You Don't Have a Budget Problem. You Have a Prioritisation Problem.
We took Canned live to the B2B Marketing Conference in Auckland with 200+ marketing leaders, two brilliant guests, and one very honest conversation.
We asked a room of over 200 marketing leaders to raise their hand if they had all the resources they needed to do an awesome job.
Nobody moved.
Not a twitch. Not a tentative half-raise. Just silence and knowing smiles.
That moment set the tone for the entire episode. Canned; the Marketing Podcast went live at the B2B Marketing Conference in Auckland, hosted by the Marketing Association, and the conversation we had on stage is one that almost every marketer in the country is having behind closed doors. How do you deliver meaningful results when your budget doesn’t match your brief?
We were joined by two marketing leaders who know this tension intimately. Fiona Taimana is the GM of Marketing at Noel Leeming, part of The Warehouse Group, where she leads marketing, digital, and creative across both retail and commercial. Her commercial division turns over roughly $200 million in revenue. She has one marketing manager. And her share of the total Noel Leeming marketing budget? Two percent. Fiona has built her career across retail, B2B, and international markets, including a stint with Emirates in the Middle East. She knows what it looks like to make a lot out of very little.
Anna Henwood is the CEO of Stickybeak, a global insights platform that helps brands test products and creative in market. Before founding Stickybeak, Anna was CMO at Les Mills, where she led a 100-person marketing function across global offices. Now she runs a 12-person startup selling SaaS into markets including New Zealand, Australia, and the UK. She’s gone from a world where the founder would casually double your content budget to one where every dollar has to earn its place.
Together, we explored three principles that every marketer working with constrained resources should have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids. Or at least pinned to their desk.
You’re Sitting on More Than You Think
Here’s the thing that gets overlooked when the budget conversation starts: money is only one kind of resource. And it’s often not the most valuable one you have access to.
Fiona’s commercial team at Noel Leeming was reformed only 18 months ago. When she looked at what she had to work with, the answer wasn’t “not enough.” It was “what’s already here that we’re not using?”
Noel Leeming has 66 stores nationwide. The commercial sales team was already aligned to stores in their regions. Suppliers like Smeg, Fisher & Paykel, and Bosch were already funding in-store events like built-in cooking centre experiences. The infrastructure was there. The audiences were there. The supplier money was there. What was missing was the connection between those assets and the commercial team’s pipeline.
So they made the connection. The commercial team started leveraging those in-store events, extending them with additional hours focused on knowledge sharing. They invited their personal networks, local chambers of commerce, and sector contacts. No new budget. No new platforms. Just smarter activation of what already existed.
Anna’s version of this was slightly different but built on the same principle. When Stickybeak launched, the founding team’s most valuable asset was their collective network. Everyone involved had built careers before deciding that startup life was for them, and those careers came with serious contact lists.
“One door opens five and then five opens ten more and away you go,” Anna said. “And it is a hard graft. That’s time you’re pouring in there, not money.”
This is worth sitting with for a moment. When we talk about doing more with less, the instinct is to find cheaper ways to execute the same activities. But the bigger opportunity is often about activating entirely different assets: your people’s networks, your existing customer base, your supplier relationships, your physical footprint, your data. The budget you need might already exist in a form you haven’t recognised yet.
Hire for Skill, Not Just for Rolodex
One of the more interesting tangents in the conversation was about hiring. In PR and sales, there’s a long tradition of hiring people for who they know. You’re essentially buying someone’s network when you bring them on board.
Anna pushed back on this. While she acknowledged that Stickybeak’s UK expansion will involve hiring people who understand that market, her priority is functional expertise first.
“I hired a couple of salespeople last year and the one who was amazing had no marketing background, didn’t have any LinkedIn followers in that space, and has crushed it.”
Her reasoning is straightforward. Great salespeople run process. They execute a playbook consistently. They close. Those are skills, not connections. And in a small team where everyone has to wear multiple hats, the ability to actually do the work well matters more than the ability to open a few doors.
Her CMO at Stickybeak is a case in point. One person running events, HubSpot campaigns, paid media, creative, and more. That’s the reality of marketing in a 12-person startup. You don’t need someone who can delegate beautifully. You need someone who can do the work.
The Case for the Lazy Marketer
Ben threw a deliberately provocative question at the panel: do some marketers choose to stay under-resourced to avoid accountability? Do they avoid fighting for budget because they’re already overworked and more budget means more expectations?
Anna’s answer was unexpected. “I actually quite like a lazy marketer,” she said. And then she explained why.
A lazy marketer, in Anna’s framing, is someone who finds the efficient path. They don’t overcomplicate things. They don’t add seventeen workstreams to a campaign that only needs one. They identify the thing that matters, they do it well, and they resist the temptation to keep layering on complexity.
