Lately I keep hearing the same story from marketers. A founder or sales leader plays around with an AI tool, builds a slick mockup of a landing page or campaign, and hands it to marketing with some version of: “You should be able to build this with AI. Everyone else is.”

It’s come up in our community more than once, and in plenty of conversations outside it. More pages, more campaigns, more ebooks. If AI can make it, why aren’t we making ten times as much?

The problem is that AI made output cheap, but it didn’t make pipeline cheap. You can spin up a hundred landing pages and still not move a single deal forward, and that gap explains a lot of the frustration marketing teams are dealing with right now.

This week on Pipe Dreams I sat down with Mike Harris, founder of Harris CMO Partners. Mike has spent 30 years running marketing at tech companies, with four exits along the way. We got into how AI is changing what companies should expect from marketers, and why so many of the job descriptions we’re still hiring against no longer make much sense.

Pull up almost any marketing manager job description and you’ll see some version of the same list. Plan and execute campaigns across email, paid, social, SEO, events and webinars. Grow MQLs quarter over quarter. Own the content calendar.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those responsibilities, but they describe a job where producing the work is the main value. That made more sense when building campaigns and creating assets took a lot more time and resources than they do today.

Mike’s argument is that the value is shifting toward the decisions that determine what gets produced in the first place. Which buyers should we focus on? Where are we losing opportunities? What would help a champion get a deal approved internally? AI can help execute against those decisions, but it doesn’t know which problem the business should be solving.

Early-stage companies have an especially hard time with this, because so many of their marketing job descriptions are borrowed from companies that are much further along. A founder with five customers and no repeatable acquisition channel hires someone to manage six channels, run a content calendar and generate a few hundred MQLs. Nobody stops to ask whether those are the right activities for the stage the company is in.

We also talked about how the job gets measured. Mike sees MQLs losing their place as the main measure of marketing performance, with more weight on sales-ready handoffs that sales and marketing agree on together.

I’ve taken a strict approach to this for years. I don’t use lead scoring to decide whether somebody is ready for sales. Unless they’ve raised their hand and asked to talk, they stay with marketing. Someone downloading an ebook might be interested in the topic, but that doesn’t mean they’re ready to evaluate software, and putting points on it never made it more meaningful to my sales team.

This was my favorite part of the conversation, because it’s something marketing should have been doing all along, and AI finally makes it practical.

Mike described marketing as the intelligence agency for the business. We’re the team studying the market, understanding the ICP and gathering what sales needs before going into an account.

That includes the problems buyers are trying to solve, the systems they already use, their likely purchase criteria and the alternatives they’re considering. Those alternatives include doing nothing, which is the outcome most of us should be spending more time understanding.

Much of that research can now happen without asking prospects to fill out another form. Marketing can give sales a much better starting point, and leave the rep to uncover what takes an actual conversation, like budget, internal priorities and how decisions really get made.

Mike also made the point that the information has to flow both ways. He recommends reviewing lost and stalled deals, sales calls and churn reasons every month to hear what buyers are actually telling us.

I like that because it connects work that usually happens in completely separate parts of the business. If we keep losing deals because buyers are worried about implementation, that should show up in the messaging we put into the market. There’s no reason to wait until month four of a sales cycle to address an objection we’ve already heard fifty times.

We spent some time on what happens after a champion gets interested, because that’s where a lot of traditional marketing content stops being useful.

The champion now has to convince other people inside the organization, many of whom have never spoken to your sales team and may not share the same priorities. Finance wants to understand the return. IT is worried about implementation. Security has its own requirements. And somebody in leadership may be perfectly happy to leave things the way they are.

The ebook that generated the original lead isn’t going to do much for those conversations.

Mike had a line on one of his slides that I liked: build assets that move deals forward and support renewal. Depending on the deal, that might mean helping a champion build the financial case, addressing an implementation concern or giving them something they can use with another stakeholder.

It also means marketing needs to spend more time with sales, especially on deals worth winning that aren’t moving.

Mike’s advice for getting into those conversations was simple. Borrow the salesperson’s best tool, which is a question. Bring something useful you’ve learned about an account and ask, “Here’s what I found. What do you think?”

You don’t need to show up pretending you understand the deal better than the rep. Bringing an idea they haven’t considered is a much better way in than asking whether they need another piece of content.

One thing I keep hearing from marketers is that AI hasn’t reduced their workload. It’s just changed what’s being asked of them. When everyone knows a landing page can be built faster, the natural response is to ask for more of them, and when those requests come from founders and sales leaders, it’s hard to push back without sounding like you’re resisting change.

Mike’s answer surprised me: you can negotiate what comes out of the fire hose.

That starts with agreeing on what marketing is accountable for. If sales and marketing haven’t agreed on what counts as a sales-ready handoff, have that conversation before either team commits to a target.

Mike believes more marketers will eventually carry pipeline targets, and maybe revenue targets too. The direction makes sense to me, but I’ve also seen what happens when marketing owns a number without much say in the GTM decisions that determine whether it’s achievable.

There’s a difference between being accountable for revenue outcomes and being held responsible for every problem between the first touch and a closed deal.

The best way I’ve found to have those conversations is to bring the actual funnel data, explain what it’s telling us and work with sales on where to invest. Sometimes the answer is more demand gen. Other times the opportunities are already there and something else needs attention.

