Summary
There’s a quiet crisis playing out in B2B marketing leadership.
While everyone’s busy chasing MQLs and polishing buyer personas, the real opportunity to drive growth is going untouched:
CMOs need to stop thinking like lead generators — and start operating like revenue architects.
According to Forrester’s 2025 Marketing Survey, only 21% of B2B marketing leaders say transitioning to buying group and opportunity management is a top priority. Which, frankly, explains a lot.
Because the game has changed. Dramatically. And if you’re still reporting on individual leads to leadership, you’re not just behind — you’re putting your whole go-to-market motion at risk.
From Leads to Lifecycles: The Shift Most CMOs Still Aren’t Making
Old playbook:
- Capture leads
- Score them
- Toss them to sales
- Hope for the best
New reality:
- Buyers are more autonomous
- Buying groups are massive (22 people on average!)
- Most of the buying process happens without a rep
- And pipeline acceleration depends on coordinated, cross-functional engagement from day one
In other words: Marketing can’t stop at lead gen. It has to span the entire opportunity lifecycle — presale, pipeline, and postsale. That requires CMOs to do more than “support sales.” It means re-engineering how marketing drives revenue through orchestration, not just campaigns. Sales and marketing must get in sync, or marketing needs to lead the entire process.
Presale: Stop Thinking Awareness — Start Activating Opportunity
Presale isn’t just about making noise. It’s about initiating relevance.
Yes, brand and visibility matter. But in a buying group world, relevance is account- and persona-specific. It means aligning efforts to engage the full group of stakeholders — not just the person who downloaded the whitepaper. It’s time to go wide and get personal!
- Lead Change: Stop chasing lead volume. Focus on opportunity activation inside your target accounts. Build insight-driven engagement paths that reflect real buying group dynamics.
- Engineer Alignment: Break the silos. Demand gen, campaign teams, product marketing, and sales need one shared understanding of buyer priorities, preferences, and signals.
- Harness Capability: Use the data you already have. Intent signals, firmographics, past behavior — it’s all fuel for more targeted, personalized outreach before sales steps in.
Pipeline: From Tossing Leads Over the Fence to Hand-in-Hand Execution
The “handoff” is dead. And good riddance.
Pipeline success now hinges on marketing and sales co-owning opportunity progression. That means marketing doesn’t disappear once the SDR books the meeting. It means:
- Lead Change: Enable sales with next-best-action guidance, message templates, content, and signals. Be a real-time partner, not a lead delivery service.
- Engineer Alignment: Identify the full buying committee together. Coordinate multi-threaded engagement, personalized outreach, and follow-ups based on actual deal stage — not “lead score.”
- Harness Capability: Let’s stop pretending data is hard. If marketing owns insights, use them to optimize deal velocity and shape high-impact mid-funnel campaigns with sales, not around them.
The days of the “hand-off” are dead. You need to be in it together for the full journey.
Postsale: The CMO’s Most Overlooked Growth Lever
If your team is still treating marketing’s job as “net new” only, you’re burning your most valuable revenue source.
Existing customers make up 73% of B2B revenue, and yet most marketing teams ghost the customer the second the deal closes. That’s not just a missed opportunity — it’s malpractice.
- Lead Change: Expand marketing’s role into retention, expansion, and advocacy. This isn’t about “customer marketing” — it’s about lifecycle marketing. Period. (There’s nothing better than maximizing the round-out.)
- Engineer Alignment: Customer success, marketing, and account teams should be working from the same strategic plan, with aligned KPIs focused on growth, not just retention. (And they need to meet regularly and have open communication — when an opportunity has velocity, there’s no room for complex communication processes.)
- Harness Capability: Use your CRM, support data, product usage patterns, and past behavior to craft personalized programs that drive loyalty, referrals, and expansion revenue.
The Modern CMO Is a Growth Integrator — Or They’re Replaceable
Here’s the hard truth: If you’re still just running campaigns and reporting on leads, you’re not a strategic partner. You’re a cost center.
The CMOs that survive (and thrive) in the next five years will be the ones who:
- Redesign the revenue engine across the full lifecycle
- Operate cross-functionally by default
- Think like systems engineers, not event planners
- Obsess over buyer behavior, not just content calendars
- Own revenue process transformation as a core leadership function
This isn’t about “doing more.” It’s about leading differently. It’s time to stop defending marketing’s seat at the table.
Build your own table and invite them to it.
