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

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.

The YouTube channel Connecting the Dots reports that CARIAD was intended to future-proof the VW Group, but, so far, it has been an expensive disaster handicapped by institutional resistance.

In 2020 former CEO Herbert Diess established CARIAD with a significant budget, army of coders and a mandate to make VW Germany’s biggest tech company after SAP, with the software engineering smarts to digitize the core vehicle business and catch up to Tesla and the leading Chinese auto firms.

On October 14 2021 Diess even had Elon Musk appear as a “surprise guest” in an attempt to energise 200 of his most senior executives at a VW conference in Austria.

However, VW’s rigid culture and myriad internal divisions resulted in disappointing progress, duplicative efforts, financial losses, delayed vehicle launches and corporate embarrassment.

In large part because of CARIAD’s failures, Diess was exited by the VW Board in August 2022 . Porsche CEO Oliver Blume then had his remit extended to the entire group.

Blume claims to be committed to turning around CARIAD’s fortunes, refactoring the organisation’s objectives with fewer people and resources. Progress has reportedly been made, but the technical and financial challenges remain imposing.

In the Connecting the Dots YouTube video, a standout comment, from my personal perspective, is the remark by an anonymous CARIAD staffer that work-life balance was an excellent and that “weekends start at 11am on Fridays”.

However, it was also acknowledged that this is “not how you win” against Tesla and the Chinese competitors.

This was also my experience of German corporate culture during four years at Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz HQ in Stuttgart. The quickest way to make oneself unpopular was to schedule a Friday afternoon meeting.

Scott and his Martech Tribe colleague Frans Riemersma now have created a dedicated platform to assist marketers filter and navigate through their subcategories and options.

They have also produced a comprehensive assessment of AI’s impact on the Martech universe. Despite (and maybe also because of) its 111-page length, Martech for 2025 is well worth reviewing.

As marketers navigate this dynamic era, the report highlights five key segments driving growth and innovation, alongside practical strategies for leveraging AI effectively.

AI-Powered Martech Growth

The surge in Martech tools, which have jumped from 11,038 in 2023 to 15,385 in 2025, shows no sign of slowing down. The growth is largely fueled by AI-powered solutions. These are categorized into five segments:

1. Indie Tools: Specialized, AI-native startups focusing on niche marketing tasks like content creation and sales automation.
2. Incumbent Platforms: Established players (e.g., Adobe, Salesforce) embedding AI to enhance existing products.
3. Challenger Platforms: Emerging platforms leveraging AI to disrupt traditional categories, such as digital experience platforms (DXPs), formerly CMS tools or website Content Management Systems.
4. Instant Software: Custom, AI-generated software created on-the-fly to address specific business needs. Salesforce, recognising an emerging commercial threat, is proactively warning against this approach, labelling it DIY AI software.
5. Service-as-a-Software: AI-driven solutions that perform tasks autonomously, like customer service or campaign orchestration, often with outcome-based pricing.

Foundations for an AI Strategy

The report reinforces the essential reality that a robust AI strategy hinges on a solid data foundation. Scott and Fran emphasize the importance of a universal data layer. 71% of those who responded to a survey for the report claimed to be using cloud data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, Google BigQuery) to integrate data across their stacks. Additionally, a universal content layer is emerging to manage personalized content at scale, blending customer data with brand identity for hyper-personalized experiences. API composability is also critical, enabling AI agents to execute actions via large action models (LAMs), which complement large language models (LLMs).

This data challenge is the biggest AI-adoption hurdle for traditional legacy businesses, who, with few exceptions, are yet to genuinely master their myriad data management issues.

Generative AI Use Cases

Generative AI adoption is widespread, with content ideation (69%) and content copy production (62%) leading as the most popular use cases given their obvious low-hanging fruit status. Other notable applications include transcription, summarization, and competitive research. While content and data-related tasks dominate, adoption in advertising and social media is lower, partly due to outsourcing or reliance on platforms like Google’s Performance Max. The report notes that 60% of marketers use both embedded AI in existing tools and new AI-native tools, with frequent use in content and analytics tasks.

Governance and Practical Insights

Only 52% of organizations have a generative AI policy, impacting adoption rates. Those with policies are more likely to cite cost as a reason for discontinuing AI tools, indicating greater maturity in evaluating ROI. The report also highlights the need for governance to address data privacy, security, and compliance concerns.

Key Takeaways

• Experiment Strategically: Start small with AI to test high-impact use cases without overhauling existing systems.
• Prioritize Data: A strong data strategy is essential for unlocking AI’s potential. There is little merit in feeding sophisticated AI engines with poor-quality data fuel.
• Embrace Composability: Build flexible, API-driven stacks to integrate AI seamlessly.
• Focus on Outcomes: Shift from flashy demos to measurable ROI, leveraging AI for efficiency and personalization.

As AI continues to evolve, marketers must balance innovation with governance to harness its transformative power. For a deeper dive, explore the full “Martech for 2025” report.

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”.

Great marketing hinges on storytelling. It’s about connecting with your audience on an emotional level, weaving a tale that resonates with their aspirations and values. A product might catch the eye, but a compelling story captures the heart. Whether it’s the legacy of a sports icon or the journey of your brand, the story you tell transforms a simple sale into a memorable experience.

So, regardless of welling you are selling a physical product, a service or your mission for the team, ask yourself: what story am I telling? It’s the narrative that drives loyalty and leaves a lasting impression

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”.

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?