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.

Key Highlights from Forrester’s 2026 Predictions

Forrester outlines five pivotal trends that will shape B2B operations this year, all centered on “The Race to Trust and Value.” Here’s a what they mean for marketing, sales, and product teams:

• Governed AI for Smarter Outcomes: While ungoverned generative AI could lead to significant costs, proactive governance opens doors to efficiency. With 75% of sales reps already using AI tools, empowering your team with AI literacy can prevent pitfalls and value through better decision-making.
• Human Expertise as a Competitive Edge: Buyers are craving deeper validation beyond AI—30% viewed genAI as meaningful in 2025, but human interactions with product experts top the list for trust. This shift highlights the power of upskilling your teams to deliver personalized insights, fostering stronger buyer relationships from early stages to post-sale success.
• Influencer Relations as Growth Levers: A huge 75% of B2B enterprises plan to boost budgets here. As buying networks expand, influencers like analysts and experts become key to building trust. Integrating them into your go-to-market (GTM) strategy—via social amplification and endorsements—can elevate proof-of-success over brand reputation, driving measurable impact.
• AI Agents Revolutionizing Payments: Expect AI agents in one-third of B2B payments, streamlining complex workflows like invoicing and trade credit. Vendors like Basware and Coupa are leading the charge, promising higher automation and efficiency—perfect for Australian firms dealing with diverse supply chains.
• Agent-Led Negotiations for Dynamic Deals: 20% of sellers will engage AI buyer agents in quotes, turning negotiations into data-driven, compliant opportunities. This evolution from static pricing to agile interfaces means suppliers with strong AI partners can protect margins while adapting to buyer demands.

These predictions underscore a market where clarity, accountability, and human-AI synergy win big. In volatile times, they’re your roadmap to turning rapid change into sustainable advantage.

Activation guidance

Ready to put Forrester’s insights into action? Here’s practical advice for B2B leaders in Tasmania and beyond:

1. Build AI Governance from the Ground Up: Democratize AI education—train teams to spot bad outputs and integrate governance into commercial apps. Start small: Audit your current tools and invest in “AI intelligence quotient” workshops to boost confidence and reduce risks.
2. Elevate Human Touchpoints: Prioritize product experts and customer success teams early in the buyer journey. Upskill them to handle complex queries, ensuring your offerings meet real needs. This not only validates AI insights but builds lasting trust.
3. Strategize Influencer Engagement: Shift from tactical PR to integrated GTM. Expand your signals to include influencer activity—track commentary and endorsements. Align budgets with performance metrics to see ROI in buyer discovery and conversions.
4. Embrace AI Agents in Workflows: For payments and negotiations, partner with agentic AI vendors. Assess your invoicing and procurement processes for automation potential, starting with pilot programs to scale efficiencies without disrupting operations.
5. Prepare for Buyer Evolution: Equip sales teams with AI agents for counteroffers, focusing on margin protection and compliance. Collaborate with in-house engineers or trusted partners to stay agile in a market where 61% of buyers use genAI for purchasing.

By prioritizing trust and value—as Forrester advises—you’ll position your business for growth in a buyer-empowered world.

For more on how digital marketing can amplify these strategies, from AI-optimized content to influencer campaigns, let’s chat. Connect via mitchellmackey.com.au/contact. Here’s to a prosperous, high-impact 2026!

Mitchell Mackey | Digital Marketing Strategist | Hobart, Tasmania Driving B2B Success in the AI Era

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.

The Marketoonist Tom Fishburne highlights this assertion. Fishburne, in his commentary on the cartoon, quotes the B2B Institute’s Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo as saying the 95-5 rule means your marketing must ensure that your product or service is remembered when a buyer does activate.

Fishburne says, you can’t push B2B buyers down a funnel, but you can, to quote Dawes’ colleague Jenni Romaniuk, “catch buyers as they fall”.

For marketers, Agentforce offers significant capability enhancements beyond what can be achieved with separate Large Language Models such as ChatGTP and Grok.

Even if you don’t run Salesforce, all marketers should be understanding and embracing autonomous AI agents, digital workers, to streamline processes, enhance personalization, and drive efficiency.

AI agents, from Salesforce and other Martech companies, are now delivering real business benefits to marketers.

Campaign automation and optimization: Agentforce automates the full campaign lifecycle, from generating briefs and audience segments to creating content and end-to-end customer journeys. The promised payoff is faster campaign execution and higher ROI.

Genuine (finally) personalized engagement: by integrating with the Salesforce Customer 360 and Data Cloud products (for those who have their data act somewhat together, if not altogether), Agentforce agents access real-time data to deliver focused communications across email, SMS, web, and mobile channels. If executed effectively, this moves marketers closer to our long-sought after goal of genuinely personalised content that boosts engagement, conversion rates and loyalty.

24/7 customer interaction: Agentforce enables two-way, conversational marketing by embedding agents in channels like email, SMS, and web, transforming “do-not-reply” messages into dynamic interactions. Again, if the execution is superior, these agents operate around the clock, enhancing satisfaction and reducing churn.

Data insights: leveraging the Salesforce tools Data Cloud and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Agentforce agents pull insights from structured and unstructured data (e.g., PDFs, videos, CRM data) to inform marketing strategies. They analyze historical and real-time data to identify trends, predict customer behavior, and suggest actionable recommendations, such as targeting at-risk customers to increase loyalty. These capabilities have long been promised by the industry’s Martech vendors and now we are closer than ever before to realising them.

