In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss why six enduring marketing problems have slipped out of conference agendas and what their absence means for you.
You’ll learn why flashy AI sessions overshadow practical needs such as clean customer records, knowing which campaigns bring buyers, and email delivery. You’ll discover how to turn overlooked challenges into focused lessons for teams by combining data analysis, AI tools, and human judgment. You’ll see how better data maintenance will support stronger forecasts, marketing decisions, and customer retention in the years ahead. Watch to learn how you can use the newest tools to fix current problems instead of chase distant promises.
00:00 – Introduction
03:30 – AI’s rise on the conference agenda
08:45 – Six marketing problems fade from stages
14:00 – Why novelty wins conference seats
19:15 – Modern tools for neglected challenges
24:00 – The case for Back to Boring
28:00 – Call to action
Watch the episode to see how you can use AI and stronger data habits to solve the marketing problems that affect your business.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Christopher S. Penn:
In this week’s In-Ear Insights, we are at MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2026. Katie and I are both talking—you’re speaking today at 4 p.m. on…
Katie Robbert:
Building a Smarter Ideal Customer Profile.
And I think 1 of the things that people are surprised about is how little AI is actually in my talk. And so I recommend people use AI for the analysis part, but for the critical thinking, for the data collection, there’s no AI involved.
And so I know that’s been 1 of the tension points for events like MarketingProfs B2B Forum: How much AI to include? How much AI do people want? What do people really care about?
And Chris, that’s where you actually started doing a deeper analysis about what things aren’t making the cut anymore.
Christopher S. Penn:
So 1 of the things that’s funny: MarketingProfs has been around forever. And using the Wayback Machine, I was able to go back to 2015 and look at the agenda every year and compare what’s on stage. It’s really funny. In 2022 there was 1 AI session. I think it was mine.
Katie Robbert:
I was going to say it must have been yours.
Christopher S. Penn:
Right. Today it is 50% of the agenda.
Katie Robbert:
Yeah.
Christopher S. Penn:
Which, and so, there are 6 areas that, when you look over time, have fallen away from the agenda, because conference makers and conference partners need to put butts in seats. They need to convince people it’s worth your time and money to come to this conference. But there are problems that—as you like to say—new tech doesn’t solve old problems.
Katie Robbert:
Sure does not.
Christopher S. Penn:
And so these 6 problems are still probably problems. Actually, they’re probably bigger problems, but they’re not on stage anymore.
So they are:
1. CRM data decay. 25% of your CRM—actually, more—is going bad every year because people move, people leave.
2. Multitouch attribution, busted in so many ways.
3. Email deliverability totally changed.
4. Tech stack sprawl.
5. Zero-click search.
6. No focus on revenue retention. People saying, like, “Hey, we’re working all this hard to try and get customers, and we’re not retaining them.”
It’s funny, I was asking the AI tools as they read the agendas. Google Analytics as a topic has not been on the agenda since 2023. It’s just gone. And yet we know the software is not gone.
So of those 6 topics, which 1, in your experience, is—why are we not doing more with this?
Katie Robbert:
I don’t think I could pick just 1. No.
In all honesty, when I was looking at the list earlier, it strikes me that it’s a very tactical, very specific list. And so when we talk about what the pain points of B2B marketers are, everyone’s dealing with some version of every single one of those 6 topics.
But in some ways, coming to an event like the MarketingProfs B2B Forum is a little bit of escapism to hear sort of the big ideas, to hear about what’s next. We know our CRM is a problem. We know attribution is a problem. We’ve been trying to fix that for years.
If I’m going to spend my money to go to an event, yeah, it would be nice if I could fix it. But who’s going to fix it in 45 minutes at a high level?
And I think that’s 1 of the challenges that we have as speakers: We really want to be helpful to people. We want to teach them things. But there’s only so much you can teach in a 45-minute session, sometimes shorter, depending on the show that you’re at.
If you have the benefit of being a workshop presenter, which you and I have done before, and we did data analytics, you can get into those topics specifically. It’s really good for a workshop. It’s not good for a breakout session.
And that’s the challenge that we run into as speakers, and that’s the challenge that event coordinators run into: What can you possibly do to teach people about their CRM decay in 45 minutes? Unless we turn it into a whole workshop. But then you run the risk of not enough people being interested. But the people who sign up are hardcore about it. So it’s all sort of a numbers game: What’s going to get people through the door to participate in the event, even though we know these are really useful things?
