Marketing teams today face an uncomfortable truth: the pace of change is accelerating, but our ways of working haven’t kept up. Between AI integration, evolving customer expectations, and mounting pressure to do more with less, many marketers find themselves in constant firefighting mode rather than building sustainable operations.
It’s a challenge I see repeatedly in our work with B2B marketing teams. The tools and opportunities are there, but the operational foundations haven’t evolved to support them.
The overwhelming reality
“There are so many tools, platforms, and tech – everyone’s talking about AI,” Jazz explained. “Understanding where to begin creates such overwhelm that before you know it, you’ve spent so much time thinking that you haven’t even got to the doing.”
This paralysis is compounded by a fundamental shift in buyer behaviour. Since the pandemic, customers increasingly conduct their research in what Karan calls the “dark funnel”– finding information and making decisions before they even enter your traditional marketing funnel. This means marketers must adapt their tactics to reach more research-savvy customers with the right information, at the right time, through the right channels.
This paralysis is compounded by a fundamental shift in buyer behaviour. Since the pandemic, customers increasingly conduct their research in what Karan calls the “dark funnel”– finding information and making decisions before they even enter your traditional marketing funnel. This means marketers must adapt their tactics to reach more research-savvy customers with the right information, at the right time, through the right channels.
Marketing transformation isn’t one-size-fits-all. It might mean restructuring your team to do more with what you have, implementing new technology platforms, or fundamentally rethinking your data architecture to support AI integration.
But here’s what often gets missed: “As leaders, we don’t always explain why we’re doing something,” Jazz noted. “It’s not just a new shiny toy we’re handing to our people. We need to explain how this will have a marked impact on their day-to-day and help them.”
The power of simplification
Both Jazz and Karan emphasised that moving from chaos to cadence requires the courage to simplify. Jazz’s team at Euromonitor was running eight campaigns monthly with just three marketers. “Sometimes you’ve just got to cut it back. But that requires courage, because the fear is we might be challenged on what our role is,” she said.
Karan’s team took a different approach to simplification. They consolidated multiple nurture programs across regions into a single, advanced framework that adapts dynamically to each lead’s intent level and profile. “We simplified everything down, but it became way more advanced,” he explained. The result? More breathing room to analyse data and optimise performance rather than constantly chasing their tails updating content.
Building sustainable workflows
A sustainable marketing workflow should create space for what matters most: understanding your customers and optimising your approach. Karan’s consolidated nurture programme exemplifies this. By building one sophisticated system that personalises based on intent and profile data, his team can now:
• Update content once across all regions
• Track which emails drive opportunity creation
• Continuously test and refine messaging
• Focus on producing relevant content rather than maintaining multiple programmes
“Once we’ve got a slightly more simplified but more advanced system, we now have the breathing room to look at the data,” Karan shared.
The foundation: updated personas
Both leaders stressed that outdated personas doom marketing efforts from the start. “The customers now are completely different to what they were like five years ago,” Jazz emphasised. Many teams operate with borderline fictional ideal customer profiles rather than validated insights.
When you speak with actual customers, the disconnect becomes clear. They often don’t think about your company the way you assumed, rendering your carefully crafted content pointless. As the marketing landscape evolves, especially with AI agents requiring accurate persona data, keeping these profiles current becomes critical.
When reporting to leadership, Jazz keeps it simple: “I’m using their language. I’m using commercial numbers. It comes down to pipeline and opportunity.”
Karan adds that the best approach is working backward from sales targets. “Go back to sales and ask what their KPIs are, how much money they need to make, and how many leads they need. Then tie everything back to the actual business goal.”
Both agree that vanity metrics like impressions may be necessary inputs, but they’re not business outcomes. Focus on account-level engagement and contribution to revenue.
The path forward
Moving from chaos to cadence isn’t about one big transformation – it’s about building adaptable systems that can evolve continuously. Working with marketing leaders like Jazz and Karan reinforces what we know to be true. It requires:
• Courage to stop ineffective activities
• Simplification that creates breathing room
• Updated, validated customer insights
• Clear alignment with business goals
• Persistent communication and optimisation
As Jazz perfectly captured it: “As marketers, it’s like we’re running from a lion trying not to get eaten. The difference is that we get to a point where we are running towards safety.”
The opportunity is there. Your customers have changed. Your tools have evolved. The question is: will your ways of working keep pace?