It’s Not a You Thing.
The Conundrum of Common Problems, Isolated Solutions
It’s a WE problem.
We wait twenty months to get our CAC dollar back.
We have lost half our marketing email deliverability.
We have lost a third of our organic search.
We bought AI to go faster. We are going slower.
We see our website traffic is down, our post responses are down.
We’re down.
You know what all of these problems have in common?
We.
WE share these problems.
But are WE sharing the solutions?
Rivers burning. Paybacks dropping. Wishful thinking.
Those aren’t just snappy headlines to grab your attention.
We are living the same challenges in the same market at the same moment.
But we seem to be… alone.
The Try Harder Trap
The effort is not in question.
If you are encountering these “challenges” your effort is not in question.
Nor is your intelligence.
Nor is your will or your focus or your skills.
Walk into any enterprise organization right now and you will find smart, seasoned professionals working hardon truly confounding problems.
They are gritting their teeth, driving themselves.
Do more. Test new go-to-market approaches.
Do it differently. Rebuild the channel mix.
Do it over.Recast the forecast.
Do the prompt one more time.
The urgency is not manufactured.
It is everywhere, and it is accelerating.
And that urgency is becoming more urgent.
Nearly half of 4,702 CEOs across 105 countries said they do NOT believe their business will be viable in a decade without significant reinvention.
The hard work gets harder.
We are all trying harder.
Everyone is working on this.
Everyone is working on this.
Separately.
Going it Alone
Between the lines of these common problems lie thousands and thousands of leaders going it alone.
Right now, across this market, at the moment you are reading this, hundreds of leadership executives are trying to solve the same exact problems.
The collapse of search is not a “you problem.”
The cratering of email effectiveness is not a “you problem.”
The explosion of AI is not a “you problem.”
Hundreds of marketing leaders are rebuilding their channel strategy from scratch without knowing that three peers at comparable companies have already tried what they’re about to try, and failed, and learned something critical from it.
Hundreds of senior leaders are wrestling with how to govern AI inside their organizations. Yet 53% of those same C-Suite execs won’t even admit to their teams that they, too, are struggling with their own use of AI. I feel them.
But the shadow cast from this “lonely shame” models the worst in Leadership, and it darkens the culture.
It’s a shadow that an Ernst & Young survey of 1,000 U.S. workers found: 59% spend more time wrestling with AI tools than if they’d done the work by hand. But they keep trying.
The message from the top? Figure it out.
Not, in all honesty, “Hey, I’m struggling with this, too.”
To my kindred Marketing Leaders: the most recent Gartner CMO Spend Survey said that the majority of you do NOT have sufficient budgets to execute your strategy. Across the conference room table, your CFO’s pressure has intensified year over year. 63% of marketing leaders report it.
Grow faster. Get leaner. Raise your game. With less.
And do it yourself.
Without talking to anyone who has solved this.
Under the false assumption that those people can’t be found.
How do you search for it on LinkedIn?
Oh, wait, there are literally thousands telling you they have it ALL figured out!
Based on their years and years of leading big businesses and big teams and big budgets!
Right.
It feels like the Genuine Leaders with Solutions That Work live on the moon.
Listen to Yourself
Over the last few months, In the 100+ direct conversations I’ve had with Senior Leaders across this $2.5 Trillion “niche” market of B2SMB, the same themes surface with a consistency that stopped surprising me a long time ago.
“We’ve been asked to spend half as much to get twice as much,” one CMO of a mid-tier payroll services provider told me. “It was not a gentle ask.”
Another VP Marketing, leader in tech hardware: “We can’t keep up with how fast our site traffic is dropping. We can’t get a click. We know what’s going on but that isn’t helping us solve it.”
Said a Fortune 500 CSO, a woman who has been selling successfully to SMBs for decades : “AI is our competitor. It’s the only salesperson our customers will listen to.”
A phone call with one of my favorite SaaS founders – a call that was a full-scale bitch on our collapsing KPIs – ended with him saying, “Nice drowning with you!”
To be clear: NO ONE is giving up.
These are passionate over-achievers, all of them. They are not wired to surrender to a trend. Or bad numbers. Or job insecurity.
But I’ve now started asking, “Who do you talk to about this?”
And I am met with a shake of the head. Chin down. Clicking on a keyboard.
Look! Over There! Another You!
The 2024 MGI Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, which surveyed 700 professional associations, found that 67% of professionals cite peer networking as the #1 reason they join.
