2025-26 will be the years where what you don’t know will really hurt you.
This is a generally true statement, but it is especially true for go-to-market functions, especially those that find meaning as multipliers of sales effectiveness and efficiency.
The fact is that very few executives understand why they spend so much money on marketing; and many of them are also rethinking the cost of their sales team in the AI era.
Losing patience with known and unknown strangers
These statements are essential for very important reasons:
Risk is the number one problem facing many businesses in 2025. Gray swans flock together, and when that happens, the likelihood that one or more black swans will appear increases significantly. The bullet you don’t hear is the one that hits you. The disproportionate risks of failing to identify what really matters are becoming greater and greater. Cash is always a limited resource and you can’t spend the same dollar twice. Executives want to understand the value the company would get if it bet on you rather than something or someone else. And what a big GTM impact they would lose if they bet money on anything else. This process of trying to figure out that Y in the road triggers a lot of anxiety for leaders, especially when no one can answer their questions. B2B marketers still don’t know how to “sell the pen” on the extraordinary contributions of marketing as a business performance multiplier. If we’re all honest for a moment, what we think we know about the marketing powers of GTM is meager and often wrong. That’s because most marketers have never invested in knowledge. Leaders no longer consider “marketing analysis” as a source of truth. They want to see mainstream causal analysis – the same mathematics used to better understand climate change and other complex ecosystems – applied to GTM. And they want someone other than marketers and sales teams to manage the system.
In short, most leaders are no longer patient with the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” that swirl around and through GTM. So what does this mean in 2025?
Marketing acumen must meet business acumen
You are competing for resources with everyone else. And your ability and credibility as marketers and business leaders are at stake. You need to match your marketing acumen with your business acumen. You must forecast and then deliver a better internal rate of return than other functions in the business.
Let’s say your CFO has done her calculations and after covering all the expenses she has to pay, she has determined that the company can achieve an almost guaranteed IRR of 4.5% on an additional $10 million in cash investable if she keeps it. It’s unlikely to do so, but that means marketing has to show it can far exceed that 4.5% yield. It’s the ground. Everyone should be able to bring in more to the company in percentage terms.
We are all familiar with zero-based budgeting, an approach that many consider to have very limited applicability in today’s business environment. More and more CFOs are returning to the budgeting business case – a plan that combines a detailed overview of GTM’s investment portfolio with expected performance and returns over short, medium and long-term time horizons. Any function – but especially those as important as marketing and sales – that cannot accurately answer these questions gets 50% of the proposed budget.
Why 50%? Because when you can’t answer questions about your impact and value creation, they will conclude that while you are needed as a service delivery team, they should fund you as cheaply as possible. If they believe they can get everything they need for less, it will be less.
It’s crucial to say that everything ultimately needs to be monetized for you to get any credit for it. The idea that X creates value “in ways other than cash” is not the way things work.
Dig Deeper: GTM 2025 Forecast — Key Changes That Redefine the Future of Go-To-Market Strategy
Enter causal analysis
How can we answer these questions? The good news is that mathematics and science have long-established methodologies that largely cover the needs of GTM. Causal analysis can establish both the individual and synergistic contribution of any factor to any outcome, without time lags and external market forces.
In a mid-sized B2B company with GTM at scale, marketing makes sales approximately 8 times more efficient and 5 times more resource efficient than sales itself would be. This means that in this example, Marketing is helping Sales sell $8 million worth of deals for about 20-25% of what Sales would need without Marketing’s help.
I realize that for many, much of this column has been a difficult task. But these last two sentences should cheer you up.
But it’s even better.
The multiplier effect of marketing
Marketing spending doesn’t just increase business performance. It simultaneously generates the same type of multiplier effect with the same money in other areas of the business, such as talent recruitment and retention, investor relations, purchasing, and any other aspect of the business where stakeholder awareness, trust and confidence make or break business success. . You’ll get more X’s, a better Y’s, and a faster Z’s than you could ever get without marketing.
This means that a top-notch marketing effort is likely the most cost-effective function in many B2B businesses, especially on a three-year rolling basis.
The first half of 2025 promises to be very difficult. The year will begin with B2B GTM under a burning magnifying glass. However, by the end of 2026, many B2B GTM teams will be in their strongest position ever.
The key is to be willing and able to do the one thing the B2B marketing profession has so rarely done: do what is necessary to answer senior executives’ questions about how B2B marketing actually works in the GTM ecosystem. It’s time to finally de-risk B2B GTM and do it for real. Many B2B marketers believe they have already done this. But your C-suite – the internal customer who pays your bills – says otherwise.
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