It’s time for B2B marketing to understand its GTM role

2025-26 will be the years when what you don’t know will really, really hurt you.  

That’s a generally true statement, but it’s especially true for go-to-market functions, particularly those that find their meaning as multipliers of sales effectiveness and efficiency.

The facts are that very few C-suites understand why they spend so much money on marketing; and a lot of them are also rethinking how much their sales team costs them in the AI era.

Losing patience with known and unknown unknowns

These statements are key for some really big reasons:

1. Risk is the No. 1 issue facing many businesses in 2025. The grey swans are gathering, and when that happens, the likelihood of one or more black swans showing up increases dramatically.
2. The bullet you don’t hear is the one that gets you. The outsized risks of not correctly identifying what really matters is looming larger and larger.
3. Cash is always a finite resource, and you can’t spend the same dollar twice. The C-suite wants to understand the value the company would get if they bet on you instead of on something or someone else. And what great GTM impact they’d be losing if they bet the money on something else. This process of trying to understand this Y in the road triggers a lot of C-suite anxiety, particularly when no one can answer their questions.
4. B2B marketers still don’t know how to “sell the pen” on marketing’s extraordinary contributions as a multiplier of business performance. If we’re all honest for a moment, what we think we know about how marketing powers GTM is meager and often mistaken. That’s because most marketers have never invested in knowing.
5. C-suites no longer see “marketing analytics” as a source of truth. They want to see mainstream causal analytics — the same math used to better understand climate change and other complex ecosystems — applied to GTM. And they want someone else other than marketers and sales teams running the system.

In short, most C-suites are out of patience with the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” swirling around and through GTM.  So, what does this mean in 2025?

Marketing acumen must meet business acumen

You’re competing for resources with everyone else. And your ability and credibility as marketers and business leaders are on the line. You must match your marketing acumen with business acumen in a big way. You must forecast and then deliver a better internal rate of return than other functions in the company.

Let’s say your CFO has done her math and after covering all of the expenses she must pay for, she has determined that the company can realize an almost guaranteed 4.5% IRR on another $10 million in investible money if she just holds onto it.  She is unlikely to do that, but what this means is that marketing has to show that it can significantly exceed that 4.5% return. That’s the floor. Everyone has to be able to return more than that to the business in percentage terms.

We are all familiar with zero-base budgeting, an approach that many see as having very limited applicability in today’s business environment. More and more CFOs are migrating back to the budgetary business case — a plan that combines a detailed outline of the GTM investment portfolio with forecasted performance and returns over short-, medium-, and longer-term time horizons. Any function — but particularly those as important as marketing and sales — that can’t answer those questions accurately get 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’re necessary 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 has to monetize for you to get any credit for it. The idea that X is creating value in “other than cash” terms is not the way things work. 

Dig deeper: 2025 GTM forecast — Key shifts redefining the future of go-to-market strategy

Enter causal analytics

How can we answer these questions? The great news is that math and science have long-established methodologies that more than encompass the needs of GTM.  Causal analytics can establish both the individual and the synergistic contribution of any factor to any outcome, net of time lag and external market forces.

In the normal midmarket B2B company with scaled GTM, marketing makes sales about 8X more effective and 5X more resource-efficient than sales would be by itself.  That means that in this example, marketing helps sales sell $8 million in deals for about 20-25% of what sales would require without marketing’s assistance.

I realize that for many, a lot of this column has been tough sledding. But those last two sentences should make you perk up a lot.  

But it gets even better.

Marketing’s multiplier effect

Marketing spend doesn’t just multiply sales performance. It simultaneously generates the same sort of multiplier effect with the same money across other parts of the business like talent recruiting and retention, investor relations, procurement, and any other aspect of the business where stakeholder awareness, confidence, and trust accelerates or deprecates business success. You’ll get more of X, better Y, and faster Z than you’d ever be able to attain without marketing.

This means that a top-notch marketing effort is probably the most cost-effective function in many B2B businesses, particularly on a rolling three-year basis. 

The first half of 2025 is likely to be very tough. The year will start with B2B GTM under a burning hot magnifying glass. By the end of 2026, however, many B2B GTM teams will be in their strongest position ever. 

The key is being willing and able to do the one thing the B2B marketing profession has so rarely done: Do what is necessary to answer the C-suite’s questions about how B2B marketing really functions in the GTM ecosystem. It’s time to finally de-risk B2B GTM and do it for real. There are many B2B marketers who feel they’ve already done this. But your C-suite — the internal customer who is paying your bills — is saying otherwise.

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