AI’s Big Bang Effect Means Marketing Must Evolve or Die
AI is changing marketing at its core. To stay competitive, marketers must quickly rethink strategy, structure, and leadership.
This is a choice. We can either take risks and be proactive or get left behind. Consider it the “big bang” of AI:
- BANG. AI offers unimaginable boosts in efficiency.
- BANG. Everyone is focusing money and attention on AI with high hopes.
- BANG. AI brings us tireless, autonomous tools that never sleep or ask for raises.
This is huge. Marketing professionals must use their experience and intuition to build a future that produces better, more impactful results. We need to be loud and urgent, or risk being drowned out. The changes go deep—into the fundamentals that drive results. Success means tackling these three key areas:
Alignment
Marketing and sales should work hand-in-hand, but in many organizations, silos remain entrenched. According to research by Strava Technology Group, only 19% of companies have achieved real sales and marketing alignment.
When aligned, companies can see sales win rates improve by up to 38%. Yet differences in roles, goals, and workflows create friction—misaligned messaging, siloed data, conflicting resources, and uneven handoffs. This friction slows execution and weakens shared accountability for revenue growth.
Back in 2006, the Harvard Business Review pointed out that product designers solved similar issues by working closely with manufacturing. Marketing and sales, whose work is deeply connected, haven’t fully adopted this mindset. That cultural divide limits their impact.
Profitability
Long-term profitability is the true measure of success, not just short-term revenue. Short-term thinking often results in short-lived customers who are costly to maintain.
Long-term customers fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). They benefit most from your offering and build lasting relationships. But many companies treat the ICP as a vague idea, easily ignored in daily sales efforts.
Changing this means shifting how success is measured and rewarded. Currently, departments are assessed independently, which creates inefficiency and confusion. Most importantly, these metrics rarely focus on profitability.
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the metric that matters. When measurement and rewards center on CLV, marketing and sales teams focus on creating happier customers who stay longer and spend more. Profitability grows directly with CLV.
Wrapping Ourselves Around the Customer
Traditional organizational structures prioritize internal needs. Today, success requires reshaping around the customer’s needs. This approach fosters cooperation instead of internal competition, delivering a superior customer experience.
Research shows customers with long-term potential expect three things, ranked by importance:
- Competence. You must meet their needs better than competitors and commit to evolving alongside their vision. No competence, no RFP.
- Domain expertise. Deep knowledge of their business matters. As one SaaS CEO said when choosing a provider: “Because you know this business as well as I do.”
- Commitment to their success. A visible, ongoing partnership where their KPIs become yours. When they win, you win.
How Does This All Come Together?
Driving sustainable growth means breaking down sales and marketing silos and uniting them under a single growth leader. This integrated function focuses on shared KPIs tied to business outcomes, improving efficiency, visibility, and ROI.
Centralizing sales and marketing enables faster, clearer decision-making and delivers higher performance and scalable growth.
Here’s an Innovative, Loud Idea
Start by introducing a profitability-focused reward system. Create a bonus pool tied to ongoing profitability, open to all contributors—from marketing and sales to support roles like operations.
If everyone benefits, the culture shifts from siloed and competitive to fair, collaborative, and supportive.
We can’t keep doing things the old way. This new world demands creativity, knowledge, and humanity to succeed. But first, we have to get loud—or risk losing our place in marketing’s future.
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