The Decline of B2B Sales and Marketing — Why Every New Tactic Fails to Fix the Same Problem

Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing Are Becoming Obsolete — Here Is Why

Most B2B businesses are running a playbook that has never worked. Not "used to work and stopped." Never worked. That is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of every conversation I have with CEOs and sales directors, and it is exactly what this article is about.

For thirty years I have watched businesses pour money into cold calling programmes, marketing automation platforms, ABM campaigns, pay-per-click, demand generation forms and LinkedIn outreach sequences. The results have been consistently poor. The excuses have been consistently creative. And the cycle repeats itself every time a new CMO walks through the door with a fresh set of promises and a bigger MarTech wish list.

Here is the reality nobody in B2B marketing wants to say out loud: the entire demand generation model was designed for consumer businesses, not B2B organisations. Every case study your marketing team cited when justifying that HubSpot or Marketo subscription? Look closely. The businesses achieving 3-to-1 and 5-to-1 returns are selling to consumers — insurance, cars, retail, travel. They are not selling six-figure software contracts to procurement committees of fifteen people.

B2B buyers behave completely differently. Research into B2B performance marketing consistently shows that buyers want to self-serve, self-educate and remain anonymous until they are ready to talk. They are not going to fill out a demand generation form so your BDR can ring them for a discovery call. And yet that is precisely what most B2B marketing teams are still building their entire go-to-market around.

The numbers are stark. 83% of B2B buyers define their purchase requirements before speaking to any salesperson. By the time a prospect makes contact with your business, they have almost certainly already identified a preferred vendor. If your company was not visible and credible during that anonymous research phase, you were never in the running. No amount of cold outreach or retargeting will fix that after the fact.

At the same time, 95% of your total addressable market is not actively buying at any given moment. That means the spray-and-pray tactics — cold calling everyone in a database, blasting LinkedIn connection requests, running PPC ads to whoever happens to be searching — are hitting a market that is almost entirely not in a buying cycle. The maths simply does not work. We estimate it takes roughly 400 cold calls to find one genuinely interested party. At around 75 calls a day, that is over a week of effort to find a single person who might want a conversation. That is not a sales problem. That is a structural problem with the approach.

The questions around whether businesses can survive without effective salespeople matter more now than ever. The decline in sales results across B2B is not because salespeople have suddenly got worse. It is because the processes they have been handed make it near-impossible to succeed. Marketing handed sales a broken engine and then blamed the driver when the car would not move.

The b2b marketing transformation that businesses actually need is not about adding more tools, hiring another Head of Demand Generation or rebranding your ABM programme as ABX. It is about facing the fact that the model itself is wrong — and building something different. Something designed for how B2B buyers actually behave. Something that creates genuine exposure to your total addressable market, educates prospects on their terms and makes your sales team's job possible rather than pointless.

That is what this article covers. We look at why traditional B2B sales and marketing are becoming obsolete, what the data actually says about buyer behaviour, where the money is being wasted, and what a credible alternative looks like. If you have ever suspected that your marketing budget is being spent on activity that proves nothing and delivers less, read on. Your suspicions are correct.

What This Article Covers — And Why Most Businesses Get It Wrong

Most B2B businesses believe they have a sales problem. They don't. They have a strategy problem that shows up in sales.

The assumption is that if you hire better salespeople, buy better tools, or run a tighter ABM campaign, the numbers will improve. They won't. Not because the people are wrong, but because the model is wrong. And no amount of effort fixes a broken model — it just burns through budget faster.

What follows takes that assumption apart piece by piece. Each section addresses a specific belief that most B2B leaders hold without questioning. By the time you reach the end, you'll see why the conventional approach was never going to work — and what actually does.

1. Introduction
2. The Big Problem with Sales
3. The Digital Transformation Challenge
4. Is One-to-One B2B Sales Dying?
5. Account Based Marketing & Experience (ABM/ABX)
6. The Push-Back
7. Key Takeaways
8. FAQs
9. Conclusion

Here is the belief most B2B businesses carry into this: digital marketing works, salespeople just need better leads.

Here is the reality: B2B digital marketing — demand generation, marketing automation, ABM, PPC — was designed for consumer businesses. It was sold to B2B companies using case studies from banks, car manufacturers, and insurance companies. Businesses that sell to people making personal purchases, not procurement teams protecting their jobs and justifying ROI to a board.

The result? Massive MarTech stacks that don't produce pipeline. Salespeople blamed for not closing deals that were never properly opened. CMOs averaging eighteen months in post before quietly moving on. And 95% of your addressable market not actively buying at any given time — completely untouched by your campaigns.

None of that is the fault of your sales team. It is the fault of a strategy borrowed from the wrong industry and never seriously questioned.

Read every section. The argument builds. By the time you reach the conclusion, you will not be able to unsee it.

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1. Introduction

Here is a belief held by most B2B business owners: your sales and marketing approach might need tweaking, but the fundamentals are sound. The model works. You just need better data, a smarter tool, or a sharper salesperson.

That belief is wrong. And I am not the only one saying it.

