June 18, 2025 | Blog
How to scale execution without scaling teams

Why enterprise CMOs must rethink how marketing work gets done
There’s a growing tension inside enterprise marketing organizations, and it has nothing to do with ambition.
CMOs are being asked to deliver more than ever: stronger pipeline, tighter personalization, faster execution, and measurable ROI. And yet, for many, headcount growth is frozen. In some cases, roles remain unfilled for months. In others, hiring has been deprioritized entirely in favor of protecting margins.
The result? Marketing leaders are left with a painful equation: rising expectations but flat internal capacity. And that equation doesn’t scale.
This is no longer just a resource issue, it’s a structural challenge. Enterprise CMOs aren’t failing to move faster because they lack strategic clarity or talent. They’re falling behind because the traditional execution model is no longer fit for purpose.
When your biggest line item becomes your biggest constraint
According to Avasant’s 2025 B2B Marketing Execution report, 55.9% of the average enterprise marketing budget is allocated to internal headcount. Add in 20.2% for technology, and just 23.9% remains for programmatic execution; the very activities that drive pipeline and business growth.
This means more than half of every marketing dollar is locked into fixed personnel costs. And with hiring on hold, teams can’t simply scale capacity to meet demand. Instead, they face stalled campaigns, underleveraged tools, and an overworked team that’s constantly stuck in execution triage.
Even the most experienced CMOs are finding themselves boxed in, forced to choose between delivering fast or delivering well.
Internal talent ≠ scalable execution
It’s not that enterprise teams aren’t capable. In fact, many are world-class when it comes to strategic planning, brand governance, and cross-functional orchestration. But those strengths don’t automatically translate into executional scalability.
Campaigns still need to be built. Content needs to be created. Data needs to be analyzed. Technology needs to be activated. And increasingly, those tasks are hitting a bandwidth ceiling.
The core issue? Legacy team structures assume that output must be delivered in-house. But in a world where marketing complexity is compounding and speed is a competitive advantage, that assumption no longer holds up.
What growth-stage CMOs are doing differently
The Avasant study highlights a stark contrast between companies that are growing and those that are treading water. One of the clearest indicators? SaaS companies, often the most growth-focused segment, allocate 42.6% of their marketing budget to outsourced execution, the highest share across all industries analyzed, and they are far more likely to outsource campaign delivery, analytics, and ops to specialized partners. These CMOs are reframing execution as a performance multiplier, not just a cost to contain. By shifting from fixed teams to flexible, on-demand operating models, they gain access to:
- Specialist skills across content, operations, analytics, and tech
- Faster activation of programs across geographies and segments
- Scalable infrastructure that grows with business priorities
And critically, they’re not just outsourcing to cut costs, they’re outsourcing to unlock speed and precision.
Elasticity is the new efficiency
In the past, efficiency meant doing more with less. Today, it means doing more with flexibility.
Enterprise CMOs who are winning in this environment are those who’ve embraced elastic execution models, ones that combine core internal strategy with scalable external delivery. Instead of growing teams linearly, they plug in modular capabilities as needed, dialing resources up or down based on campaign volume, market readiness, or sales velocity.
This isn’t about replacing internal teams. It’s about giving those teams the freedom to focus on what they do best: driving insight, shaping strategy, aligning stakeholders, and protecting brand integrity.
Execution, meanwhile, becomes a fluid layer of capability, rather than a fixed bottleneck.
Smarter structure, not more spend
A common mistake is to treat execution as a downstream output, a final step after the “real” work is done. But in current enterprise environments, execution is the battleground. It’s where strategies succeed or stall.
The most effective CMOs are flipping the question from “How can we get more budget?” to “How can we reallocate what we already have?” That means:
- Auditing the true ROI of internal execution vs. externalized models
- Rebalancing budgets away from fixed costs and toward flexible value
- Building operating models that prioritize agility, outcomes, and clarity
This mindset shift brings CMOs closer to how CFOs think: turning marketing into a high-performance function that earns trust at the executive table and measurably contributes to revenue.
The next CMO advantage: executional leverage
Enterprise marketing isn’t short on vision. It’s short on executional leverage.
And that leverage won’t come from adding more people. It will come from rethinking how work gets done, and by whom.
The CMOs who thrive in the next wave of B2B growth won’t be the ones with the largest teams. They’ll be the ones who build the most adaptable, performance-focused marketing organizations, built on elasticity, orchestration, and speed.
If you’re still trying to scale your outcomes with a fixed internal team, it’s time to challenge that model.
Turning insight into action
If you’re feeling the strain of rising expectations without the runway to grow your team, you’re not alone. The Avasant 2025 B2B Marketing Execution Report lays out how enterprise CMOs are navigating these pressures, and why executional agility is emerging as the key competitive edge.
At 2X, we help CMOs turn structural constraints into operational advantage. Our marketing as a service (MaaS) model gives enterprise teams instant access to specialized talent, AI-accelerated workflows, and scalable delivery across content, campaigns, analytics, and MarTech. That means faster execution, higher output, and less internal pressure.
You’re not outsourcing to cut corners. You’re outsourcing to outperform.