Marketo Cofounder | AI Marketing Automation Pioneer | Reinventing Revenue Marketing and B2B GTM | CMO Advisor | Board Director | Keynote Speaker | Cocktail Guru
If you're a CMO struggling to hit pipeline numbers, it's probably not your strategy, team, or tactics. It's the broken system. For over a decade, B2B had a playbook that worked. Budgets were predictable, buyers were reachable, and marketing automation (mostly) tracked the journey. We built careers on nurtures, MQL handoffs, and attribution models. Then that foundation cracked. Here's the data to prove it. THE BUDGET SQUEEZE Marketing budgets dropped from 11% of revenue pre-pandemic to 7.7% today (Gartner). Meanwhile, WordStream reports Google Ads CPL hit $70.11 in 2025, up 31% from $53.52 two years ago. B2B tech companies now routinely pay $200+ per lead. We're doing more with less, while the price of every click, impression, and conversion climbs relentlessly. THE INVISIBLE BUYER 6sense shows 70% of the buyer journey now happens anonymously, outside systems you can track. Gartner found 75% of B2B buyers actively avoid sales contact until they're ready, and when you do connect, Digital Commerce 360 reports 1/3 go silent after initial contact. Buying groups expanded to 6-10 people on average, sometimes up to 16, according to Gartner. Most of those people will never appear in your CRM. They're researching and forming opinions in the dark — and traditional marketing automation can't reach them there. THE BROKEN INFRASTRUCTURE Cookie deprecation and privacy regulations blocked the known, tracked visitors underpinning marketing automation, breaking traditional scoring methods and making the journey even harder to track. And meanwhile, the legacy MAP vendors were mostly stagnant, raising prices without adding new functionality. THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS Backlinko reports content exploded to 6M blog posts daily. Algorithm InSights 2025 found LinkedIn organic reach collapsed to 1-2% in 2025 — half of prior levels.. Email isn't faring better. Infraforge says cold email open rates dropped from 36% to 27.7% in one year. Reply rates fell from 7% to 5.1%, meaning 19 out of 20 cold emails are now ignored. It's a tragedy of the commons. We abused every tactic until buyers tuned out and opt out. THE MEASUREMENT BREAKDOWN Meanwhile, Televerde and Anteriad report many companies haven't updated MQL definitions in over five years. We're optimizing for metrics sales doesn't value, while what really drives revenue impact (strong brand awareness and preference) stays invisible. THE BOTTOM LINE Today's B2B marketers operate with smaller budgets against higher costs, trying to influence larger anonymous buying groups through noisier channels with weaker reach, measured by outdated metrics — all while buyers demand authenticity and avoid our outreach. I'd argue your pipeline misses are probably not an execution failure. The system fundamentally changed and the old playbook broke. What part of this broken system is hitting you hardest: the budget pressure, the invisible buyer, or the broken infrastructure? And do you have other stats on this?
Before companies waste valuable budget and other resources chasing increasingly poor conversion rates, they should continuously track non-revenue metrics such as: 1. Number of weekly searches that used your category name. 2. Number of weekly searches that used your company name. 3. Average Time on Site 4. Bounce rates - by page 5. Number of LLM responses that include your company and/or category name. If your company doesn’t rank high enough - against industry benchmarks - you’re wasting your time on email campaigns, cold calls, etc. No one is listening and no one cares. It’s not about how much content you’re generating. It’s about how much thought leadership you’re generating. I’m actually shocked that startup boards and enterprise exec teams don’t demand weekly reports on these non-revenue statistics. Shameless plug: my new book (out in Q1 2026) titled, “Market Engineering- Because Markets Don’t Build Themselves” is a prescriptive guide that shows you step by step how to engineer a market. I’ve done it multiple times as a startup founder and as an operating exec. Great product engineering is just table stakes. Great market engineering almost always determines winners.
Agree, most pipeline problems aren’t marketing execution issues, they’re systemic alignment failures between how companies sell and how buyers buy now. We’re still running lead-gen plays in a demand-gen world. The invisible buyer has flipped the funnel, and too many CMOs are still trying to prove ROI on metrics that no longer correlate with revenue. The only way forward is rebuilding the system around observable signals, intent data, and brand-driven trust. It's the stuff that actually influences those unseen buying groups.
Average enterprise SaaS buying committee is about 22 people - economic buyer, champion, direct/indirect users, legal, data privacy, infosec, procurement. Any one of these can sink the deal. Even so the hidden figures that are far removed form the product. You are right, buyers don't want to talk to sales. Instead they have dark social -internal emails, chats, slacks, teams... One way to influence this is thru the research entry points which now include the AI engines. Buying committee mapping has to be front and center; signals do not work. SDR agents is creating resentment at this point (for me at least) patching inaccurate signals with scraped titles plastered into ICP. That is not prospecting, that is spamming. Enterprise sales processes are complex and need orchestration. GTM is also highly probabilistic, non linear and has a time lag in an open system where we don't control 80% of the variables. You need causal measurement frameworks to navigate that and take into account all the operating pieces. Whatever you call it, the issue needs diagnosis whether that is measurement frameworks that are correlational, to tactics that do not reach to the intended buying committee.
Jon Miller,to this list of mounting difficulties, we could add increased numbers of vendors in every category and buyer hesitation from an uncertain economy and from wondering how AI might change their options in the short term. So the challenges are greater than ever before. What are some approaches modern b2b marketers should be thinking of today?
So many important points. I think the predictable revenue model has also played a role in breaking everything. The spam cannon outreach strategy is treating people like numbers and playing high volume games. This has eroded customer trust, alienated entire markets, and rendered nearly every outreach strategy ineffective. What do you see as the solution Jon Miller?
The real tragedy is we all know this but still have to explain why MQLs are down in next week's QBR like any of it matters anymore
The lack of understanding of what exceptional marketing is and can be for a business, and that it’s more than promotion and lead gen. I think that’s the root cause of the majority.
Yes, this is all true, but it worse than even this presents. Because we have had 20+ years of SaaS solutions, prospects just see less value in selecting a new solution. Moving from an on-prem to cloud = a lot value, moving from a cloud solution to a slighty better cloud solution = not much value especially when you add in risk and switching costs. So we are flooding channels selling products that have lower value (relative to current solution), the old days aren't coming back for SaaS.
Great post. It’s interesting how we’re going back to first principles. Build the brand, understand the 95:5 rule, apply 60:40 thinking (will vary depending on category), and measure and optimise the outcome.
Fractional/Interim CMO (ex-Salesforce) | De-risking GTM for early-stage companies | Builds pipeline that scales
2wThe irony of the founding father of marketing automation becoming a brand evangelist is not lost on the MOPS community — and it's exactly the plot twist we needed. :) You've nailed it: the system didn't crack, it shattered. But here's what the data really tells us: when you can't track the buyer, can't reach them, and can't afford spray-and-pray, the only thing left standing is whether they already know and care about you. Your brand. But brand isn't just awareness theater or a logo refresh. It's your point of view — your perspective on the market and customer, expressed through everything you put into the world. It's the ethos and aesthetic that resonates with buyers and makes a committee of 10 invisible people want to shortlist you during that anonymous 70% of the journey you'll never see. When 75% of buyers avoid sales and 19 of 20 emails get ignored, brand preference is the only thing that gets you into consideration before you know they exist. The budget squeeze, invisible buyer, and broken infrastructure are all hitting hard. But the real miss? Thinking we can out-tactics a system that now punishes tactics. The commons are scorched. Brand is what survives.