I want to reference four pieces of published work that confirmed what we at salesXchange had already identified — that the standard B2B go-to-market model is not fit for purpose, and that the industry is slowly, reluctantly, beginning to admit it:

1. The Sales & Marketing Expense Ratio by Dave Kellogg — 27<sup>th</sup> February 2022
2. Traditional B2B Sales & Marketing are Becoming Obsolete by Brent Adamson, Distinguished Vice President at Gartner — 1<sup>st</sup> February 2022
3. The Clear & Complete Guide to Account-Based Experience by Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo, co-founder of Engagio, and then CMO at Demandbase
4. Traditional B2B Sales is Dead, Long Live the UCE? by Dave Kellogg — 6<sup>th</sup> March 2022

I have spent years deciphering the breakdown between prospects, marketing, sales and customers — in that order. That sequence matters. Most businesses get it backwards. They build the product, hire the sales team, bolt on a marketing department, then wonder why no one is buying.

We identified early on that the entire digital B2B sales and marketing model was built on the wrong foundation. It was designed for consumer businesses — insurance, retail, travel — and transplanted wholesale into the B2B world without anyone stopping to ask whether it actually worked. It does not. The evidence is in the business failure rates. The evidence is in the CMO tenure figures. The evidence is in the S&M expense ratios that Dave Kellogg unpacks with forensic precision. The evidence is in Brent Adamson's frank admission in the Harvard Business Review that traditional B2B sales and marketing has become obsolete.

The problem I have always had is not identifying what is wrong — I have been able to see that clearly for years. The difficulty is making others see the same picture. When you have watched the same pattern play out across dozens of businesses, it becomes obvious. But obvious to you is not obvious to a CEO who has just been told by a CMO that the new ABM platform will fix everything. They need external validation. They need respected names in respected publications to say what we have been saying.

These four articles provided exactly that. They are not from salesXchange. They are from Gartner, from the Harvard Business Review, from the co-founder of Marketo, and from one of the most respected voices in SaaS metrics. And every single one of them, from a different angle, arrives at the same conclusion we reached years ago: the standard B2B model is broken, and doing more of the same will not fix it.

If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got. The only difference now is that the people running the platforms that sold you the broken model are starting to admit there are holes in it. That should tell you everything.

2. The Big Problem with Sales

Let me be direct: traditional digital marketing, the entire MarTech stack marketers are expected to run, demand generation, lead generation, ABM — none of it works for B2B. It never has. And I've been watching businesses waste money on it for years.

I want to take you through a piece of analysis that sharpened my thinking on exactly why the numbers never add up. A few years ago I read a post on LinkedIn shared by Jon Miller — co-founder of Marketo, former CEO of Engagio (the ABM SaaS business that merged with Demandbase in 2020), and former CMO at Demandbase. Miller has since moved on to build his next start-up, but at the time he was as close to the beating heart of ABM orthodoxy as anyone. I had also worked my way through the ABM/ABX playbook he had published.

The post that stopped me in my tracks was titled The Sales & Marketing Expense Ratio, written by Dave Kellogg — advisor, former CEO, and one of the sharper analysts of enterprise software economics around.

The Numbers Tell the Story

Kellogg identifies something that most businesses in this space refuse to talk about openly: there is a structural cost imbalance between sales and marketing, and marketing is the reason for it.

Because marketing consistently fails to generate real pipeline, Chief Revenue Officers have no choice but to hire more and more BDRs and SDRs to pick up the slack. That keeps pushing the sales-to-marketing spend ratio further and further out of balance — to a 75/25 split. Kellogg's view is that it should sit at 50:50. The gap between those two numbers represents the cost of marketing's failure, loaded onto the sales headcount budget.

He also shows that the total cost of sales and marketing as a proportion of business expenses changes dramatically with growth rate. A $15m SaaS business growing at 25% spends around 20% of its costs on sales and marketing. The same business growing at 75% sees that figure rise to 46%. The faster you try to grow using broken go-to-market strategies, the more expensive those broken strategies become.

Where the Blame Always Lands

Here is what really sticks. Because marketing cannot show results and the CRO is piling in more BDRs to compensate, the overall cost of sales bloats. The split deteriorates. And when new business numbers disappoint — which they reliably do — the CMO becomes the scapegoat. That is the direct reason why, by my research, the average CMO tenure sits at around 18 months. Spend three months building a plan, twelve months trying to execute it through tools that were never designed for B2B, then spend the final three months clearing their desk.

For context on the wider picture: Spencer Stuart's 2024 CMO Tenure Study puts average tenure at the Fortune 500 at around 4.2 years — the shortest of any C-suite role. In the technology sector specifically, that average falls to around 3 years. We all know what that means at the smaller, faster-burning SaaS businesses where the pressure is most intense. The numbers are worse. The tenure at those businesses is exactly what you would expect when marketing has no answer and the CRO is paying for the failure out of his headcount budget.

Kellogg makes the wry observation that the CRO should at least have the decency to attend the CMO's leaving party. He has a point.

