1. The Problem With Most B2B GTM Planning Meetings Marketing walks in with their sourced pipeline numbers. Sales brings their forecast. Partners have their own contributions listed separately. Everyone’s defending their slice of the pie, but no one’s baking the pie together. This is the root issue in most go-to-market planning meetings: This creates...
You’re Convinced. Now What? You read the last article, nodded your head, and thought, “Yes, shared pipeline goals make sense.” But when you picture bringing it up to sales, finance, or your CEO, it feels risky. That’s normal. Most companies aren’t ready to ditch attribution, MQL targets, or sourcing-based dashboards overnight. But that doesn’t...
1. The Funnel Is Broken and It’s Not Just Attribution’s Fault The traditional B2B funnel is breaking down. Legacy models like the SiriusDecisions (Forrester) waterfall promised clarity and predictability. But in today’s reality, they often deliver finger-pointing and frustration. Attribution models were supposed to solve the measurement challenge, but they’ve become a new kind...
Imagine planning your next vacation. In a deterministic world, you assume everything will go exactly as planned: no flight delays, perfect weather, no traffic to the hotel, and your kids love every minute of the itinerary. In a probabilistic world, you acknowledge some uncertainty. You build in buffer time, check weather forecasts, maybe even...
Most CMOs and marketing leaders don’t need to become finance experts. But they do need to plan like finance expects. Because while marketers are often busy explaining campaign performance and top-of-funnel volume, finance leaders are thinking in terms of risks, ranges, options, and forecasts tied to measurable outcomes. When those two styles of planning...
Most B2B marketing teams still run their planning in spreadsheets. Campaign calendars in one sheet. Budget calculations in another. Quarterly targets listed across columns. Add a few notes, drop in some static conversion rates, and you’ve got yourself a marketing plan. It’s what we’ve always done. But it’s also what’s keeping marketing from operating...
For years, marketing teams have chased credit. We optimized for attribution. We tried to prove we “sourced” pipeline. We counted every MQL and traced every form-fill back to a campaign. And for a while, it felt like progress. But here’s what we’ve learned, especially in B2B: Chasing credit doesn’t build confidence. It kills it....
Attribution was supposed to make things easier. A clean report that tells you which channel “caused” a deal. Clear numbers to defend your spend. A way to prove marketing’s value in the revenue process. But attribution is just the beginning of the problem. The deeper issue is the flawed model it supports: That marketing’s...
B2B marketing planning is evolving—and if CMOs want a stronger seat at the table, they need to start planning more like their CFOs. Finance leaders aren’t just managing dollars. They’re managing uncertainty. Every budget cycle, they forecast multiple scenarios, build confidence intervals around targets, disclose their assumptions openly, and propose tradeoffs—not ultimatums. It’s not...
For decades, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) has been a staple KPI in B2B marketing. It promised to bridge the gap between marketing activity and revenue contribution—yet today, it’s one of the most misunderstood, misaligned, and misleading metrics in the modern B2B funnel. Ask most CMOs privately, and they’ll tell you what many already...
