Let’s be honest: seeing Gartner’s latest CMO spending report probably made your stomach drop. Marketing budgets are down 15% year-over-year. Only 24% of CMOs feel confident about their 2024 funding. This sparked doom-and-gloom predictions about marketing’s diminishing role in 2025. But here’s the truth: this isn’t a crisis of budgets — it’s a crisis of…
Diversity and inclusion in marketing can improve business outcomes. Just as assembling a team from different personal backgrounds yields positive outcomes, a team with diverse career backgrounds can benefit a martech team and its broader organization. Fortunately, there are many aspects to an individual’s career that avail themselves to provide diverse insights. The growing complexity…
A new loyalty management solution aimed at retailers and CPG brands will be released by SAP in the second half of 2025. It also entered the agentic space on behalf of retail, with a shopping assistant AI agent, made to integrate with any ecommerce storefront, that will be generally available in the first half of…
The faster the sales process, the faster the revenue growth. Unfortunately, as we learned in science class, of friction slows acceleration or can stop it altogether. Whether that’s adding complexity to a simple process or frustrating customers with needless back and forth, friction is bad news for deal velocity. This isn’t just a sales problem,…
Whether you are a small startup with a simple ecommerce system or a global retailer with a complex sales process, clear dashboarding and insightful reporting are key for teams to work effectively. However, reports often take significant time and effort to create, only for the data to be questioned or ignored. Maintaining these reports also…
As we begin 2025, I’ve been reflecting on my own journey with AI anxiety. I’ve been waking up at 5 a.m. for months, eagerly trying to catch up on all the AI news by reading newsletters and testing the latest marketing tools. Even so, I feel. like I’m falling behind. My students, colleagues and friends…
Who, what, when, why and how? Journalism students learn to answer these questions to ensure the most important information is conveyed first in an article. Depending on their backgrounds, marketers may not be familiar with this structure. Even as someone who studied journalism, I’m guilty of forgetting my roots. We all get busy trying to…
As 2024 comes to a close, it’s impossible to ignore the central theme that has shaped marketing and technology this year: artificial intelligence. From breathtaking advancements in generative models to bold proclamations about the “agentic era,” the year has been dominated by promises of transformation. And yet, for all the excitement, there’s a significant gap…
With budgets for 2025 set, marketing leaders face a familiar challenge: limited resources and growing skills gaps. With the intense competition for specialized talent, the solution may be in embracing a training culture. This will close critical skills gaps and drive long-term success. Why talent gaps are a major threat to marketing success Ed Gordon,…
2025-26 will be the years when what you don’t know will really, really hurt you. That’s a generally true statement, but it’s especially true for go-to-market functions, particularly those that find their meaning as multipliers of sales effectiveness and efficiency. The facts are that very few C-suites understand why they spend so much money on…