Picture this: It’s Friday night, you’re planning your weekend, and your CEO calls with the corporate equivalent of “we need to talk.” That’s exactly what happened to Jarod Greene, CMO at Vivun, and his marketing team one month before a major product launch. The news? Their AI agent had completely evolved—new capabilities, new way to work, new everything.
Oh, and they still had to launch on time.
RIP Traditional Product Cycles (We Hardly Knew Ye)
Remember when product releases happened in the oh-so-sweet 6-to-12 month cycle? A time when you could set your marketing calendar months in advance and actually stick to it? Ah, simpler times indeed.
Jarod’s experience perfectly captures what’s happening across B2B SaaS: AI has compressed development cycles from 6 months to 6 weeks (or less). Product teams literally don’t know what they’ll be capable of shipping next month because the landscape changes that dang fast.
“I asked the product team in December what they’re shipping in March, and it was just like, ‘we don’t know yet. We’ll tell you in March and you can launch it in April,'” Greene shared. “And I didn’t know it then, but they were absolutely right.”
The New Launch Reality: Your Playbook Just Got Torched
Traditional launch playbooks with their neat five phases? Strategy → Planning → Create → Communicate → Review? They no longer work.
Here’s what matters now for B2B SaaS marketers:
Agility Over Everything
“If you can’t rapidly adjust, if you are too rigid, if you are too locked into traditional ways of doing things, your brain’s gonna break,” Greene warned. The companies surviving this shift are the ones treating agility as a core competency, not a nice-to-have.
New Success Metrics (Because Pipeline Attribution Takes Too Long)
Forget waiting 60-90 days for pipeline attribution. The new launch scorecard focuses on immediate indicators:
- How many existing customers raised their hands for the new thing
- User adoption: uptick in analytics platforms
- Website traffic and offer conversion rates
- Good old-fashioned impressions (yeah, we said it)
Quarterly Rhythm Still Rules
Even in this chaos, successful teams anchor major launch moments every 12 weeks. The infrastructure stays consistent (venues are booked, webinar dates are set), but the content and agenda stay flexible until the last minute. Fortunately, AI has also enabled marketers to get more done at a much faster pace, allowing for such agility.
The Content Chaos Problem (AKA Everyone’s a Marketer Now)
Here’s where things get spicy. AI tools have democratized content creation, which sounds great until your sales team starts feeding your positioning docs through ChatGPT and creating their own “improved” versions of what the new product offers.
“Everyone has a different version of the first call deck. Everyone has a different version of how they tell the story of the company,” Greene explained. The solution isn’t command and control – that ship has sailed. It’s providing guardrails.”
The Ice Cream Approach: Tell your team, “We sell ice cream. You can add sprinkles, cherries, whatever—but we don’t sell coffee or milk. Stay within the guardrails, but make it contextual.”
The AI Skills Imperative (Or, How to Stay Employable)
Here’s Greene’s advice for every marketer: “I think the next interview you have, if you’re not being asked about your AI skills or AI competencies and how those can help scale the company – reduce cost, increase efficiencies – if they don’t ask that question, it’s probably not gonna be around for a while, that company.”
By now, marketers understand this is more than mastering ChatGPT prompts. It’s about understanding:
- What AI can do for your specific role and company
- How AI changes competitive landscapes
- Where the opportunities and risks live
- How to provide guardrails without stifling innovation
The Bottom Line: Embrace the Chaos
The luxury of time in B2B SaaS PR and marketing? It’s gone. The predictable quarterly cadences? Also gone. But here’s the thing—there’s never been a better time to be a marketer if you can adapt.
“We live in an age of always-on engagement,” Greene noted. “There’s probably not a better time to be a marketer in a world where not only can you rapidly create, but the expectation that you actually rapidly create is on the other side as well.”
Listen here for the full episode with Jarod Greene on SaaS Half Full.