Here’s a summary of Andrei’s timeline of how we got here:

• 2000s – Demand Waterfall Era
  Gate content, manufacture MQLs, hand off to sales. We bought into the illusion of controlling the buyer journey with predictable stages, turning marketing into a volume game: more MQLs = more revenue.
• 2010s – Marketing Automation & Nurturing
  When MQLs failed to convert, we added drip campaigns and lead scoring. The narrative shifted to “warming” leads—shifting blame to sales if “100-point” prospects didn’t close.
• 2014–2023 – Growth Hacking & Outbound Overload
  Scalability became synonymous with tech-heavy tactics: web scraping, automated cadences, ads + outbound on steroids. Marketing shrank to a pure lead-gen function, losing sight of brand and buyer reality.
• 2023 onward – AI Everywhere
  With CMO tenures dropping and layoffs exposing inefficiencies, AI promises to do more with less: auto-generate content, enrich leads, build workflows overnight. Yet many leaders are now racing to prove they’re “AI-native” out of FOMO—while avoiding the real issue.

The elephant in the room? We’re trapped in a broken system that rewards short-term metrics over long-term strategy. AI isn’t the escape hatch; it’s just another layer of complexity. True survival—and thriving—comes from challenging the status quo: hard conversations with leadership about marketing’s real role, deeply understanding customers and their journeys, and building brands that B2B buyers actively choose.

This is the reset B2B marketers need in 2026. Zinkevich’s core message resonates deeply with what I see in my work: efficiency gains from tools are meaningless without reclaiming marketing as a strategic, full-funnel discipline focused on customer reality, not just pipeline volume.

If you’re ready to move beyond the “lead vending machine” trap and rebuild a more effective, buyer-led marketing engine, I recommend tuning into the conversation Andrei is leading.

Next week (March 24–26, 2026), FullFunnel is hosting the 7th Virtual Full-Funnel Summit—free to attend.

It’s a 3-day virtual event with 15 live keynotes from B2B experts (including Andrei himself and his cofounder Vlad Blagojevic), focused on actionable full-funnel strategies, case studies, and real-world insights for high-ACV, long-cycle B2B companies. No product pitches—just practical advice on aligning marketing and sales for genuine growth.

Save your free spot here: https://fullfunnel.io/summit/

Whether you’re reassessing your martech stack, rethinking ABM in an AI era, or simply tired of short-termism, this summit is a timely opportunity to hear from leaders pushing back against the broken playbook.

What’s one outdated B2B tactic you’re ready to ditch in 2026?

If you’d like to explore how centralised, full-funnel strategies can transform your marketing function, reach out via the contact form or book a call.

The content boom: budgets up, volume surging, AI leading the charge

Content production is accelerating at a pace that’s outstripping expectations, fueled by expanding channels and AI innovations:

• Rising budgets: Over 80% of organizations plan to increase content and creative budgets in the near future, up from 70% in 2024. Notably, 29% expect significant increases, a jump from 19% in 2023.
• Volume explosion: 82% of teams reported higher content output last year, with 27% seeing significant growth. AI is the primary driver, with 75% of professionals saying it has boosted volume—30% significantly.
• Evolving ROI metrics: Success is measured through a mix of engagement (40%), brand awareness (38%), conversions/lead gen (38%), and sales revenue (38%). ROI is improving, with 28% reporting significant gains (up from 19% last year).

Teams with mature workflows are reaping the rewards, being 3x more likely to see substantial ROI. This underscores the need for investments in AI, automation, and centralized systems to handle the surge without sacrificing quality.

Content operations: maturity matters, fragmentation hurts

Operational challenges persist, but top performers are addressing them head-on. Canto’s report highlights persistent pain points like keeping up with content demands (40%) and managing volume (36%), but also shows progress in tech adoption.

• Workflow maturity: Only 43% have advanced, standardized workflows, but these teams report 48% significant ROI increases compared to 0% for those with ad-hoc processes.
• Improvement tactics: 51% are using AI for creation, tagging, and organization; 41% are enhancing cross-team collaboration; and 36% are introducing automation to cut manual work.
• AI’s role in efficiency: Widespread AI users find maintaining brand consistency extremely easy (49% vs. 6-9% for non-users).

High-ROI teams prioritize automation (47%), templates (45%), and asset distribution (33%), proving that streamlining operations directly boosts returns.