No Solution Was Offered

To be fair to Kellogg, he diagnoses the problem accurately. The imbalance is real. The failure is real. He suggests the CMO needs to get the CRO and CFO on side. Fine advice, as far as it goes.

But he does not offer a solution. He does not say what marketing should actually do differently. He does not challenge the fundamental model — the one that borrowed consumer demand generation tactics, dressed them up in B2B language, and sold them to businesses that had no idea the underlying machinery was designed for someone buying a pair of jeans, not a six-figure software contract.

That is the real problem. The sales and marketing industry produced a system it cannot defend and cannot replace — so it just keeps running it, watching CMOs come and go, and loading the cost of failure onto BDR headcount. Nobody in that chain wants to be the first to say the model is broken from the ground up.

I will say it. The model is broken from the ground up. And the rest of this article explains what you do instead.

3. The Digital Transformation Myth

Here is what typically happens. New business stalls. Marketing gets the blame. The CRO hires more people to compensate. Costs rise. Results don't. Then someone at board level says the words "Digital Transformation" and everyone nods along as if that is the answer. I've watched this play out in business after business and it drives me mad, because the problem has been misdiagnosed from the start.

Digital Transformation — or DT as the consultants love to call it — is sold as the solution to operational inefficiency. Streamline your processes. Improve the customer experience. Deploy Business Process Management platforms. Get slicker. And yes, there is genuine value in all of that. But here is what nobody in the boardroom says out loud: if you haven't fixed how you find and win new customers, you have transformed nothing.

The influencers and consultants pushing DT are talking about internal operations. Systems talking to systems. Workflows that run smoother. Back-office efficiency. What they are not talking about is why the pipeline is empty and why the marketing budget keeps disappearing with nothing to show for it. That gap — the go-to-market gap — is where the real problem lives. And DT, as it is typically defined, does not touch it.

The Board's Fatal Assumption

Most boards believe that getting new business is cheap. It's a cheap telesales hire, a cheap marketing automation subscription, and a prayer. When it doesn't work, the solution is to take on more people, because dialling 400 numbers to find one interested party is somehow preferable to rethinking the model. And when the CMO fails to deliver — which happens reliably within eighteen months — you replace them with another one who makes the same promises and starts the clock again.

I've been in those rooms. I've sat on those boards. The assumption is that selling is simple and marketing is even simpler. Call them, send them something, they'll buy. And because directors believe that, they see no reason to question the underlying strategy. Why change something you think is easy?

That assumption is exactly why sales and marketing transformation never happens. Not digital transformation — sales and marketing transformation. That is the long description for what we call digital selling at salesXchange. And it is the one transformation that never gets put on the agenda, because the people who should be pushing it either don't understand it or are too invested in the current model to change it.

Transforming the Wrong Thing

Think about it this way. Boards approve large DT budgets to overhaul operations, improve customer touchpoints and build slicker internal processes. Nobody argues with that in principle. But what about the experience the customer had before they became a customer? What was the buying experience actually like? Was it a cold call out of nowhere? A pestering sequence of automated emails they never asked for? A demand generation form that blocked the very information they needed?

We know that 83% of B2B buyers research digitally and define what they want before they speak to anyone in sales. By the time your BDR gets them on the phone, they have already made up their mind about who they like. If the first thing they encountered from your company was an unsolicited cold call or a form demanding their contact details, you lost them before the conversation began. No amount of back-office transformation fixes that. And Gartner confirmed in 2024 that 73% of B2B buyers will actively avoid a supplier who sends irrelevant outreach. They don't call back. They just disappear.

So you can have the slickest CRM, the most elegant customer portal, and the most optimised onboarding workflow in your sector. If the front door — the experience of discovering you, researching you, and deciding whether to trust you — is broken, everything behind it is wasted effort. You are polishing the inside of a house that nobody walked into.

Why DT Projects Keep Failing

The numbers are not encouraging. Research from BCG and McKinsey consistently shows that around 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to meet their objectives. Bain's 2024 analysis found that 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. Globally, failed DT programmes have wasted an estimated $2.3 trillion. That is not a rounding error.

The standard explanation for these failures points to poor change management, cultural resistance, and technology adoption problems. All true. But there is a more fundamental issue that nobody names: most DT projects are solving for the wrong objective. The objective was never clearly defined in the first place. The board approved a project to become more efficient. But efficient at what? Serving customers better? Great. Finding them in the first place? Crickets.

It is like the old Inspector Clouseau sketch. "Your dog is biting my leg." "It's not my dog." Marketing says it's not their problem. Sales says it's not their fault. The CRO hires more BDRs. The CMO recuts the deck. And the DT programme quietly excludes the one thing that needed transforming most.

What Actually Needs to Change

If the objective of Digital Transformation is to streamline the business, make operations more efficient, and serve customers better at every point — then the buying experience has to be part of that scope. Not an afterthought. Not the next project. Part of this one.

