by Christina | Sep 15, 2026 | 2026, Marketing
CMOs once asked agencies to prove their value. AI could force them to answer the same question about their own teams.
Marketing has brought capabilities in-house before. AI is making the case for doing it again — faster, cheaper, and at a scale previous waves couldn’t match.
The problem is what happens after the tools are adopted. Previous in-house pushes exposed hidden costs around talent, culture, and technology. This time, the test could come when boards ask whether all that AI-driven efficiency is actually producing better marketing results.
As the famous warning goes, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Marketing is entering its third major push toward in-housing, and the first two offer a warning: The promise of efficiency can outpace the reality of building and managing the capability yourself.
The first two in-house waves came with hidden costs
The first came during the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Facing budget cuts, companies like Intel brought services, especially media, in-house to preserve budget, hiring creative talent to execute campaigns directly.
The second came during the mid-2010s digital boom. As transparency concerns grew, especially with social platforms, CMOs lost trust in their data and programmatic media partners. As internal teams’ skills grew, so did CMO confidence in them. The ANA reported that the share of members with in-house agencies jumped from 42% to 78% by 2018.
CMOs assumed that competitive salaries would lure top agency talent in-house, and some did jump. But especially in B2B, creative talent got bored. Agency life offered variety: a scrappy startup one week, a Fortune 500 rebrand the next. Brands struggled to build that creative culture, and much of the talent drifted back within a year.
In-house agencies also never got a seat at the leadership table. They became order-takers stuck on repetitive production work.
Then there was the cost. CMOs saw agency hourly rates and assumed they could save millions, overlooking what it actually takes to run an internal department. Software licenses and Martech stacks that agencies had spread across a whole client roster now had to be absorbed by a single company.
AI is creating a different in-house problem: proving performance
AI is changing the in-house equation. Pressure from boards and executive teams is pushing CMOs to integrate AI into everything, recognizing that work once delivered by agencies can now be done in-house. Generative tools make it easy to develop content, build ABM programs, and handle more creative internally.
Agentic AI is streamlining workflows and absorbing mundane tasks. But we’re about to reach the point where executives start asking about performance.
The efficiency case for AI in marketing isn’t in question. Content moves faster, campaigns launch quicker, and mundane work disappears. But efficiency was never what CMOs promised the board. They promised results. That’s where the third wave starts to echo the first two.
Start with performance. Duke University’s 2026 CMO Survey asked marketing leaders to rate their organizations’ marketing technology activities on a 7-point scale. No martech activity scored above 5, including “generating ROI from marketing technologies.” Adoption has outrun the organization’s ability to turn that investment into measurable results. The tools are running. The proof isn’t there.
That gap shows up sharply at the board level, too. Comviva’s 2026 Global CMO Survey found that 86% of marketing leaders had been asked to justify AI spending at the board level, while only 16% felt confident defending those investments with clear business evidence. That’s a remarkable admission: most CMOs pushing AI into their organizations can’t yet show their own leadership what it’s buying them. This isn’t a messaging problem — it’s an accountability gap opening up in real time, with boards now asking CMOs the question CMOs used to ask their agencies.
Then there’s the number that should worry marketers most. The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 report, produced by MIT NANDA, found that 95% of organizations were getting no measurable return from enterprise genAI, despite $30 billion to $40 billion in enterprise investment.
Buried in that finding: sales and marketing absorbed the largest share of that budget, precisely because it was the easiest use case to pitch internally. Operations and finance pilots, which got less funding and less attention, actually produced better returns. Marketing got the biggest slice of AI spend and the weakest evidence to show for it.
by Christina | Apr 14, 2026 | 2026, Marketing, Sales
Back when I was a client-side marketer, I noticed a pattern slowing our team down: the habit of holding onto work until it felt perfect.
To break that cycle, I led the team through what I called the “Embrace Your Suckiness” exercise – an honest conversation about what we were each great at, and where we genuinely fell short.
