The One Skill That Actually Makes You a Better Marketer

Most marketers are busy. Campaigns delivered. Dashboards updated. Traffic up. And yet somehow, the business isn’t growing the way it should. Frans Riemersma has seen this pattern across hundreds of companies — and he knows exactly where it breaks down.

The skill that never went away

Frans has spent years as a Martech analyst, consultant, and business university lecturer. His view on what separates outperforming brands from the rest is surprisingly simple: they always start with the customer, not the technology.

What outperformers do, regardless of any innovation in technology, is ignore the noise, play with new tools, understand them deeply — but always make technology a means to an end. They reverse engineer a customer experience that brings money. That’s it.

“I hope now, because with AI everything becomes more commoditized, that the entire market is able to become marketer again. Which means just listen to humans, listen to their needs, play into it, and then make money.”

It sounds obvious. But Frans points out that most marketing training still starts with lead data rather than customer data. Most teams measure campaigns by volume rather than by revenue contribution. And most marketers have never walked through the door of their own sales department.

The sales department no one visits

One story from this conversation stopped me in my tracks. Frans described a marketer who walked over to the sales team to collaborate on understanding their customer base. The response from sales? You’re the first person from marketing to open this door in 25 years.

Twenty-five years.

Frans’s prescription is straightforward: take your best customers, the ones who actually make money for your company, and reverse engineer how they got there. You don’t need the entire database. Start with 20 to 30 percent. Talk to sales. Understand where customers switched on and where they switched off.

“You will be an expert in your client base in no time. It’s crazy. I see these people grow in two, three sessions.”

This is also the answer to the fake engagement problem. Fake profiles cannot make a purchase. If you start from real revenue and work backwards, you end up working with real email addresses, real buying patterns, and real people.

AI is not a press-play button

Frans is neither an AI pessimist nor an AI evangelist. He’s something more useful: precise. And his take on the current moment is worth sitting with.

We are at the pivotal moment in the hype cycle. The feeling that AI is coming for everyone’s job is giving way to something more grounded: humans in the loop. Someone has to write the prompts. Someone has to say when the output doesn’t make sense. And right now, according to Frans, roughly 5 percent of AI projects actually make it into production — a figure backed by multiple reports from MIT and Gartner this year.

“Many people say AI makes you dumber. I disagree. You now have to ask the intelligent questions to get the right results. It’s me who’s doing the thinking. They spit out stuff. And if it doesn’t make sense, I’m the only person who can say it doesn’t make sense.”

The comparison he draws is memorable: writing a thesis on a laptop versus a typewriter. The time investment was the same. But the laptop gave him a thousand shots at getting it right. AI is the same deal. The effort doesn’t disappear. It shifts.

What clicks are actually telling you

When Frans teaches at business university, he has marketers bring in their own client data and build a picture from the ground up. In one case, a student came back puzzled: there was a strong correlation between newsletter open rates and leads who eventually became customers — and they had no idea why.

Frans’s advice? It doesn’t matter yet. Use it as a predictive data point and keep investigating. That’s how you fill in the puzzle. That’s how you earn a seat at the table.

Clicks and likes are not inherently useless. They become vanity metrics when they’re not connected to a revenue outcome. The moment you tie them to customer lifetime value and cost of acquisition, they start telling you something real.

The bottom line

Frans Riemersma’s argument is not anti-technology. It’s anti-distraction. The marketers who win, now and across the last several decades, are the ones who keep asking the same question regardless of what tool or platform or AI model is in front of them: is this generating real value for a real customer?

The opportunity right now, as AI commoditizes execution, is to finally focus on what machines cannot do: understand people, build trust, and tell the customer story at the boardroom table.

“You have to be the Sherlock Holmes of the company with a pitbull mentality. That’s the only thing that counts. And I will tell you, this is the fastest way to earn a lot of respect.”

If that framing resonates with you, you can find Frans on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/fransriemersma