“It’s hard to do marketing simply,” she said. “It’s easy to get carried away with the complexity of all the integration and the connections you can do.”
There’s a Venn diagram somewhere between too basic and too complex, and the sweet spot is closer to simple than most teams think. Especially in B2B, where the temptation to build elaborate multi-touch attribution models and integrated nurture sequences can consume more energy than the actual marketing.
Fiona added another angle. When you genuinely don’t have the resources to overcomplicate things, the constraint itself becomes a feature. You don’t have a million options. You make a decision, lean into it, and make it happen. Sometimes the absence of choice is what creates speed.
The Paid Search Kill Switch
Anna told a story from her time as marketing manager at STA Travel (RIP to anyone who booked a gap year through them) that deserves its own section because it’s one of the best “prove your value” plays we’ve heard.
Her GM, who had no marketing background but plenty of opinions (sound familiar?), didn’t believe paid search was working. STA Travel was only 5% e-commerce at the time, and in his view, the paid search investment wasn’t justifying itself.
Anna tried showing him the data. The leads. The contact-us page traffic that was driving people to stores. He wasn’t convinced.
So she turned it off.
Eight days later, the GM was at her desk. Every store in the country had called him. Call enquiries were down. Emails were down. The only thing he could think of that had changed was paid search.
“Turn it back on,” he said. And Anna never had to fight for paid search budget again.
It’s a risky play and she acknowledged that. But the lesson is important. If you believe a channel is driving value, you should be able to prove it. And sometimes the most convincing proof isn’t a dashboard. It’s the absence of results when you pull the lever.
AI Interns and 40-Minute Email Redesigns
Both guests are using AI tools in their teams, and neither is precious about it. But both were clear on the same point: AI is an intern, not a senior marketer.
Fiona’s biggest challenge is creative output at scale. Her commercial team spans education, trade, and other sectors, and you can’t send the same creative to a teacher that you send to a tradie. With one marketing manager serving multiple segments, the volume of manually created assets is a bottleneck. She’s investigating AI tools that can combine product and human imagery to unlock faster creative production for remarketing, social content, and sales enablement.
The challenge, as she put it, is quality control. One of her sales team recently sent her a Canva slide for brand approval, and keeping everything on-brand when you’re distributing creative capability across a team is genuinely hard. Her approach is tight brand guidelines, locked-down templates, and AI-powered tone of voice agents that can adapt messaging for different audiences within guardrails.
Anna went further. She told a story about discovering that Stickybeak’s password reset email was, in her words, “disgusting.” So she opened Lovable (an AI development tool), dropped in a template, gave it copy she’d borrowed from another platform she admired, asked it to optimise for SendGrid and make it responsive, and pushed it to production 40 minutes later.
Forty minutes. From “this is terrible” to “this is live.” That’s the kind of speed that changes how small teams operate.
Anna also shared something worth stealing: quarterly AI hackathons. She encourages her entire team to spend dedicated time experimenting with AI tools, many of which offer free trials of 7, 14, or 30 days. Solve a real problem. If it doesn’t work, you’ve learned something. If it does, you might save three hours a week. The downside risk is low and the upside is significant.
Of course, not every organisation is there yet. As Steph pointed out, some businesses still have the door firmly locked on AI adoption. The gap between the companies experimenting and the companies resisting is going to become very visible very quickly.
Big Rocks, Focus Fives, and Fit for Future
The second principle we explored was about prioritisation, and specifically about having the discipline to focus on the initiatives that will have the greatest impact rather than spreading effort across dozens of smaller activities.
Anna’s approach is structured and deliberate. At Les Mills, her team ran what they called a “Focus Five” process, a quarterly planning exercise where the team came together every 13 weeks to define the key priorities. Each priority needed a clear definition of what good looks like, a way to measure success, and a named owner.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Without a named owner, priorities become shared responsibilities, which is another way of saying nobody’s responsibility. And the person who owns it needs to scope it, because otherwise you end up with big rocks that are actually boulders and nobody has the capacity to move them.
At Stickybeak, Anna runs the same rhythm with her small team. She’s honest that the volume of big rocks still tends to exceed what the jar can hold. But the discipline of the process, even imperfectly executed, keeps the team aligned and creates a shared reference point. It’s especially valuable when you’re hiring constantly and new team members need context on what matters and why.
One concept from Anna’s Les Mills days that stood out was the idea of a “Fit for Future” pillar. Across their quarterly priorities, they always reserved roughly 20% of capacity for forward-looking work. Not the biggest project, not the most urgent. But if they weren’t intentional about making space for innovation and strategic investment, they’d end up treading water indefinitely.