So then my assumption is that other speakers are like, “Well, these are still useful topics. What else can I do with them outside of the event to teach people?” So there’s a lot of different ways to approach it.
But when we’re talking specifically about an event like the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, yes, all of those topics are critically important today, just as they were 5, 6 years ago. But people are coming here to hear what’s next.
Christopher S. Penn:
Given what you and I talk about, though, how would you take these 6 things that we all agree are still really important? And as our friend Brooke says, how would you zhuzh them up?
Katie Robbert:
So let’s take attribution analysis as 1 of the topics. And this is actually—I think this was 1 of the workshops that we gave a few years back—you could talk about today’s technologies, today’s resources, and what that looks like to apply to attribution analysis, to say…
So let’s say the MarketingProfs B2B Forum said, “Hey Katie, could you talk about attribution?” I’d be like, “Great, sure.”
I would approach it from the 5P framework by Trust Insights. That’s where I would start. And then I would talk about what attribution analysis is, what it truly is, what you can do with it, and the tools that you would need. And then where, or where not, AI fits in with that today.
And so with today’s resources, you can do a better job of data analysis. Whereas historically, when we were talking about attribution analysis, we were reliant on the out-of-the-box tools, like whatever Google Analytics gave you, which said, like, “Here’s your first touch. Here’s your last touch. Here’s your medium touch. Here’s your data-driven one.”
And you were like, “Okay, I guess that’s what it is.” And you didn’t really have the resources and the analytics tools to do anything but that.
Now today you can look not only at your Google Analytics data, you can look at your CRM data, and you can look at your marketing automation data. It’s more of a marketing mix model than it is attribution.
But at the end of the day, you’re answering the same question, which is: What brings people to our site? What converts? And now with today’s tools, you can do more of that without having to need a data scientist on your team, without having to have a whole analytics firm, or without having to go to your IT department to beg for access to things when you can just take snapshots.
Christopher S. Penn:
Some of these things also might not be conference sessions because they don’t have to be. So, like, email deliverability—one that’s a Claude skill.
That is literally—you could take all the learnings from that bundle into a skill and say, “Turn on the skill in your Claude and obey it.” Follow its directions where it says, “Okay, now I need to see this.” Exactly what you’re saying: “Give me screenshots. Now I need to see this. Log in to Postmaster Tools. Let me see this.”
And after 45 minutes without a conference session, it’s like, “Okay, I fixed everything I can fix for you. Go do that.” So there’s some of these things that, yeah, it doesn’t need to be a conference session anymore.
Katie Robbert:
But wouldn’t you argue that, as marketers turn over in their roles, the learnings about email deliverability are still important? So that could still be a conference session. And so, just like the question you asked me about attribution, I would say you could build a whole session around email deliverability.
Deliverability: What is it? Why is it important? And how do today’s modern tools help the everyday marketer make sure that their newsletter is getting to the right people?
Because again, for a long time, email deliverability was something that was really only known by really deep tacticians who understood the DMARC and the laws and all those sort of things. Now you don’t have to be that tactician, but you do need to know enough information to bring it to your large language model to build that skill.
So I could see that it could be a whole session, like “Modern email deliverability: Using today’s tools for yesterday’s problems.” Yeah, I think I just built it.
Christopher S. Penn:
You did. There you go. Yeah.
So for 2027, that’ll be that for a topic like CRM data decay. Yeah. How would you tackle that? Because that’s a big deal.
Katie Robbert:
It’s a big deal.
I think, again, it starts with the education of: What is it? Why is it important? Are you even aware that this is a problem? And what does that mean for your sales organization? What does your CRO say about your CRM decay?
I think it’s just a matter of stepping back and getting a little bit creative around what you could do with these topics. Because there’s an education component to all of them, which is why people come to these events—to learn what it is and how to do it.
And so you could position it as: “Did you know you have CRM decay? What are you going to do about it?” So really start with that scare factor: “Oh, I didn’t know. How do I even find out? What does that mean?” “Well, here’s what it means. And so, what do you do about it?”
