This article was based on the interview with Qualified Digital Chief Client Officer Kate Dalbey on building an adaptive martech operating model by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
We’ve all been in that conference room. The one where the final signatures are inked on a seven-figure martech contract. There’s a palpable sense of accomplishment, of forward momentum. A new platform, a new capability, a new promise of streamlined workflows and unparalleled customer insight. This, we tell ourselves, is the tool that will finally connect the dots. Yet, as marketing leaders, we also share a quiet, collective understanding of what comes next: the messy middle. This is the unglamorous, often grueling phase between purchase and payoff, where potential either translates into performance or slowly withers on the vine of poor adoption and fragmented processes.
The tendency when a rollout stalls is to scrutinize the software. Was there a feature gap we missed? Is the UI clunky? Did the sales demo oversell its capabilities? While technology can certainly be the culprit, my experience interviewing hundreds of experts in this space points to a more common, and more foundational, issue. The problem is rarely the tool itself; it’s the human operating model surrounding it. Real transformation doesn’t come from a login screen; it comes from changing how people work, how they collaborate, how they measure success, and how leaders sustain their focus long after the initial excitement has faded. Getting this right is the difference between a powerful new asset and another expensive piece of shelfware.
The Critical Role of Sponsorship in the “Messy Middle”
Executive sponsorship is easy to secure for a kickoff meeting. It’s far more difficult, and infinitely more valuable, to maintain it six months later when the implementation team is deep in the weeds of data migration and workflow redesign. This is what Kate Dalbey identifies as the period where projects often go sideways. The initial vision and budget have been approved, and the executives who championed the investment have, with the best of intentions, turned their attention to the next strategic fire.
Effective sponsorship, however, isn’t a one-time transaction. It’s an ongoing commitment to clearing roadblocks and ensuring the project remains aligned with its original business objectives. The leaders who see these initiatives through to success understand that their role evolves from visionary to navigator, staying close enough to the work to provide course correction without derailing the team.
“The best executives that have seen this through to success are the ones that stay close enough to the work to understand what’s going on and the choices that have been made to this point without kind of coming in and swooping and pooping. … Usually when we’re in that kind of messy middle, I’ve been having a one-on-one with these executives all along the way, and we’ve been kind of unpacking and what I like to say untying knots together.”
Dalbey’s “swoop and poop” metaphor is one that will resonate with any leader who has seen a senior executive drop into a late-stage meeting with ill-informed feedback that sends the team scrambling. The alternative she describes—a process of “untying knots together”—is the mark of true leadership. It requires consistent, scheduled time to understand the nuances and trade-offs the team is facing. It also often requires an investment that can’t be made over Zoom: getting the key players in a room together. In an era of distributed teams and tight travel budgets, the strategic value of looking someone in the eye to solve a complex problem is often underestimated. This builds the human trust necessary to weather the inevitable technical and procedural challenges.
Beyond Training: Engineering True Adoption
Another common pitfall is mistaking training for adoption. We can create the most comprehensive training manuals and host hours of workshops, checking off the “training” line item in the project plan. But if the underlying behaviors and workflows don’t change, the team will inevitably revert to their old, comfortable methods. The new platform becomes, at best, a slightly more complicated way to do the same old thing.
The key, as Dalbey points out, is to move beyond the “how” and anchor the change in the “why.” Adoption isn’t about learning a new set of buttons to click; it’s about understanding how those clicks lead to a better outcome—for the business, and just as importantly, for the individual.
“I’ve seen trainings be beautifully put together… and then literally the next week, no one is even thinking about the training manual that they were sent or session that they attended because they don’t remember why they need to change. So you have to attach that change to the why. This is going to help us get better data so that we can make more insightful decisions. This is going to help you move faster as a marketer so that you don’t have to do that grunt work that you already don’t like.”
