asking rather than the ones the business assumes they are asking. Sales conversations become easier because the groundwork has already been laid by what buyers have read and seen. Proposals land more strongly because they are informed by a clearer picture of what matters to that specific buyer type.
Most importantly, marketing stops feeling like a cost of doing business and starts behaving like part of the commercial system.
That is what a strong energy marketing strategy should support. Not activity for activity’s sake, but commercial momentum.
A Useful Test
If your business development team sat down with marketing tomorrow and listed the five concerns buyers raise most often, would your website, your content and your messaging clearly reflect those concerns?
In most energy businesses, the honest answer is not fully. Sometimes not at all.
That gap is where misalignment lives. And it is often where commercial opportunity is being quietly lost.
Making Alignment Practical
Closing this gap does not require restructuring departments or introducing complex processes. It usually starts with something much simpler.
Business development insight needs to become a real and regular input into marketing decisions, not a quarterly debrief but an ongoing feed of what buyers are actually saying, asking and objecting to. That intelligence, treated as a content and messaging brief rather than a sales update, changes what marketing produces and how useful it becomes to the people having commercial conversations.
The businesses that do this well do not ask marketing to support sales. They use both functions as part of one connected commercial system. Buyers notice the difference, even if they cannot always articulate why one business feels clearer and more credible than another.
At AB Fiftyone, we work at the intersection of marketing and commercial strategy across the energy sector. We see this misalignment regularly in businesses with strong capability, good people and genuine ambition, and we understand what it takes to close the gap in a way that changes commercial outcomes rather than just marketing outputs.
If this feels familiar, it is probably worth a conversation.