And that’s again where you can bring in the modern tooling, the modern resources. A lot of large language models have those connectors to CRMs. And so, again, the amount of time it used to take to go through records one by one, clean them, and run them through Million Verifier to make sure the email addresses are all clean—all those sort of things—now happens so much faster because of the way automation and agentic systems work.
But you first have to be aware that it’s even a problem. And that’s where bringing that education into events is still relevant.
Christopher S. Penn:
I almost think, because you’ve done this a lot, too, with our own internal CRM stuff, where you have the agentic tools kind of enforcing the rules to say, like, “Hey, this deal hasn’t moved in 90 days. This deal is dead,” and stuff like that. So some of the decay is because we’re not doing that maintenance.
Katie Robbert:
And we say this to our clients all the time. We have this conversation internally. The maintenance is the hardest part. And so it’s fun to build the thing. It’s fun to stand it up and let it run, but then somebody has to take care of it.
Ann talked about the 90s technology in her opening keynote. And 1 of the things she brought up was the Tamagotchi.
Now, I never had one.
Christopher S. Penn:
Neither did I.
Katie Robbert:
But my understanding is that it was this little electronic pet that you had to feed, water, and keep alive. That’s maintenance. And so when you have a CRM, you have to feed it and water it and keep it alive. It’s not a one-and-done.
And that’s the problem with a lot of these software systems is that the vendors will do the shiny demo and, like, “Here’s how it can solve all your problems.” Nobody talks about what happens when the shine wears off and you have to keep the thing up and running. It’s like getting a new Tamagotchi. “Oh my God, it’s amazing. Let me name it. Let me outfit it. Let me—blah, blah.” And then it’s like, “Oh, wait, this thing needs food every single day.”
Christopher S. Penn:
That’s why we have a pet rock.
Katie Robbert:
But the point being is that we don’t talk about what maintenance looks like. That in and of itself is a whole session. Why maintenance is important.
Now, you started the conversation where it’s these conference coordinators, these event coordinators. They have to get butts in seats. We’re marketers. You’re telling me we can’t come up with some sort of clever name for these CRM decay sessions? Something you could go, like, “Zombie Apocalypse.” You could go “Dentist.” You could come up with a lot of puns. There are ways to message it.
But then people get in the room and they’re like, “Oh, this was actually really helpful. I can take this with me today and go do something.” Like, we’re marketers. I call BS on them saying, like, “Oh, those sessions are too boring.” Like, message it better.
Christopher S. Penn:
And that’s the thing I keep coming back to, looking at these topics: If these are still pain points, and everybody we know has these pain points in some fashion, why aren’t they on stage? Why aren’t the marketers, why aren’t the speakers doing these sessions? Because AI itself—is that the means by which you will do CRM data cleanup stuff? Why are we not seeing that on stage?
Katie Robbert:
I don’t have a good answer to that question. I have my own assumptions. I think that people are looking for the shiny object. I think they’re looking for the forward-thinking thought leaders, which is great, and for all of them to tell you what’s coming in the next 5 to 10 years. That doesn’t solve my problems today. Right.
And I think events in general—I’m not speaking about the B2B Forum at this point—that’s sort of been the M.O. of “Let’s get the forward-thinking.” We don’t want to have the practical application on stage that’s not as exciting and flashy, with lights and all these sorts of things.
And it’s tough because people want to know what’s coming because it’s a nice quick escape from what their problems are today.
Christopher S. Penn:
Right. But if you solve their problems today, they were like, “Okay, that wasn’t the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. But my problems are now gone.”
Katie Robbert:
So, I mean, what’s your take on it?
Christopher S. Penn:
I think, I don’t know, it’s something where the economics of a conference mean that you have to get butts in seats. You have to go the flashy route.
If you do something like a virtual conference, where you have much less infrastructure to deal with—catering and meals and stuff like that—I could totally see you doing, like, a B2B, but it stands for “Back to Boring B2B.” A boring conference where it’s just this stuff.
But it’s like, “Here’s how you solve it today. Here’s the AI tools and the whatever agents and code to solve these problems today.” So that when you walk out of this event in 6 hours, you have the tools you need to solve these problems.
And what I would love to see is the enablement to go with it. So you have a session on CRM data decay. The education: “Did you know this is a problem?” Here is the Claude skill to diagnose it. Here’s the Claude skill to do data augmentation. Here’s the Claude skill to do this, or the plugin, or the ChatGPT, or it doesn’t matter, but I could see there being value added.
