B2B GTM is broken. Not “needs tweaking” broken. Structurally broken.
I’ve spent 28 years in demand generation. I’ve watched the industry swing from account-centric cold calling to lead-centric digital marketing and back again. I’ve seen marketing automation go from revolutionary to table stakes to actively counterproductive.
Right now, we’re in the middle of another shift. And most companies are responding by buying more tools instead of fixing the architecture.
What follows is what I’m seeing. Not vendor pitches or framework diagrams. Observations from the front lines about what’s actually breaking and what’s actually working.
Some of it will be uncomfortable. All of it comes from real client work, not theory.
01
We satisficed our way into a GTM crisis
Twenty years ago, B2B sales was account-centric by default. Identify target accounts, research the buying committee, pick up the phone, build relationships. Expensive, but effective.
Then came marketing automation. Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce promised scale. The economics were irresistible.
But these platforms were built around the lead object, not the account. So we optimised for what the systems measured: leads, MQLs, conversion rates. We satisficed. We accepted “good enough” because the tools made it easy and the metrics made it defensible.
Satisfice – verb: to choose a solution or outcome that is “good enough” to meet your minimum needs, rather than searching for the absolute best or perfect option.
Now the bill is coming due.
Digital channels are saturated. Buyers are overwhelmed. Marketing teams are drowning in data they can’t act on. Sales complains that leads are junk. CFOs see marketing as a cost centre.
The response? ABM platforms. Buying group models. Intent data.
But most companies have adopted the language of account-centricity without rewiring anything underneath. They’ve bolted intent platforms onto their lead-centric CRM without changing the data model. That’s not a lead problem. That’s an account architecture problem.
Here’s the dirty secret: rewiring the CRM is the easy part. The hard part is that your marketing and SDR teams are still comped on leads created. Change the incentive structure first, and the data model follows.
02
Everything you’ve heard about the buyer journey is wrong
Everyone in B2B believes the buyer journey is something you can influence. Build the right content, run the right nurture sequence, time it well, and you generate demand.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of what we call demand generation is actually demand detection. We’re not creating buying intent. We’re showing up, occasionally, when it already exists.
And if you’re only showing up when intent already exists, you’re already too late. Our research explains why.
We partnered with 6sense on the current B2B Buyer Experience Study, surveying 754 buyers across the UK and Ireland.
94% of eventual winners were already on the buyer’s Day-1 shortlist
Think about what that means. By the time a buying group starts actively evaluating vendors, the decision is largely already made. Not by the sequences you trigger when someone shows intent. By the preference you built, or failed to build, long before they started looking.
This demands two completely different operating modes. One for out-of-market accounts, the 60%+ of your TAM that isn’t buying right now, where the job is building preference and earning a place on the Day-1 shortlist. And one for in-market accounts, where you have days, not weeks, to respond when a buying group flips from passively learning to actively buying.
Most companies run one playbook for both. And crucially, one set of metrics for both. Should your SDRs really be chasing appointments with accounts that aren’t in-market? For strategic accounts, engagement still makes sense, but the goal shifts to relationship building and gathering business intelligence, while marketing builds preference through thought leadership and events.
03
Your AI-personalized email is landing in a graveyard
Pull up your marketing automation platform. Look at email performance over the last five years. Open rates, click rates, reply rates.
Draw a trendline. I already know what it shows.
Digital channels are exhausted. Not because digital doesn’t work. Because everyone got good at it simultaneously.
Ten years ago, a well-crafted email sequence was a competitive advantage. Today, your buyers aren’t getting one thoughtful email. They’re getting one hundred and fifty. All “personalised.” All blending into noise.
AI finished what automation started. The barrier to marketing to a segment of one dropped to zero. Every competitor reached the same nirvana at the same moment. Volume exploded. Personalisation became table stakes, expected and ignored in equal measure.
Here’s the irony: we spent a decade optimising for digital scale, and the winning move is now the thing we abandoned. Phones are back. Not because cold calling is romantic. Because it cuts through when everything else is noise. For out-of-market accounts where you’re building familiarity and preference, a well-timed, well-researched call does what no sequence can.
85% of buyers initiate contact themselves…
By the time they reach out, they already have a shortlist and a preferred vendor. More outbound volume won’t change that. What changes it is being ready when they move, and knowing when they’re about to.
That’s where signal-led GTM comes in. Not calendar-driven campaigns that hit every account on the same schedule. Programs that detect buying group behaviour and trigger the right action at the right moment. When an account shows intent, you have days, maybe hours, but not weeks. If your sequences treat in-market and out-of-market accounts the same way, you’re not just wasting budget. You’re burning the relationships you spent months building.
The question isn’t which channel works. It’s whether your GTM motion can tell the difference between an account that’s ready and one that isn’t.
04
This won’t get fixed without executive air cover
Marketing leaders get account-centricity. They understand buying groups matter more than individual leads. They know MQLs are flawed.
But they can’t drive the change alone. Three reasons.
The architecture is against them. Your CRM was built around the lead object. Your MAP scores contacts, not accounts. The data model itself is the constraint.
The metrics are against them. The language has evolved, from MQLs to marketing-sourced pipeline. But the timeframe hasn’t. Whether the CFO wants leads or revenue attribution, they want it this quarter. You can’t stop feeding the machine while you’re rebuilding it.
Sales already operates this way. Your sales team has always been account-centric. They talk about “the Siemens deal,” not “lead #47291.” Marketing’s systems force a lead view that sales never actually used.
Our study found that 83% of buyers have their requirements set before they contact a vendor. Separately, 83% of winners already had a prior relationship with the buying organisation. Buyers don’t shortlist strangers. And by the time signals appear, the window is already closing.