This is where a lot of B2B teams fall down. The BAU is so relentless and the commercial pressure so immediate that there’s never time for the work that compounds over the long term. Having a named pillar for it forces the conversation.
Fiona’s reality is slightly different. Noel Leeming operates in a heavily trading-led environment where the Monday morning review of commercial performance can reshape the entire week’s priorities. Her big rock isn’t a specific initiative. It’s maintaining a flexible structure of templated activities that can be turned on and off depending on which part of the business needs support.
“When I say crisis, it’s never really a crisis,” she said. “It’s more about the opportunity that has arisen. Building and trade is suddenly picking up. What can we turn on for that?”
Her marketing team needs to be able to move within a week. That’s the reality of B2B marketing inside a retail group, and it requires a different kind of planning discipline. Less about locking in a quarterly roadmap and more about having the components ready to assemble quickly when the moment calls for it.
Introduce, Enhance, Perfect
Anna shared a framework that started in Stickybeak’s product team but has broader application for any marketing team trying to ship work faster.
The problem it solves is the instinct to skip straight to perfect. Teams want to deliver a polished, fully featured solution on the first pass. But perfect takes time, and in a resource-constrained environment, the pursuit of perfect often means nothing ships at all.
The framework is simple. First, you introduce. Put something to market that’s good enough to learn from. Does the audience even want this? Does it solve the problem you think it solves? You’re not committing to a final version. You’re testing an idea.
If the introduction works, you enhance. That might mean deeper integration, better design, more sophisticated functionality, or expanded reach. You’re building on validated demand, not assumptions.
Perfect is the final tier, and Anna was candid that Stickybeak probably won’t have many perfect things in the next 12 months. And that’s fine. The point is to create a shared language that gives people permission to ship work that’s good but not finished, and to build iteratively based on what you learn.
This is essentially a reframe of the MVP concept, but the language matters. Calling something an “introduction” feels different from calling it a “minimum viable product.” It implies a deliberate first step rather than a compromised output. And for marketers who take pride in the quality of their work, that distinction can be the thing that unlocks faster execution.
Showing Results to Unlock More
The third principle is the one that makes everything else possible. You can activate hidden resources and prioritise ruthlessly, but if leadership doesn’t see the impact, the budget stays where it is. Or shrinks.
Anna’s philosophy here is simple: little and often.
“Don’t save up a big quarterly 50-slide presentation that’s beautiful to bore your C-suite peers to tears,” she said. “Just be constant with the impact that marketing is making.”
At Stickybeak, her CMO runs a Slack channel that surfaces customer activity in real time. Event registrations, whitepaper downloads, webinar sign-ups. Anna doesn’t need this data for her own marketing decisions. Her CMO has HubSpot for that. The Slack channel exists specifically so that Anna, as CEO, is constantly aware of what marketing is generating.
Every one-on-one, every meeting, every casual conversation becomes an opportunity to drop in a data point. “That packaging masterclass is up to a hundred registrations already.” No fanfare. No formal report. Just a steady drumbeat of evidence that marketing is working.
The contrast with the traditional approach is stark. Most marketing teams batch their reporting into monthly or quarterly reviews, which means leadership only thinks about marketing’s impact when a deck lands in their inbox. Anna’s approach means marketing’s value is ambient. It’s always in the room.
Fiona took a different but equally effective approach with the “Class of the Future” campaign. Noel Leeming invited schools across New Zealand to win a future-proofed classroom, eventually awarding it to a school in Mangakino. The team documented the entire experience and created a compelling human story around it.
Here’s the smart part. They didn’t play it to the CEO first. They played it to the internal teams. The stores. The sales staff. The broader business. The emotional response rippled upward until the group CEO saw it and understood, viscerally, why brand storytelling matters.
“It reminded everybody of the human piece,” Fiona said. “Why we do brands, why we connect with people.”
The result? “What other things can you do like that, Fiona?” Which is the best question a CEO can ask a marketer. And the answer, of course, is “plenty, with the right investment.”
That storytelling approach then got applied to sector-specific content for LinkedIn campaigns, creating an ongoing content engine from what started as a single brand play. One well-told story became the proof point for an entire content strategy.
What Happens When They Cut Your Budget in Half?
We asked both guests what they’d do if someone walked in tomorrow and halved their budget. The answers were instructive.
Anna went straight to market focus, a discipline she learned at Tourism New Zealand. The principle is tiering: rank your markets by priority and allocate resources accordingly. A tier one market gets TV, PR, and the full toolkit. A tier three market gets trade media and targeted activity. The decisions about what to cut become almost automatic once the tier structure is in place.
For Stickybeak, the UK is currently the highest-growth market, the cost base is roughly the same regardless of geography, and the pound converts very favourably against the New Zealand dollar. A customer who pays $8,000 NZD locally would pay about four and a half thousand pounds, which converts back to significantly more NZD. If Anna had to be ruthless, she’d consolidate all investment into the UK.
