January 21, 2025 | Blog
Why traditional marketing operating models cannot address modern marketing challenges

Modern marketing teams are under unprecedented pressure to deliver greater impact while minimizing costs.
But traditional marketing operating models, which rely on linear resource structures—where increased output requires proportional increases in budget or headcount—fall short of addressing these demands.
And as market conditions constantly evolve, the need for flexibility, scalability, and faster time-to-impact becomes critical.
To thrive in this climate, marketing organizations must rethink their operating models. They need a new marketing operating model that allows them to maximize revenue impact, remain agile in the face of shifting priorities—within tight resource constraints.
The shortcomings of traditional models
The traditional marketing operating model often struggle to meet the demands of modern marketing when it comes to:
- Maximizing impact with limited resources: How do you drive greater revenue impact when faced with limited headcount, budget, capacity, and skills? Traditional marketing operating models, reliant on fixed in-house resourcing, demand significant time, effort, and investment to hire, train, and retain talent—a luxury most marketing teams cannot afford.
- Agility and responsiveness: Marketing priorities can shift rapidly, requiring teams to quickly mobilize resources to address time-sensitive initiatives like new product launches or competitive threats. The traditional marketing operating model is too rigid to support this level of responsiveness, with long lead times for hiring or reallocating resources.
Understanding the type of marketing work
Transforming the marketing operating model starts with having a clear understanding of the types of work marketing teams perform:
- Strategic work: This includes tasks such as such as product positioning, brand building, and long-term planning. These activities are closely tied to an organization’s unique value proposition and require internal ownership to align with broader business goals.
- Execution work: This encompasses tactical tasks like campaign execution, data analysis, MarTech management, content and creative production. These activities, while essential, are less tied to strategic vision and can often be outsourced to achieve efficiency and scalability.
The first step to transforming the marketing operating model begins with delegating execution tasks to specialized external partners so internal marketing teams can focus on high-value strategic initiatives. Next, adopting the right outsourcing model—one that provides flexibility, scalability, and access to trained, specialized expertise—will be key to addressing today’s marketing challenges.
Subscription-based resourcing model: The future of marketing resourcing
The future of marketing resourcing is agile. A subscription-based resourcing model addresses the shortcomings of traditional marketing operating models by providing:
- Flexibility to handle shifting priorities: The traditional marketing operating model struggles to meet added workload and priorities due to lengthy hiring and onboarding processes. Subscription-based resourcing overcomes this by enabling teams to adjust capacity swiftly, ensuring time-sensitive initiatives are executed and aligned to business objectives, leading to quicker time-to-impact.
- Cost-effectiveness for lean budgets: Subscription-based resourcing not only significantly reduces the overhead costs of maintaining a full-time, in-house team for execution tasks—hiring only the expertise you need, when you need—it frees up your budget for strategic initiatives.
- Access to specialized expertise leads to better marketing outcomes: Subscribing to end-to-end marketing expertise from managed services providers like 2X grants you access to dedicated resources specializing in campaign build, content and creative production, MarTech management, data analytics, and more. This means you leverage the latest advanced tools and best practices to deliver better results.
How FARO increased marketing impact with subscription-based resourcing
FARO Technologies, the global leader in 3D measurement, imaging, and realization solutions, leveraged 2X’s subscription-based resourcing model. The company outsourced its execution work, enabling its in-house team to focus on strategy, positioning, and messaging and achieved:
- Return on marketing investment: FARO managed to 5x their marketing ROI—even after surpassing their anticipated 35% cost reduction goal.
- Dramatic improvements in demand metrics:
- Conversion rate: FARO achieved a sevenfold increase in demand conversion.
- Velocity: The time to convert leads into sales decreased by more than 50%.
- Recognized by Forrester: FARO was awarded the Forrester’s Return on Integration (ROI) Honors in 2022, recognizing its transformational efforts in driving cross-functional marketing and sales alignment to achieve business goals.
Transform your marketing operating model today
In a world where marketing teams must do more with less, traditional operating models are becoming less viable for sustained success. Instead, more and more organizations are turning to subscription-based resourcing models to achieve greater efficiency, scalability, and agility.
This reimagined way of working not only addresses immediate operational challenges but ultimately positions organizations for long-term success by aligning marketing efforts with enterprise value creation.
With 2X, you gain a strategic partner that helps you deliver impactful marketing outcomes while optimizing costs and driving sustained growth.
Learn what 2X can do for you