Because if a customer's first experience of your business was pestering cold calls, irrelevant automated sequences, and a website that hid all its useful content behind a form — that customer is not going to become loyal. They tolerated the experience to get to the product. The moment a competitor shows up with a cleaner, more respectful buying process, they will leave. And all your investment in DT will not bring them back.

We call this Sales and Marketing Transformation. It means designing the entire go-to-market process around the way buyers actually want to buy — self-directed, anonymous in the early stages, educational before promotional — and then building the digital infrastructure that supports that. It is not a buzzword. It is the piece of the transformation puzzle that boards keep leaving out, then wondering why the finished picture doesn't look right.

If your selling and marketing strategy is still mapped out on the back of a napkin, the outcome — or the lack of one — should come as no surprise. And calling the wider change programme a Digital Transformation doesn't fix that. It just gives the problem a more expensive name.

4. Is One-to-One B2B Sales Dying?

Here is a commonly held belief: B2B sales is dying because buyers no longer want to speak to salespeople. And here is why that belief is both right and wrong at the same time — and why getting confused between the two will cost you dearly.

A while back I came across an article in the Harvard Business Review called Traditional B2B Sales & Marketing are Becoming Obsolete, written by Brent Adamson, former Distinguished Vice President at Gartner and co-author of The Challenger Sale. Brent knows his subject. He has spent decades researching how B2B organisations actually sell and how buyers actually buy — and the gap between those two things is enormous.

His core argument was straightforward: the way most B2B businesses sell has become misaligned with the way their prospects want to buy. Not slightly misaligned. Structurally, fundamentally broken. The traditional commercial model — sales team on one side, marketing team on the other, both operating in their own silo and passing leads back and forth in a linear sequence — no longer reflects how purchase decisions get made.

Brent referenced Gartner survey data showing that B2B buyers now spend only around 17% of their total buying time in direct contact with any supplier's sales team. And that 17% is split across every supplier they are evaluating, not just yours. So the actual window of access you have to a prospect in a competitive deal is tiny. Meanwhile, buyers spend the rest of their time researching independently online, reading, comparing, forming opinions, and building internal consensus — all before most salespeople even know they exist.

That tracks exactly with what we see. 83% of B2B buyers define their requirements and research digitally before they ever speak to anyone in sales. By the time a prospect gets in touch, they have usually already decided who they prefer. They are just validating the decision, not making it. Recent research from 6Sense confirms this: buyers still mostly or fully define their purchase requirements 83% of the time before speaking with sales, even as economic pressures have shortened timelines.

So the question is not whether one-to-one sales is dying. It is not. Complex B2B purchases will always need a human conversation at some point. The question is: what happens in the long stretch before that conversation? That is where most businesses are completely invisible to the people who could buy from them.

The SMART Technologies Example

To illustrate the problem and a possible answer to it, Brent used the example of SMART Technologies — a Calgary-based business of around 1,300 people that sells interactive display technology to schools and enterprises. SMART Technologies were struggling with exactly what most B2B businesses struggle with: the traditional separation of sales and marketing was creating friction, confusion, and wasted effort at every stage of the customer relationship.

Their response was to tear down the silos entirely. They dismantled the traditional sales, marketing, customer success, and service functions and rebuilt them from scratch around what they called a Unified Commercial Engine, or UCE. Rather than designing around internal processes and departmental KPIs, they designed the whole commercial operation around the buying jobs their customers needed to complete at each stage of a purchase decision. The result: revenue growth of 40%.

That is not a marginal improvement. That is what happens when you stop organising your business around your own internal convenience and start organising it around the way your customer actually behaves.

Why This Matters and What It Confirms

Brent's article confirmed something I had already concluded independently, having spent years watching B2B businesses haemorrhage money on demand generation, ABM, PPC, and marketing automation — none of which was designed for B2B in the first place. The whole apparatus was borrowed from consumer marketing and dropped into a B2B context where it simply does not work the same way.

The reason one-to-one sales appears to be dying is not that buyers have stopped wanting human contact. It is that businesses have made themselves inaccessible, unhelpful, and invisible during the 80% of the buying process that happens before first contact. Buyers do their research, form their shortlist, and make their provisional decision entirely without you. Then, if your name happens to be on the list, you get the call.

If it is not, you never hear from them at all. And you never know why.

Gartner's own 2024 survey data reinforces this: 61% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience, and 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. Bad prospecting does not just fail — it actively damages your chances with the very people you are trying to reach.

The fix is not to abolish sales. The fix is to make your business genuinely useful and visible during the research phase — before the salesperson gets involved. That means open-access content, clear positioning, honest education, and a digital presence that answers the questions your prospects are actually asking. When you do that, the one-to-one sales conversation does not die. It becomes far more productive, because the person sitting across from you already understands what you do and why it matters to them.

Reading Brent's article felt like external validation of what I had already built. I had spent years developing a B2B strategy grounded in exactly this reality — not theory, but the real-world observation that the market had changed and the old playbook had stopped working. His conclusions and mine pointed in the same direction. The difference is, I had already started building the alternative.

