How Leading CMOs Are Reshaping Their Teams to Deliver More With Less
04 Sep 2025
In the face of resource constraints, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are under pressure to deliver tangible impact with limited marketing spend. In short, they have to do more, with less. This requires a major strategic shift in how skills are accessed and deployed in the business. Negotiating this can feel like an impossible puzzle. However, as we have discovered at HelloKindred, this puzzle is simply a Rubik’s cube that requires its own innovative framework and thinking.
Facing the challenge
In our previous article in this series we explored how the current economic climate and technological innovation has resulted in resource challenges for CMOs. At HelloKindred, we typically engage with CMOs when their B2B marketing and creative teams are facing reconfiguration. This means working alongside leaders as they negotiate how talent is arranged and deployed. This can be a sizeable challenge, as marketing operations are complex, involving verticals, horizontals, and local market structures. We have to find solutions to serve sometimes100+ marketing leads with requirements for different talent and access to creative production across 40 countries, all time zones, and follow-the-sun service. People remain the most valuable resource, while the rise of AI-augmented workflows, generative AI, and the emergence of agentic AI play an increasingly significant role in enhancing human capabilities.
Part of this challenge includes deploying the right skills in the right place at the right time, while staying within budget. Some organisations make the mistake of replacing the middle layer of talent with junior skills, supported by AI tools in order to save costs. This creates gaps in expertise, as well as leadership and culture.
CMOs will find more success with an output and purpose-driven operating model, resourcing strategy, and team culture that builds a middle layer of internal and augmented specialist talent, specialist teams or specialist agency services. This provides a framework to get the job done well, support junior team members with exposure and experience, and take the pressure off leads for Business as Usual (BAU) so that senior leads can focus on high-value tasks.
The new approach – A Rubik’s Cube for dynamic, responsive team configurations
Leaders have described the challenge of balancing onshore, nearshore, in-house and outsourced capabilities as similar to a Rubik’s cube – but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
At HelloKindred, we define the Rubik’s Cube as an intentional, future-fit organisational design that that combines structural innovation, skill development, cultural change, and new ways of working. In fitting all these elements together, organisations can be equipped with teams that are more capable and more adaptable than traditional marketing departments of the past. In our work with CMOs at leading global organisations, this approach has proven to be dynamic, responsive, agile and cost-effective. It achieves the magic trifecta – quality, speed, and cost.
Some elements of our approach include:
Pods:
We have moved away from traditional functional silos toward integrated teams, or pods, that can handle end-to-end marketing processes from across the world. These pods can be scaled up and down according to business needs, and be supported by a strong centre of excellence that provides specialized expertise when required.
Hubs:
In the case of our work with London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), effective resourcing looked like a centralised single hub. The client already had an office space in Cape Town, which was the perfect location for an on-site insourcing team. The brand needed content created and reviewed within tight turnaround times, so the similarity in time zone was a critical deciding factor. Through the hub, we were able to provide high-calibre, senior design and branding resources that could be fully embedded in the business and operate with LSEG’s internal stakeholders independently. The entire team, from in house to insourced, is integrated with the Adobe stack and workflow tools. This has created a structured approach to allocating the high demand of tasks coming from the business.
Steve Habbi, LSEG’s Chief Brand Officer says, “Cape Town isn’t just where we produce content — it’s part of the creative heartbeat of LSEG. With HelloKindred embedded in our operations, we’ve built an always-on, always-aligned creative engine. Same time zone. Same standards. Same team.”
SPUs:
Special Purpose Units (SPUs) are an ideal intervention for functions such as content creation, digital and communications. Where pods and hubs are multi-disciplinary, SPUs have a single purpose or goal. This approach gives clients sharp, focused instruments for the job.
Augmented talent:
Another successful approach is augmented talent, where companies temporarily bring in resources to support their in-house teams. In working with HelloKindred, clients can access staffing augmentation from 14 different countries, from onshore, time zone-based and offshore talent for leads in the US, UK, EU and APAC.
In our work with a leading global consultancy, we find that custom staffing augmentation programmes offer flexible, scalable, cost-effective resourcing with seamless onboarding and quick integration. The consultancy also benefits from HelloKindred’s strong, consistent client support and post-placement management for marketing leads and contractors.
Creative platforms
Marketers can also access talent through creative platforms, a centralised service model that provides platform-based services for marketing and creative resources or projects. In our work with our global consultancy client, for example, a creative production hub integrates onshore and nearshore resources to deliver outstanding, on-demand content production solutions tailored to marketers’ needs while the client service team ensures prompt delivery, operational readiness, and creative excellence, meeting our clients’ diverse requirements effectively and efficiently.
A path forward
While the future of resourcing looks different to the marketing teams of the past, it offers new benefits. Through agile structures such as pods, hubs, SPUs or creative platforms, marketing leaders can evolve and flex their talent to meet their needs. The rise of remote working has exploded, offering CMOs access to top tier creative skills all over the world, which can be mapped to a company’s team culture, budgetary and geographical preferences. The global marketing community has never been in a better position to create decentralised augmented teams where being effective, collaborating, changing culture and increasing creativity is at its highest.