Out of that came the CRAP process: Create, Refine, Act, Perfect.
The rule was simple: if you got stuck at any stage, you passed it to someone else. It increased our speed to market and later that year we won an internal award for the best performing department.
We borrowed IBM’s 70% rule – get it to 70% and go. Let the market, the audience, the world complete the other 30%. Then we refined the campaign.
Fast forward many years, and I applied that same process to a book I just finished – three years in the making.
I sent the first draft to friends and family. What came back was hard to hear after all those late nights and weekends.
But that’s exactly the point.
The people who matter most told me: “It’s good… but it’s not good enough.” Good, because they appreciated the work and effort that went into it. Not good enough, because they respected me enough to push me further.
That feedback is a gift. And it only comes from people willing to tell you what you don’t want to hear.
If you’re early in your career, here’s the most important thing I can share: Surround yourself with those people.
Not people who echo your worldview.
Not people who validate everything you do.
People who are honest – even when it’s uncomfortable.
We live in a time that makes it dangerously easy to only hear voices that agree with us.
Don’t fall for it.
Here’s the truth: Everyone is great at something, and everyone sucks at something. That’s not a flaw – that’s just being human.
You may only have 70%. That’s okay. That’s why you need the right people around you to help you find the rest.
Embrace your suckiness. It just might be your greatest strength. 💪
To learn more about The Hidden Buyer Journey click the link https://carbondesign.com/the-hidden-buyer-journey/
by Christina | Apr 3, 2026 | 2026, Marketing, Sales
After 7 years of research – analyzing hundreds of buyer journeys, profiling the personalities of thousands of decision-makers, and tracking what actually drives B2B deals – I finally finished the first draft.
Unlike other books in the sales and marketing space, this is not survey driven. We didn’t ask buyers for their preferences, we observed their behaviors in the data.
The work took longer than I ever expected, but every extra year added a layer of insight I wouldn’t trade. The 📕 title: The Hidden Buyer Journey.
Here’s what I discovered that changed everything:
● 85% of buyers influencing your deals never make it into your CRM.
● Most personas are built for selling, not buying.
● Corporate culture predicts deal velocity better than any other factor.
● Although there are a dozen or more buyers involved in the journey, only 4-5 make the deal happen.
● Reps can sabotage deals by not adjusting their style to fit the buyer’s personality.
These aren’t just interesting data points – they represent a fundamental shift in how modern B2B sales needs to be approached.
The book explains why win rates aren’t improving, why sales cycles are stretching, and why “personalization” isn’t working. More importantly, it shows exactly what to fix…and how.
I’ll be sharing more over the next few weeks. If any of this resonates with challenges you’re facing right now, follow along. You won’t want to miss what’s coming.
To learn more about the book and to reserve your copy visit https://carbondesign.com/the-hidden-buyer-journey/
by Christina | Sep 4, 2025 | 2025, Blog, Marketing
What if you ignored your “high intent” signals – didn’t follow up, didn’t call, didn’t email – just to see if leads would self-identify and reach out to you?
It sounds counterintuitive, but if a lead is really interested (at least according to your scoring tools), they should eventually fill out a form or call you, right? That’s the experiment we’ve been running.
For the past six weeks, we’ve been quietly tracking web traffic and running a test we know many of our clients would love to try but can’t. No outbound, no follow-ups – just observation.
The Setup
Using Warmly, we set our parameters around ICPs, buyer personas, and first- and third-party intent signals. For this experiment, visitors had to meet two criteria:
● Spend at least 28 seconds on the site
● Visit at least 2 web pages
The Results
After filtering out competitors and consults, 15 visitors from the last 45 days fit the criteria:
➖ 10 Moderate confidence lead
➖ 3 High confidence lead
➖ 2 Very high confidence lead
(“Lead” comes from the platform, not us. )
Our “highest intent” visitor came back to the site 24 times over two weeks, spending a total of 26 minutes across pages like Team, Services, Solutions, and Blogs. That person sounds like a qualified lead, right? We’re still waiting on a form submission.
