Marketing and sales have really shifted in the last couple of years.
You can speculate as to why: geopolitics, AI, awful, awful government leadership and nervous buyers have made companies risk-focused as opposed to growth-focused.
As such, your sales lead times are longer. Customers prolong your agony by months as they wonder if they should just do nothing and carry on.
The way through this is relationships and trust. Brand and connection.
That is an annoying answer to companies that have organised their sales teams like military operations.
I've been writing a lot about AI lately, but the more I look at it, people are really struggling with is how to connect with customers.
The problem is behavioural rather than in technology.
Yesterday, I asked my CMO and media networks what other folks are seeing. I'll do more on these posts, but one reply came back from a B2B agency founder I thought was on the money.
Now, I asked for big, enterprise CMOs. Jordan Price cheekily emailed to say she isn't that, but as agency CEO of Small City Marketing, I thought she summarised it really well.
The biggest shift we are seeing across our B2B clients is a move from volume to relevance. Mass cold email has stopped working. What lands now is low-volume, well-researched outreach where the first line proves you understand the person's business.
We run targeted LinkedIn and email sequences through tools like Dripify, Instantly and Apollo, but the tooling only works when the list is tight and the message is specific. 10 good prospects beat 1,000 sprayed ones, but is especially relevant now the way that firms are adopting AI).
In-person events are doing a lot of the heavy lifting again (and physical media!), particularly small, curated ones. A focused panel or a dinner with 15 of the right people builds more trust than a large conference ever did, and the conversations carry on long after.
On digital, founder-led content is outperforming polished company pages by a mile. The content that works is specific and based on real experience, not the safe, generic posts that now read as AI-written.
I suppose this points to where AI both helps and hurts. We use it heavily behind the scenes, for research, first drafts, repurposing and personalising outreach at scale, and it lets a small team produce far more than it should be able to.
The risk is sameness. I personally find this EXTREMELY frustrating, and it’s a common argument I have with a lot of business owners as to where the human elements sit within marketing & where they provide value.
When everyone uses the same tools, the output converges, so the things AI cannot fake become the advantage: a distinct brand, a real opinion, and first-hand experience of having done the work.
On the product side I am more adopter than vendor, but I have a useful vantage point. I share an office space with a mentor and close friend who leads AI at one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies globally, and he has built a range of his own tools for productivity, strategy and things like design systems.
The tools have primarily been built for enterprise, but we’ve adopter at SME level and it has given us a MASSIVE competitive advantage. We also lean on AI heavily for data analysis, pulling insights out of client data and turning them into results much quicker than we used to.
So you need to get up close and personal. If you have transactional websites and people, you're in the trenches with the AI bots I'm afraid.
Have a good one.
Dan