5. Account Based Marketing & Experience (ABM/ABX)

Let me tell you what ABM is supposed to be, and then show you what it actually is. Once you see the gap, you cannot unsee it.

I read Jon Miller's Clear & Complete Guide to Account-Based Experience when it came out. Jon co-founded Marketo, built Engagio, became CMO of Demandbase — the architect of the whole ABM/ABX category. He has since left Demandbase and is now running a new startup reimagining marketing automation. If anyone was going to tell me I had missed something important about ABM, it was going to be Jon. I went in with an open mind.

I have been clear across this website about where I stand on marketing automation and MarTech for B2B. It does not work. The reason so few others are saying so is simple: they have not joined the dots. But that will never stop me reading everything I can find to make sure I have not missed anything.

The Premise Sounds Reasonable

Here is the logic ABM is sold on. Demand generation was not producing results. The vendors explained why: it was because multiple people are involved in a B2B purchasing decision, so targeting just one contact was never going to be enough. According to Forrester's 2024 Business Buying Report, the average B2B purchase now involves around 13 stakeholders. For larger enterprise deals, buying committees can run to 20 people or more. The answer, said the vendors, was ABM — target all the decision-makers simultaneously, personalise every touchpoint, and the deals will follow.

That sounds logical. So why does it fall apart?

What Buyers Actually Want

Jon's own guide confirmed something we have known for years at salesXchange: 100% of B2B buyers hate filling out forms. They want to self-serve, self-educate, and remain anonymous. They do not want to be identified. They do not want to be called. They do not want a gift in the post. They want to research on their own terms and speak to someone only when they are ready.

We know that 83% of B2B buyers research digitally before speaking to anyone. We know that 95% of your market is not actively buying at any given time. Yet ABM doubles down on chasing the people who are deliberately staying out of sight. The whole framework is built on hunting people who have made a conscious decision not to be found.

The Surveillance Problem

One of my pet hates in selling is any kind of underhand tactic, and ABM is full of them. A central component of the strategy is reverse IP lookup — tools like Lead Forensics, Clearbit, Albacross, and Demandbase's own platform — which identify the company that has browsed your website. You then hunt down the likely stakeholders through LinkedIn or external databases and cold call or cold email them.

Think about that. Jon himself stated in his guide that he actively chastised anyone who sent him a cold email because he wanted to remain anonymous. He was describing, in the same publication, a strategy that does exactly that to other people. The person who built ABM did not want to be on the receiving end of it.

And the tools have only multiplied. Beyond Lead Forensics, you now have platforms like 6sense, ZoomInfo, RB2B, and Warmly all doing versions of the same thing — trying to unmask the anonymous visitor and hand their details to a sales rep. There is even a category of tools that match IP address data against consumer spending databases to surface mobile numbers for cold calling. That is why you get called on a Saturday.

The Gifting Strategy

The final nail was the gifting element baked into ABM programmes. Sending physical gifts to prospects at various stages of the process is positioned as relationship building. I see it differently. Offering anything to a prospect at any stage of a negotiation creates an expectation that more is coming. It puts you on the wrong footing from the start, and it is precisely why anti-bribery legislation exists. If your product needs a hamper to open a door, you have a different problem.

More of the Same, Dressed Up Differently

ABX is simply ABM with a rebrand. The thinking has not changed. Rather than build a strategy around how people actually want to buy, ABM and ABX expand the same broken digital marketing model outwards — hitting more people, using more channels, spending more money — in the hope that sheer volume across the buying committee produces a result.

The industry has poured billions into this. The ABM technology market is forecast to grow past five billion dollars by the end of this decade. Sixty-six percent of marketing leaders increased ABM spending in 2024. Ninety-four percent of marketers say ABM is important to their objectives. And yet, only 52% of companies actually measure the ROI of their ABM programmes. When the majority of practitioners cannot or will not measure whether it works, something has gone wrong.

B2B Buyers Are Not Consumers

People have changed over the past thirty years. They are intelligent, they are cautious, and they have a professional responsibility when they spend company money. A B2C purchase is personal — someone sees something they like and buys it. A B2B purchase means justifying the spend, protecting your job if it goes wrong, and working through a committee of colleagues who all have opinions. That process requires trust built over time through open, accessible information. It does not respond well to being identified, intercepted, and gifted into a sales conversation.

The right approach is to make your content open and accessible so buyers can self-educate without giving up their details. Put everything on your website. Let Google index it. Let people come to you when they are ready. That is not a nice idea — it is what 83% of your buyers are already trying to do before they speak to anyone. ABM points in the opposite direction entirely.

Nothing has changed with ABM by calling it ABX. The tactics are the same. The assumptions are the same. The results will be the same.

6. The Push-Back!

By Sunday evening I was feeling pretty satisfied. I had read Dave Kellogg's Kellblog piece on the sales and marketing expense ratio, I had joined the dots with Brent Adamson's Harvard Business Review article confirming that traditional B2B sales and marketing was becoming obsolete, and I had Jon Miller's publication confirming that nothing had materially changed with ABM. Three independent voices, all pointing in the same direction.

