We're one week into 2026, and if your marketing team is already overwhelmed, reacting to every request that comes your way, and wondering where your strategic plan disappeared to—you're not alone.

In this week's Revenue Marketing Raw livestream, Dr. Debbie Qaqish and I tackled one of the most pervasive problems plaguing marketing organizations: teams are incredibly busy, but not productive or effective.

Sound familiar? Let's dig into why this happens and, more importantly, how to fix it.

The Planning Problem: It's Not About Having a Plan

Most marketing leaders do create plans. They do the budget (because, let's face it, that's a requirement of showing up to work on January 1st). They set goals. They create spreadsheets.

But here's where it falls apart.

The Real Issues With Marketing Planning

1. Lack of Alignment

The first breakdown happens right at the planning stage. Marketing creates a plan, but it's not aligned with the business plan. It's not aligned with sales. And in far too many organizations, marketing and sales executives don't even have the same shared objectives or bonus structures.

Think about that for a moment. How do you expect your company to perform at peak level if you're measuring people on completely different things? When marketing is going this way, sales is going that way, and product is somewhere else entirely—you're not rowing in the same direction. You're creating unintended friction.

Does 1+1 equal 10? Or does it equal -7?

2. Plans Get Dropped Like a Hot Potato

Even when marketing creates a solid plan, it gets abandoned within two weeks because teams spend all their time reacting. The initiative du jour. The request du jour. The CEO wants this. The board wants that. A vendor needs something.

Marketing can't say no, so they fill their days doing a bunch of stuff. They're busy, but they're not productive.

3. The Spreadsheet Trap

Planning has become too spreadsheet-driven, too numbers-focused. It's about hitting budget numbers, not about understanding the why behind what you're doing or how you can do it better with your partners across the organization.

We've walked into countless organizations since 2007 and asked one simple question: "What are your goals this year?"

The response? A blank stare.

"Goals? Yeah, those are somewhere. Give me a few minutes to see if I can find them."

That's a massive red flag.

The Time Management Crisis

Even in the best-run businesses, things change. You need to adapt at least quarterly. But when we ask marketing leaders if they're taking time with their teams—a couple days a quarter to go offsite, review performance, and recalibrate—the response is always the same:

"What are you talking about? We can't stop long enough for that. We don't have time."

And there's the problem. You can't get to repeatable, predictable, and scalable if you're always busy reacting.

The Virtual Meeting Explosion

One downside of going more virtual, especially post-pandemic, is that we have even more meetings. People schedule back-to-back-to-back-to-back calls. Eight hours of meetings. No time to think. No time to absorb what just happened. No time to actually do the work you committed to doing.

Here's the truth: You can't be in meetings eight hours a day and do your job.

You need time to be creative, to be strategic, to get the work done.

The Meeting Culture That's Killing Productivity

Let's be real—everyone complains about their meetings. To a person, including the CMO, they'll say: "Oh my God, our meetings are terrible. We hate them. They're so unproductive. We need to do something about that."

But then nobody does anything about it.

Three Ways to Fix Your Meeting Culture

1. Question Who Should Actually Be in the Meeting

With AI transcription and summaries now widely available, do you really need 10 people in a meeting where seven won't speak and three will talk for five minutes each?

Use AI to create targeted summaries for different stakeholders. Give marketing their relevant section, give finance theirs. You just saved everyone 50 minutes.

2. Understand Consensus vs. Unanimous

This fundamental misunderstanding drains enormous amounts of time. Teams end up having multiple meetings because they think everyone has to agree. That's not how decisions should work.

You need to examine your decision-making culture. How do you actually make decisions? Because if you can't make a decision in the meeting you called to make that decision, you have a serious problem.

3. Block Your Calendar

Start saying: "I'm not available during this time. I have work to do."

Some companies don't do client meetings on Fridays so they can actually get work done. Others have designated "innovation days" or "creative days." Post these well in advance so people who lean on you know when you're heads-down.

The CMO's Role: Leading the Change

Here's something I learned in my Vistage group that really stuck with me: If you're a CEO and you want your team to change, you have to be prepared to change three times as much.

The same applies to CMOs.

You can't just wish for a better meeting culture or tell everyone, "We're going to be better about meetings this year," and then do nothing yourself. People are watching every move you make. They're conditioned to wait and see if you'll stick with it or revert to old habits in two weeks.

If you're not willing to stand up and run the business like a business person, if you're not willing to work with your executive team on real alignment, then your organization will have a very difficult time changing.

The One Thing You Can Do Right Now

If I could make one suggestion to every marketer reading this, it would be this:

Find space in 2026 to look at what you did, make changes, and plan what you need to do moving forward.

Even if you only do this once a quarter:

  • What did you accomplish?
  • What did you have on your plate to accomplish?
  • What was the variation between the two?
  • What do you need to do moving forward?

This simple practice will help you stop the madness. Stop the "oh my gosh, we have to do this and this and now they want us to do this" spiral.

It's a Choice

At the simplest level, it really does come down to choice. I know many executives feel they don't have a choice—they're so busy doing all this stuff. But you can choose to say no. You can choose to prioritize. You can choose to run your business the way it should be run.

Yes, sometimes your boss wants something and you've got to do it. But there are far more situations where marketers have much more control over their circumstances if they would just change their mindset.

Looking Ahead

Marketing doesn't have to be a hamster wheel of activity without results. The path forward requires:

  • Real alignment with sales, leadership, and business objectives from the planning stage
  • Protected time for strategic thinking and execution
  • A healthier meeting culture that respects everyone's time
  • Better decision-making processes that don't require unanimous agreement
  • The discipline to pause, reflect, and recalibrate quarterly

If your marketing team is exhausted, frustrated, and not hitting revenue targets, it's time to stop and ask: Are we busy, or are we effective?

Because being busy isn't the same as being productive. And in 2026, effective marketing teams will be the ones who learn the difference.

Want to dive deeper into these topics? Watch the full Revenue Marketing Raw livestream at www.pedowitzgroup.com/revenue-marketing-raw. Next week, we're tackling how to create your own AI virtual assistant with ChatGPT to reclaim your time—you won't want to miss it.