Unlocking the Potential: Embracing B2B Marketing’s Role in Go-To-Market Strategies

The years 2025-26 will be critical, as ignorance could prove to be quite damaging.

This applies broadly, but is particularly poignant for go-to-market strategies, which serve as crucial catalysts for enhancing sales performance and efficiency.

Many executives struggle to comprehend the substantial financial investment in marketing; additionally, there is a growing reconsideration of the costs associated with sales teams in the age of AI.

Increasing Frustration with Known and Unknown Unknowns

The following points illustrate why these observations matter significantly:

1. Risk remains the top concern for many organizations heading into 2025. As grey swans gather, the likelihood of encountering black swans grows significantly.
2. It’s the unseen threats that often pose the greatest danger. The substantial risk of failing to accurately identify key factors is becoming increasingly apparent.
3. Cash is limited, and each dollar can only be spent once. Executives are eager to comprehend the potential benefits of investing in your team compared to alternative options. They also want to know what critical go-to-market advantages they might sacrifice if their resources are allocated elsewhere. This dilemma tends to heighten anxiety among C-suite executives, especially when their inquiries remain unanswered.
4. B2B marketers frequently struggle to effectively demonstrate the significant impact of marketing as a catalyst for driving business performance. In reality, what is widely believed about marketing’s role in go-to-market strategy is often inadequate and sometimes incorrect. This stems from many marketers’ lack of investment in gaining deeper insights.
5. Executives no longer regard “marketing analytics” as an absolute truth. They seek mainstream causal analytics — akin to the methods applied to understanding climate change and other complicated systems — when analyzing go-to-market strategies, preferring oversight from individuals outside the marketing and sales departments.

In summary, the C-suite is losing tolerance for both “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” that are prevalent in go-to-market operations. What implications does this hold for 2025?

Integrating Marketing Acumen with Business Acumen

You find yourself competing for resources with your peers. Your expertise and credibility as marketers and business leaders are at stake. It is essential to align your marketing insights with business intelligence significantly. You must project and subsequently yield a superior internal rate of return compared to other company functions.

Suppose your CFO has evaluated the situation and determined that, after accounting for all necessary expenses, the company could achieve a nearly guaranteed 4.5% IRR on an additional $10 million investment if it remains unspent. She’s not likely to do so, but this context signifies that marketing must demonstrate the ability to surpass that 4.5% return significantly. This benchmark is the minimum — all departments must yield greater returns to the business.

The concept of zero-based budgeting has often been regarded as limited in today’s business landscapes. Increasingly, CFOs are reverting to the budgetary business case — a strategy that integrates a thorough outline of the go-to-market investment portfolio, along with predicted performances and returns over various time periods. Any department — especially significant ones like marketing and sales — that fails to accurately answer these questions will receive only 50% of the proposed budget.

Why just 50%? When you’re unable to clarify your impact and value creation, executives may conclude you’re a necessary support team but need to be funded as economically as possible. If they believe they can attain their needs for less expense, they will.

It is vital to emphasize that everything must eventually convert into revenue for you to gain recognition for it. The notion that X generates value in non-monetary terms isn’t the reality.

Explore further: 2025 GTM Forecast — Major Transformations Shaping Future Go-To-Market Strategies

Embracing Causal Analytics

How do we tackle these inquiries? The good news is that established methodologies from math and science can thoroughly satisfy the needs of go-to-market strategies. Causal analytics can clarify both the individual and collective contributions of any factor to any result, taking into account time delays and external market conditions.

In a typical midmarket B2B company with a scaled go-to-market approach, marketing enhances sales effectiveness by around 8X and makes resource use 5X more efficient than sales could achieve alone. This indicates that, in this scenario, marketing assists sales in securing $8 million in contracts for only about 20-25% of the resources that sales would need without marketing’s support.

While much of this discussion may seem challenging, those last two statements should raise your interest.

And there’s even better news.

The Multiplier Effect of Marketing

Marketing investments do not merely amplify sales performance; they also create the same multiplicative effect across various business functions, including talent acquisition and retention, investor relations, supply chain management, and any other area where stakeholder awareness, confidence, and trust influence corporate success. You’ll achieve more of X, improved Y, and quicker Z than you could without marketing efforts.

Thus, a high-performing marketing strategy is likely one of the most cost-effective functions within many B2B organizations, particularly over a rolling three-year timeline.

The initial half of 2025 is expected to be incredibly challenging, with B2B go-to-market strategies facing intense scrutiny. However, by the end of 2026, numerous B2B go-to-market teams could be in the most robust position they’ve ever experienced.

The key is to possess the willingness and capability to achieve what the B2B marketing sector has so infrequently accomplished: to accurately respond to the C-suite’s inquiries regarding the actual role of B2B marketing within the ecosystem of go-to-market strategies. It’s time to genuinely de-risk B2B go-to-market strategies. Although many B2B marketers believe they have succeeded in this regard, your C-suite — the internal customer funding your operations — is indicating otherwise.