“AI and modern martech mean one marketer can have more impact than ever before, but at exactly the same time the remit has exploded.”
Brand, growth, AI, customer experience, data and commercial strategy all make Jeremy Laight's list, and for a B2B marketer the remit can extend much further across demand generation, ABM, content, media, measurement, sales alignment and multiple markets. As he puts it, “No one can be world-class at all of it.”
That creates a useful career question. When the job has become too broad for any one person to master every part of it, what actually makes a marketer more valuable as they become more senior?
Jeremy has seen the question from several perspectives, through senior marketing roles at organisations including Nationwide, NatWest, Bupa, Crown Worldwide, Travelex and LendInvest, and today as a Fractional CMO and Founder of The Slice Network. One of the clearest answers from that experience is judgement.
Experience should change how you see the problem
Working across different businesses has made pattern recognition particularly valuable. “You start recognising the same challenge appearing in different organisations, often dressed up in different language,” he says, with poor measurement, inconsistent execution and unrealistic expectations among the problems that recur. The boundaries between marketing and sales can become equally blurred, particularly when marketing is expected to deliver today's revenue while also building tomorrow's pipeline.
That wider view can change the diagnosis. “In my experience, it's usually a revenue problem that's been labelled as a marketing problem.” More leads will not fix an opportunity conversion problem, another marketer will not fix the wrong strategy, and a programme producing different results across markets may need a better understanding of those markets before anybody decides what needs changing.
This is where experience becomes more useful than simply having done the job for longer. It creates a reference point for challenging assumptions, spotting familiar problems and moving more quickly without assuming that every apparently similar situation has the same answer. That experience becomes transferable, allowing you to “challenge assumptions, avoid mistakes and move much faster than if you were seeing that problem for the first time.”
It also makes one deceptively simple question more useful: “What problem are we actually trying to solve?”
Knowing when you need somebody else's expertise
The breadth of modern marketing also means the expertise required to solve that problem will not always sit inside one team. Businesses already combine permanent marketers with agencies, fractional leaders and specialist partners, so the more useful consideration is whether the capability being accessed is creating value. As Jeremy explains, “The real question isn't where capability sits; it's whether it's creating more value than it costs.”
There is a useful difference between the perspectives those people bring. Internal marketers have depth of context because they understand the customer, brand, commercial priorities and organisation from within, while people working across businesses can develop breadth through seeing similar problems play out in different companies, sectors and markets. That pattern recognition is one of the advantages of working fractionally, and agencies and specialists can bring their own wider exposure within the disciplines they work across.
For the marketer leading that mix, value comes partly from knowing how to use both. They need enough understanding to recognise good expertise, challenge recommendations and connect the people involved around the commercial outcome, without assuming they personally need to be the deepest expert in every discipline. That thinking also changes how teams are designed: “I'd stop designing around headcount and start designing around capability.”
Some of your most valuable work is the hardest to see
That shift becomes particularly interesting as a marketer gets more senior because their contribution often becomes less tangible. Earlier in a career, it can be relatively easy to point to the campaign you built, the content you produced, the channel you ran or the event you delivered. Later, more of the value sits in the decisions around that work: recognising that the problem was not lead volume, challenging the brief, connecting something happening in marketing with something happening in sales, bringing in the right specialist or understanding why an approach that worked in one market is not translating neatly into another.
Sometimes the most useful decision is to stop something altogether. “Some of the biggest value I've created has come from helping businesses decide what not to do rather than simply adding more activity.” That kind of contribution may never produce another asset or number on a dashboard, but it can prevent the wrong hire, save budget and move the business forward faster.
The challenge is making that contribution visible. As more of a marketer's value sits in judgement, commercial understanding and the ability to connect expertise, being able to explain the thinking behind the work becomes part of the job too. Three pieces of advice from the conversation are particularly relevant.
Market your marketing
“Market your marketing. One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is assuming everyone knows what they're doing. They don't. If you don't communicate your thinking, your progress and your results, people often assume nothing is happening. Visibility builds confidence, both inside and outside the organisation.”
Making your value visible means communicating the thinking and decisions behind the work, as well as reporting what happened.
Get comfortable not knowing everything
“No one can be world-class at all of it.”
Progression does not require accumulating every specialist capability marketing touches. It does require enough understanding to ask good questions, recognise expertise, challenge recommendations and bring the right people together as the remit grows.
Understand the commercial problem
“What problem are we actually trying to solve?”
That question becomes a much bigger question when you understand what happens beyond the campaign: where opportunities stall, what sales is seeing, why performance differs between markets and which outcomes marketing can genuinely influence.
“The best organisations stop worrying about where marketing ends and sales begins because customers certainly don't. Commercial growth is a shared responsibility.”
Perhaps that is what experience should ultimately give a marketer: greater knowledge, but also better judgement about what they are looking at, what they do not know and whose expertise they need around them.
The final question
As part of our MQL series, we're asking every guest the same final question:
B2B marketing in 2027 is…
“...less about generating activity and more about creating commercial certainty. I think we'll see smaller permanent teams supported by more specialist expertise, bought in exactly when it's needed. The businesses that embrace that shift will be paying for outcomes rather than headcount and I suspect that'll become one of the biggest competitive advantages of the next few years.”