In B2B marketing, we obsess over tools, funnels, and tech, but not nearly enough over the humans running them. My conversation with Randy Brasche, author of “Some Assembly Required: The B2B Revenue Marketer’s Survival Guide,” puts the spotlight back on the marketer’s perspective and on personal agency.
Personal Agency as a Revenue Skill
Randy describes personal agency as a stack of capabilities: continually upgrading your skills, staying relentlessly curious about customers and markets, building strong networks inside and outside your company, and protecting your own mental and physical health. He even dedicates a chapter of his book to mental health because burned-out marketers don’t shape strategy; they simply react to it. When individual marketers invest in agency, entire teams become more accountable and more effective at driving revenue.
Data, ICPs, and “Failing at Scale”
A major theme in our conversation, drawn from the 55 interviews Randy did for the book, is data frustration. Too many CMOs step into new roles without clarity on which customers are truly profitable, how segments should be prioritized, or even a shared, operational view of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Meanwhile, customer data sits fragmented across systems. On top of that shaky foundation, we’ve layered ABM platforms, marketing automation, and now AI. Without a solid data layer and living, dynamic ICP, AI doesn’t make things smarter; it helps us “fail at scale,” generating highly “personalized” outreach that is still fundamentally misguided.
Randy sees a real opportunity for AI to finally support dynamic ICPs that are continuously updated with new signals, unified across tools, and regularly reviewed and agreed upon by the executive team.
“Spray and Pray 2.0”
We also discussed what I’d call “spray and pray 2.0.” The old version was batch-and-blast email. The new version is the temptation to “just throw it into AI and let the robots do the marketing.” If your data is wrong and your story is weak, AI will simply make bad outreach faster. Randy shared an email that congratulated him on his “work at Pavilion,” a community he belongs to but doesn’t work for. That single, small error destroyed credibility. Even when the facts are technically correct, you can often feel when something was written by a model rather than a human. The reaction is the same: delete. The answer isn’t more AI; it’s better human inputs (clear ICPs and real narratives) and then using AI to scale what already resonates.
Events as Content and Insight Engines
Events were another area where we see both upside and underperformance. Events are back, but in a more focused way: smaller, more intimate, often ABM-driven experiences where marketing and sales work closely together to move real opportunities forward. The missed opportunity is that many organizations still treat events as one-and-done lead generators. They underinvest in pre-event orchestration, are inconsistent in post-event follow-up, and fail to capture the rich content that emerges when customers and prospects are face to face.
Storytelling as the Core Human Advantage
Beneath all of this is one capability that Randy argues should sit at the top of the modern marketer’s skill set: storytelling. Not prompt-writing, not tool configuration: storytelling. Great marketing still depends on being able to frame a hero (your customer), a villain (the problem or risk), a journey, and a resolution that feels real and meaningful. Even in “boring” industries, there is always human tension: risk, career exposure, opportunity cost, fear of choosing the wrong partner. AI can assist after a human has defined the narrative, but when content is generated without domain expertise or empathy, scaling it with AI only makes the disconnect more obvious.
CRO–CMO Alignment and the Seat at the Table
We closed by talking about the relationship between marketing and sales leadership, particularly CMOs and CROs. Randy has operated in multiple org structures, sometimes reporting into the CRO, sometimes as a peer to the CRO reporting directly to the CEO. What matters more than the org chart is that marketing has enough autonomy to think beyond short-term demand harvesting, and that there is healthy, honest tension between marketing and sales rather than one-way marching orders.
Discussion points include
- Why personal agency is now a core marketer competency
- How bad or static ICPs cause teams to “fail at scale” with automation and AI
- Using AI to build dynamic, agreed-upon ICPs instead of more spam
- Turning events into content and insight engines, not just lead sources
- Why authentic human storytelling remains the marketer’s unfair advantage
- How stronger CRO–CMO alignment and shared pipeline ownership change outcomes