Marketing (in the field)
In a recent post, Katharine Sliwinski posted a question about whether people were fans of getting out in the field or staying in the board room. And it was immediately clear to me that marketers find themselves in boardrooms (and behind monitors) the majority of the time these days. After all, it's Sales job to "get out and sell", right?
Marketers are getting further and further away from clients. We trade focus groups for automated surveys with AI summaries. We pre-program all our marketing outreach (like the recipients never change). We prep white papers and case studies based off second hand information (online research and salespeople).
All these activities lead us to becoming more and more disconnected from what it means to "touch" a customer; and we replace it with anything we can digitally track.
But it's not working. And if we took a minute to look at how marketing activities are contributing to the balance sheet, we would see it.
For those of you are seeing these patterns, the answer isn't another system that gathers more data.
The answer lies in YOU. And your ability to get good information directly out of your prospects and clients.
And honestly? It's faster.
And you get better data, without getting so much you can't process it anymore.
Better data. Less time. And better brand relationships.
I mean...that sounds good to me.
So, how do we get there?
Let's start from where we are.
Marketing Time Distribution
According to ChatGPT (yes, you'll see use of AI tools and systems in the list), a typical corporate marketer’s time in 2026 is spent like this:
30–40% → Content creation & campaign execution
15–20% → Data, reporting, optimization
15–20% → Meetings & alignment
10–20% → Manual / operational work
5–15% → Strategy & planning
5–10% → Research & customer insight
5–10% → AI / tools / systems
Anyone notice a glaring discrepancy?
First of all, that's a shockingly low amount of time spent on strategy (if you're on the lower end), but let's ignore that for now.
Look at the time spent on Data, reporting, optimization vs. Research & customer insight.
According to this, which I would say I see mirrored in the market, people are spending FOUR TIMES more time on data analysis (most of it NOT collected directly from a customer), than they are collecting customer insight. Add in that most of the Research & customer insight is actually online research with AI tools, and it gets even worse.
I always think it's interesting to just see how often a Marketer interacts directly with the target audience. Whether it's following up with a client, or getting in a comments chat with a prospect on social media, is that happening on the daily? Weekly? Even monthly?
I would guess that most corporate marketers go MONTHS without an interaction with a client. And I would further hazard that many companies are actively looking for ways for them to NOT have to interact with clients. Between AI commenting, email automation, virtual NPS efforts, and sending only Sales to tradeshows, we cheer when marketers get to stay in the office so they can "focus".
But focus on what exactly?
The real details about where the focus makes sense is in the customers hands.
A New Operating System
Let's say we shift these numbers so we're spending 30% of our time in direct customer conversations, we could probably expect more insight, right?
But this doesn't just create MORE insight; it fundamentally re-wires the effectiveness of every other activity.
We move from a system based on production:
Produce → distribute → measure → adjust (based on data)
To one that's based in understanding:
Understand → produce → distribute → measure (against reality)
With that shift, let's look at what happens to the rest of our time buckets.
Content Creation (15%)
Most content creation today is based on guessing. Which we have to do when we're not actively talking to clients. But if we incorporate real conversations, we don't have to wonder about how the customer sees it, what their decision moments and criteria are, or how to speak to their logical (and emotional) triggers.
Which means, our focus can become more precise. Because we don't have to guess who we're talking to. We know, and we can speak directly to them.
It becomes possible with a single conversation. And it doesn't even have to be an official survey or focus group.
Just one person, who believes in solving a particular problem, exploring with another person how they see that problem (or don't). That's exponentially more effective.
💡 What changes in practice:
We stop creating content based on volume that explains
We start creating reflections that allow our clients to recognise themselves
Campaign Execution (10%)
Personally, I'm not a fan of campaigns in general, because we end up batching execution around something that only matters to us (that we're going to be at a tradeshow, or there's some kind of seasonality in our product).
It's not about our customers at all...it's about us.
When we layer in our customer conversation operating system, we can focus our campaigns around buying moments, connection points and actual pain. And we didn't even have to guess.
💡 What changes in practice:
We stop asking: "what are we doing that we can tell the clients about?"
We start asking: "how do we help our clients out of their pain?"
Data & Analytics (5%)
Ever collected so much data that there was no possible way to assess it so it means something? I was recently chatting with someone who had so many competitors in their competitive analysis, that there was NO WAY to pull any meaningful information from it in a reasonable amount of time. And sure, you can use AI for that, but even then, how much prompting do you need to do to get the most insightful data?
