The Future of Marketing is Sales

If you plowed into 2025 with high hopes that the friction between your marketing team and your sales team would be less intense this year…buckle in. In 2025 and beyond, marketing and sales are going to become even more intimately interconnected; it will be the only way to make major headway in a seriously cluttered digital universe where personal outreach is already starting to trump volume marketing plays.

My opinion is that looking a decade or more ahead, marketing will become almost strictly an arm of sales, and marketing professionals who can effectively work with and enable sales will become the fuel that powers revenue.

Now before you throw me off the boat, allow me to justify my thoughts

Forces Shaping the Future of Marketing

Digital clutter is not a new problem and traditional marketing has more or less survived it, but a few factors are going to make it infinitely more difficult in the coming years:

Content proliferation and saturation

GenAI bumped content publishing into ludicrous speed (please tell me you know that reference). Bad content has always been a problem, but now it can be created at 100x the rate it could before. The good news is that good content can also be created at 100x the rate. But the outcome of both of these scenarios is: a sh*tload of content competing for the same amount of eyeballs.

GenAI is altering search engine efficacy

Search engines are also losing steam. We’ve all seen the statistic from Sparktoro floating around: Only about 60% of Google searches end in a click (you can see the exact data for the U.S. and EU here). I can’t see how paid search, SEO, and traditional “publish it and they will come” marketing will survive this.

The reduction in third-party cookies

It’s only been a few years since regulators started cracking down on GDPR regulations and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Websites with visitors from these regions are now required to ask users to give explicit consent to use cookies — and an average of just under 50% of these individuals in the US say they “often” or “always” accept cookies. This makes tracking and targeting notably more difficult for marketers. While we’ll no doubt find ways around this — opt-ins and first-party data, to start — I don’t think this problem is going away. It’s a stepping stone towards even greater difficulty tracking and targeting mass audiences.

Shift Toward ABM, Personalization, and Individualized Marketing

I suspect that all three of these factors will result in a couple of scenarios:

The deprioritization of generic content as blind lead generation

Publishing content for the web will become table stakes and slowly shift to a “keep the lights on” strategy. It will always be necessary to leave the fishing line in the pond, but it won’t be a primary focus anymore.

Think about it like the journey of email marketing — even just a handful of years ago, it was the strategy to generate leads, improve branding, and move prospects through the funnel. While it is still necessary, it’s now more of a secondary tactic for catching a few fish inexpensively, nurturing leads (even this is dying), and communicating with prospects who have already expressed interest.

Note that my point here is not that content will become less important. Publishing content blindly or with an SEO aim will become less important, but content, in general, will become more important…just with an alternate aim — which I will discuss shortly.

The rise of relationships over leads

Remember back when you could just fill your database with contacts (or even purchase lists online if you were desperate) and blast out massive emails and targeted ads with relatively positive results? Or publish a blog with some SEO tactics and watch your Google rankings climb?

Those were the good ol’ days.

Some companies are still able to do this, and this strategy isn’t dead yet, but the big wins in this arena always have and always will go to companies that have simply been on Google’s radar since the internet was born. It’s hard to compete with a company that has been publishing content for 20 years. And it’s only going to get harder.

If you’re not IBM, Microsoft, or Oracle, your marketing is going to have to get more personal. You must start talking to smaller groups with similar qualities and needs, and address them as intimately as possible to get their attention. This means more and better segmentation, smaller campaigns, more community engagement, and more sales enablement.

Less “talking at” and more “chatting with”

Marketing has traditionally functioned as a company’s megaphone. We “talk at” our mass audiences in a very impersonal way. Somehow, B2C companies have gotten way out in front of this — they have long been publishing more genuine, vulnerable reels on TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit that display their personality, use humor, and talk to their audiences with warmth and expression. This makes the recipient feel they are in the room with the company; that the company understands them personally.

B2B tech hasn’t quite caught up with this. We still tend to publish as if from a stage rather than a home visit. We are still too us-focused rather than you-focused. And it’s not necessarily about publishing videos — writing can be equally personable.

