The Performance Squeeze: Why "Do More With Less" Is Failing

The “Do more with less” commandment from up high bugs me. Especially when you’re already, by all accounts, doing well.

Get the same results, but cut your budget by 20%.

Or worse: Get better results AND cut your budget by 20%.

There are marketing leaders out there scraping and clawing to keep even a flat budget, while at the same time being asked to exceed the rising expectations of them. The CEO wants growth, the CFO wants efficiency, and you’re sitting there still trying to figure out which half of your spend is the half that’s actually working.

Add in unreasonable expectations of AI, both in what you can achieve with your current headcount, or smaller headcount. Fire a third of your team, but give the rest of them AI, and then we can save money, and get better results. Genuinely that sentence seems to be the commandment some people are getting.

Figure it out.

If you’re being expected to cut your budget, and increase your results, you’re not alone, and most marketing leaders are struggling to answer the question of how to do it. It’s not because they’re not smart enough, or because they’re not trying hard enough.

So what can you do?

The Numbers Don't Lie And They're Not Pretty

Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey said that marketing budgets had flatlined at about 7.7% of overall company revenue. At the same time 59% of CMOs say that their budget is insufficient to execute their strategy. Those numbers basically haven’t moved in over 2 years. Meanwhile ad prices continue to increase, and ROI concerns are not just persisting, but growing. CMOs are effectively already getting less for each media dollar they are spending.

You can’t tread water anymore. If you don’t change what you're doing, you're going to sink. The surface of the ocean keeps rising up around you, but the things keeping you afloat aren’t working as well year after year, month after month, week after week.

On top of the measurement environment, what you need to make smarter decisions, is getting noisier and harder every year.

That’s the Performance Squeeze, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

The Real Problem Isn't the Budget

Some marketing leaders facing this squeeze might go looking for the answer in their dashboards. They pull reports, talk to their agency, add another tool, another platform, another layer of reporting. At the end of it they still can’t answer with confidence what to do.

If you HAVE the data, the problem is usually not the data itself (though of course there can be technical problems, and you should regularly audit your data pipelines and your data collection) but the foundation underneath the data.

The processes, the decision architecture, the organizational design. All those things determine whether the data is even able to tell you something useful, or if it’s making the noise look like a signal when it’s not.

And usually the problem isn’t that you don’t have enough data, you don’t need more data, you need to trust the data that you already have.

The sequence matters here. Many organizations will buy the tools first, and the build the strategy second, or never. They’ll implement GA4, without first defining what decisions that data needs to inform. They’ll stand up dashboards before agreeing on what the metrics they care about even mean. They invest in new platforms before fixing the process problems that made the last platform a waste of money.

Fix your foundation first, and then the data might start working.

Three Things You Can Do Right Now

1. Define your Decisions before you touch your data.

Write down the three to five decisions that you need your data to answer. Not something vague like “i need to understand our performance” but specific decisions like “Should we shift budget from organic social to paid social this quarter?” or “Is our presence at these trade shows actually driving the pipeline?”

When you start with decisions, you can then work backwards to make sure you have the data that you actually need, and stop drowning in the data that you don’t.

2. Audit your humans before you audit your tools.

I mentioned auditing your data above, and you should do that, but you should also first audit your humans. Most data problems I’ve seen over the years have human signatures attached to them. Inconsistent UTM tagging, no common definitions of even what a “conversion” is, reporting that tells three different people three different things, sometimes on different tabs of the same report.

Before you spend a dime on another platform, you should spend time to make sure you have good process. Who owns what? What does each metric actually mean? What decisions are you looking to make with the data? Who makes those decisions? The answers will tell you a lot about whether your foundation is broken, more so than a tool audit.

3. Build for directional confidence, not perfect attribution.

You will never have perfect data. The ad platforms have subtly trained you over the years to believe that you CAN have perfect data, or perfect attribution, but it’s a lie. Cookies are degraded, AI Bidding is a black box, last click is almost always wrong… and you know these things. But directional intelligence, that’s trustworthy enough to help you make better decisions than you're making right now… That’s almost always achievable. That’s the goal. Not perfect omniscience, but just to have enough confidence in your data to make decisions.

The Bottom Line

The Performance Squeeze is real and the pressure marketing leaders are feeling is real. The companies that navigate this successfully aren’t the ones who found a better tool or a smarter agency, they’re the ones who fixed their foundation: The humans, the process, and their strategy.. So that when that data comes in, they actually know what to do with it.

The rockstar outcome of spending 20% less and getting 20% more that your unreasonable boss is asking for isn’t going to come from a nicer looking dashboard or BI tool. It’s going to come from having a stronger foundation.

And if you want a quick free way to evaluate the human foundation of your data layer, check out our Base 12 assessment, free takes only a few minutes.