This Q&A with Kathy Floam-Greenspan originally appeared on citybiz. Read the full Q&A here >
Marketing is being remade in real-time as artificial intelligence disrupts traditional workflows, consumer buying journeys become increasingly complex, and the pressure to prove ROI intensifies. This is changing how marketers work with their C-suite counterparts and how they help brands drive measurable revenue.
In today’s Q&A, we connected with Kathy Floam-Greenspan, Founder and Chief Strategist at POM Marketing, a B2B marketing firm serving as a senior-level marketing partner for organizations ranging from high-growth startups to $1B+ multinationals.
With over 25 years of experience helping B2B organizations align their marketing efforts with real business outcomes, POM Marketing understands the mounting complexity and expectations facing today’s marketing professionals.
To better understand these challenges, POM Marketing recently surveyed over 100 B2B marketing leaders for their newly released report, “Marketing Under Pressure.”
As a marketing veteran, how have you seen the B2B landscape change in the last 5-10 years?
Historically, marketing aligned with leadership and sales leads at the beginning of the year, agreed on shared goals, and then successfully executed on those goals with clear marching orders. That’s not to say that marketing was a set-it-and-forget-it team or department, but the strategic roadmap was generally more stable and predictable.
Today, this dynamic is much different. Marketers’ efforts haven’t changed, but the pressure, complexity, and demand for measurable impact have reached a boiling point. Focusing and refocusing marketing efforts as corporate priorities change is the new workflow.
When you add factors such as rapid integration of artificial intelligence, longer sales cycles, and increasingly crowded markets, the pressure on these professionals has increased dramatically.
Your firm conducted research to identify the causes of the more recent disconnect between B2B marketers and their senior organizational leaders. What motivated this pursuit of knowledge and analysis for you?
We were primarily motivated by our desire to understand the consistent patterns we kept observing across the marketing sector, where our friends, colleagues, and even competitors were noticeably struggling.
Marketers were held accountable for driving measurable results, but KPIs were constantly shifting, resources were stretched thin, and leadership expectations were not always clearly defined.
We weren’t interested in assigning blame, but we wanted to deeply understand what organizational leaders might be unintentionally creating within their departments and the factors forcing these friction points to the forefront.
What are some of the key findings that your research revealed?
The survey revealed several key themes that helped explain the direct pressures shaping how B2B marketing teams operate.
First, it was clear that marketing teams are chronically under resourced. In the survey, 69% of marketers said leadership expectations were outpacing their staffing, time, and budget. Consequently, teams are being asked to deliver more impact without additional capacity.
Of course, AI is also playing a prominent role in the marketing conversation. While nearly 80% of surveyed marketers report that AI is impacting their strategy, many still lack clear use cases, necessary expertise, or ethical guardrails. Instead of simplifying workflows, this lack of clarity makes AI feel like just another complicated thing to figure out on top of an already full plate.
What was the most surprising trend for you?
The most surprising trend from our survey results was just how consistent this intense pressure felt across the board. It didn’t matter what the company size was, and titles didn’t matter either.
Everyone from solo marketers and managers to directors, VPs, and CMOs was describing the exact same tension.
The universal nature of this problem highlighted that the industry is experiencing a systemic structural issue rather than an isolated talent problem.
Would you like to offer any strategic tips for marketers to learn from this report to make progress in 2026 for their companies?
Based on our research, there are three practical shifts marketers can implement to build real momentum in 2026, all rooted in focus, alignment, and working smarter. First, teams must get explicitly clear on big-picture goals with leadership upfront. The need to know the end goal before they start.
Secondly, marketers must fix their fragmented data to tell a much clearer performance story. By unifying metrics from various silos into comprehensive dashboards, performance can be viewed holistically, leading to more productive, trust-building conversations with leadership.
Finally, teams should treat AI as a collaborative partner. It won’t solve every problem, and it introduces new challenges that necessitate clear guardrails, training, and expectations-setting.