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In my last article, I wrote about the three pressures that are currently crushing marketing teams:

In that article, I also mentioned how I didn't have a clear answer for how to alleviate these pressures, but now that I've had a bit more time to think about it, here's how to navigate it.

First, if you unpack these pressures, at the root of them is a gap between expectations and reality. Here’s how to close that gap:

This is the only way I've seen it work.

What does this mean?

Understand expectations

Understanding expectation is about sitting with your stakeholder and unpacking the deeper rooted reasons for why they have this expectation. Now it's beyond just the surface-level expectation. It's really digging deeper.

For example:

This is truly a therapeutic-type exercise where you're unpacking the expectation.

Establish your baseline

Setting your baseline is about a bottoms-up exercise that helps your stakeholder understand where you are today. More specifically, it's converting an emotional gut reaction into an objective framework that will help you identify which levers you will be planning to pull to close the gap.

“My team is overwhelmed” →

“My team can do 4 projects total so we have room for 1 more”

Roadmap the gap

The third step of the process is road mapping how to close the gap between expectations and reality. Here, the goal is to showcase:

For each pressure, I’ll share how I’d approach the 3 steps.

Interestingly, for each pressure the step that’s most important changes.

Understand expectations

The new expectations from the C-suite is that 100% of Marketing could be done with AI. As you can imagine, they are in dinners, conferences, on LinkedIn, hearing only about the benefits of AI.

A great example of this is the recent conversation that's been circulating that Anthropic had just one growth marketer using AI for everything. Although this was not objectively true at all, the expectation has been set.

But if you dig deeper on the expectation, it's really coming from a place of fear. CEOs and CFOs are having intense conversations with their investors, and they're seeing writing on the wall that if they don't move fast, the competition will close the gap.

Ignore the fact that Brand is important and so is distribution because well honestly, your leaders are. Remember, Marketing is a field that they believe they can do themselves, and that it's a line item that's very expensive, so the expectation is not really in our favor.

My first piece of advice is don't fight the expectation, because it will just cause your stakeholder to retrench. Instead, understand their expectations better. What are they really expecting? Why are they expecting that now?

Establish your baseline

Now, your baseline with AI will be slightly different, but what's important is to be honest with how you’re using AI.

If we break down Marketing into individual blocks, it’s really “just” 3 pieces:

I'm being very generalistic, and I understand how much more goes into it, but at a high level, that's how people think about marketing.

What's our strategy?

How are we delivering it?

How is Marketing performing?

Now, for each of these, be honest with yourself and very clearly communicate how you're using AI to manage these pieces.

For example, say you’re writing a Marketing Strategy brief. Are you using AI to write it or give it feedback? Are you using it to synthesize user personas?

Go through each of your day to day operations and grade yourself from a 1 to 5 on how you’re using AI. If you manage a team, then do this for their activities.

By the end of this exercise, you should have a set of workflows and a scale of 1 to 5 how much are you using AI to solve it right now.

✅ convert emotions to objective scorecards

Roadmap the gap (most important)

And now, finally, the road map. In the road map, you'll want to plug the gap between your baseline and the expectations. What's most important here is to be very concrete on timelines and the blockers that are preventing you.

Let’s go back to our Marketing Strategy brief example.

Before: I used to write it manually etc etc.

Now: I’m using AI to automate writing the brief and saving 10 hours.

Next: I’ll be using XYZ to automate the last 25% of it

I know my examples are vague, but I’m trying to provide a framework for you to identify WHERE you can use AI. The roadmap will tell you when.

In addition, if there are expectations, then leadership needs to know why you can't meet those expectations. It's not about making excuses; it's about painting a very clear picture.

For example, in a podcast I had with the leader of E+Y’s CMO advisory practice, he shared that he's been advocating to his clients to use this as an opportunity to plug in data gaps, to invest in data resources, and to highlight that data is a prerequisite for investing in AI. Brilliant!

The roadmap is an opportunity to prioritize efforts. Where is AI best served? Is it producing creatives? Or are you blocked by Eng to make custom landing pages?

Where can you be less reliant on other teams?

Use this opportunity for transformation within your organization and company. The best Marketers I know are embracing AI but also being transparent about how beneficial it really is.

Things not to do:

Understand expectations

The expectation to do more with less is constant, but now there's a catalyst within AI. To be honest, the process to understand expectations is not really that much different than what I described above, so I won’t repeat.

Instead, the more important part of this pressure is setting the right baseline.