Then Dave Kellogg published a second article — Traditional B2B Sales is Dead, Long Live the UCE? — this time going after Brent's argument paragraph by paragraph. Which surprised me, because in his first piece Dave had not actually offered any practical answer to what struggling marketers were supposed to do. The closest he got was suggesting they make friends with the CFO and the CRO and hope they kept their jobs.

Now, I have no problem with disagreement. Disagreement is how you get to the truth. But what struck me was the scale of the rebuttal. Dave described Brent's piece as an eight-page article — and the irony is that Dave's own takedown ran to over 2,200 words, which is longer than what he was criticising. Brent's piece came in at around 1,810 words. Think about that for a moment. You write more than 2,200 words to dismiss something you are describing as overlong. And then, in his penultimate paragraph, Dave noted — almost as a footnote — that Brent's featured case study, SMART Technologies, was a business Dave had some history with from around 2010. Draw your own conclusions about whether that context shaped the strength of the reaction.

Here is the question I kept coming back to: if Brent was so completely wrong, why not just say so in a paragraph? A clean rebuttal takes thirty seconds to write. The fact that it took 2,200 words tells you something. Either the argument required significant effort to unpick — which would suggest Brent was onto something — or there was another reason for the effort involved. I genuinely do not know which, and I am not going to speculate beyond what the facts show.

What I do know is this. Dave Kellogg has built a substantial following, and his views on B2B go-to-market carry real weight in SaaS circles. If businesses are aligning their strategy to his position — that traditional B2B sales still works and the UCE concept is overcooked — then his influence matters. Brent, writing as a Distinguished Vice President at Gartner, is saying the opposite: that the current commercial model is becoming obsolete, that buyers have moved on, and that the way most businesses still try to sell is badly out of sync with how people actually want to buy.

Both of these men have serious credentials. I am not going to tell you who is right. What I will say is this: stop looking at other people's opinions and look at your own numbers. What does your pipeline actually look like? What is your cost of customer acquisition doing year on year? How many BDRs are you carrying because marketing is not delivering the leads it promised? How long has your current CMO been in post?

If everything is working, you do not need this website. But if you are adding headcount to compensate for campaigns that are not converting, paying for MarTech that nobody is properly using, and watching your sales and marketing expense ratio drift further out of balance — then the answer is not to pick a side in a LinkedIn debate between two Americans. The answer is to accept that the model is broken and start building one that actually fits how B2B buyers behave today.

You decide whose side you are on. Just make sure you are deciding based on what your bank account says, not on who writes the most convincing blog posts.

7. What This All Means

There is a belief that runs through almost every B2B boardroom: if the sales numbers are down, get better marketing. Buy more tools. Hire a CMO. Launch an ABM programme. Run some paid search. Add another layer to the MarTech stack. Something will eventually stick.

None of it is working. And the reason it is not working is not bad execution. It is a bad premise.

The Strategy Was Never Designed for You

Every piece of demand generation technology — the automation platforms, the ABM tools, the PPC campaigns, the gated content landing pages — was designed for businesses selling to consumers. Banks, insurance companies, car manufacturers, travel brands. These are organisations where a person sees something they like and buys it. The emotional trigger fires and the transaction happens.

B2B does not work like that. A B2B buyer is not spending their own money. They are protecting their job, justifying an ROI to a CFO, and navigating a buying group that now regularly involves ten or more people. The decision takes months. The research happens in private. By the time a prospect gets in touch with you, they have already shortlisted their preferred vendor. You are not influencing that process with a retargeting ad or a gated whitepaper.

We know from research that 83% of B2B buyers define their purchase requirements before they speak to anyone in sales. Buyers spend roughly 80% of the entire buying process without any direct contact with a vendor. When they do reach out, 81% already have a preferred supplier in mind. Your demand generation programme is not creating that preference. Your visibility — or the lack of it — is.

The Tools Made the Problem Worse

MarTech did not solve the new business problem. It inflated the cost of failing at it. Go-to-market teams grew to roughly five times the size they needed to be to operate the platforms, manage the campaigns, write the automation sequences, run the ABM plays, and report the KPIs. Meanwhile, no one was held to account for revenue. If sales were poor, it was the salespeople's fault. The CMO lasted an average of 18 months — three months of planning, twelve months executing, three months heading for the exit.

The salespeople, meanwhile, were made progressively more impotent. Cold calling still takes around 400 calls to find a single interested party, at roughly 75 calls per day. At any given moment, 95% of your market is not actively buying. You cannot automate your way out of that arithmetic, and you cannot ABM your way around it either. ABM is simply demand generation with more recipients. It still relies on the same broken premise: interrupt people who are not ready to buy, hand their details to a BDR, and hope something converts.

Anti-Bribery Laws Exist for a Reason

The gifting strategies that became standard practice inside ABM programmes are not just ineffective — they are legally and reputationally dangerous. Anti-bribery legislation is clear. The moment you start sending gifts to prospects at any stage of a negotiation, you create an expectation. You also create a liability. Buyers who receive gifts do not feel grateful. They feel suspicious. Or they start to expect more. Neither outcome moves a deal forward.

