Feed the context eating beast

Getting sales people to read and understand your go-to-market material has always been tough. If AI can help, then it means marketing people need to spend more time on the strategy and raw material to feed into the AI machine: settling on stories, gathering customer references, objection handling, and overall thought leadership.

A large part of portfolio marketing’s success was in evangelizing these deliverables — getting sales and marketing across the revenue engine to read, remember, and act on them.

AI engines aren’t so resistant. Instead, they demand context. These same assets can now serve as inputs into systems. Sales no longer has to struggle to find and make sense of a battlecard — instead, they can ask an agent to help them compose a response to a hard question. Instead of interpreting a messaging document, demand marketers can ask a messaging agent to refine their campaign materials. These tools dramatically expand the impact of portfolio marketing’s expertise. The requirement for portfolio marketing is to ensure that these deliverables are up to date, unambiguous, and on target.

Marketing people are often one of the least technical groups in an organization. The bias against “slop” means they can’t just shoot out AI generated content. Well, that is bad. There’s probably a couple years of arbitrage: marketing organization that go full on Claude crazy¹ and build systems around AI – instead of just slides and “battle cards” – have an advantage.

🔗 Portfolio Marketing’s AI Honeymoon Is Over

Also, something called MARGE.