A CEO told his team recently: if you can’t tie your work to revenue, your job is at risk. That’s the right pressure. Vanity metrics have had a free ride for too long. But right pressure, wrong timeframe.
If the buying cycle for your key accounts runs two to three years, quarterly revenue targets will kill the transformation before it starts.
The answer isn’t to abandon accountability. It’s to measure the right things in the interim. How many buying groups at your key accounts have you engaged? How many executive relationships built through events or research-led conversations? You’re building an account mosaic. Leadership needs to see it taking shape before it converts to pipeline.
This is rebuilding the plane in flight. Agencies have been part of the problem too, preaching the future state without helping clients survive the transition.
Executive air cover means protecting the team through the messy interim. Not just understanding the transformation, but buying it the time it needs.
05
You don’t need another agent. You need an orchestrator.
Your RevOps stack is technically integrated. Data flows between platforms. But look at what’s actually syncing: lead-level activity, not account or buying group signals. The tools are connected. The picture is still fragmented.
Here’s what happens when you add AI on top of that before you’ve fixed it.
Every vendor is now shipping AI agents that write emails, research accounts, score leads. But each agent is optimised for its own narrow task. None of them talk to each other. Without proper exclusions, the same VP of Engineering gets a generic nurture email from marketing at 9am, an AI-generated “personalised” LinkedIn message from sales at 11am, and an event invitation from a partner campaign at 2pm. All from the same vendor. None of them aware the others fired.
You’re not accelerating your GTM motion. You’re multiplying its failure modes.
And while your stack is creating these collisions, the buying group is already forming its shortlist. They don’t see your internal architecture problems. They see a vendor that can’t coordinate its own outreach.
The category forming now to solve this is orchestration layers. Not more point solutions. A coordination function that sits above the stack and decides what fires, what doesn’t, and in what sequence, so the buying group sees one coherent conversation instead of five disconnected ones. Some teams are already building this by design. Within two years I expect it to be a defined and contested space.
In the meantime, the companies winning aren’t the ones with the most agents. They’re the ones making their existing stack work as a coordinated system. That usually means stripping things out, not adding more.
06
Half your pipeline should never touch a human
Not every deal is a complex sale. For transactional sales, a single decision-maker, clear value prop, straightforward implementation, the lead-centric approach still works. In many cases it’s already fully automated. A human may step in for the occasional edge case, but that’s the exception, not the design.
But here’s what most companies haven’t done: connected the marketing and signal layer to each motion deliberately. They separated the sales channels. But the marketing underneath still runs the same playbooks. Same nurture sequences. Same cadence logic. Same measurement. Whether the deal is a single buyer clicking through to purchase or a ten-person buying committee navigating a twelve-month cycle.
The problem was never MAP itself. It was applying MAP logic to complex buying groups it was never designed to handle.
40-60% of B2B purchase attempts are abandoned because the buying group never reached internal consensus.
But here’s what most companies miss: an abandoned purchase isn’t a closed-lost. It’s a buying group that was active, engaged, and stalled. The contacts are known. The intent was real. The companies measuring at the buying group level see a preference-building opportunity for the next cycle. The ones still collapsing everything into individual MQLs just see a dead lead.
07
What signal-led GTM actually looks like
The MQL has a structural flaw nobody wants to name. It assumes buying group representation without evidencing it.
Every MQL handoff carries a promise: this person represents a real opportunity. Sometimes they do. But the model scores the individual. Whether the right roles in the buying group are engaged is never verified. 40 to 60% of complex B2B purchases are abandoned because the buying group never reached consensus. Most had a qualified contact. Nobody measured at the group level.
Marketing generates activity that does not convert. Sales does not trust it. Pipeline stalls. The cost shows up in the metrics that matter: win rates, pipeline coverage, forecast accuracy. It feels like an execution problem. It is an architecture problem.
The answer is signal-led, account-centric, and scaled through AI. Both motions start as data problems.
Signal-led means the data tells you which accounts are moving, when, and why. Account-centric means the data connects activity across contacts to the buying group, not the individual. AI builds breadth across the buying committee over months, earning preference before a new cycle starts. The human role shifts to what machines cannot do: reading the politics, understanding unstated pains, developing trust. The signal determines when and why to deploy depth. Orchestration makes the handoff clean.
In complex sales, you do not determine when the buying group evaluates you. A forcing function does. A new leader. An M&A event. A regulatory shift. Without one, most RFPs end with the status quo. But being invited matters. Marketing builds preference to get you noticed. Sales deepens it during the process. When the stars align, whether in that RFP or a future one, you are already the obvious call.
The MQL does not get retired. It gets a proper home inside the account layer. A single-threaded deal is not bad luck. It is what a lead-centric model produces by design. A transactional contact is a buying group of one. A complex deal involves eight to fourteen or more. You are qualifying whether the right roles are showing the right signals. The buying group, not the lead.
None of this is solved by buying another tool. Incentives drive behavior. For over a decade the incentive has been MQL volume. If your comp plan still rewards it, nothing else changes. The companies that cannot make this shift are held back by the same thing: process, data, and incentives from the old model.
94% of winning vendors were on the buyer’s Day-1 shortlist before evaluation began. The shortlist forms before you know the cycle has started.
That 94% figure is not an argument for investing more in brand. It is a structural observation: shortlists form before evaluations begin, and the teams that win are almost always already present with the right buying group before any buying signal is formally declared. The GTM reset starts there — not with more volume, not with better sequences, but with configuring your revenue motion to act on the signals that already exist in your platform. If you want to know where your team stands on that, our free Signal Readiness Assessment gives you a straight answer.
