CMOs must master organizational agility to navigate market shifts, overcome barriers, and drive growth with speed, alignment, and flexible resources.
Organizational agility isn’t just desirable — it’s essential.
Today’s B2B CMOs are under constant pressure to respond rapidly to market dynamics, align marketing execution to evolving business priorities, and maximize ROI amid constrained resources. Without agility, organizations risk reacting weeks or months too late to critical opportunities or threats, diminishing the impact of their marketing efforts and negatively impacting their competitive position.
The ability to pivot quickly can define the difference between market leadership and falling behind. Here’s a deeper look at what’s driving this make-or-break need for organizational agility, along with common barriers and how to overcome them — and come out on top.
Why is organizational agility so critical?
In today’s world, the ability to adapt quickly to change is the hallmark of a successful business. Organizations face an unprecedented pace of change driven by rapid technological advancements, evolving consumer expectations, global economic fluctuations, and heightened competition. Agility empowers marketing leaders to proactively meet these challenges, turning potential disruptions into opportunities for growth.
Here’s how organizational agility directly benefits CMOs:
- You can respond rapidly to market dynamics. Fast-moving competitive environments demand that marketing organizations pivot swiftly in response to changes like competitive threats, shifting buyer behavior, macroeconomic changes, and new opportunities.
- You can align execution to business priorities. Whether it’s launching a new product, entering a new market, or supporting urgent sales initiatives, agility ensures seamless transition — and continued momentum — from strategic planning to tactical execution.
- You can maximize ROI with flexible resources. When CMOs can quickly reallocate budgets and align resources with the right capabilities to initiatives that show the highest potential or best results, they swiftly and efficiently optimize overall marketing performance and impact.
Common barriers to organizational agility — and how to overcome them
CMOs frequently encounter challenges that hinder agility, whether those are slow activation cycles due to cumbersome and inefficient processes or siloed departments that create barriers to speed and cohesion — fragmenting communication, multiplying decision points, and clouding accountability. The result? Slower response times and missed opportunities.
But by using Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS) models, organizations can overcome traditional agility barriers effectively, unlocking the power of a subscription-based alternative to traditional B2B marketing operating models.
Here are five of the most common barriers CMOs face in creating organizational agility, and how MaaS can help.
- Barrier: Siloed structures and decision-making bottlenecks
Teams organized strictly by functions, products, or regions often struggle to collaborate effectively, leading to delays from excessive hand-offs or escalations. Many organizations structure their teams as “networks” or “pods” to drive better alignment — which can improve communications across teams but often doesn’t solve escalation or hand-off issues.
MaaS solution: A MaaS model featuring offshore execution pods acts as a shared services layer, enabling quicker cross-functional activations through clearly defined service-level agreements. - Barrier: Rigid resourcing models
Traditional fixed headcounts and narrowly defined roles create challenges in pivoting quickly when strategic priorities shift, whether between campaign support, analytics, or other functions.
MaaS solution: MaaS teams offer scalable, flexible resources that can swiftly adapt to changing demands, reallocating talent dynamically without increasing fixed overhead. - Barrier: Slow activation cycles
Even clearly articulated strategies can stall due to approval bottlenecks, disconnected technologies, limited resources, or inconsistent processes.
MaaS solution: Deploying offshore resources or teams for under-resourced initiatives and best-in-class marketing execution activities frees members of your strategic onshore team to focus on high-value activities that require their business and industry subject matter expertise — significantly accelerating execution timelines and innovation. - Barrier: Limited visibility into capacity and workload
CMOs struggle to quickly reallocate work and assess trade-offs without clear insights into team capacity, often leading to inefficiencies, underutilization, and team burnout.
MaaS solution: A strong MaaS partnership provides transparent dashboards tracking capacity and workload, enabling real-time optimization and effective management of resources. - Barrier: Change fatigue and resistance to adaptation
Frequent reorganizations can strain teams, resulting in resistance to further change initiatives aimed at agility — especially when the impact at the individual level isn’t clear.
MaaS solution: Offshore MaaS teams operate behind the scenes, absorbing incremental workloads without disrupting existing structures. This minimizes internal disruption and fosters smoother, more sustainable agility — change happens around the team rather than to the team.
Unlock agility by leveraging a MaaS approach
Organizational agility empowers marketing leaders to proactively meet the challenges of the modern marketplace. By adopting a MaaS model, CMOs can effectively overcome traditional agility barriers with rapid response to market demands, seamless realignment with evolving business objectives, and enhanced resource optimization — without further straining overburdened teams.
For more expert articles and industry updates, follow Martech News
As market complexities continue to rise, agility is no longer optional. Leveraging the capabilities of a MaaS approach positions CMOs and their teams to lead rather than follow.
Jennifer Ross, Executive Director of Marketing Strategy Consulting Practice for 2X
Wise is the Chief Information Officer at 6sense, where he leads the Business Technology organization responsible for Enterprise Applications, Security, IT Operations, Corporate Data, and Procurement. He is focused on enabling business growth through scalable systems, modern infrastructure, and operational excellence.
A Bay Area native and seasoned technology leader, Bryan began his IT career in the late 1990s during the dot-com boom. He brings deep experience leading IT strategy and transformation for high-growth, cloud-native companies. Before 6sense, he served as CIO at GitLab, where he built the systems and processes to support a successful IPO in October 2021.
Earlier in his career, Bryan was the first Vice President of IT at Snowflake, where he scaled enterprise applications and global infrastructure during a hyper-growth phase — helping the company grow from 400 to 2,000 employees in just 18 months and reach a $3.5 billion valuation. He also served as Vice President of IT Operations at DocuSign, leading global infrastructure, DevOps platforms, and service delivery at scale.
Bryan is passionate about building high-performing teams that align closely with business priorities and make a measurable impact.
He lives in Menlo Park with his wife, their two children, and their dogs. When he’s not working, Bryan can usually be found on his Peloton.