Digital Asset Management: centralization is key to avoiding chaos

Fragmented asset storage, a persistent problem, remains a major drag, with most teams using multiple systems like cloud storage (62%) and DAM solutions (47%). The consequences are clear:

Only 35% are very confident employees use up-to-date brand assets, meaning most perceive that colleagues in sales, product management, customer service and the broader marketing team are using dated, often inaccurate materials which exposes their brands to numerous risks.

In contrast, DAM users report smoother operations, and those unifying assets with product content see 4x higher ROI gains.

For product-focused teams, accuracy is critical: 88% struggle with consistency across channels, but centralized approaches reduce duplication and improve access.

Tech stack optimization: closing gaps for better scale

Content teams lose time on manual tasks, with 22% prioritizing AI automation and 21% better search/retrieval. Core capabilities like analytics (43%) and standardized workflows (41%) are established in many organizations, but only 24% have fully optimized stacks.

Teams with strong ROI excel in AI tools (59%), analytics (50%), and automated tagging (42%). As stacks mature, expect more focus on integration to eliminate silos.

AI throughout the lifecycle: from analysis to personalization

AI is embedded across operations, with top uses in performance analysis (41%), SEO optimization (40%), and tagging (39%). High-ROI teams apply it more broadly, especially in personalization (41%) and discovery (43%).

Looking ahead, teams want AI for streamlining reviews (38%), smart search (36%), and reuse recommendations (35%). Adoption is at 77%, with 81% confident in AI’s accuracy for tagging—higher among heavy users.

What this means for your marketing strategy

The report paints a clear picture: success in 2026 hinges on operational maturity. Fragmented systems fuel burnout, waste and magnify risks, while AI-driven, centralized approaches unlock speed, consistency, and ROI. If your team is stuck in manual workflows or siloed assets, now’s the time to audit and optimize.

I help businesses in Tasmania and beyond implement these strategies— from AI integration to DAM setups. If you’re ready to scale your content operations, let’s talk. Download the full Canto report here to dive deeper. Let’s turn these insights into action for your business.

The product manager—a bright, young, and refreshingly candid voice in the martech world—shared an observation, gained from many formal and informal discussions with senior executives across the world, that was not surprising and yet still shocking. Despite decades of so-called “lessons learned,” and the explosion of sophisticated sales and marketing technologies, the fundamental rift between sales and marketing teams remains stubbornly in place at all too many big and small companies.

The arguments are eerily familiar to anyone who’s been in B2B long enough:

• Marketing complains that sales doesn’t convert the leads they’ve worked so hard to generate.
• Sales counters that marketing doesn’t deliver enough high-quality leads worth pursuing.

These debates were raging decades ago. They’re still raging today.

The truth—then and now—is that neither side is entirely right or wrong. The real issue is that too many organisations treat sales and marketing as separate, even competing, functions rather than two halves of the same revenue engine.

As my new friend in martech product management highlighted, no ABM platform, no AI-powered targeting tool, no shiny piece of martech will magically bridge this divide. Technology can enable better alignment, but it can’t create it.

What’s required is genuine, consistent collaboration—not just between department heads, but all the way down to the front lines. That means:

• Talking regularly—not just at quarterly reviews, but in weekly syncs and shared planning sessions. Most do this, but few do it well.
• Agreeing on common goals—clear revenue targets, shared definitions of a qualified lead, and mutual accountability for results. Common goals are, of course, common sense, but this remains a scarce commodity.
• Embracing one unified scoreboard—so that both sales and marketing are working to the same numbers, in real time, without the selective reporting that fuels mistrust. Separate reporting and tracking processes and systems are almost guaranteed to generate friction.

Genuine collaboration is simple in concept, hard in practice, and absolutely essential. The most advanced ABM platform in the world—contact-level or otherwise—will fail in an environment where sales and marketing remain siloed. But when the two teams align on purpose, process, and performance measurement, technology becomes a force multiplier rather than a false promise.

If you’re investing in ABM, don’t just evaluate the tool. Evaluate your organisation’s willingness to collaborate—because without that fundamental commitment, you’re just buying another piece of tech for the shelf.

Unfortunately, despite commitments to artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to upgrade customer service capabilities, a CCW (Customer Contact Week) study has confirmed what we all sense to be true, reporting a 55% reporting a decline in quality over the past year. The issue isn’t AI itself but how companies use it – prioritizing efficiency over empathy.