So… Why Haven’t They Converted?
We dug deeper and found a few possible reasons:
1. Bad Data – when we looked into the contact records, some were miscategorized – for example, individuals associated with a company but are no longer employed there.
2. Wrong Personality Fit – using our proprietary personality profiling tool, we found that some visitors’ motivations were likely exploring on behalf of someone else, or just passively learning.
3. The Nature of Our Business – we don’t sell widgets. We offer services – thoughtful, consultative, relationship-driven solutions. Our sales cycle is longer and leans heavily on word-of-mouth. It takes time, trust, and timing.
Now let’s play this out and say we did hit the button on pushing them into Hubspot as a lead, as many organizations do every day.
The “leads” would make their way over to sales and be assigned to SDRs for follow up. Here’s the dirty little secret that marketing and sales knows but they don’t talk about.
Marketing knows those leads aren’t qualified but has a “lead target” to hit so off they go. Sales also knows that marketing knows those leads are qualified, but they have SDRs that need to be fed. This is the game that is being played across sales and marketing organizations every day.
Marketing with an increasingly vast number of tools and ways to capture anyone who merely glances at a website or email are able to capture more contacts than ever before. Tool providers using the wrong term “lead” for what is maybe at best a “response” are complicit in this charade.
Sales, which in the past would ignore (and still do in some ways) these non-qualified responses are now stuck with sales capacity they need to make productive. They’re using reps to qualify “leads” that aren’t leads, in the hope of making them leads. Sounds ridiculous right, because it is.
Even though they know the chances of a conversion are low, I’ve never met a sales manager that will give up sales resources voluntarily. The mentality of “the more reps I have, the better shot I have of making quota” is pervasive.
All of this to hopefully expose the charade so that sales and marketing can have a candid conversation about how ineffective the game is and finally take steps towards realistic performance goals.
The winner in all of this? Potentially everyone – marketing, sales and most importantly prospects who are just trying to learn who you are. and what you do, or to simply just read some content that you have posted.
Just because you can track every visitor doesn’t mean you should hand them off. Let your prospects explore. Let them learn about your company, your services, and your value – at their own pace. Let them raise their hand when they’re ready.
It’ll save your team time, effort, and energy – and likely lead to better conversations when the moment’s right.
by scott.gillum | Nov 2, 2021 | 2021, Marketing
It started with a simple question: why hasn’t B2B sales and marketing performance improved?
Despite advances in strategy and the industry’s massive investment in technology, the needle simply hasn’t moved over the last 10 years or longer.
Our curiosity led us to investigate this performance challenge. We noticed that our tools – mostly glorified task lists and activity trackers – were only picking up on rational factors. So we started to explore what wasn’t being tracked and discovered a “hidden buyer journey”.
As we explored buyer behaviors, motivations, and personality types, we found that purchase decisions made by buying groups were driven by individuals’ personal motivations, not titles or roles.
For two years now, we’ve been using research on buying groups and AI-enabled Personality-Based Marketing to help clients improve their sales and marketing efforts.
This eBook shares our insights and how you can apply Personality- Based Marketing to improve your B2B marketing performance – at last.
Download the E-Book now!
Sorry. This form is no longer accepting new submissions.
by scott.gillum | Oct 1, 2021 | 2021, Marketing, Sales
Scott was a guest speaker at the WVU Marketing Horizon podcast, a sub-series of WVU Marketing Communications.
Marketing Horizons is forward-thinking, looking ahead, through the front windshield and beyond, into the marketing future. Hosted by Cyndi Greenglass and Ruth Stevens, Horizons is a podcast dedicated to looking ahead to the new ideas, technologies, tools and strategies that are emerging to help marketers navigate over the marketing horizon.
Listen here. https://bit.ly/2ZNfYpC