The problem is that there's SO much noise in the data, we end up not using it.
But in customer conversations, what matters is revealed. And in an authentic conversation, you don't have to dig nearly as much as you might think.
💡 What changes in practice:
We stop asking: "what is the data telling us?"
We start asking: "does the data confirm what customers told us?"
Meetings & Alignment (10%)
Oh, how many of us have felt the "death by internal meeting" dread? This happens because internal conversations that are NOT led by client conversations turn into opinion-based debates that require endless alignment conversations and really only drive stakeholder disagreement (instead of agreement).
Let's not even talk about the "I told you so" scenarios.
But when your customer's voice is the anchor, your decisions become grounded in reality. Or, very minimally, you can reveal right away when something is about YOU (as a brand) and NOT about the customer.
💡 What changes in practice:
We stop having reporting meetings (because they don't help the client)
We start anchoring the need for meetings and decisions in helping the clients better
Manual / Operational Work (10%)
Let's be honest, manual and operational work will never disappear; especially if you are constantly evolving with your customers. But when this manual work is fed by customer insight, you get to stop doing unnecessary work.
Which means, you can get a LOT of time back.
And I mean, A LOT.
And the work you do still have to do, becomes more tolerable because you can clearly see why you're doing it...in customer (and business) results.
💡 What changes in practice:
We stop optimizing all workflows.
We start eliminating irrelevant ones.
Strategy & Planning (15%)
I generally marketing falling into two categories from a strategic planning side:
We do the same things over and over again
We constantly change things to try to figure out what works
Either way, our Management Planning meetings are just the reiteration of a bunch of market positioning assumptions, that means we can neither create meaningful tests (to do the latter), nor make good decisions on what to keep doing (the former).
But what if the strategy came from the patterns that are revealed across customer conversations? We would clearly understand who we serve, what they care about, and why they choose us. Which makes it pretty clear what we should keep and what we should evolve.
We aren't INVENTING the strategy. We're observing it. And executing on it.
💡 What changes in practice:
We stop guessing (and be honest with ourselves when we are guessing)
We start observing (and converting that into action)
AI & Tools (5%)
Oh, AI. It can totally help us, and equally has become a HUGE distraction in marketing. We fill our time with generic prompts, which create surface-level outputs, and content that “sounds right” but doesn’t hit; with us OR our customers.
But what if, instead, AI was trained on real customer language? What if that led us to get outputs that were grounded in actual human context?
That looks and feels a whole lot different than most of the AI slop coming out of marketing today. AI becomes an amplifier for customer truth, instead of a generator of content.
💡 What changes in practice:
We stop feeding AI the belief that it knows more about our customer than us
We start feeding AI the belief that we know what our customer wants to hear
A New 100%
If we re-assign 30% of our time to talking to customers, we eliminate the need for over-testing, over-producing, over-analyzing and over-aligning. This allows us to spend a reduced amount of time in the other categories, meaning we are NOT spending any more time.
We;re just using our time more wisely.
And not wasting it attempting to solve for uncertainty.
We're intentionally producing less and moving slower SO THAT we can use our human effort where it makes the most sense: in understanding and in relationship building.
In exchange, we get higher conversions, stronger resonance, clearer positioning and less wasted motion.
What about scale?
Now, most organizations won’t make this shift because it doesn’t scale cleanly. Because as humans, we haven't been working to solve the problem of how to scale curiosity; only activity.
And the argument is usually that curiousity is difficult (maybe even impossible) to measure.
But is that true?
What if, we measured how many questions we asked in a day?
What if, our corporate cultures celebrated NOT having the answer (and going to find it) as much as already having one?
Maybe, just maybe, we'd stop scaling efforts that don't serve us OR our clients.
And instead, we'd scale the efforts that DO 💖
At the end of the day, scaling curiosity leads us closer to our clients. So, isn't that a journey worth going on?
Versus scaling the things that take us farther away?
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think so.
Marketing only becomes powerful when it reflects reality (not assumptions). Talking to your customers kills those assumptions. And ensures that anything you DO scale has the client at the heart of it.
If you're ready for that kind of growth, come get into the conversation with the Authentic Marketing Fellows on the Crazy, STUPID Marketing show 🎉
