If you’re a CEO or marketing leader feeling like everything that used to work suddenly doesn’t — you’re not imagining things. You are watching the collapse of your 2020 playbook in real time.
AI is rewriting how buyers find information. No one wants to click on blue links on Google's First Page anymore if they can get AI-generated answers instead. Writing an article a week seems to have lost its efficacy. Campaigns that once worked now feel like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Buyers seem to be all over the place, engaging with content, but there is no clear path to attribution anymore. Everything seems to make no sense at all at the moment. And yet, most organizations are still marketing like it’s 2020. Some out of stubbornness, but most simply don't know what else to do.
I sat down with Marcus Sheridan, bestselling author of the landmark book They Ask, You Answer (now Endless Customers), which Forbes and Mashable recognized as one of the top marketing books of all time. His frameworks have generated over US $1 billion in revenue for companies worldwide. He began his career building a swimming-pool business that became the most visited site in the market by embracing complete transparency and buyer-first content. Today, he delivers more than 70 global keynotes a year and helps leadership teams build trust into their culture, communication, and growth strategy.
His message is simple but urgent: “Disrupt, or be disrupted. Lead, or be prepared to follow. This rate of change is going to be so extraordinary in the coming years, you’re going to say, ‘I never expected this.’”
This article distills what Marcus said every organization needs to change — and how to do it — so you can lead instead of follow.
Let's start with the most fundamental shift in marketing and sales in decades: The way people buy has changed. Marcus knows it firsthand. He built one of the world’s most visited pool-company websites from the ground up after almost going bankrupt in the big crash of 2008. He did this by answering buyer questions online, but he admits that even that formula would not work the same way today: “I don’t think [what I did in 2009] would work today … You’ve got to be in as many places as possible because your buyers are fragmented across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.”
The implications are clear: Writing helpful and authoritative content is still valuable and necessary, but you can’t win by optimizing your website alone. You need to be everywhere your audience is.
Marcus calls it becoming “omnichannel,” but not in a fluffy, buzzwordy way. It means intentionally mastering one channel at a time until you’ve built real presence across several.
Start small, but start. Every quarter, you master one element and then you move on to the next:
You don’t need to do it all at once. You do need to stop waiting.
“Become great on a single platform and then work your way out.”
According to Marcus Sheridan, the number of companies planning to move on from their marketing agencies increased rapidly over the past three years:
The reason is simple: “You can’t outsource your voice and think that you’re going to become that voice of trust online … unless you learn to have some of these capabilities yourself.”
In other words, trust-building cannot be outsourced.
In the TrustLeader Framework, this is where the Foundational Layer begins — your competence and authenticity are what establish credibility. When you hand your entire content voice to an agency, you lose both.
That’s why, according to Marcus, the future belongs to in-house creators:
Perfect is not the goal — authenticity and presence are.
He puts it plainly: “When it’s overproduced, it loses authenticity … You’ve got to be nimble, lean, and fast. Imperfection is actually a really good thing.”
So don’t aim for a flawless brand film or an overproduced podcast episode. Aim for a trustworthy conversation.
Marcus built They Ask, You Answer around one principle: Give buyers what they want, in the format they prefer. It isn't up to your preferences (whether you consume videos or prefer reading long articles) or your in-house skill levels. You have to show up where and how your audience wants to engage with you.
As Marcus says, “Some people want to see a video … You can’t say, ‘Video’s not our thing.’ If you’re an entrepreneur, you signed up to meet the buyer where they are.”
This shift is subtle but profound. And this is precisely where many B2B teams stall: trying to fit buyer behavior into company comfort zones. If your buyers are consuming videos, watching demos, or comparing vendors via AI summaries, you must adapt your format strategy. Written content still matters, but it’s no longer sufficient. Your job is not to produce content — it’s to create clarity.
BTW: As the TrustLeader Framework emphasizes, trust at the Relational Layer grows through empathy and benevolence — by helping people feel understood and safe. Meeting them where they are does exactly that.
