By Lisa Heay, Vice President of Business Operations at Heinz Marketing
A lot of the CMOs we talk to get some version of the same message from their board or CFO at some point: hit the pipeline number, but cut the budget. It’s nothing new.
The difference now is that AI then comes up in that conversation almost immediately as the answer to the “do more with less” task. If AI can write the first draft, maybe we don’t need writers. If AI can score and route leads, maybe we can replace sales or marketing operations.
Why “Do More With Less” Isn’t a Strategy
I understand why it feels like the obvious response. It sounds efficient. And in many cases maybe there is room to trim some excess from the current process, budget, or team.
But in practice, it’s not a strategy. It’s a target with no plan attached. Teams that treat it like a strategy usually end up in one of two places: burned out, or filling the gaps with agencies and freelancers who were never given a real workflow to plug into. They’re not set up to succeed or drive real results.
A strategy tells you how the work is going to change. ‘Do more with less’ only tells you how many people are going to do it, or how much money it needs to happen with. That’s the gap most teams get stuck in: everyone signs off on the number, but nobody has actually decided what the work looks like once the number changes.
Start With the Work, Not the Org Chart
I run operations at Heinz Marketing, both on the business side and marketing ops specifically, so I spend a lot of time in the gap between what leadership wants and what the team can execute day to day. Here’s what I’ve noticed: when leadership hears ‘do more with less,’ the first instinct is almost always to cut people. But the real fix rarely starts there. It starts with looking at how the work actually gets done, step by step, and fixing what’s broken in that process before touching headcount at all.
The right first question is: what does the team in question produce? And from there, what objective does that serve? What outcomes are they responsible for? And which parts of that production genuinely require a person doing exactly what they’re doing today? Most of the time, nobody has mapped that out.
Without that mapping, the cuts get made based on tenure, or cost, or who’s easiest to part with, and everyone is surprised later when quality drops or deadlines slip. The work didn’t get smaller. The team did.
If people are let go without considering process, they may have been the ones holding together a system nobody wrote down, like an approval chain or a hand-off between teams. The work doesn’t disappear. It lands on whoever’s left to piece things together until something breaks and everyone’s scrambling to figure out what to do now.
Faster Isn’t the Same as Fixed
The team was probably never given a version of the workflow that accounted for what AI could realistically absorb versus what still needed a person’s judgment. Nobody redesigned anything. They just removed people from a process that was built assuming those people would always be there.
This is also why AI so rarely delivers on the “do more with less” promise by itself. Go back to the opening: can AI write a first draft? Sure. Can it score and route leads? Also sure. But writing a draft and knowing when it’s ready to publish are two different jobs, and so are scoring a lead and deciding what to do with it. AI can speed up the first job. It has no opinion about the second, which means unreviewed drafts and badly routed leads just move faster through a process that was never built to catch what AI misses.
Map the Workflow Before You Set a Number
Look at the actual workflow. Figure out where a person is doing genuinely high-judgment work: decision-making, relationship management, creative direction, the kind of thing AI still can’t reliably do. Then figure out where a person is doing repetitive, well-defined work that AI or automation can absorb without a meaningful drop in quality.
A content workflow might break down like this: AI drafts the outline and first pass, a strategist decides whether the angle is actually right, and an editor makes the final call on tone before it ships. Two of those three steps are repeatable. One isn’t, and that’s the one still worth paying for.
Only after that mapping is done does a headcount number mean anything.
The Contractor Problem
What happens when this mapping never gets done? A team gets cut, the work doesn’t shrink, so leadership brings in outside help to cover the gap. Contractors are an easy choice because they come with less overhead than a full-time employee.
That’s not wrong on its own. Bringing in outside expertise can be the right move. But when it happens as a patch, without anyone rethinking the underlying workflow, it gets expensive fast and hard to manage, because now you have contractors layered onto a process that wasn’t designed for them either.
Start With the Workflow, Let the Org Chart Follow
The fix is a workflow that’s been genuinely thought through, so that whoever is doing the work: an employee, a contractor, or AI, there is a clear place to plug in.
That said, none of this is about defending unnecessary headcount. Plenty of teams do have more people than the work requires, and plenty of roles were built for a version of marketing that doesn’t exist anymore.
But the answer to “do more with less” can’t just be less boxes on the org chart. It has to start with an honest look at the work itself. What needs a person, and what doesn’t. That’s a harder conversation, but it’s the only version of “do more with less” that holds up.
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Image by Megan Rexazin Conde from Pixabay
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