But we have to be willing to get on the same level with our audiences. The only way to do this effectively is to speak to smaller groups of people with particular interests and create a sense of vulnerability. We have to be willing to show our scars.

The Key Role of Sales in Marketing

So we’ve established that marketing needs to individualize marketing, get more personal, speak to groups of ten or twenty rather than thousands. Well, think about it…who is already doing this?

Sales.

The crux of this entire shift in marketing is that the personalized nature of sales is going to become infinitely more important. And if marketers want to stay relevant and contribute to revenue, we’re going to have to focus our efforts and attention on supporting the sales team and involving ourselves in their work. We’re essentially going to become pre-sales.

I want to reemphasize something here because I can imagine a whole lot of people reading this and saying “But we are still generating tons of leads! We can prove exactly how much we contribute to revenue and it’s substantial!”

You’re right. Lead generation via mass marketing (SEO, email distribution, paid ads, etc.) is still going to play a strong role in your marketing mix. I’m not arguing that. But long-term, those tactics are going to become less valuable — i.e. they’ll receive less budget — and they’ll fade into the background. They’ll run and they’ll do their job, but they won’t be the primary strategy of your marketing team.

Your marketing team is going to become more hyper-focused on individuals. You’re gonna get real people-y. Here’s a short list of the top 3 strategies your marketing team should spend more time on — and the tactics that will make them successful:

Personalized, role-based outreach

Personalization is already the cornerstone of effective outreach, and it’s only getting more important. Tailoring content specifically to the needs and roles of individual buyers increases the relevance and impact of your message — and gives you a chance to truly connect.

Top tactics:

Building microsites and content libraries for particular roles and verticals to give the sales team targeted content to share with prospects
Contacting small groups of high-potential buyers with role-based emails, ads, or ebooks that address their day-to-day challenges.
Writing personalized follow-up email communications for the sales team (because they usually suck at it)
Building sales presentations for different members of the buying committee that effectively communicate your unique selling proposition.

Collaborative targeting

The revenue engine of a company is no longer going to be marketing inbound followed by sales outreach; outreach efforts will belong to everyone. Sales and marketing teams will need to get very cozy, crafting messages together and tackling campaigns in tandem.

Top tactics:

Igniting social media or community conversations in conjunction with sales reps
Launching Call-Email-Content campaigns with the BDR team to give focused attention to specific high-quality targets.
Writing sales scripts for specific roles and verticals your sales team is calling.
Building presentation slides for different members of the C-suite so sales priorities are addressed along with broader marketing messages.

Customer-first marketing

To stay ahead, marketing needs to focus on customers, not just prospects. It’s about building real relationships that go beyond the sale and creating ongoing opportunities. A customer-first strategy helps you nurture these relationships and create content that resonates.

Top tactics:

Fostering relationships with customers to facilitate cross-sell/upsell campaigns and create sales slides that speak to your ICP.
Publishing genuine, vulnerable videos, blogs, and webinars that include customer and guest discussions to humanize your brand.
Joining sales and upsell calls to create content showcasing the expertise of your team and the potential uses of your technology.

When I say “the future of marketing is sales,” I’m not suggesting that sales is going to overtake marketing or that marketing will go away. I’m suggesting that the role of marketing will become more individualized and campaigns will be tackled in conjunction with BDRs and sales reps, rather than with a marketing-to-BDR lead dump with an (awkward) handoff. These teams will need to be tightly integrated, not only for net new lead gen, but also for uncovering and pursuing expansion and retention opportunities.

Some tech companies are already doing this. They’re already making this shift to focus on sales enablement and hyper-targeted, small-batch campaigns. Bravo — you’re already ahead of the game! If that’s not you, now is the time to start shifting your thinking. But how do you do that? How do you create this kind of content and start the process of becoming more sales-enablement-focused?

I’m gonna take one from the Hollywood playbook here, and leave you with a cliffhanger: We’ll talk about that in the next post!