This is the essence of effective change management. It requires leaders to articulate a clear and compelling vision that connects the new technology to tangible benefits. That “why” isn’t one-size-fits-all. For a campaign manager, it might be about reducing manual reporting. For a content strategist, it might be about gaining faster access to performance data. Tailoring the message is crucial. Furthermore, when someone successfully uses the new process to achieve a positive result, that success needs to be amplified. Celebrating small, early wins creates a feedback loop of positive reinforcement, demonstrating to the rest of the organization that the new way of working is not just a mandate, but a genuine improvement.
Designing a “Flexibly Inflexible” Operating Model
One of the greatest challenges in a large enterprise is balancing the need for speed with the need for governance. Modern martech platforms are often designed to be highly flexible, empowering teams to create and execute with more autonomy. This is a powerful feature, but without a well-defined operating model, that flexibility can quickly lead to fragmentation. Different teams adopt different processes, data becomes inconsistent, and the organization inadvertently recreates the same silos it was trying to break down.
The solution isn’t to lock down the platform with rigid, bureaucratic controls that stifle agility. Instead, it’s about designing what Dalbey calls a “flexibly inflexible” operating model. The model must be firm on the principles and outcomes that are non-negotiable—things like brand compliance, data governance, and alignment with core business KPIs—while allowing for flexibility in how teams achieve those outcomes.
“You have to design an operating model that’s flexible enough to be reasonable, but inflexible enough to support achieving the business metrics that it was designed to support… I would guess… there’s probably some sort of approval gate in every single one of those people’s ecosystems that people are stuck on… If the operating model can be designed to need approval but not gate it, then that campaign will go to market faster and revenue will be generated faster.”
Her example of the campaign approval gate is a perfect illustration. The “inflexible” requirement is that work must be approved. The “flexible” opportunity is to rethink how that approval happens. Does it require a single person to manually click a button, creating a bottleneck? Or can approval be automated through pre-set templates, compliance checks, or a more distributed model of accountability? The goal is to build guardrails, not gates. This approach allows teams to move quickly and confidently, knowing they are operating within a framework that ensures quality and consistency without sacrificing speed. This is particularly vital in the age of AI, where the pace of change demands an operating model that can adapt without breaking.
Measuring What Actually Moves the Needle
Finally, how do we know if any of this is actually working? Too often, we fall back on usage metrics: login rates, number of campaigns launched, features utilized. While these can be useful health indicators, they don’t tell the whole story. As Dalbey astutely notes, it’s entirely possible to have a dashboard full of green lights while the business itself is shrinking.
A successful martech implementation must be measured against the business outcomes it was intended to influence from the very beginning. This requires defining success not in terms of platform activity, but in terms of business impact.
“The last thing that we want to do is have clients measuring themselves against productivity metrics that don’t ladder up to business success… Teams are all green, right? Every light is green. Great. But the business is shrinking meanwhile. No, we do not want that… as long as it’s tied to the business metric, that’s the quickest way to ensure larger adoption.”
Connecting the new way of working to a top-line KPI is the ultimate way to validate the investment and drive continued adoption. When a sales team sees that leads processed through the new AI-powered workflow are generating qualified pipeline faster, they don’t need to be cajoled into using the system. The results speak for themselves. This focus on business value elevates the conversation from “Are people using the tool?” to “Is the tool helping us win?” It provides the executive sponsors with the ROI they need to justify the investment and gives the teams on the ground a clear line of sight between their daily work and the company’s success.
The allure of new technology is powerful, and in a landscape being reshaped by AI, the pressure to invest and innovate is immense. But the hard truth is that technology is just an enabler. The real work lies in building an organization that can effectively harness it. This means cultivating leaders who remain engaged through the messy middle, fostering genuine adoption by connecting change to a clear “why,” and designing operating models that are both structured and adaptive.
Ultimately, the goal isn’t just to implement a new platform. It’s to build a more agile, data-driven, and effective marketing organization. Success isn’t measured by the date the contract was signed, but by the lasting improvements in how your teams work and the tangible results they deliver for the business. The platform may be the catalyst, but the people and processes are the engine of enduring transformation.