Establish your baseline (most important)

The baseline here is the most important component because it's where most marketers turn this into an emotional response when it's really an objective one. The best way I can describe this is through an anecdote from when I led global brand and international growth marketing science at Uber.

To cover EMEA, APAC, and Australia, I had just three analysts. There was no way we could measure everything. What I did was to set a very simplistic framework that, based on the budget and complexity of a campaign, gave you a score. My analyst had a defined resource budget, and marketers could choose what campaigns they wanted my team to work on.

Essentially, I said, 'Here's the amount of work my team can deliver at a high quality. You get to choose which projects they want to work on.”

Now, naturally they would always choose the highest impact project, but it also pushed prioritization back on my marketing team so that my analyst did not have to have that fight.

This worked because it transformed the relationship from an emotional one to a constraint-based optimization that felt more mathematical.

Teams didn’t argue or feel as neglected because they understood we had to prioritize.

So similarly, if you're feeling resource pressure, then one of the ways to paint the picture is to clearly outline what type of work and how much work your team can deliver today in some objective format.

Of course there will be pushback, but think about it this way:

If you have a well-defined and structured methodology and you say, "My team can do X," you are going to get pushback to do 2X. But you won’t be asked to do 5x (unless leadership is truly delusional).

The 2x ask burns teams a bit but people can navigate and get there. The 5x expectation breaks them. By having a strong anchor point for how much work your team can do you won’t be asked to do 5x.

My point is that resource optimization is a negotiation and when you bring objective facts rooted in reality the negotiations tend to go a bit more smoothly.

When they say “can’t you make it 2x” that’s when you can bring in the roadmapping, but by setting the baseline here and rooting that in an objective manner, you have a very clearly documented and outlined plan for what you can and cannot do.

Roadmap the gap

To alleviate resource pressure, roadmapping is traditionally seen as a headcount plan. You should take the same approach but the biggest call out here is that you need to be very strict on ensuring that any resource that you have can go deeper but it cannot go wider.

What I mean by that is you cannot ask a performance marketer to then lead lifecycle marketing. You can ask a performance marketer to potentially do more performance marketing but that’s the extent.

Going wide in marketing is just a recipe for disaster.

In addition, the number of FTE asks you can make will have gone down but there’s a baseline number you’ll need to keep the lights on. Be conservative here with the number of resources but also the impact of AI and get to a headcount that is aligned.

Traditionally, it may have taken 10 marketers to do now what 6 can but it’s not 10 → 2.

Things not to do:

Another great exercise to do here is to model out the impact of being asked to do less with more.

“If you cut my team by 75% here’s exactly what will happen to your growth model”.

If they still decide to proceed then that’s a strategic business call but you’ve at least down the work to show how less resources is not a good thing.

Understand expectations (most important)

Here, understanding expectations is the most important part of the puzzle. Marketing data science has been around for at least a decade, if not more, so there's no real new tricks in the book.

It's a simple formula:

The expectation component matters so much because you need to ensure that these foundations are in place before you can even create the baseline roadmap.

The gap here is the one I see the most and the most frequent.

When you’re digging into the expectations for your stakeholder, you need to press them on how willing are they to take risks.

“Are you willing to turn off Meta for 3 months?”

“Should we stop sending emails to 50% of our users?”

Understanding expectations is also your way of showing you clearly know what you’re talking about when you ask the right questions.

Establish your baseline

The baseline here is assessing the skill set you currently have. Now, sometimes there is a knowledge gap, and that's what my course that I'm building is there to help, but really it's more of a cultural and sometimes technical resource that's missing.

This is a small section because it's pretty black and white. You either are able to prove the ROI of marketing in a cohesive way, or you're not. There are some shades of gray, but those are really from a lack of commitment or investment and not from a capabilities perspective.

So, when establishing baselines, just rate the following from 1 to 5 (or 1 to 10):

To truly measure the ROI of Marketing, I believe you need the following:

Most people assume it’s some other combination but the truth is I can’t do anything without a culture that let’s me test.

Roadmap the gap

And finally, this is a classic road map where you'll want to outline either the hiring or the new tasks that you're going to run, or whatever it is to plug this gap.

Again, the road map here is easier because it's been defined for so long.

So, now looking back at the 3 pressures, here’s where you should focus if you want to take some of that weight off:

None of this is meant to be easy as we’re tackling some of the biggest technological shifts in nearly 30 years but at least you have somewhere you can start to help yourself.

Need 1:1 help solving your Marketing Science problem? Let’s chat >

That’s it for this week!

Stay experiMENTAL,

Sundar