Cross functional collaboration: Agentforce integrates with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Slack, aligning marketing with sales and service teams. For instance, marketing agents can share campaign insights with sales teams to support upselling or cross-selling, ensuring a cohesive customer journey and maximizing revenue opportunities.

Time and cost savings: by automating repetitive tasks like content creation, segmentation, and performance monitoring, Agentforce frees marketers to focus on strategic initiatives. Salesforce claims Agentforce’s efficiency reduces operational costs while scaling marketing efforts.

Scalability and customization: Salesforce says its low-code Agent Builder allows marketers to customize prebuilt agents or create new ones tailored to specific goals, industries, or use cases using tools like Flows and Prompt Builder. This flexibility ensures Agentforce scales with business needs, from small teams to large companies

Enhanced security and compliance: Salesforce’s Einstein Trust Layer ensures data privacy with features like zero data retention, toxicity detection, and audit trails, allowing marketers to deploy AI confidently while adhering to security and regulatory policies.

Improved content performance: Agentforce agents can A/B test content to recommend the most effective versions and optimize marketing materials for better search rankings and engagement.

Event and appointment management: Agents automate event logistics, such as sending details, booking sessions, and conducting surveys, or schedule appointments based on customer history, streamlining personalized marketing efforts and improving customer experiences.

Real-world impact: Salesforce cites reference customers who assert that Agentforce is reducing customer inquiry response times by nearly 50% during peak seasons, demonstrating the ability to handle high-volume marketing tasks efficiently.

In summary, Agentforce has the potential to transform marketing by automating workflows, personalizing customer interactions, and providing actionable insights, all while ensuring scalability, security, and alignment with our broader business goals.

The challenge, as always with sophisticated, potentially complex marketing tech, is execution and for that we need not only smart AI but also smart, tech-literate marketers.

Too few, according to CX guru and the Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute Bruce Temkin.

Bruce has recently revisited the case he originally made back in 2010 for organisations to focus on the value customers derive. He argues for a concept called Point of Value to be recognised as the next logical step after the traditional Point of Sale or transaction stage.

According to Bruce sales without customer value are like a Ponzi scheme. They feel good in the moment, but the long-term outcome is likely to be negative.

“Too many organizations overly focus on selling their products and services, keeping a tight eye on short term metrics like sales targets,” Bruce writes, “but sales are not necessarily an indication of long-term success. What’s missing from the picture? Value!”

“If customers don’t get value from their purchases, then they are likely to return them, stop using them, not renew them, and tell others to stay away. Does that sound like a sustainable blueprint?!? Of course not. However, most organizations have a hard time breaking their addiction to sales numbers.”

Bruce challenges companies to compare and contrast their focus on sales targets versus the usually secondary effort they devote to delivering value.

“It’s time for organizations to shift their focus from sales to value! If we see an economic downturn, then the focus on value will become even more critical as companies are pushed to target their limited resources at retaining customers.

According to Bruce a POV mindset would mean the following:

• A clear measure of customer value that’s used as a critical KPI for the entire business, driving everything from sales commissions to bonuses for the product development teams.
• Support for customers to help them envision and articulate their POV and match their purchases accordingly.
• Cross-functional journey teams with responsibility for driving success during the engagement phase for key customer segments, and continuously monitoring any changes in how customers perceive the POV.
• Product organizations adopting a focus on “designing for value” by prioritizing features and enablement that streamlines the path to POV over new capabilities. Rather than considering feature adoption as a customer success function, product teams are responsible for ensuring that it is as easy as possible for customers to reach the POV.

Announced with characteristic bravado and ambition at the company’s Dreamforce jamboree in San Francisco in September, Genie generalises its CDP capabilities across all its Sales, Service, Marketing and Commerce clouds, as well as its Platform, Tableau, Slack and Mulesoft tools, to enable customer experience orchestration in real time.

Salesforce, which has overtaken SAP to seize enterprise software application leadership by revenue, says Genie connects with the CDP engine to establish a single customer or group of customers with AI and machine learning and connects that data to Salesforce’s Flow automation.

Examples include serving ads, content or offers; making sales recommendations based on browser behaviour, pulling up historical sales and service data or reacting to real-time maintenance alerts to quickly solve customer problems or deleting or restricting customer data when they opt out of marketing.

Users can see exactly how the entire end-to-end process is flowing or stalling, from marketing across to sales, service, compliance, and system-of-record transaction management.

The rebranding of the CDP to Genie was to “make it fun” and, critically, to help customers and stakeholders embrace and understand the value proposition.

In summary, Salesforce asserts that data orchestration blended with engagement capabilities and genuine AI, results in a so-called “real-time” CRM. Next level stuff.

Constellation Research founder Ray Wang was quoted as stating, “to take the CDP to the next level, you really have to do it in a very different way. You have to not just think about the data that’s there, you have to think about how everything’s connected”.

Salesforce claims large companies run an average of 976 separate applications in their businesses, resulting in data fragmentation and an inconsistent environments where value can not flow smoothly.

Salesforce’s CDP leader Rahul Auradkar was quoted as saying that the company’s own customers had said that their own downstream customers were expecting far more personalized experiences now and in the future.

“The power of real time is doing the right thing, at the right time,” said Auradkar.

Let’s see how that promise, oft touted and promised in the CRM world over the years, is delivered.

Nothing wrong with the ambition. Everyone agrees we need to create a hyper-personalised relationship with our customers, pooling and harmonizing data into what Forbes calls a “a reconciled, comprehensive customer portrait”.

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?