Mike shared a 30/60/90-day plan for marketers stepping into a new role. It assumes the company already has product-market fit. If it’s still searching for fit, the priorities change.

Days 1–30: Understand the funnel and set a baseline. Review the deal data, conversion rates, sales cycle and why deals are lost or stalled, and spend time with sales and customers.

Days 31–60: Revisit the ICP and messaging, then test one improvement on a single pipeline stage.

Days 61–90: Measure what changed, plan next quarter and decide what kind of hire comes next.

I’ve felt both sides of this.

AI has taken a lot off my plate. The “can you fix this deck” requests, the asset scramble the night before a meeting, and the repetitive work that used to keep me from spending more time on the pipeline. That part has been great.

But the expectations have grown faster than the time it saved. Why aren’t we running more campaigns? Why aren’t we spinning up more landing pages? If AI can do it, why not do a ton of it?

Part of our job now is explaining, professionally and tactfully, why more activity isn’t the same as more results. And why the assets that bring in a new account rarely help close the deals already in the pipeline. Those usually need to be much more specific to what’s happening with that particular buyer.

What worries me more is the marketers coming up right now.

People like Mike and me had years to develop the judgment to push back on a founder, question a sales assumption or walk into a deal review and ask to get involved. We learned by making plenty of mistakes along the way. I wonder how the next generation builds those instincts when AI is taking over the work that gave junior marketers their first experience. That’s one reason I keep coming back to mentorship, and to getting junior marketers closer to the decisions being made instead of just producing whatever assets somebody requests.

If you’re earlier in your career, start with Mike’s advice. Get closer to sales, learn what buyers are actually saying and bring something useful to the conversation. You don’t need all the answers, but you do need to start building the judgment AI can’t build for you.

I’m curious how this is playing out where you work. Has AI freed up time for more meaningful work, or has it mostly raised expectations for how much marketing should produce? Reply and tell me. I’d like to hear what other teams are seeing.

🎧 Mike walks through the before-and-after marketing job description, his sales-ready handoff criteria and the full 90-day roadmap in our conversation. He also leaves founders and marketers with one question each.

Watch the full episode →

Last week’s edition on growth targets sparked another conversation inside the community.

Ólöf Kristjánsdóttir turned Jason Cardillo’s advice around. She’s adding his questions to her own list for when she’s the one hiring. Good candidates are going to start asking how leadership arrived at the revenue number.

So I asked Jason how a hiring manager should respond. His advice was refreshingly simple: be honest about where the number came from. If it came from the board, say so, and work through the assumptions together. If you don’t know, admit it and figure it out together.

The “just build it with AI” pressure is one of the most active conversations in the MarketingHQ community right now, and a big reason I wanted to have Mike on.

That’s what the community is for: early-stage B2B marketers comparing notes on the stuff they’re actually dealing with. We’re over 100 in-house marketers now, with a private Leaders Circle for heads of marketing, a jobs list every Friday and a Boston group.

Join MarketingHQ Free →

No vendors. No pitches. Just marketers helping marketers.

Career Up: Marketing Jobs This Week

Hand-picked roles from the MarketingHQ Job Board. Community members get them first, every Friday.

Leadership

VP of Marketing at Buzz Solutions (Palo Alto)
VP, Marketing at Doxel (San Francisco)
VP of Marketing at Nift (Remote)
VP of Marketing at ECG Management Consultants (Chicago / $150–350K)
Director of Marketing Operations at OPSWAT (cyber) (Tampa)
Director of Growth at Belong Health (King of Prussia, PA / $160–190K)

Boston-area

VP, Marketing at Videa (Boston / $230–270K)
VP for Marketing & Communications at Clark University (Worcester / $265–314K)
Events Marketing Executive at Ahrefs (Cambridge, MA)

Product marketing, ops & growth

Sr. Regional Marketing Manager, NAM at Palo Alto Networks (cyber) (Santa Clara / $163–264K)
Product Marketing Manager, Cloud AI, Gemini Enterprise at Google (Sunnyvale / $141–205K)
Senior Product Marketing Manager at Samsung Ads (Mundelein, IL / $180K)
Marketing Manager at Foundry Robotics (Emeryville, CA / $150–250K)
Digital Marketing Manager, Web Strategy at AWS (New York)
Manager, Marketing Measurement & Optimization at PayPal (New York / $117–173K)
Marketing Operations Manager at Avolve Software (Remote / from $110K)
Marketing Operations Manager at The Institute of Internal Auditors (Lake Mary, FL)
Marketing & Communications Manager at Unravel (Remote)

Early career

Sr. Marketing Operations Coordinator at DLA Piper (Remote / from $101K)
Marketing Operations Associate at Ekimetrics (New York, hybrid / from $75K)

Find many more roles on our MarketingHQ Job Board

Imagine a Saturday where you're not catching up on the CRM you didn't touch all week. 

HubSpot's new self-updating CRM doesn't wait for you to log back in. Friday's calls are already logged. The deal that needs a nudge Monday morning is already flagged. The automation you set up once keeps running without you thinking about it. None of it needed you over the weekend. 

Customers are already seeing it pay off: 45% more deals closed. Finally, you start Monday caught up, not behind.

Get a Demo

If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here to get our weekly newsletter directly in your inbox.