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If you only have time for one marketing conversation this month, let it be this one!

In this episode of Connecting the dots, I sat down with Alex Venus, Director of Growth Marketing at Personio (one of Europe's leading HR and payroll platforms) to talk about what it really takes to build and lead a modern B2B marketing team. We covered a lot of ground: AI adoption, creative strategy, the future of performance marketing, how buyers are changing, and a belief about brand that Alex held for years before completely reversing it.

Here's a recap of what we covered and what you can take away from it.

The buyer journey has already changed. Has your funnel?

The traditional B2B sales funnel was designed around how brands wanted to sell, not how buyers actually want to buy. Alex's team at Personio has been working to redesign that by implementing an AI SDR that handles discovery conversations 24/7, shortening MQL to SQL time by around 50%. 

But the bigger shift is earlier in the journey. Buyers are increasingly researching through LLMs before they ever land on your website. Tracking how your brand shows up in AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity is becoming one of the more valuable things you can do. Yhis is increasingly where consideration happens.

AI is a speed enabler, not a strategy

Personio's approach to AI started with one question: what's slowing us down? For Alex's team, reporting was one answer: monthly business reviews were taking a full week per market. An internal AI agent now does the same job in two hours. That's the unlock: not AI for AI's sake, but AI pointed at real operational drag. 

His advice to any marketing leader is to start there: audit your operating model first, find the bottlenecks, and then look for the applicable use case.

He's equally clear about where AI falls short. The teams skipping the research phase, the cross-functional work, the genuine strategic thinking (and hoping AI fills the gap) are producing very average work. Fast, but forgettable (and mid).

The creative muscle you need to build

In a category like HR software, where everyone is saying the same things, standing out requires real creative discipline. Alex runs dedicated campaign workshops, uses a "So what?" principle to stress-test ideas, and has built an internal channel where his team shares and tears down ads they're seeing in the wild — not just during working hours, but whenever inspiration strikes. The goal is to build a genuine passion for creative across the whole team, not just leave it to the designers.

His view on AI-generated creative is clear: the best content he sees on LinkedIn right now isn't AI-produced. It's authentic, behind-the-scenes, camera-on content from real people. People buy from people, after all, right?

The performance marketing reckoning

Within a couple of years, Alex doesn't think the performance marketing manager role will look much like it does today. Channel management is increasingly being absorbed by platform algorithms, leaving less room for manual control. What remains (and what he believes will become the real competitive advantage) is creative strategy. The ability to understand what resonates, why, and how to brief it. That has implications for who you hire, how you train them, and what you expect from your agency relationships.

The brand belief he completely reversed

Perhaps the most striking moment of the conversation was when Alex reflected on a belief he held early in his career: that investing in brand was a waste of time. Why spend money on things you can't track when you want conversions and pipeline?

He's completely reversed that now. His view today is that 70–80% of your budget should be going towards demand creation — shaping the narrative around your category, positioning yourself so people understand why you're different. For most companies, he argues, the balance is still heavily skewed towards demand capture. And the synergy is real: the more you invest up funnel, the better your acquisition costs and down-funnel metrics will look.

How to apply this to your strategy

  • Audit your operating model before your tech stack. Find the tasks eating time without adding strategic value. That's your AI starting point.
  • Search for your brand in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Is the narrative accurate and differentiated? This is your new shop window (psst! We can also do that for you, just like we did for Personio!)
  • Run a "So what?" test on your last campaign brief. If it could have been written by AI, it needs another pass.
  • Check your budget split. How much is going to demand creation versus demand capture? Even a rough estimate will tell you something worth acting on.

🎧 Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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