Still not convinced? Consider this analogy from Marcus:
“There are two types of organizations … The one that goes to the grocery store and buys their food, and the one that grows their own food. The grocery-store marketer runs out of food when they run out of money. The farmer always has food. But it takes longer to grow.”
The “law of the harvest” applies directly to your marketing system:
But it isn't as simple as this. The "law of the harvest" applies to all types of short-term thinking in marketing and sales:
My point is not that you shouldn't do those short-term sprints, but that you cannot rely solely on them to work without the fundamentals in place first.
Short-term thinking is not a sustainable strategy. You have to stop thinking like a grocery store and start thinking like a farmer. And yet, most organizations still spend more time “shopping” for leads than planting seeds for trust.
And trust, Marcus says, “is the ultimate example of the law of the harvest because it requires so much nourishing, so much work. But once you become that voice of trust, you generally don’t go hungry.”
In TrustLeader terms, this is the transition from transactional trust to transformational trust — when your reputation sustains demand even in turbulent markets.
Both Marcus and I are very passionate about ethical disruption. Ethical disruption is a company saying, "I've had enough of this. I am going to change this outdated or unfair business practice for the benefit of the customer, and I am not going to care what the market or the competition has to say about it." It isn't disruption for the sake of disruption or PR, it is customer-centric leadership.
In my book Lead with Trust, I cover this topic in the Cornerstone #9 — Ethical Disruption chapter as an important lever in the TrustLeader Framework. In TrustLeader language, ethical disruption happens at the Transformational Layer — where organizations move beyond self-promotion to active market leadership. It’s the difference between marketing and movement building.
It’s not enough to keep up with change. You must create it — but for the right reasons.
Marcus shares some advice on how to do this: “Look at your industry and ask: What is it that everyone’s doing that’s wrong, that I want to change? … We talked about fiberglass pools being built on sand — which was stupid — and by calling it out, we changed the whole industry.”
So, here is what you need to do:
That’s ethical disruption in action — not breaking things for attention, but breaking old rules that hurt customers.
Marcus explains it this way: “Rule breakers are the ones that create innovation … The rule breaker becomes the rule maker, and the previous leader becomes the rule follower.”
In other words, if you’re not disrupting your own rules, someone else will.
Many leaders hear this, freeze, and say, "We can’t move that fast," "We’re not that creative," or "We don’t have a video team." The market doesn't care what excuse you are telling yourself. And frankly, neither does your audience.
Here’s how to begin your own ethical disruption in the next 90 days:
Small steps, publicly shared, compound fast.
Marcus closes the interview with a warning that doubles as a dare:
“Disrupt or be disrupted. Lead or be forced to follow.”
There’s no safe middle anymore. Marketing is evolving faster than most organizations can plan. But trust (through the right communication, behavior, and leadership) remains the one thing that will always compound.
The truth is, you can’t afford to wait for clarity. The playbooks that worked five years ago are now liabilities. Trust is the only currency that still compounds — but only if you operationalize it.
This is where the TrustLeader Framework comes in. It helps you see where your trust gaps are and what to fix first. Maybe your Foundational Layer (competence and transparency) needs repair because your buyers still can’t find honest answers. Maybe your Relational Layer (empathy and benevolence) is weak because your content sounds corporate instead of human. Or maybe the trouble is in your Transformational Layer because you’ve stopped leading with courage and practicing ethical disruption — calling out what’s wrong in your industry and setting a higher standard.
So here’s how to start, practically, in the next 90 days:
Diagnose your gaps. Take the TrustLeader Assessment to map where your organization sits today across the three trust layers.
Prioritize one layer to improve. Choose a single trust gap that will make the biggest difference — transparency, empathy, or ethical disruption — and focus your resources there first.
Build a 90-day sprint plan.
Measure and refine. Track signals of trust — response rates, time on content, sales confidence, inbound quality — not just clicks.
By the end of those 90 days, you will not only know more about what your buyers want, but you'll also know how to deliver it. You will have built a muscle for leading change instead of reacting to it.
Because the question isn’t whether the market will change again. It’s whether you will still be waiting for permission when it does.