Most marketing leaders are responsible for delivering larger pipeline targets, but with half the team. Pipeline360's research puts the number of marketers being asked to deliver more with fewer resources over the past 12 months at 63%. Nearly a third have seen headcount cut outright.
"Doing more with less" gets presented in board meetings as though saying it makes it achievable. But a directive is not a plan. Telling a team to move faster without changing how work gets done just creates faster chaos.
The instinct is to hand teams access to AI tools: Claude here, ChatGPT there, a few custom GPTs for good measure. But uncoordinated AI access does not create efficiency. It creates six different ways to produce six different results from the same brief. The underlying system is still broken, only now it’s broken more quickly and in more places. And let's not mention the risk of egregious and made up citations!
The result can be teams working harder, burning out faster, and still missing deadlines. Quality drops. Strategic work gets buried under urgent requests. Campaigns launch late or not at all. Leadership wonders why efficiency gains never materialize.
This approach has a ceiling and most teams hit it quickly.
The math is unforgiving. A three-person team with the same target as a six-person team needs to produce twice the output per head. If each campaign still requires the same research, briefing, drafting, review, and revision cycles it always has, doubling output means doubling hours. That is not sustainable. More importantly, it is not what leadership actually wants. They want the same results at lower cost, not the same process executed by fewer people working twice as hard.
In the Content Marketing Institute's 2026 B2B Content and Marketing Trends report, 74% of marketers who saw improvement in their content strategy effectiveness pointed to strategy refinement as the driver. Not bigger budgets. Better systems for how work gets done.
Today, the resource problem and the strategy problem are often the same problem. Teams without a system for how work gets done will always feel under-resourced. No matter how many people they have.
This is not a philosophical claim. It is a description of what happens in most marketing organizations.
Strategic intent gets documented in a slide deck. Then someone needs to launch a campaign.
The messaging document sits in a folder.
The campaign gets built from scratch, informed by memory and guesswork.
By the time the work ships, it has drifted from the original intent.
The next campaign drifts further. Eventually, the strategy exists only as an artifact. Disconnected from the work it was supposed to guide.
Operationalized strategy shows up where work happens. When someone starts a campaign, the foundation is already there: the messaging, the audience definition, the positioning, the proof points. Not as a reference document to consult, but as the starting point.
This is the difference between a team that starts every campaign from a blank page and a team that starts from a true foundation. The first team will always be slower, no matter how talented the individuals are. The second team moves at a pace that feels impossible to the first because they are not rebuilding context every time.
Marketing teams that successfully do more with less share a common trait: they stopped treating each campaign as an isolated project and started treating campaigns as instances of a repeatable system.
The leverage is not in working faster, it is in eliminating work that should not exist. The research that gets redone because no one can find the last version. The messaging debates that happen on every campaign because approved positioning is not accessible where work happens. The review cycles stretch for weeks because each stakeholder is seeing the strategy for the first time.
When the foundation is solid and accessible, campaign creation becomes assembly rather than invention.
The strategic decisions were already made.
The messaging was already approved.
The audience was already defined.
What remains is execution. And execution from a clear starting point is dramatically faster than execution from a blank page.
Most marketing teams are not under-resourced, they are under-systematized. The two problems feel identical from the inside and they have very different solutions.
Adding headcount to a team without working systems in place does not solve the problem. It spreads the same inefficiencies across more people. Cutting headcount makes things worse. Both responses treat resources as the variable when the real variable is how work gets done.
"Doing more with less" stops being a trap when it stops being a mandate and becomes a system. Not a hope that people will figure it out. A structural change in how campaigns move from strategy to execution.
That is when efficiency gains become real, sustainable and repeatable.
The teams that figure this out will outpace their competitors.
Conclusion:
The teams that figure this out will not be the ones who worked the hardest. They will be the ones who stopped treating each campaign as a unique problem to solve and started treating campaigns as executions of a system that already holds the answers.
When the foundation is already laid—when messaging, audience definitions, and positioning are accessible where work happens—the "do more with less" mandate stops being a morale problem and starts being a math problem with a solvable answer.
Q1: If the problem is systems, why does adding AI tools not fix it?
A: AI tools accelerate execution, but they do not create coherence. Giving a team access to Claude or ChatGPT without an underlying system means six people producing six variations of the same campaign, each starting from scratch, each interpreting strategy differently. The output is faster, but it is not aligned.
Q2: How do I know if my team is under-resourced or under-systematized?
A: Look at where time actually goes. If your team spends significant hours searching for approved messaging, re-researching audiences, debating positioning on every campaign, or waiting on review cycles because stakeholders are seeing strategic context for the first time, you have a systems problem.