The Problem: Misaligned AI Strategies

Businesses too often deploy AI to cut costs, forcing customers into rigid, impersonal journeys. Common pain points include:

• Basic automation failing complex queries.
• Channel-switching (e.g., WhatsApp to phone).
• Lack of personalization, requiring customers to repeat themselves. A persistent source of friction.
• High expectations set by CX leaders like Amazon, unmet by others.

The Solution: AI + Human Empathy

AI excels in transactional tasks like password resets but falls short in emotionally charged moments like service outages. For now, the immediate future lies in AI complementing human agents, not replacing them. Companies must:

• Use AI for high-volume, low-emotion tasks.
• Reserve human interaction for complex, empathetic needs.
• Train AI with quality data tailored to customer use cases.

Looking Ahead to 2026

To win at CX, businesses must prioritize customer-first strategies. This means building or partnering for AI models that ensure compliance, accuracy, and scalability..

The future of CX is about blending AI’s efficiency with human empathy to create genuine connections that keep customers coming back.

Walker has released a follow-up to their 2013 report Customers 2020, called  Customers 2020: A Progress Report, which endeavors to answer three questions:

• What customer expectations and trends are still relevant as 2020 approaches?
• What should B-to-B firms do today to ensure they’re able to win and keep customers in 2020 and beyond?
• What are the implications for CX professionals?

Walker says “interactions at every stage of the journey are becoming more complex, presents a striking conundrum for today’s B-to-B firms”.

The winners are focused on personalization, ease, and speed. According to Walker, these companies have fundamentally changed how they think, act, and collaborate.

Here is how Walker defines the three imperatives:

PERSONALIZATION:
There is no average customer. Customers want to do business with companies that know their individual and company needs and are willing to tailor the experience to meet those needs.
EASE:
An explosion of information, connected networks, and more competitive options lead to little patience for complexity. Customers don’t have time on their side and place a real premium on simplicity.
SPEED:
The pace of business is accelerating rapidly. Time is of the essence. Customers can’t afford to wait around while their business issues are being considered. They value companies that provide real-time response and proactively anticipate their future needs.

Planning, publishing, distributing and measuring content are collective, connected challenges that modern marketing teams must master.

The proliferation of channels represents a massive burden for marketers. They cannot be effectively serviced manually by expecting marketers to engage in heroic efforts, with the aid of Excel.

Gartner says that “by 2020, 90% of brands will practice at least one form of marketing personalization. However, content — not data — will be the bottleneck and primary cause of failure”.

And Gartner also says that by 2021, the term “content marketing will be defunct as all marketing content rises to high-quality expectations of attention-limited audiences”.

“The aim is to unite and focus buyer engagement through valuable content, delivered across thousands of assets and channels where it expresses itself,” Gartner .

“Content Marketing Platforms are the ideal channel-agnostic environments to tag and apply structure to content; thus, they create a de facto unified back-end to fragmented channel experiences.

“This extends to reporting, as many B2B marketers integrate their CMP with a marketing automation platform or CRM system to link content consumption with specific buyer profiles or target accounts.”

Forrester defines a CMP as a “a solution that helps marketing teams collaborate on a content strategy, orchestrate the numerous, concurrent streams of activity by content creators, curators, and distributors inside and outside of the company, and optimize downstream cross-channel distribution to key audiences”.

Forrester says, “if content is digital’s soul, then a CMP is the church”.

A CMP enables teams to transition to some form of agile marketing (light, medium or heavy, depending on the appetite for change and the business need to accelerate the generation and distribution of better quality content more often).

Given this dynamic, I was happy to participate in a recent webinar hosted by Australian content player Simple (they call their solution a Marketing Resource Management application) and the Australian Marketing Institute.

On June 20, together with Simple’s Sara Gonzalez, marketing capability expert Rachel Rohrlach and Simple’s product chief Michael McKerlie we discussed a Simple-AMI report which found that most marketers are struggling to meet basic brand governance expectations.

A significant majority (59%) of marketers reported that responsibility for managing the customer experience now rested with the chief marketing officer or marketing team at their organisation, according to the study, Marketing Resource Management in the Age of Intelligence.

The research showed marketers, hampered by the use of static tools to manage increasingly fluid processes, are struggling to obtain a big-picture view of marketing activities in areas such as planning, budgeting, governance and workflow:

• Only 13% easily monitor their spending against budget
• Just 10% say their primary planning tool provides an up-to-date view of their marketing plan
• 51% don’t monitor their marketing process at all
• And astoundingly, 41% have no formal process to manage compliance and governance issues.