“If you don’t understand the priority order of your markets, push your SLT to make that decision this week,” she told the room. “Because it just unlocks you in terms of what you do with your budget and who does what.”
Fiona’s approach was similar in structure but applied to customer segments rather than geographies. Which sectors are in growth? Which have the most margin? Which are worth protecting? She lines up the activities against each segment, draws a cut-off line, and then lets the business leaders debate where that line should sit.
She also shared a specific budget defence tactic. When asked to cut $20,000 from a category, she showed the leadership team the sales impact data. “You’re cutting $20,000 but you’re going to lose $200,000 in sales. What would you prefer?” She got some of the money back.
The key to making that work is having the numbers ready before you need them. If you’re scrambling to pull together an ROI case after the cut has been proposed, you’ve already lost ground. Fiona measures constantly so that when the conversation comes, and it always comes, she’s ready.
Anna put it more bluntly: “Just have a few numbers. Say it with confidence. If you don’t know, there’s no way they’re going to know.”
The Great Debate: More Budget or More People?
We posed a question to both guests: if you could only have one, would you take a larger budget with a smaller team, or more team members with a smaller budget?
Fiona chose people. Her reasoning is that the tools available now, from Canva to smart digital planning platforms, mean a skilled team can stretch a modest budget remarkably far. Building a customer database, creating events, running ongoing communications, sharing expertise, telling stories. All of that can be done affordably if you have capable people doing it. And once you start spending heavily on media, you’re also spending on agencies, and the cost to get to market climbs fast.
Anna chose budget. Her reasoning is equally logical but starts from a different place. With AI tools expanding what a small team can produce, the constraint isn’t capability. It’s access to the platforms and tools that cost money. More budget means more AI subscriptions, more paid media, more technology. And those tools multiply what a lean team can achieve.
There’s no right answer here. Both perspectives reflect the reality of the environments these leaders operate in. Fiona comes from a world of large retail teams and in-store infrastructure where people are the engine. Anna comes from a fully in-house marketing function at Les Mills where a 100-person team included social, insights, design, and video editing. She’s now in a world where technology can replace some of that headcount, but only if you invest in it.
The real takeaway is that the question itself is worth asking in your own context. What’s actually the binding constraint in your team right now? Is it hands on keyboards or dollars in the account? The answer should shape your next budget conversation.
In-House vs Agency: When to Hold and When to Fold
The final audience question we got to was about the perennial tension between building capability in-house and partnering with agencies.
Fiona’s model is a core in-house team covering creative, digital, and marketing, supplemented by specialist agencies brought in for specific skills as needed. If you’re short on social, bring in a social agency. If media is the gap, find a media partner. The agencies rotate based on what the team needs at any given time, and a key benefit is that the agency relationship brings exposure to emerging trends and approaches that an internal team can miss when they’re heads-down in execution.
“You can’t be fully internal or you just become a closed loop,” Fiona said. “And then that’s the fate.”
Anna added a financial lens. If you don’t have a big paid media budget, hiring a full-time salary to manage it might not deliver a good return. People create work. A team member who doesn’t have enough to do will fill their time, and that can lead to busy work rather than impactful work. An agency stays in scope. They do what you’ve briefed them to do and they’re generally disciplined about not wandering.
Both perspectives point to the same principle: the in-house vs agency decision isn’t a philosophical one. It’s a practical one based on volume, skill gaps, and where you’ll get the best return on the money you have.
What It All Comes Down To
The conversation in Auckland reinforced something we keep coming back to on this podcast. The marketers who deliver the most impact aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who think clearly about what they have, focus ruthlessly on what matters, and communicate their value relentlessly.
Fiona is doing remarkable work with a fraction of the resources most marketers would consider the minimum. Anna is scaling a global SaaS business with a team of twelve and a framework that prioritises learning over perfection. Both are proof that constraint, when combined with clarity and discipline, can produce better marketing than abundance ever could.
If you’re a marketer who feels under-resourced (and based on that room in Auckland, you probably are), the playbook from this episode is worth pinning up. Know what you’ve got. Decide what matters most. Ship the introduction, not the perfect version. Measure everything. Tell your CEO about it constantly. And when the budget conversation comes, have your numbers ready and say them with confidence.
Watch or listen to Episode 32 on your favourite podcast platform and hit subscribe so you don’t miss a week.
Read all past episodes and show notes on the Canned Marketing Substack: cannedmarketing.com
Connect with your hosts: Ben van Rooy (Human Digital) linkedin.com/in/benvanrooy/ Steph Quantrill (Cue Marketing) linkedin.com/in/stephanie-quantrill/
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