Genuine customer relationships are not built with Amazon vouchers. They are built by demonstrating, consistently and at scale, that you understand a prospect's world better than your competitors do.

The Exposure Problem Cannot Be Solved in Isolation

Cold calling, ABM, PPC, marketing automation — none of these tactics solve the fundamental exposure problem. They all share the same structural flaw: they reach a tiny subset of your total addressable market, at a moment in time when most of those people are not buying, and they do so at a cost that cannot be justified by the returns.

The UK sees 500,000 businesses start and another 500,000 close every single year. Business failure rates sit at 20% in year one, 30% in year two, 50% by year three, and 91% by year ten. You do not survive those odds by spending more on the same things that were not working before. You survive by reaching more of the right people, educating them before they are ready to buy, and being the obvious choice when they are.

Willingness to Look at the Numbers Is Not Optional

The reason these failures persist is that no one in a marketing department wants to open the spreadsheet and prove the ROI. Consumer businesses talk openly about getting a three-to-one or five-to-one return on every pound of marketing spend. B2B organisations keep everything as quiet as possible. That silence is the tell.

If you are a CEO or a business owner reading this, the one thing I would ask you to do is demand the numbers. Not the MQL count. Not the click-through rate. Not the engagement score. The actual revenue generated, attributable directly to marketing spend, net of all costs. Then decide whether what you have been doing makes sense.

AI tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others — can speed up content production, research, and outreach sequencing. But AI amplifies whatever model you feed it. Give it a broken go-to-market strategy and you will get the wrong outcomes faster. Fix the strategy first. Then use the tools to scale what actually works.

The way forward is not more of the same. It is selling at scale, to the full addressable market, with open-access content that educates rather than gates, and a sales function that is freed up to do what salespeople are actually good at — having real conversations with people who are already informed and already interested.

8. FAQs

What is digital transformation?

Here is the standard answer you will find everywhere: digital transformation is the process of using technology to change how a business operates. Cloud computing. AI. Automation. Integrations. All good stuff on paper.

But notice what that definition leaves out. It says nothing about whether any of it generates new revenue. I have watched businesses spend six and seven figures modernising their tech stack and still not be able to answer a simple question: where is my next customer coming from? Digital transformation that ignores the go-to-market side of the business is just expensive housekeeping. The technology is neutral. What you do with it is the only thing that matters.

What are some examples of digital transformation?

You will read about cloud migration, AI adoption, IoT, big data analytics. All real. All potentially useful. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney, Higgsfield, and DALL-E are now part of how teams create content, research markets, and produce video. None of them are magic. AI amplifies whatever model you feed it. If the underlying go-to-market approach is broken, AI just produces the wrong outputs faster. Fix the approach first. Then use the tools to execute it at scale.

Why is digital transformation important?

The standard line is: transform or get left behind. That sounds urgent. It also conveniently sells consultancy and software.

Here is what the data actually says. We know that 83% of B2B buyers define their purchase requirements before they speak to a salesperson. They research online, anonymously, on their own timeline. If your website and content cannot educate a prospect at that stage, no amount of backend technology changes that. Digital transformation matters because buyers now self-serve. Not because your CRM needs upgrading.

How does digital transformation affect sales and marketing?

The official answer: it helps you reach more people, collect better data, and automate processes. All true in theory.

The reality I have seen in practice is different. MarTech inflated B2B go-to-market team sizes by roughly five times. Businesses ended up with more people, more tools, and less accountability. Marketing KPIs multiplied. Actual revenue from new business did not keep pace. B2B digital marketing and automation — Marketo, HubSpot and the rest — was designed for consumer businesses where someone sees a product and buys it. B2B buyers do not work that way. They are protecting their budgets, their jobs, and their credibility. They research for months before ever raising their hand. A demand generation form is not going to change that. One hundred percent of B2B buyers hate filling out forms. That is not my opinion — that is on the record from Demandbase's own leadership.

What is account-based marketing (ABM)?

ABM is the idea that instead of casting a wide net, you target specific accounts with coordinated, personalised outreach across multiple people in the buying group. The concept is not wrong. The execution almost always is.

It was sold to B2B businesses as the solution to demand generation not working. When marketers could not prove ROI from automation, the vendors said the reason was that multiple people are involved in B2B decisions — up to fifteen or twenty — and you needed to reach all of them simultaneously. So the workload multiplied. The tech stack grew. The team grew. And the results remained as thin as ever. ABM became an expansion of the original broken model, not a replacement for it.

How does ABM fit into a digital transformation strategy?

On paper it fits well: targeted digital outreach, coordinated across channels, aligned to specific high-value accounts. In practice, ABM without a clear educational content strategy is just more of the same spray-and-hope, applied to a shorter list.

ABM works when buyers can self-educate freely and at scale before you ever approach them. That means open-access content, no gating, no forms, no reverse IP look-up gimmicks designed to catch someone browsing your site so you can cold call them on a Saturday morning. If you are thinking about ABM, ask yourself first whether a buyer can visit your website right now and walk away properly educated about their problem and your solution. If not, ABM is not your answer. The content foundation is.

