Prioritizing Your B2B Marketing Projects: The Art of Choosing What You Won’t Do

Forty sticky notes. Zero decisions.

You know the meeting. Start-of-year planning, the whole team, coffee, sticky notes. Two hours in, the whiteboard is full: website redesign, podcast, LinkedIn campaign, industry study, trade show. Forty ideas, all of them good. That’s exactly the trap.

Three months later, the team has completed four projects. Not the four it picked: four others. The ones that came up in the meantime, the ones someone kept pushing for, the ones that were urgent on a Tuesday morning. As for the whiteboard, someone who needed the room wiped it clean.

Prioritizing isn’t choosing what you’ll do. It’s choosing what you’ll drop. And that’s a lot harder.

The real problem isn’t (only) budget

Budgets are tight, and no one would argue otherwise. According to Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, the average marketing budget now accounts for 7.8% of company revenue, 18% less than four years ago. More than half of CMOs say they lack the budget (56%) or the resources (54%) to deliver their strategy.

But in Quebec, our study on B2B marketing practices tells a different story. The top internal challenge cited by respondents: delivering a large number of projects with a small team (35%). At the other end of the ranking, “developing and executing a marketing plan with discipline” barely registers at 4%. And yet strategy and marketing planning rank first (45%) as the biggest contributors to hitting their goals over the past year.

In other words, teams give planning credit when it works, but don’t see its absence as the problem. And without shared criteria for choosing, decisions still get made. Just not by you: by urgency, the loudest voice in the room or the org chart.

The good news? Fixing this doesn’t take budget. It takes a method.

Every extra project costs more than you think

Gerald Weinberg, a pioneer in technical team management, observed what happens when one person runs several projects in parallel. With two projects, they lose about 20% of their day switching between them. That leaves 40% per project. Not 50. Forty. With five projects, context switching eats up 75% of their time: each project gets just 5% of their attention.

These are ballpark figures, but the logic holds. And they give you a solid business case: adding a fifth project to a team already carrying four isn’t asking for 20% more effort. It’s sabotaging the other four.

Case in point: Sophie’s quarter

Meet Sophie, marketing director (fictional, but very realistic) at a 140-employee manufacturing company. Her team is just her and two colleagues. Over a 13-week quarter, that’s 39 person-weeks in theory. Once you take out meetings, emergencies, vacations and day-to-day work, about 30 are left for projects. That’s her real budget, measured in weeks, not dollars.

Her whiteboard has 14 ideas on it. How does she choose?

See, filter, decide: three tools, one funnel

The common mistake is thinking you have to pick one prioritization method. In reality, three of them fit together like the stages of a single funnel. The principle behind it all: the precision of the tool should match the cost of the decision. Analyzing 40 ideas in depth is a waste. Committing an entire quarter on the strength of a sticky note is reckless.

Step 1. See: the impact/effort matrix

Two axes, four boxes. The simplest framework there is:

• Quick wins (high impact, low effort): do them this week.
• Big bets (high impact, high effort): one at a time, not two. Remember Weinberg.
• Fill-ins (low impact, low effort): if there’s time left. There won’t be, and that’s fine.
• Money pits (low impact, high effort): say no. Really. These are often the most visible projects, and the hardest to turn down.

Here’s what the exercise looks like for Sophie:

The diagnosis: three quick wins, three money pits that could swallow the whole quarter… and nothing decided. Then the VP of Sales looks at the matrix and moves the podcast from the money pits to the big bets. Who’s right? Impossible to say: “high impact” is a word, not a measurement. And in a tug-of-war over a word, the best idea rarely wins. The most senior person does.

The matrix did its job: it surfaced a disagreement. But to settle it, you need to move from words to numbers.

Step 2. Filter: the ICE method

Popularized by Sean Ellis, who coined the term growth hacking, the ICE method is built for fast sorting. You score each project from 1 to 10 on impact (if it works, how much will it bring in?), confidence (how sure are you that it will work?) and ease (how simple is it to deliver, approvals included?), then multiply.

