The expectations placed on marketing teams keep climbing. The budgets, largely, do not.
That is the central tension revealed in Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey — and it is a tension that marketing leaders across industries are navigating right now. Marketing budgets remain effectively flat at 7.7% of company revenue in 2025, unchanged from the prior year. [1] Meanwhile, the mandate to drive growth, generate demand, build brand, and demonstrate ROI has never been more demanding.
The result? More than half of CMOs say they still lack sufficient budget to deliver their strategy. [1] More than half of the people responsible for marketing at major organizations do not have the resources they need to do the job they have been asked to do.
That is a significant structural problem — and it is not going away on its own.
For mid-sized businesses, the pressure is even more acute. Enterprise companies can absorb budget constraints through scale. A mid-sized business with a lean marketing team and a flat budget has to make genuinely difficult choices about where to invest and what to cut.
The Deloitte and Duke University CMO Survey reinforces this picture. [2] Marketing leaders are being asked to do more with the same resources, justify every dollar with measurable outcomes, and compete against organizations that have larger teams and more sophisticated infrastructure.
So what are the teams that are actually succeeding doing differently?
The answer, increasingly, is outsourcing execution to partners who already have the tools, the talent, and the processes in place. Rather than building internal capabilities from scratch — which requires hiring, training, and technology investment that flat budgets cannot support — smart marketing leaders are extending their teams through agency partnerships that deliver expertise without the overhead.
This is not a new concept, but the logic for it has never been stronger. When your budget is flat and your goals are growing, the fastest path to closing the gap is leveraging external capacity that is already optimized for the outcomes you need.
The math works like this: an agency partner that specializes in demand generation, content, or performance marketing can often deliver better results at lower cost than building the equivalent capability in-house — because they have already made the infrastructure investment, already trained the team, and already refined the process across multiple clients.
For businesses that are feeling the squeeze between flat budgets and rising expectations, the question is not whether to consider outsourcing. It is which functions to outsource first, and which partners are actually equipped to deliver.
Conversion Media Group works with businesses that need to grow their pipeline without growing their overhead. If you are trying to do more with a flat budget, call us at 1-800-419-3201 and let us talk about what is possible.
[1] Gartner, “CMO Spend Survey 2025” — via Demand Gen Report
[2] Deloitte / Duke University, CMO Survey
[3] MarTech, “CMOs Brace for Cuts as Marketing Budgets Stay Flat”