The Chief Protector of Focus with Kathy Floam-Greenspan of POM Marketing

Kathy Floam-Greenspan founded POM Marketing, and she has landed on a job title that is not on any org chart.

“I’ve turned into the chief protector of focus in marketing because it is tough out there,” she says.

Her firm works with growing B2B companies in cybersecurity, IT services, and SaaS infrastructure, companies with big growth goals and a marketing team of two or three people. She surveyed a hundred of those marketers, across director, manager, and CMO roles, and published what came back as a report called Marketing Under Pressure.

Three Findings She Stopped On

The first was the gap between what gets asked and what gets funded.

“Across the 69% of the people that we interviewed said that expectations are outpacing staffing time or budget,” she says.

The second is the one that gets argued about at every quarterly review, and her number on it is low.

“29% of marketers, only 29% of the marketers that we spoke with, that we surveyed, feel confident proving marketing’s impact,” she says.

She did not expect that figure in a market saturated with analytics tools. The third finding is about AI, and it splits cleanly between effect and plan.

“80% say that AI is impacting strategy, but many don’t have a clear plan on how to use it,” she says.

Her reading of all three together is that the problem is upstream of the work.

“It’s not a lack of effort. It’s not a lack of talent. It’s kind of a lack of clarity around priorities,” she says.

The Same Pressure at Every Title and Company Size

Asked what she did not see coming, she pointed at what the data refused to do, which was sort people into groups.

“I think the number one thing that was kind of astounding to me was how the issues that we saw, it had nothing to do with title. It didn’t matter about company size and it didn’t matter about role. It was a consistent experience,” she says.

“Whether you were director of marketing, marketing manager, or CMO, people were describing the same tension,” she says.

She listed the tension in one breath, which was not enough resources, trouble proving ROI, AI to figure out, and very little time to do any of it.

Why She Protects the Focus

The shifting is what she keeps coming back to, and she puts the interval at weekly.

“Priorities are shifting and I would say even weekly priorities are shifting. And I think marketers are really struggling to keep up,” she says.

“Yeah, it’s like whiplash, you know?” she says.

She described how planning used to run, with an end of year meeting, goals for the year, and a plan that survived contact with the year. That horizon has collapsed, and she has moved her own bar down to match it.

“Now it’s like, if you could get a quarterly plan in place and implement it, that’s a win,” she says.

“But don’t keep changing the focus because you’re not going to be happy with the outcome,” she says.

I told her that protecting the focus sounds like a good name for a marketing newsletter, and I have watched leadership teams run a short campaign and then express disappointment in the results. Her answer puts the fix above the marketing team.

“I do think it, the C-suite needs to help protect the focus,” she says.

The line from her report is blunter than anything she said out loud.

“These findings should be a wake-up call for the C-suite, not just a marketer,” the report says.

Skepticism as a Working Requirement

She took a thirteen hour AI masterclass and now uses it to steer what her team adopts, so her caution is not avoidance.

“I still have a healthy amount of skepticism with AI. I think that if you just don’t, then that’s, I think, worrisome, honestly,” she says.

She is clear on where the tool stops.

“There is a human aspect of marketing that I believe to date can’t be replaced by AI,” she says.

What she sees from leadership is less a theory about AI than an appetite.

“I think it’s just a demand for more, more, more. I don’t even know that they’re thinking about AI necessarily,” she says.

She watched the dot com cycle run its course, so she asks the obvious question about the AI moment.

“Everybody and their mother is now putting AI on their website,” she says.

Her client base makes that more than an aesthetic complaint. POM does a lot of work with government contractors, and she thinks that sector in particular has reason to slow down.

“One would think that government contractors need to be careful about how they’re using AI,” she says.

Where the Data Goes

On measurement, she has stopped looking for a standard and started building one per client.

“They’re using 9 million different tools and all of them have analytics in them. And it’s really hard to create a story with all these different tools,” she says.

Her team routes those tools into a single dashboard and interprets from there, while the client usually rebuilds it as a PowerPoint for leadership. Asked whether the clients running a structured operating system do better than the ones flying loose, she would not draw the line.

“There’s no one system that I haven’t seen any common thread in any of the companies that we’re working with, sadly,” she says.

Watch the Episode

Marketing Under Pressure is free at pomagency.com/survey, and POM keeps a resource section for marketers on the same site.

For more conversations, visit talk-commerce.com/podcasts.