🕵🏻‍♂️ Revenue Marketing

What real revenue marketing means, how to build a brand in the AI era, and which marketers will succeed in 2026 and beyond.

Last week, we started updating our “The State Of Full-Funnel B2B marketing” report (you can participate here as well) by talking to B2B marketing leaders of mid-size/enterprise tech companies.

When we asked, “When you think about hitting pipeline and revenue targets, what’s really getting in the way right now?” the repetitive reply was:

A constant push for short-term ROI while the market requires to invest in the long-term trust building that is actually needed to grow.

Which means we are at the end of revenue marketing as we know it.

For the upcoming month, we are going to send a series of tactical posts on how to survive as a B2B CMO and drive the enterprise pipeline in the AI era.

To kick it off, we want to share Jon Miller’s keynote from our Full-Funnel Summit.

In today’s newsletter:

• What real revenue marketing means

• How to build brand in AI era

• Which marketers will succeed in 2026 and beyond

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BECOME A FULL-FUNNEL B2B MARKETER

Full-Funnel Academy is a comprehensive B2B marketing training and Slack community for B2B marketers who care about revenue and want to move the needle.

Academy includes:

• All our B2B marketing courses including ABM playbook, Demand Gen Playbook, LinkedIn Allbound marketing playbook and 11 more courses that aren’t available publicly + all upcoming courses.

• Private Slack community to answer all your questions

• Personalized learning plan. If you are not sure what skills you’d develop in the first place and how to get maximum from the program, we can create a personalized learning plan accordingly to the time you can dedicate to education.

• Behind-the-scenes sessions. See what’s working and what doesn’t work and why on the “behind the scenes” sessions where we review the campaigns we are running for our clients and us.

Learn more and join the academy here.

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The Rise and Fall of Revenue Marketing

Back in 2006, marketing had a reputation problem. We were seen as the team that made pretty brochures and threw parties – a cost center at best. So we fought back with what became known as "revenue marketing." We promised a predictable system: invest the budget, measure the touchpoints, attribute the revenue, and optimize. It was supposed to be our ticket to the revenue table.

For a while, it worked. Marketing automation platforms fed this mindset with increasingly complex systems that could track, measure, and optimize everything. We felt scientific, accountable, and important.

But somehow, here we are in 2025, and marketing is facing a deeper credibility crisis than ever before. Recent research shows that less than a third of CEOs trust their CMOs. Over half think their marketing teams put their own interests above the company's. More than a third of Fortune 500 companies don't even have a CMO anymore – marketing is being moved under Chief Revenue Officers or relegated to a sales support function.

At the same time, every marketer I talk to tells me the same thing: "It feels hard out there." SDR productivity is declining, we're missing pipeline goals, and we're constantly being told to do more with less. Despite all our new technologies and tactics, creating pipelines feels harder than ever.

Something is fundamentally broken.

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The Three Fatal Problems

The traditional revenue marketing playbook has three critical problems that explain why we're struggling:

Problem 1: The Gumball Machine Mentality

We treated marketing like a gumball machine. I would go to my CFO and say if we need to double the number of leads, then I'm gonna need to double my amount of budget. We taught them to think you put a quarter in, you get an MQL out.

But anyone who's actually been on the buying side knows that's not how it works. Marketing and buying are complex, non-linear processes. There are multiple decision makers with competing priorities, extended cycles with unpredictable timing, invisible research we can't track, and complex trust dynamics that aren't measurable.

Think about it like a biological ecosystem or weather patterns. These are complex systems where small changes can have massive, unpredictable effects – the butterfly effect in action. You can't attribute a hurricane to one butterfly flapping its wings any more than you can attribute a deal to one marketing or sales touch.

Problem 2: The Tragedy of the Commons

Marketers discover a tactic that works, then we all use it until it doesn't work anymore. Email worked great until everyone was sending emails. Content marketing was powerful until everyone had content. Now AI-generated personalization is following the same path – what was novel a year ago is spam today.

Meanwhile, buyers have gotten savvy. They know that filling out a form means unwanted calls and emails, so they've stopped doing it. They're researching on ChatGPT, in communities, on Reddit – anywhere but our websites. The tracking foundation our systems were built on is crumbling.

