AI’s big bang effect means marketing must evolve or die

Let’s be clear – this is our choice. We can be proactive and take some risks, or not.

This is the big bang theory:

• BANG. AI promises untold, unimaginable increases in efficiency
• BANG. All eyes and money turn to AI with profound optimism
• BANG. AI introduces us to its agentic minions (who never sleep or ask for a raise)

That’s big stuff. It is time for us to evolve. Marketing, meaning us humans, must use our experience, expertise and intuition to create a future state with better, more impactful results. We’ve got to be compelling, urgent and loud or our voices and our careers will be drowned out.

I choose the former. We need to dig deep to succeed because it’s changing the big, fundamental things that drive big results. And the big things are buried deep and we may need help within the corporation.

These three areas will yield the most significant results:        

1. Alignment.
2. Profitability.
3. Wrapping ourselves around the customer.

Alignment

In theory, marketing and sales are symbiotic. In reality, the organizational construct is flawed at its core—dysfunctional by design. There will always be silos. This is baked into the culture. We build bridges, but the scaffolding never comes down. 

“Only 19% of organizations have achieved true sales and marketing alignment,” according to Strava Technology Group research.

Dig deeper: 3 MOps bottlenecks killing your campaign velocity

Review42 reports that, “Organizations with aligned departments can achieve up to 38% higher sales win rates.” 

The distinct roles, priorities and workflows of sales and marketing create friction — from misaligned messaging and siloed data to resource conflicts and inconsistent handoffs. The friction not only slows down go-to-market execution, it erodes the shared accountability needed to drive revenue growth.

That’s not healthy competition. Interestingly, if we step into the Wayback Machine and return to the ancient world of 2006, we find a real head-slapper in the HBR article “Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing.” 

“Product designers learned years ago that they’d save time and money if they consulted with their colleagues in manufacturing rather than just throwing new designs over the wall. The two functions realized it wasn’t enough to just coexist—not when they could work together to create value for the company and for customers. You’d think that marketing and sales teams, whose work is also deeply interconnected, would have discovered something similar.” 

This underscores the basic cultural dynamic, which prevents sales and marketing from contributing significantly more.

Profitability

If your company wants to stay in business, all roads must lead to long-term profitability. Currently, the overarching goal is short-term revenue (and wishful thinking).

Long-term profitability only comes from long-term customers. Short-term thinking focuses on short-term revenue, which, more often than not, generates short-term customers. Short-term customers are high maintenance. If they stay long enough to amortize the cost of acquisition (CoA), it’s usually around 18 months for a SaaS company, but you might wish they didn’t.

Dig deeper: 6 marketing team silos you need to break down, and how to do it

Long-term customers lurk within the boundaries of your ideal customer profile (ICP). They are companies that stand to gain the most from what you do. They are a portrait of long-term relationships. 

In many companies, the ICP is no more than a concept that wilts in the light of day-to-day sales. Changing that means rethinking the current systems of measurement and reward, which are the only true determinants of behavior.

Currently, each department is measured and rewarded independently, which is inefficient and somewhat puzzling. Moreover, none of the current measurements or rewards have anything to do with profitability (although continued employment certainly does).

What does have to do with profitability is the customer lifetime value (CLV) metric. That metric means money. If measurement and reward focus on CLV, then marketing and sales will work to create happier customers who stay longer and buy more. Profitability varies directly with CLV.

Wrapping ourselves around the customer

Organizational structures developed to meet the needs of the organization. Today, you must rethink and reorganize around the needs of the customer. That is a more successful, competitively differentiating model that delivers a more enveloping customer experience.

The goal of this new model is cooperation around the customer instead of competition within the culture.

Qualitative research shows that customers with long-term potential want three things, in order of increasing importance:

1. Competence. You must be able to do the job now, meet our needs better than your competitors and commit to a development path that responds to our vision of our future. You don’t have this, you don’t get the RFP.
2. Domain expertise. How well do you know my business? Recently, a SaaS CEO was asked why they chose one provider from a field of six: “Because you guys know this business as well as I do.”
3. Commitment to my success and not just the sale. Visible, continuous commitment over time. My KPIs are your KPIs. I win, you win.

How does this all come together

Driving sustainable growth requires breaking down the silos between sales and marketing and uniting them under a single, integrated growth function led by a growth leader.

This alignment shifts the focus from departmental metrics to shared KPIs tied to business outcomes — improving efficiency, visibility and ROI across the funnel.

Centralizing sales and marketing under a single growth leader and aligning around shared KPIs enables organizations to operate with greater clarity, speed and efficiency. This integrated model drives higher performance and long-term, scalable growth while maximizing ROI.

Here’s an innovative, loud idea

The first step, and one that will have an immediate impact, is adding a profitability-focused reward. This will force cooperation and innovation.

Create a bonus pool tied to ongoing profitability. The pool is open to all contributors.  This includes marketing and sales and extends to all support roles that drive growth and efficiency, such as operations. If everyone wins, we stand a chance at changing the culture from hardened silos to one of fairness, unity, collaboration and mutual support. 

But this is the way we’ve always done it

We are entering a different world. I am certain that our creativity, knowledge and humanity are the primary reasons for lasting success. But right now, we’ve got to get loud—or look for another career.