Marketing: Be AI-savvy and a Strategic Sales Partner

Recently, a colleague told me that their marketing team just puts something into ChatGPT, and it spits out topics and drafts an article, blog, or email without any strategic insight, knowledge of their product’s features and benefits, or understanding of the audience/customers/members. When did marketing go from a strategic partner providing insightful market and customer data to just creating materials that show little knowledge or integration with their sales efforts?

As a marketing leader (interim or fractional CMO), my job isn’t just to generate leads, but to fuel the teams I support (sales, product development) with a clearer view of what’s happening competitively in the market, how to personalize our offer to our customers and what’s coming or can be expected down-the-road, so we provide a better product/service to our customers. Today, there are predictive AI tools that are a game-changer for marketing teams as they help us move from reactive reporting to a proactive strategy that they should be sharing with their sales teams.

But it goes deeper—with predictive analytics platforms (Salesforce or Tableau), we see which industries, geographies, or types of customers are trending toward interest in our product/offer. It can help sales teams identify at-risk accounts with insights that can be developed into personalized marketing campaigns or at least more informed outreach strategies.

If your sales and marketing process still treats Salesforce like a customer/lead warehouse instead of a strategic engine, you’re missing an opportunity. Tools like PathFactory are reshaping how we move leads through the funnel, and they plug directly into a platform to make content engagement smarter and align more with sales objectives.

Bottom line: if your marketing team isn’t feeding this kind of insight into their sales, product development team, and leadership, they’re not strategic partners—they’re just running ads and sending emails.