Falling Behind in B2B Marketing? Turn Pressure into Progress

By Lily Rogers
October 29, 2025

Modern B2B marketing is moving faster than ever. New tools and strategies bring disruption and raise expectations for what marketing can (or should) deliver. But when constraints like flat budgets and siloed teams slow you down, it’s natural to worry about falling behind.

You’re not alone. Even well-resourced enterprise teams feel the pressure to keep up. A recent LinkedIn survey shows that 72% of B2B marketers feel overwhelmed by the pace of change, and more than half say expectations have never been higher.

This blog post takes an honest look at five high-pressure challenges keeping marketers awake at night. Read on to determine if you’re actually behind the curve (spoiler: most of your peers have plenty of room for growth) and learn steps to help you adapt your strategies and move forward confidently.

Four Principles for Progress

Keep these guiding principles in mind as we move through each challenge. Applied with intent, they turn “do everything now” pressure into focused next steps.

Focus on goals and outcomes, not trends or technology.
Resist the pressure to chase every new tool or tactic. Instead, stay focused on your core marketing goals and outcomes, then decide where innovations might support them.
Strive for continuous improvement.
You don’t have to fix every issue at once or undertake massive overhauls to marketing strategy. Iterative, measurable improvements add up faster (and have more staying power) than sweeping transformations.
Stop comparing and despairing.
Instead of worrying about whether your team is behind the curve, shift your attention to what you can control—the tangible steps that will help you build consistent progress. And remember, most marketing teams are still figuring it out, just like you.
Embrace optimization and experimentation.
Run pilot programs and experiments to test new approaches while minimizing risk. Keep what works, refine what doesn’t, and evolve your playbook with flexibility.

Challenge #1: Adopting AI Everywhere

The pressure
AI has become a core focus of the marketing toolkit. Teams are asked to apply it everywhere, from content creation to campaign optimization. Meanwhile, headlines and LinkedIn feeds can make it seem like mature, fully integrated AI programs are the norm.

The truth
Most teams are still experimenting, learning, and proving value.

Just 36% of marketers have operationalized AI in daily workflows.²
67% cite a lack of training as a barrier to AI adoption.²
49% of enterprise leaders struggle to show AI’s business value.³
27% of CMOs say their organization has limited or no GenAI use in campaigns.⁴

Tendo’s take
Tie AI to goals and scale deliberately. AI shows the most value when it improves quality and efficiency in ways that matter to a specific strategy. Aim for impact that your stakeholders feel, like publishing faster, reducing manual tasks, or moving from insights to action sooner.

Try this next step: Pick one repeatable workflow, such as content summaries, tagging, or content assessment, and run a controlled AI pilot. Define inputs, add QA checkpoints, and document time or consistency gains. Working in manageable steps builds team skills and earns executive trust. Once your strategy is steady, extend it to other content or processes.

Challenge #2: Scaling Personalization

The pressure
Personalization is no longer a buzzword; it’s an established practice. Overwhelmed buyers have grown immune to generic messages, and 66% of B2B customers look for personalized content when making a purchase.¹Marketers feel pressure to adopt more sophisticated and comprehensive personalization.

The truth
Though a long-standing priority, seamless personalization is still elusive for most.

Only 1% of B2B marketers describe their personalization as comprehensive.²
59% say it’s limited to simple tweaks in one or two channels with little integration.²
Just 49% of buyers feel brands use their information in beneficial ways (down from 60% in 2022).³

Tendo’s take
Personalize with precision over volume. The goal is not to touch every channel, but to add relevance where it can move a business metric.

Try this next step: Focus on one lifecycle touchpoint (like onboarding or renewal) and one priority revenue segment. Build a journey with tailored content and measure improvement. Use lifts in engagement or retention to refine your approach and scale thoughtfully instead of reactively.

Challenge #3: Measurement and Attribution Clarity

The pressure
You’re sitting on massive quantities of data, and leaders expect you to harness it. They want a crystal clear picture of what’s working, with the attribution models to back it up.

The truth
Data visibility remains uneven for many teams.

Nearly half of marketers still can’t unify data across channels and say their data implementation strategy is in exploratory or developing stages.¹
67% of CMOs say they are overwhelmed by the volume of marketing data.²
Only 31% are fully satisfied with their ability to connect data sources.³

Tendo’s take
More data without useful insights is just noise. Prioritize clarity first, then you can refocus your collection strategy on what’s missing.

Try this next step: Define the key questions that you want your data to answer. For example: Which campaigns create sales-qualified opportunities? What are common elements of content that influence closed-won deals? (For more, see our post on content attribution and measurement.) Use those questions to guide not just the data you collect, but how you read and put that data to work for you. Shift from data accumulation to data value creation.

Challenge #4: Integrating the Latest Martech

The pressure
Nearly 22% of total marketing budgets now go to martech.¹ Stacks keep growing as teams add tools for automation, analytics, orchestration, and AI. With so much available, the pressure is high to use owned tech to its best advantage.

The truth
Tools are often bought faster than what’s feasible to deploy and maintain.

Marketers use only 33% of their martech’s capabilities on average.¹
62% of marketers are using more tools than two years ago, but over 32% say the pace of change is a challenge.²
35% of larger orgs expect it to increase efficiency, yet 45% of marketing ops professionals cite a lack of skilled resources surrounding martech.²

Tendo’s take
Having the latest tools doesn’t necessarily mean you’re operating ahead of the curve. It’s more important to extract value before expanding your toolkit. Instead of chasing shiny tech, optimize the impact of the tools you already pay for.

Try this next step: Conduct a use-it-or-lose-it audit. List each tool, its owner, utilization rate, and business outcome. Identify tools with untapped potential and tools that should be discontinued. Reinvest unused license spend into staff training, integrations, or enablement that make existing tools work better together.

Challenge #5: Breaking Through with Thought Leadership

The pressure
Strong thought leadership is now a major signal of credibility in B2B markets. Senior decision-makers spend meaningful time with it each week and expect distinctive styles and formats offered by experts.¹ That raises the stakes to ensure what you produce meets high standards and breaks through in a crowded landscape.

The truth
The bar is rising, but teams still struggle with consistency and quality.

50% of content creators say content is under-resourced at their organization.
54% of business leaders say high-quality thought leadership is a factor in their decision-making
Yet only 15% of business leaders rate most thought leadership as very good or excellent.¹

Tendo’s take
Prioritize adding value. The world doesn’t need more mediocre content. Slow down and find a consistent, sustainable output of content that delivers original insights, research, examples, and guidance, tightly mapped to customer careabouts or business needs.

Try this next step: Before writing anything, define your thought leadership POV and strategic narrative. Determine the goals you want thought leadership to achieve and how it will shape hearts and minds.

Moving Forward

Progress in B2B marketing is an ongoing discipline. The most effective marketing teams treat it as a cycle of learning, testing, and refining. They pick one area to sharpen, measure results, and use those insights to fuel the next.

These intentional moves compound into business wins, from better use of budgets to clearer pipeline attribution. Share what works, standardize it, and keep moving. Every improvement—a cleaner workflow, a smarter data insight, a sharper narrative—builds momentum toward a marketing engine that’s more connected, intelligent, resilient, and profitable.

Ready to create marketing that stands out?

We help enterprise B2B teams connect ambitious goals to clear outcomes, building strategies and content that spark momentum.

Let’s connect and turn your marketing pressures into meaningful progress.

Sources

Personalization