Problem 3: The Quarterly Hamster Wheel

We've become "pipeline-obsessed hamsters on a quarterly wheel," chasing short-term metrics at the expense of building meaningful customer relationships. When we prioritize immediate attribution and quarterly pipeline goals, we end up doing things that might generate short-term results but actually harm our long-term customer relationships.

The things that truly drive marketing success – building trust, establishing thought leadership, creating genuine value – these things take time. But our systems and incentives push us toward tactics that optimize for speed over sustainability.

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BECOME A FULL-FUNNEL B2B MARKETER

Full-Funnel Academy is a comprehensive B2B marketing training and Slack community for B2B marketers who care about revenue and want to move the needle.

Academy includes:

• All our B2B marketing courses including ABM playbook, Demand Gen Playbook, LinkedIn Allbound marketing playbook and 11 more courses that aren't available publicly + all upcoming courses.

• Private Slack community to answer all your questions

• Personalized learning plan. If you are not sure what skills you’d develop in the first place and how to get maximum from the program, we can create a personalized learning plan accordingly to the time you can dedicate to education.

• Behind the scenes sessions. See what’s working and what doesn’t work and why on the “behind the scenes” sessions where we review the campaigns we are running for our clients and us.

• 30% discount for live events and bootcamps

Learn more and join the academy here.

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The New Playbook: Beyond the Outer Circle

The solution starts with understanding that most marketing problems aren't actually marketing problems. They're deeper issues disguised as tactical challenges.

Here is a brilliant infographic by Pierre.

The outer circle is where most teams focus when results aren't working – new creative, different campaigns, fresh tactics. But that's just focused on promotion, one of the four Ps of marketing.

The real leverage comes from the inner circles: product-market fit, brand positioning, and go-to-market strategy. If you don't have product-market fit, no amount of great marketing will fix that. If your positioning is wrong, it creates headwinds that make everything else harder.

Research shows that consumers care most about product quality, price, and trust. Yet we spend most of our time optimizing the promotional outer circle instead of these foundational elements.

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What is true revenue marketing?

This brings us to a crucial point: we need to redefine what "revenue marketing" means. True revenue marketing isn't about MQLs and short-term tactics. It's about marketing that truly impacts revenue by shaping buyer perceptions so that when they're ready to buy, you're the first one they contact.

6Sense research shows that 80% of the time, buyers have already picked their preferred vendor before they ever contact sales. If you're that preferred vendor, you're much more likely to win. That's a real revenue impact.

But here's the challenge: AI is changing how buyers research and make decisions.

We're already seeing zero-click search, where AI summarizes information at the top of search results, leading to massive drops in website traffic. AI email assistants are reading and responding to emails for us. Soon, AI buying agents will research vendors, compare options, and even negotiate deals on behalf of buyers.

So, how do you build a brand and drive long-term revenue when AI is filtering and summarizing everything?

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GET ACCESS TO A NEW FULL-FUNNEL ABM 2.0 COURSE

What's included with the course access:

• 12 modules covering step-by-step ABM strategy development: goal decomposition, ICP, account list building, ABM team, warm-up and activation playbooks, reporting, scaling ABM and building a cohesive ABM & demand gen function.

• Short explanation videos and "how to" examples. We believe it's better one time to see a practical example then listen to the theory hundreds of times.

• 5 orchestrated and ready-to-use ABM playbooks and a detailed explanation

• Report dashboard for 4 types of ABM programs: new revenue, pipeline acceleration, expansion and churn prevention

• Live case studies and examples of the campaigns we implemented with the clients of Fullfunnel.io in the past few years

• 17 templates to simplify your ABM strategy launch: ICP, revenue analysis, intent data tracking, account warm-up cadence, customer research, account scoring and prioritization, ABM budget planning and forecasting, account planning, reports, personalized offers, and many more.

• Planning & Presenting a Pilot ABM Program to Execs and Sales Framework

• Minimal viable stack recommendation and guidelines on how to use it to avoid ramping up budget and being pressured to show ROI for the purchased $50k software

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How to build your brand in AI era

The answer lies in focusing on three things that AI cannot easily summarize or replicate:

1. Experiences

A photograph of a trip to Hawaii doesn't capture the feeling of sand between your toes. Humans crave authentic experiences with other people. This might be as simple as a dinner bringing together prospects, customers, and your team, or something more elaborate. B2C companies have been building experiences for years; B2B needs to catch up.

