The tension between marketing and sales usually looks something like this: Sales claims that marketing is just delivering volume - leads that are unworkable and out of target market. Marketing fires back that sales just isn’t working the pipeline properly. Hence there now is a lot of chat on LinkedIn to suggest that marketing and sales should both just be measured on closed deals - however it’s not as simple as this. Most of the friction between marketing and sales is not about effort or attitude. It is about definitions. If marketing calls something a qualified lead and sales calls the same contact a waste of a follow-up call, that is not a performance problem but a calibration problem. Marketing and sales are different functions doing different jobs on the way to the same goal. The answer is not to force them onto one shared metrics and loose all the insight that so called ‘vanity metrics’ deliver. It is to use holistic KPIs that reflect what each team actually controls, connect them to one shared outcome, and measure the whole lifecycle underneath.

Every marketer has been in this meeting. Pipeline is quiet. The room is tense. And someone asks the question: "What's the ONE thing we can do right now to move the needle?"

Sometimes it's the magic bullet ask. Sometimes it's the conference version: "Competitor XYZ just did this and it worked really well, why aren't we doing that?" And who remembers when everyone wanted to go viral?

Here's what I've seen after working inside dozens of businesses across different industries and growth stages: There is no one thing.

81% of buyers have already formed a preference before they ever speak to sales. The decision is being made quietly, over months, before anyone fills out a form. In SaaS and professional services, that buying journey can run 6 to 12 months.

Which means the real question isn't which channel works best in isolation. It's whether your brand is present, consistently, across the whole window - so that when a buyer is ready, your name is already the familiar one.

This post outlines what actually drives growth, why the one-channel approach leaves money on the table, and what to do with the leads already sitting in your pipeline.

When your leadership team is doing marketing because there's no one else to do it, something's got to give - and it's usually the thing they were actually hired to do. Marketing absorbed into everyone's day job tends to go one of two ways. Either your team has less time for what they're there for. Or it just doesn't happen.

And it's not just small businesses. Sometimes the gap looks different - a senior marketing hire just left, a product launch is looming - but the need is the same: marketing expertise without the lead time and commitment of a permanent hire.

In these cases, looking at bringing in a fractional CMO or fractional marketing leadership can be a great option. But before you start, a few things are worth getting right. Done well, a fractional marketing leader brings coherence to your marketing, frees up your team, and builds momentum that grows your business. Done badly, the engagement can create more work than it solves.
This practical guide covers what you need to consider before you bring in a fractional marketing leader, how to make the engagement work and how to create sustainable growth for your business.

The biggest challenge with AI adoption is often not technological. Most marketing teams already have access to a growing number of AI tools. What many organisations (and individuals) lack is a clear understanding of how to integrate those tools into their workflows and decision-making in a way that actually creates value. And that problem isn't getting easier. The sheer volume of content, commentary, tools, and competing claims on the topic has created its own kind of paralysis. When everything is urgent and everything is transformative, it becomes genuinely hard to know where to start - or what to trust.

In this post we’ll explore principles and examples of AI implementations that create wins for the organisation, for the teams, and for the customer.

In the last few posts, we’ve started reviewing the 4P AI Marketing Excellence Framework and each of its pillars. This next ‘Protect’ pillar of the Model refers to the risk mitigation element around ensuring data privacy, governance and responsible AI use.

The second P (Produce) in our 4P AI Marketing Excellence Framework reflects the impact AI is having on informing strategy and ideation, as well as scaling content, campaigns, and execution through automation.

AI excels at accelerating both strategic preparation and executional delivery.

For teams operating under tight timelines and constrained resources, this is transformative. But focusing on the productivity aspect alone can introduce real risks.

For a long time, marketing has largely been reactive. Modern marketing increasingly relies on AI-driven decision engines that score customer propensities and predict next actions, however fragmented data, inconsistent tracking or disconnected systems limit AI’s effectiveness.

Since AI doesn’t fix data problems but rather extrapolates them, it is now more important than ever to address underlying (data) foundations to ensure AI prediction can provide reliable results.

Many executive teams I speak with today have AI firmly on their strategic agenda. But when you look a layer deeper, at how it’s actually being used in practice inside marketing functions, things become less clear.

Most of us in marketing have grown up with the traditional 4Ps - Product, Price, Place and Promotion - as a simple way to emphasise the pillars of marketing.

To bring some clarity to what can otherwise feel like a very broad and noisy space, I’ve applied this familiar framework to AI adoption in marketing.