The Evolution of Marketing

This isn’t historically an advantage for a prey animal. Typically, the lower on the food chain you are, the more important it is for you to be able to hide from predators. In their traditional forest homes, squirrels’ mottled grey, brown, or reddish coats allow them to blend into tree trunks, rendering them almost invisible. But in big cities, dominated by grey asphalt, their primary predators are cars. In urban environments, it’s an advantage to be more visible, so drivers can see and avoid you. Hence, why black has become the dominant form in cities. 

Like urban squirrels, we’ve been plopped into the middle of a rapidly changing landscape over which we assert very little control. But instead of waiting for nature to take its course, we’re free to choose how we respond. Our goal in this playbook is to demystify the most important changes to the marketing landscape and give you a clear direction to succeed in 2025 and beyond. 

In this playbook, we’ll cover the biggest threats facing marketing and break down the key strategies that marketers need to not only survive, but thrive in this new landscape. 

It’s time to become the squirrel that goes black, then whatever's next, and next, and next.

This is a fight for marketing’s very survival

Right now, the stakes are high. While it’s true that squirrels as a species are not in danger—but Washington state grays and mojave reds certainly are. 

Which, we regret to inform you, is you. Sure, marketing will continue to exist. But will your company survive the shakeup? Your team? 

If that sounds dramatic, allow us to explain. Today, one of the biggest risks to your brand is being poorly perceived by buyers. Who wants to fill out a gated form if they know they’re going to immediately get bombarded with three calls in a row from an AI SDR, a series of text messages, an “I’m sorry I missed you” email, and a connection request on LinkedIn? 

AI has only made these sales automations more relentless. Most would rather not put themselves under that kind of personal siege, thanks. 

The old marketing and sales playbook perpetuates this kind of poor personalization and targeting—and in the process, does widespread but unseen damage to your reputation. While you might make some conversions in the short term, in the long run, you become a spammer and end up alienating the people who weren’t yet ready to buy—aka your future pipeline. 

If we want to build sustainable businesses, we can’t keep sacrificing tomorrow’s long-term growth potential in favor of today’s short-term gains. We have to build trust, so when buyers are ready to make a purchase, they don’t think of us as the annoying sender of all those irrelevant emails they had to delete, but as a reliable brand they can turn to to get the information they need. 

The triple threat facing marketing

This might be the most challenging time to be a marketer—aside from every other time. From the dawn of radio to television, the internet, social media, and more recently, generative AI, a marketer’s role is constantly evolving. Today is no different. Although navigating challenges is nothing new, the types of challenges facing marketers today are different than the ones we’ve seen before. 

We see three big challenges that are upending the way we have to think about marketing strategy:

1. New buyer behavior and expectations

The fact that buyers are doing their own research is not new—but most teams are not yet aware of just how deep this goes. According to research by 6sense, most B2B buyers are about 70% through their purchasing process before they choose to engage with sales. 

By the time they reach a salesperson, it’s pretty much too late to educate them, because most customers have already made up their minds. They may only be on the demo to validate their existing bias. 

This means that marketing now owns the customer relationship much further down the funnel than ever before and building trust with your audience is paramount. 

2. Death of the “growth at all costs” teams

It’s not only customers’ priorities that are changing. Boards and senior executives are changing too. For much of the 2010s and into the early 2020s, a “growth at all costs” mentality subsumed the tech industry. Flush with investor cash, marketers were able to channel these funds into conversion goals—at least, for a while. But you can only fill a leaky bucket for so long before you start to wonder where all the water is going. 

Today, there’s been a shift in thinking from "growth at all costs" to growth that’s sustainable. This means companies are shifting from focusing on new logos to net revenue retention (NRR). Companies are becoming more focused on keeping customers for the long run rather than converting as many new buyers as possible, which is a good thing. But it does mean a shift for marketing—and increased scrutiny on marketing spend, which might have been easily approved during the “growth at all costs” era.

According to research from Gartner, marketing budgets have dropped from 9.1% of company revenue in 2023 to 7.7% in 2024—a 15% decrease. Worse, only 24% of CMOs feel they have the budget to execute on their planned strategy for the year. Budget is no longer a given, and this too is a new reality we have to adapt to. 

3. Sales frustration  

All these changes mean that sales and marketing have splintered even further—just as it’s become more critical that they’re in lockstep. In the old playbook, roles were clearly defined: Marketing owned the buyer’s journey up to a certain point (usually once they filled out a form to get a demo or request a quote), then sales took over to close the deal. Now, it’s a lot more fluid and requires input from both sides along the journey, not just at set points. 

But many sales teams are still running the old playbook, trying to educate and influence buyers (who have likely already self-educated and made up their minds about what they want to buy). They might still expect marketing to hand them “leads” rather than work together to nurture accounts. If these old strategies have stopped working or stopped working as effectively as before, resentment might start to creep in. 

In order to serve our buyers and meet leadership’s new goals and expectations, sales and marketing are going to have to learn how to adapt to this new landscape together. 

Where we go from here

Let’s be clear: Not everything you know about marketing is broken. The fundamental marketing principles we’ve come to rely on—like knowing your audience, targeting buyers with the right message at the right time, and using the technological tools you have at your disposal to understand how your audience is engaging—are all still critical. These underlying principles have not changed, but how we put them into practice needs to evolve. 

Here are some of the key points of evolution: 

1. We need to redefine the traditional marketing/sales waterfall: The buyer’s journey has changed dramatically, but how we sell has not kept up. We need to fully rethink how we support the buyer’s journey as marketers and sellers, and what roles we each should play in the process. 

2. We need common data and signal sources: Sellers and marketers cannot effectively collaborate if they’re working from separate or out-of-sync tools and dashboards. To be able to work together, we need to be able to understand what’s happening throughout the buying journey.
   
   
3. We need a common language: As we rethink our processes, key terms like “MQL,” “MQA,” and “in-market” are all critical to understanding how we nurture our buyers. Sales and marketing need common definitions of these terms in order to effectively collaborate.
   
   
4. We need to shift from lead generation to building relationships: Our customers are looking to us as a trustworthy source—and we need to convey that credibility and reliability whether they’re speaking with us directly or indirectly. That means demand gen marketers need to become fluent in brand. 

Success in all these endeavors will require holistic thinking and an integrative approach. We’ll have to leverage AI and data thoughtfully, not just for the sake of automation. We can’t just create content to have something to feed a nurture program—it needs to be focused on building trust and delivering value. And finally, the purpose of this whole project should be on creating a long-term, sustainable pathway for growth—not just hitting numbers or signing buzzy new logos. 

And it needs to fit into a trim package that's so obvious that all the people outside of marketing (like your CEO and the board) understand what the heck you're doing and applaud it. 

You must become the bundle of 10^27 atoms and 466M neurons that presents as simple as this: 

Oh, look. A black squirrel. Wow, that stands out.