Like you said, it’s very tactical stuff. It’s not exciting, but it makes pain go away. And if we want people to have AI enablement be meaningful, we’ve got to take pain away.
Katie Robbert:
So I think you just came up with our—Every year, at the beginning of the year, we come up with a theme. So I think our B2B 2027 is “Back to Boring,” because—
Well, and to be fair, everything we do at Trust Insights, especially with the 5P framework, is foundational. And so yes, you have definitely spoken on stages about what’s coming next. People call you the futurist because you stay up to date on what’s happening. But to your point, their problems still exist.
So what would it look like for us to have a whole focus on “Back to Boring”? Let’s take all of these future, really exciting shiny tools and apply them to your problems, make those problems go away, and show you what’s possible.
Because we talk about the data hierarchy, and that foundation is good data hygiene. Without that, the rest of it doesn’t matter. So what does it look like to take the new shiny objects, apply them to your data hygiene—which is what I’ve been doing with our CRM, which you mentioned—then you can do more sophisticated forecasting, then you can do your attribution analysis, then you can figure out your ROI, then you can do your click-through rates, then you can do whatever it is that you’ve been trying to do but guessing?
Christopher S. Penn:
Yeah, exactly. And the really nice thing now is—and we heard about this in the opening keynote with Rory Sutherland—once you get the foundation in place, you can then look at, okay, how do we build in stuff that isn’t in our system to say, okay, this is our blind spot?
So, you and I have been working on our ideal customer profiles for 2027. And with those blind spots, there are clear blind spots, like, “Okay, this is one right here. As a spoiler, Regulated Industries is a blind spot. We don’t do a lot in that industry.” And so to be able to say, yeah, this is something we need to have an answer for, but you can’t do that without the hygiene.
Katie Robbert:
It’s true. All right, so, I mean, I think we’ve come to the conclusion that while your analysis is helpful for what we’re not getting anymore at events, there’s no good reason why we shouldn’t be getting those things at events.
Christopher S. Penn:
Right? Exactly.
So to wrap up, the things we’re going to do, then, are obviously to spend some more time with not just the big 6, but a whole bunch that are missing, and maybe create some of our own enablement materials around them. Who knows? Maybe we’ll have a “Back to Boring” event of our own next year.
Katie Robbert:
We’re Back to Boring.
Christopher S. Penn:
We’re Back to Boring.
If you’ve got some thoughts about how you are approaching things that are not on stage but are still problems, drop into our free Slacker. Go to Trust Insights AI Analytics for Marketers, where you and over 4,700 other marketers are asking and answering each other’s questions every single day.
And wherever you watch or listen to the show, if there’s a challenge, rather than having it on the show, go to the Trust Insights AI podcast. You can find us in all the places fine podcasts are served. Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll talk to you on the next one.
Katie Robbert:
Want to know more about Trust Insights?
Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm specializing in leveraging data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to empower businesses with actionable insights.
Founded in 2017 by Katie Robbert and Christopher S. Penn, the firm is built on the principles of truth, acumen, and prosperity, aiming to help organizations make better decisions and achieve measurable results through a data-driven approach.
Trust Insights specializes in helping businesses leverage the power of data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to drive measurable marketing ROI.
Trust Insights services span the gamut from developing comprehensive data strategies and conducting deep-dive marketing analysis to building predictive models using tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch and optimizing content strategies.
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Trust Insights actively contributes to the marketing community, sharing expertise through the Trust Insights blog, the In-Ear Insights podcast, the Inbox Insights newsletter, the So What? Live webinars, and keynote speaking.
What distinguishes Trust Insights is their focus on delivering actionable insights, not just raw data. Trust Insights is adept at leveraging cutting-edge generative AI techniques like large language models and diffusion models, yet they excel at explaining complex concepts clearly through compelling narratives, visualizations, and data storytelling.
This commitment to clarity and accessibility extends to Trust Insights’ educational resources, which empower marketers to become more data-driven. Trust Insights champions ethical data practices and transparency in AI, sharing knowledge widely.
Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, a mid-sized business, or a marketing agency seeking measurable results, Trust Insights offers a unique blend of technical experience, strategic guidance, and educational resources to help you navigate the ever-evolving landscape of modern marketing and business in the age of generative AI.
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Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.
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