Here’s how Sophie sorted the main projects on her list:

Yes, it’s subjective. That’s the point: ICE isn’t there to make the decision. It’s there to shrink the list. Still, read the scores with a critical eye. In Sophie’s case, the newsletter redesign scores 216 points, far more than the website redesign (84). But that score is inflated by an ease rating of 9, while impact tops out at 3. When you multiply, one extreme rating outweighs everything else. So Sophie files the newsletter under fill-ins. On the flip side, the nurturing sequence, which landed among the fill-ins in step 1, comes in second here: the numbers corrected the first impression.

She also keeps the VP’s podcast despite its modest score (as well as the visual identity redesign, a favourite of upper management): cutting them at the sorting stage would have looked like a political move. Better to discuss them later, with numbers to back things up. Where should you draw the line? Keep as many projects as you’re willing to dig up real data for. For most teams, that’s five or six. Not fifteen.

Step 3. Decide: the RICE method

Developed by Sean McBride at Intercom, the RICE method adds a variable you can’t guess. The formula: (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort.

• Reach: the number of people affected per quarter. A real number, pulled from your analytics or your CRM. If you can’t name the source, it isn’t a number.
• Impact: from 0.25 (minimal) to 3 (massive), measured against the quarter’s objective.
• Confidence: 100% if you have data, 80% if you have good indicators, 50% if you’re guessing. That isn’t a flaw: it’s a signal to go find more information.
• Effort: in person-weeks, all in. Revisions and approvals included.

Here’s Sophie’s calculation for her five finalists:

Three takeaways. First, total effort adds up to 47 person-weeks, while Sophie has 30. That’s not an opinion, it’s arithmetic. Second, the winning project is the least exciting one on the list: optimizing a form page won’t win any awards, but that’s where the return is. Third, the podcast, dead last, is the VP’s project. So a score, on its own, doesn’t settle anything. It’s the start of a conversation.

Also read: AI Stole Your TOFU: Why Your B2B Website Needs Consideration Content

Three RICE pitfalls to avoid

Used poorly, RICE gives an arbitrary decision a veneer of science.

False precision. Three of the four variables are judgment calls. An impact of 3 instead of 2, and Sophie’s score jumps from 960 to 1,440. Comparing 960 to 25 is legitimate. Comparing 960 to 940 isn’t: in that case, pick the project the team is most excited to work on.

Underestimated effort. Teams count production time and forget about revisions and approvals. Rather than trying to estimate better, look at how long your last three similar projects actually took.

Made-up reach. “About 5,000” with no source is an opinion dressed up as a number. No source, no score.

The blind spot: RICE works against your brand

It’s structural. Brand projects have diffuse reach, an impact measured in years rather than quarters, and inevitably low confidence. The result: a low score, every time. Yet neglecting your brand is a very bad strategy in B2B, where buying cycles are long and most of the market isn’t ready to buy right now.

The solution: split your capacity into three buckets rather than a single ranking, following the 70/20/10 model.

• Performance (70%): what already works. Optimization, conversion, proven channels. This is where you use RICE.
• Brand building (20%): in-depth content, brand awareness, relationships. These projects never compete against performance projects.
• Experimentation (10%): new channels (like ChatGPT and Reddit), tests, bets. A budget you’re prepared to lose.

These percentages are a starting point. In B2B, think of the 20% as a floor. What matters is that the bucket exists and doesn’t get eaten up by emergencies.

For Sophie, that means 21 weeks for performance, 6 for brand building and 3 for experimentation. And the conversation with her VP takes on a whole different tone. It’s no longer “your podcast isn’t worth it,” but rather: “The podcast is brand building. We have six weeks for that this quarter, and it needs 12. What do we do?”

Also read: Is Your Brand Ready for a Rebrand?

