The era of annual marketing plans and quarterly campaign rollouts is officially over. Modern B2B marketing moves too fast for that approach. New competitors appear on the scene overnight. Customer expectations shift monthly. AI tools reshape entire workflows in weeks, not years. If you want to build a winning brand, you need to be able to pivot quickly while maintaining strategic focus. But it’s not easy.
Deanna Adams, Senior Director of Integrated Campaign Marketing at Dropbox, joined us on our Best Story Wins podcast to discuss exactly this challenge. Deanna has built her career around creating marketing operations that can move at the speed of modern business while still delivering cohesive, brand-aligned campaigns. The secret to her success? It’s not an annual plan or even a quarterly plan. It’s about adapting in real time. As she says, the goal now is to “quickly iterate and deliver, quickly iterate and deliver.”
So, what does that look like in practice? Here are Deanna’s top tips to build an agile marketing operation that actually scales.
The Secrets to Successful Agile Marketing
From embracing failure to reimagining team structures, here are the key strategies that will help you break out of the old B2B marketing playbook mentality.
1) Embrace the iterate-and-deliver mindset.
The biggest shift in modern B2B marketing isn’t about tactics; it’s about tempo. You can’t spend three months perfecting a campaign only to launch it into a completely different market reality. Speed is key, but that doesn’t mean you should cut corners. The goal is simply to work faster.
Deanna describes this new rhythm as an iterate-and-deliver cycle that lets you test, learn, and adjust without losing momentum. This way you can build better systems over time without overthinking or getting in your own way.
The key is accepting that perfection is the enemy of progress. As Deanna points out, you ultimately have to consider that impossible triangle of: Do you want it good? Do you want it fast? Or do you want it cheap? You can’t have all three, so you have to choose your own two of the three.
Tip: Start with shorter testing cycles. Instead of quarterly campaign reviews, try monthly or even bi-weekly check-ins. Build hypotheses upfront, test quickly, and be prepared to pivot based on what you learn. (For more on running smart experiments, see our guide to agile marketing.)
2) Build a structure that enables flexibility.
This might sound contradictory, but the most successful agile marketing teams actually have more structure, not less. The secret is creating frameworks instead of rigid plans. Give your team overall direction and success metrics, but allow them the freedom to experiment with how they get there. This approach provides more flexibility as insights come through or tweaks need to be made.
Deanna uses the example of her colleague who noticed degrading SEO returns and pivoted toward YouTube content that feeds into LLMs. This observation allowed them to design a test and go from there.
Tip: Document your marketing framework, including your goals, key messages, target personas, and success metrics, but leave the tactics flexible. (BTW, you can use our B2B marketing strategy toolkit to get this planning on paper.)
3) Celebrate lessons as loudly as wins.
Here’s something most marketing leaders won’t admit: They’re terrible at learning from failures. Everyone loves to celebrate the wins and sweep the misses under the rug, but that’s detrimental to an agile operation.
“We have to be the loudest people in the room for our failures,” Deanna says. “We’re always great at showing the positive, showing how great we are, and making sure that we’re really pumping up the victory lap. That’s meaningless if we don’t also have that balance as far as what didn’t work, what didn’t land.”
Deanna references Thomas Edison’s approach to inventing the light bulb: “It took him 1,001 different tries to figure out how to create a light bulb. Well, in reality, he found a thousand different ways not to create the light bulb. And that’s also incredibly important.”
Tip: When things don’t work, do a post-mortem to recap and spend equal time on what worked and what didn’t. Most importantly, share those learnings across teams so everyone can benefit from the insights. (You can also turn those fails into great content, which your audience will appreciate.)
4) Move from silos to cross-functional squads.
Traditional marketing org charts are killing agility. When everyone stays in their lane (think brand over here, demand gen over there, product marketing in another corner), you can’t move fast enough to respond to market changes.
Deanna embraces the idea of squads, not silos. Instead of organizing purely by function, you create cross-functional teams around specific problems or opportunities.
For example, if she needs to solve a problem that is top of funnel, Deanna might pull in a product person, a brand person, a comms person, and a performance marketer to get everyone on the same page and make sure they’re all listening to those early indicators.
This approach breaks down the territorial thinking that slows everything down. Also, when teams are focused on shared outcomes rather than individual channel metrics, they can move much faster. (For the record, this is the same approach that Shipt took in an effort to break down the walls between departments, and it radically changed the way they work.)
Tip: Experiment with temporary project squads for specific campaigns or initiatives. Pull together people from different functions and give them shared success metrics. You’ll be surprised how much faster decisions get made when everyone’s incentives are aligned.
5) Evolve beyond traditional MQL metrics.
Here’s a controversial take that Deanna isn’t afraid to voice: MQLs might be holding you back from true agility. Not because they’re inherently bad, but because they’re often too narrow to capture real buying intent in today’s complex B2B landscape.
“I think that MQLs are a really strong measure of our ability to gain net new contacts. But I think that there are other ways for us to measure engagement, success, and intent, and how that can then be delivered into a sales outbound motion.”
The future Deanna envisions involves “high intent customers and accounts that sales wants to talk to” rather than just focusing on form fills and email opens.
This requires looking at combinations of metrics like product intent signals, content engagement, web traffic patterns, and traditional MQLs to create a more complete picture of account readiness.
Tip: You don’t have to throw out MQLs entirely, but start experimenting with composite scoring that includes multiple intent signals. Work with your sales team to identify which combinations of behaviors actually predict deal success and actively monitor them.
How to Build Your Agile Marketing Operation
The shift to agile marketing isn’t something you flip like a switch. In many ways, it takes a ground-up reimagining of how you plan, execute, and measure success. But that doesn’t have to happen overnight.
- Start by auditing your current processes. Where are you spending three months on something that could be tested in three weeks? What rigid structures are preventing your team from responding quickly to new opportunities?
- Assess which metrics are really valuable. You’re probably tracking a number of metrics just because that’s how you’ve always done it. But if they don’t drive real business impact, they aren’t providing much value.
- Stay flexible. Agility isn’t about moving fast for its own sake. As Deanna puts it, the goal is creating “enough space for that intimate and very smart innovation” while still heading towards the common goal. Keep your eye on the overall goal and intentionally experiment in service of that goal.
The truth is, the only way to win is to stay nimble and persistent. Just because you don’t see immediate success doesn’t mean you’re doomed. Think about things critically, learn from your experiments, and keep it moving. That’s the only way to win in this era of B2B marketing.
If you want to learn more about building integrated marketing operations that can adapt and scale, check out our full conversation with Deanna on the Best Story Wins podcast, and subscribe for more insights from marketing leaders who are winning hearts, minds, and market share.