Check out the webinar at the AMI site with this email address: simple@simple.io.

Simple and its competitors are addressing the fundamental question of how can marketing claim to own the customer experience if their upstream planning, production, distributor and brand governance is not aligned and flowing?

In contrast, the best technologists are re-engineering and collaborating to co-create genuine digital businesses, not just “serve the business”.

As digital disruption accelerates, the division between front and back offices is blurring. Traditional back-office apps are migrating, one vendor at a time, to be closer to the sales-and-marketing, customer experience driven front end. The agility imperative means back and front office must integrate and synchronize

Digital technologies are transforming CRM. Tighter integration means CRM is extending from sales, service, and marketing into commerce. The long-term focus is not simply on selling products and services, but on delivering authentic brands and experiences, from campaigns to customer journeys to commerce.

All businesses either will be digital platform businesses or they will be out of business. As we transition from transactions to conversations, we need to urgently consider the critical role our platform strategy must play.

Rather than making and selling products and services in a series of transactions with individual customers, we must view our customers as partners who should be integrated into a flow of value within the context of a connected, collaborative and scalable platform. In this environment, value creation is not linear. It is two-way and continuous.

MIT Digital Economy fellow and Boston University professor Marshall W. Van Alstyne in a recent Harvard Business Review interview said that with platforms, the rules of strategy change.

“Strategy shifts from controlling to orchestrating resources; from optimizing internal processes to facilitating external interactions; and from increasing customer value to maximizing the value of the ecosystem,” Van Alstyne said

“The failure to transition to a new approach explains the precarious situation that traditional businesses find themselves in. For traditional firms, the writing is on the wall: learn the new rules of strategy for a platform world, or begin planning your exit.”

What do we mean by platform? MIT Professor Michael Cusumano provides this definition: “A platform or complement strategy differs from a product strategy in that it requires an external ecosystem to generate complementary product or service innovations and build positive feedback between the complements and the platform. The effect is much greater potential for innovation and growth than a single product-oriented firm can generate alone.”

The importance of platforms is linked to the concept of network effects: The more products or services it offers, the more users it will attract. Scale increases the platform’s value, helping it attract more complementary offerings which in turn brings in more users, which then makes the platform even more valuable.

Accenture’s Tech Vision 2016 report makes it a point that a platform doesn’t just support the business, the platform is the business. The report also quotes Marshall Van Alstyne: “Products have features. Platforms have communities.”

The Accenture reports cite estimates from IDC, which predicts that within the next two years, a majority of large enterprises will create or partner with industry platforms. IDC also predicts that the number of industry clouds will reach 500 or more by 2018, up from today’s 100-­plus.

For marketers focused on ensuring that their customer experience is the decisive differentiator, they must start considering how best can they integrated their systems, processes and people into an integrated customer-facing marketing-and-sales front end, which must also be synchronised with the transactional front end.

For example, a website content management system, integrated with a marketing automation application and a CRM-ERP solution, plus a powerful analytics tool is a force multiplier of genuine significance. Operate those solutions individually with limited integration and their collective value to the business is inhibited and not the game changer it should be .

The study, by the firm which describes itself as a customer experience consultancy, tracks the cumulative total stock returns for two model portfolios _ comprised of the Top 10 (“Leaders”) and the Bottom 10 (“Laggards”) publically traded companies in Forrester Research’s annual Customer Experience Rankings.

According to the report’s latest edition, leaders outperform the broader market. They generated a total return that was 35 points higher than the S&P 500 Index. Laggards were far behind. Their total return was 45 points lower than the market.

Watermark states that “a great customer experience, and the internal ecosystem supporting it, can deliver tremendous strategic and economic value to a business, in a way that’s difficult for competitors to replicate”.

So why do the laggards “continue to subject their customers to complicated sales processes, cluttered websites, dizzying 800-line menus, long wait times, incompetent service, unintelligible correspondence, and products that are just plain difficult to use”?

Watermark says leaders embrace these basic tenets:

• They aim for more than customer satisfaction
• They nail the basics and then deliver pleasant surprises
• They understand that great experiences are intentional and emotional
• They shape customer impressions through cognitive science
• They recognize the link between the customer and employee experience

Download the report.