When martech requires a sprint — and when it demands a marathon

In martech, momentum is often mistaken for progress. That pause feels especially welcome in this space. With all the disruption and change, it can help to take a moment to breathe before the next wave arrives.

Over the years, I’ve landed on a metaphor for how people tend to operate at work and in life. We’re either born sprinters or marathoners. The difference shows up in how we use our time, energy and focus to achieve results.

Sprinters are built for speed and intensity. Their mindset is optimized for fast starts and quick wins — short, high-intensity bursts of effort. They prioritize immediate impact, make decisions quickly, course-correct often and measure success by how fast change happens.

Marathoners, on the other hand, are built for endurance. They focus on consistency and long-term performance. They think in longer planning horizons, emphasize stability and scalability and measure success by sustained progress rather than spikes.

We don’t get to choose just one operating model. Our work demands that we take on the personas of both sprinters and marathoners. The real challenge is not to be both at the same time.

The pressure to move fast is constant. New goals, new plans and new momentum can make action feel urgent. But the most valuable work doesn’t always begin with action. It begins with a pause. Stepping back to reflect on what worked, what didn’t and why creates clarity before acceleration.

Here are three ways to slow down just enough to assess what’s working, learn from what isn’t and make deliberate choices that lead to stronger outcomes.

1. Assess where you’re spending your time

There’s a funny thing about time. Gretchen Rubin once said, “The days are long, but the years are short.” Day-to-day work can feel heavy. We move through endless meetings and decisions, and we have daily fires to put out. And yet, we look up, and suddenly, a year, a career phase or even an iconic agency is gone.

Martech is a harsh industry to be in right now and many of us are feeling it. A few perspectives help explain why the days feel exceptionally long.

Execution is harder. In 2025, marketers are spending more time coordinating, governing and validating than actually executing. Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey found that only 49% of tools are actively used, and just 15% of organizations qualify as high performers. This quiet crisis has slowed progress without reducing expectations or outcomes.

Marketers are being pulled in competing directions. Confessions of a CMO, a December 2025 study by World Partners, shared: 

“Under constant pressure — from finance, from technology, from culture itself — marketing leadership has undergone rapid mutation. Other publications have charted these external forces in detail: the shortened tenures, fractured titles, proliferating metrics, shrinking budgets and boardroom misunderstandings that define the modern corporate environment.” 

Dig deeper: Marketers should make time for time management

Marketing hasn’t lost its way. It’s been given too many paths to follow. Without alignment on what success actually means, even the most capable teams end up running hard without moving forward. What’s a marketer to do? The next step isn’t about working harder, but stepping back.

I’m a tactile person, so I recommend grabbing a couple of different colors of sticky notes. Look at your day, then zoom out to your week, month, quarter and year. Write down everything you spend time on. Group those activities and label the problems they’re meant to solve.

Then ask the more complex questions. Are these the right problems? What problems aren’t being addressed? Where is your time out of proportion to the value being created?

Finally, tie those activities back to your department and corporate goals. Where’s the alignment? What’s missing? These gaps are often where frustration lives. It might not be because you’re failing, but because you’re solving yesterday’s problems with today’s energy.

This exercise isn’t about optimizing every minute. It’s about awareness. When you can clearly see where your time goes, you can decide what deserves a sprint and what requires a marathon.

2. Get close, even closer to your internal and external customers

Distance creates assumptions. Assumptions create misalignment. And misalignment is expensive. It’s easy to think we understand our customers because we’re close to the systems that support them. We see the dashboards, review the roadmaps and sit in governance meetings. But proximity to tools is not the same as proximity to experience.

Step into the shoes of your internal and external customers. Get closer and gain first-hand experience. Sit in on sales calls. You won’t be there to pitch, but to listen. Watch how your teams explain solutions. Ask your customer-facing teams which processes help them move faster and which ones slow them down. Pay attention to the language people use when they’re frustrated. Be sure to keep an eye on body language too. That’s where the real signals come from.

The same applies externally. Customers don’t experience your marketing stack—they experience outcomes. They feel friction, delay, inconsistency and confusion long before they can articulate a technical problem. When you listen closely enough, patterns emerge. Those patterns should shape your priorities more than any vendor roadmap ever will.

Dig deeper: The competition you’re ignoring is costing you customers

Secondary research has its place, but some of the most valuable insights still come from simply spending time with customers in their own environments. Seeing how people actually work and understanding their workarounds, hesitations and moments when things slow down can add context that data alone can’t provide. It helps explain why certain behaviors show up, not just that they do.

I’ve also found value in acting as a mystery shopper from time to time. Going through the experience as a customer would without shortcuts or inside knowledge has a way of surfacing minor points of friction that teams often stop noticing once they’re too close to the work.

This is easier to picture in retail, but it applies just as well in B2B. In financial services, for example, I’ve worked with clients to arrange for brand leaders and the marketing team to sit in on conversations between intermediaries and their customers. Listening in, without trying to steer the discussion, created a much clearer view of the full B2B-to-consumer experience.

These moments tend to shift perspective. They make the work feel more concrete and help reconnect strategy with the realities customers navigate every day. While gaining this closeness may slow you down in the short term. It speeds everything up later.

3. Create a plan and delegate

Plans can get a bad reputation in fast-moving environments. They’re seen as rigid, slow or obsolete the moment they’re written. But the issue usually isn’t planning. It’s confusing planning and prediction.

A good plan doesn’t lock you into a future. It gives you a shared direction and a framework for decision-making when things inevitably change.

Be explicit about what requires sustained effort and what calls for focused bursts. Name the work that needs marathon energy (think platform consolidation, data governance and operating model shifts). Then isolate where sprinting makes sense (campaign launches, experiments and targeted optimizations).

Then, delegate with intent. Delegation isn’t just about capacity — it’s about clarity. When the right people own the right work, you reduce context switching, decision fatigue and the constant feeling of being behind. Trust helps to accelerate.

Dig deeper: Strong MOps is how marketing runs on time and at scale

Bringing it all together

If you’re feeling exhausted, stalled or behind, it doesn’t mean you’re losing. More often, it means you’re running the wrong race or trying to run two at the same time.

Martech rewards both speed and endurance, but not simultaneously. Knowing when to pause, assess, listen and plan is what allows you to accelerate with purpose instead of burning out in place.

As you look ahead, resist the urge to sprint right away. Take a breath. Look at where you are. Decide which race you’re actually in right now. Because progress isn’t about moving faster, it’s about moving intentionally.

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