The biases that sabotage your decisions

The best formula is useless if the real decision gets made in the hallway after the meeting. Three biases are especially stubborn:

• The HiPPO effect (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion): without clear data, the group falls in line behind the most senior person. The real cost is all the good ideas nobody bothers pitching anymore.
• The planning fallacy: we consistently underestimate timelines, even after missing our last ten deadlines.
• The sunk cost fallacy: “we’re too far in to stop now” isn’t an argument. The only question that matters: starting today, is this the best use of the resources we have left?

The antidotes are simple and free. Score independently before the discussion, then compare: if Sophie estimates the podcast at 12 weeks and her VP at 3, you’ve just found the real topic of the meeting. Have the most senior person speak last, and say the rule out loud. Estimate from your track record rather than your gut. And run a pre-mortem: “It’s six months from now and the project has failed. Why?”

Making prioritization stick beyond one meeting

A method applied once changes nothing. Remember the 3 Cs:

• Criteria: the same scoring grid for everyone, defined before looking at the projects.
• Cadence: a fixed checkpoint, usually every quarter, and a freeze in between. A request that lands in February waits for the next session.
• Consistency: a single place where everything is recorded, and a dashboard someone actually looks at.

When it comes to tools, pick the simplest one that works. For a team of one to five people, a spreadsheet is more than enough. Add one crucial column that almost everyone forgets: the actual impact observed after the fact. That’s what turns an estimation exercise into a system that learns.

Also keep an eye on the number of projects dropped each quarter. Zero is a bad sign: a healthy team drops projects. It’s proof the team is actually measuring.

How to introduce it without a power struggle

The pushback won’t be aimed at the method, but at what looks like a loss of power. Three phrases help defuse it:

• “I’m not suggesting we change who decides. I’m suggesting we decide with the same information.”
• “We score the projects together. You see the numbers at the same time I do.”
• “If you want to override the ranking, you can. We’ll just write down why, so we can learn from it.”

So, what about the podcast?

Sophie kept the quote request page, the nurturing sequence and the case studies, while holding six weeks in reserve for the unexpected. A team that plans at 100% of its capacity is planning to fail. As for the podcast, it was postponed. And it was the VP who suggested it: seeing that it needed 12 weeks when the brand-building bucket only had six, he did the math before anyone else.

Sophie didn’t win a debate. She didn’t need to have one. She simply made the constraint visible, and the constraint did the work.

This article is based on our webinar Doing More with Less in B2B Marketing (in French). Fill out the form to get the replay and our RICE prioritization template, ready to use in Excel.

Is your team taking on more projects than it can realistically handle?

At Bang Marketing, we help B2B marketing teams make clear choices: marketing planning, initiative prioritization and, when capacity falls short, marketing outsourcing to deliver what really matters. If your whiteboard is overflowing, let’s talk.

FAQ

What’s the difference between the ICE and RICE methods?
ICE scores three criteria from 1 to 10 (impact, confidence, ease) and multiplies them. It’s fast and ideal for filtering a long list of ideas. RICE adds reach, a real number pulled from your data, and divides the result by effort in person-weeks. It takes more work, so save it for the five or six finalists that warrant a closer look.

How many projects should a marketing team run at the same time?
There’s no universal number, but every project you add increases the time lost to context switching. A good practice is to set a work-in-progress limit (for example, three active projects per person) and never add anything without removing something else.

How do you prioritize when you’re a one-person marketing team?
The same logic applies, on a smaller scale. A single person has about ten productive weeks per quarter: the matrix and the ICE method are usually enough to make the call. Stick to two active projects at a time, and share your ranking with your manager so every new request is weighed against the same list.

What tool should you use to prioritize marketing projects?
The simplest one that works. A spreadsheet is enough for most teams of one to five people. A visual board like Trello becomes useful when progress tracking starts to matter, and a structured database like Airtable or Notion when you want to filter and cross-reference your historical data.

When is it better to outsource a project than to postpone it?
When a project scores well but doesn’t fit within the team’s capacity this quarter. That’s often the case for one-off projects that call for expertise the team doesn’t use day to day. Marketing outsourcing then lets you deliver what matters without sacrificing your other priorities.