2. Relationships

When AI can create and summarize messages, the source of information becomes more important than the information itself. We're already seeing this with news – people trust information differently based on the source.

This manifests in three key ways:

• Partners: Trusted partner recommendations carry enormous weight

• Communities: Whether building your own or participating authentically in existing ones

• Influencers: Including founders building personal brands to establish thought leadership

The theme here is that we'll trust the source of information because of existing relationships more than we'll trust the actual content.

3. Original Research and Content

AI can only remix content it's seen before. It can't create something truly original. This might be genuinely creative content, profound thought leadership, or most scalably, original research based on your proprietary data.

Companies like Carta publish anonymized startup funding data that's incredibly valuable to their audience. Gong analyzes millions of sales calls to publish insights about what works in selling – including research on when you should or shouldn't swear on a sales call. Only they can publish this because only they have the data.

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GET ACCESS TO A NEW B2B DEMAND GENERATION PLAYBOOK

You’ll get access to:

• 25 short and actionable videos and tutorials. No theory or high-level overview

  15-mins max videos to explain a specific process or show how to implement it

• 10 ready-to-use templates including demand gen reports, budgeting demand gen program, creating joint playbooks with sales, a pilot demand generation program presentation, demand generation program examples, thought leadership, nurturing content production templates, and many more

• 30/60/90 launch plan with step-by-step instructions, demang gen plan example, and a timeline

P.S. If you have access to our ABM course, the new demand generation playbook will help you increase awareness and support your ABM program with engaged strategic accounts.

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Which marketers will succeed in 2026 and beyond

The most successful marketing leaders today aren't obsessing over email open rates or MQL volumes. They're focused on things that truly move the needle:

• Constantly deepening their understanding of the market through actual customer conversations

• Crafting clear, compelling positioning that makes their brand stand for something meaningful

• Building authentic relationships and vibrant communities that create value beyond transactions

• Creating experiences so meaningful that buyers seek them out

These are the activities that transcend AI's ability to filter or summarize. It means we need to initiate the change and make the transition that won't be easy.

We've spent 20 years telling leadership that MQLs matter, that marketing is measurable, that we operate like a machine. Shifting focus to harder-to-measure, longer-term initiatives requires changing hearts and minds internally.

The marketers who succeed in the next decade will be different from those who succeeded in the last one. Instead of being the most quantitative and operationally focused, they'll be the ones who can best articulate the need for change and build organizational buy-in. They'll elevate marketing from tactical lead generation to strategic growth driving.

Some CMOs are even changing their title from Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Market Officer – the idea being that marketing is the only C-level function named after the practice rather than the outcome.

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New Metrics for a New Era

If not MQLs, then what should we measure? Several things:

• Brand awareness and reputation sentiment through tools and quarterly tracking studies

• Target account engagement across your ideal customer profile

• Post-sale metrics like net revenue retention and net promoter score

• The percentage of your target market that thinks the specific things you want them to think about your brand

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TLDR;

We're entering a new era that requires a new playbook. Most buyers aren't in-market at any given time and they're researching anonymously. We need to build visibility and trust long before they contact sales, in a world where AI is filtering our traditional messages.

This means focusing on experiences and relationships that AI can't summarize. It means moving from MQLs to accounts and buying groups. It means recognizing that post-sale is as important as new logo acquisition. And it means embracing AI to make our marketing as relevant and engaging as a consumer's Instagram feed.

The companies that embrace this shift – that understand marketing as a complex system, that focus on long-term relationship building, and that use AI to handle tactical complexity while humans focus on strategy, creativity, and genuine value creation – these will be the ones that don't just survive the transition, but thrive in the new era of marketing.

The gumball machine is broken. It's time to build the growth engine.

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Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.

If any of these challenges sound familiar:

• You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.

• You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it

• Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.

• You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.

• You clearly see that you're already behind your revenue targets

We can help.

We'll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.