I can attest. I’ve witnessed it first hand.
My “associations” include: NRF, NTA, SMPTE, 4As, LMA, and the rest of my career’s worth of alphabet noodles.
And then of course B2SMBI for the last 8 years (!)
I am the first to say that my career was built on the shoulders of peers who were generous (and strong) enough to lift me.
So I’m not surprised that the demand for peer connection is rising.
Because peer wisdom works.
The dialogues – the genuine, smartly focused problem solving sessions with fellow practitioners – are not found within your own four walls. Or on LinkedIn. And never on Teams.
We don’t solve problems on earnings calls. Or in performance reviews. Or frankly around every Executive Committee table I have sat around (6 in all) and even led.
The solutions live inside not just a single peer, but in the brains of a few connections, or a dozen, or hundreds.
Or maybe at the end of a long call when someone drops their guard long enough to say what is actually true.
What is actually true: the B2SMB market that I love so dearly is one of the most fragmented professional communities in business.
Peers simply do not talk to peers.
Problems that are universal are being solved as if they are unique.
In a bizarre twist, we take the fragmentation of our 33 Million customers and apply it to our own behaviors.
Lessons already learned the hard way are being learned again, by someone else, at full cost.
Is Isolation a Strategy?
I have to wonder. Because isolation really looks like a strategy.
I suppose in this market, at “this level,” you are supposed to have the answers.
That is the job.
You are the senior person in the room. You are the one the organization looks to when the channels stop working and the numbers go sideways and the board starts asking harder questions.
Admitting you’re not sure what to do next feels like a confession of failure.
So you don’t admit it. You go back to your team and work harder and optimize the funnel one more time and tell yourself the answer is just around the corner.
Small wonder, then. Your behavior.
Research published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2024 found that psychological safety is a prerequisite for sharing behavior.
Without that safety, people hide what they don’t know. At this level, not knowing is the one thing you cannot admit. So the knowledge that could solve the problem stays locked in your office.
61% of Senior Leaders say that isolation is actively impairing their performance.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness and isolation put a clinical frame on it: professional isolation reduces task performance, limits creativity, and impairs reasoning and decision-making.
71% of small and mid-size business Leaders experience that isolation at least occasionally.
I don’t quote those stats to brainstorm a motivational poster with you.
This is not a YOU problem. This is not a ME problem.
I just want to point out another twist of irony: that we value peer wisdom, connections, our network, and yet we take on our job alone.
Sad that in our “industries”, we have few mechanisms for peer-to-peer problem solving at scale.
There are conferences where everyone show-ponies their highlights. There are LinkedIn post-players that are always performatively “right.” There are chats that feel more like video-game trash-talking than anything.
There are few places where real, unguarded collaborative problem solving happens.
So the problems WE are facing compound and remain YOUR problem.
The CAC crisis gets worse because everyone is independently testing the same failed channel strategies without knowing they are duplicating work that has already been done and already failed.
The channel collapse accelerates because no one is coordinating a response to a shared infrastructure problem – I’m looking at you, Google.
The AI confusion deepens because the executives who most need to govern these tools are the least likely to admit they haven’t figured them out yet.
Isolation doesn’t just slow the solutions.
It compounds the damage. Geometrically, down the chain.
Putting Our Heads Together
In 2024, researchers Terekhin and Trinh published a systematic review in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, synthesizing the full body of existing research on peer development groups. Their conclusion: structured peer groups are a legitimate, documented intervention that improves executive effectiveness.
That word – intervention!
Our shared problems – problems that are mounting every day, that are becoming radioactive – require an intervention.
An intervention conducted in a circle.
With people living the same business crises alone.
Here’s what such a gathering is NOT:
- a vendor pitching a solution
- a consultant diagraming one
- a self-proclaimed SME power-pointing one
- an influencer with an infographic
- anyone who claims expertise based solely on number of followers
We need to re-discover our campfires.
Pull up some logs. Talk. Listen.
The ground rules are simple:
No bullshit.
No performative anything.
No shame.
Because no one in the circle believes you are doing anything wrong.
YOU ARE NOT DOING ANYTHING WRONG!
The math breaks.
The playbooks burn.
The tools fail.
The solutions escape us.
But I am willing to place any bet on the table.
WE will crack some codes.
WE will walk away more capable.
Won’t call it a comeback.
We’ve been here for years.
Our solutions will come.
As WE return.