What are some common challenges businesses face during digital transformation?

The standard list is resistance to change, legacy systems, integration complexity, and cybersecurity concerns. Those are all real. But they are not the most dangerous challenge.

The most dangerous challenge is doing the wrong things faster and more expensively. I have spent thirty years watching B2B businesses invest in technology that amplified a failing approach. The go-to-market model was built for a consumer market. The metrics were built to protect the marketing department rather than measure revenue. When digital transformation accelerates a broken process, you burn through budget faster and have more sophisticated data proving the wrong things are working. That is not progress. That is organised failure.

How can businesses overcome these challenges?

Not by buying more software. Not by hiring another CMO on an average eighteen-month tenure who arrives with a new plan, spends twelve months executing it, then leaves before anyone can audit the results.

The answer is to fix the model before you scale it. That means understanding how your buyers actually behave — they research digitally, stay anonymous for as long as possible, and arrive at a conversation already 70 to 80 percent through their decision. Your job is to be visible, credible, and educational during that phase. Build a strategy that serves buyers the way they want to be served. Then use technology — including AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini — to execute that strategy at scale. Not the other way round.

What are some potential benefits of digital transformation for businesses?

Real benefits exist: lower cost of delivery, faster response times, better visibility of what is actually working, and the ability to reach your entire addressable market with educational content without a field sales army.

But the biggest benefit — the one nobody talks about — is the ability to sell at scale to the 95% of your market that is not actively buying right now. Most businesses only target the 5% who are already in-market. Digital transformation, done properly, means the other 95% know who you are and trust you before they even start looking. That is the competitive advantage. Not the technology itself.

How can businesses measure the success of a digital transformation strategy?

Revenue from new business. That is the only number that matters. Not MQLs. Not marketing-qualified leads that the sales team ignores. Not click-through rates. Not pipeline created by marketing that never converts.

I am not saying ignore all other metrics. Track them. But hold every activity against a single question: did this bring in a new customer, or did it move a prospect closer to becoming one? If marketing cannot draw a straight line from its activity to a closed deal, it is measuring itself rather than the business. The KPIs have to change before the results do. Start there.

9. Conclusion

There is a belief that runs deep in B2B — that if you just do more of what you have always done, with slightly better tools, it will eventually start working. It won't. And the numbers have been telling you that for years.

Here is the test I always suggest. Forget the dashboards. Forget the CMO's slide deck. What does your bank account say? What does your CFO say when they're being honest? Are your sales and marketing teams actually producing new revenue, or are they producing activity? Those are different things.

Cold calling is a 400-to-1 shot — roughly 400 calls to find one person who will have a conversation. The average CMO lasts eighteen months in the job. Three months planning, twelve executing, three months quietly looking for the next role. And Forrester's own research confirms that fewer than 1% of leads travelling through a demand generation funnel ever become revenue-generating customers. Less than one in a hundred. That is the strategy the industry has been telling you to invest in.

In the UK, 20% of all businesses fail in year one. 30% are gone by year two. 50% do not make it to year three. By year ten, 91% have closed. Of businesses that received investment, 40% fail completely, 75% never hit their own targets, and 95% fail to return the investment their backers put in. These figures come from the Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times and Sifted. They do not point to bad luck. They point to a broken model being repeated at scale.

And yet the model keeps going. Why? Because CEOs have not been presented with an alternative. CMOs and CROs keep proposing more of the same — more MarTech, more automation, more ABM, more BDRs dialling through lists — because that is the only playbook they know. We have watched MarTech inflate B2B go-to-market team sizes by roughly five times, and the results have got worse, not better.

The MarTech industry built its case studies on consumer brands — insurance companies, car manufacturers, retail giants. Businesses where someone sees something they like and buys it. B2B is not that. B2B buyers want to know if your product or service will make them money. They want to research it themselves, on their own terms, without filling out a form that triggers a BDR call. Gartner's data now confirms that 61% of B2B buyers prefer a completely rep-free buying experience, and 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. We know from our own research that 83% of B2B buyers complete the majority of their research digitally before they ever speak to anyone. 95% of your total addressable market is not actively buying at any given time. The job is to be visible, useful and trusted by all of them — not just the 5% raising their hand today.

One-to-one selling, cold outreach and marketing automation cannot get you the exposure you need. ABM cannot get you there either. These tactics cannot reach a total addressable market. They cannot operate at the scale a B2B business needs to survive. They have been failing year after year, and the only reason they persist is that nobody wanted to stand up and say so — because admitting it means admitting the last five, ten, fifteen years of budget was largely wasted.

I am not suggesting every CEO is naive or careless. Most are doing what they were told to do by the people they hired to know better. The problem is those people did not know better. Or they did, and said nothing, because their job security depended on the existing model continuing.

What B2B businesses actually need is scale and exposure that cold calling, automation and ABM can never provide. Low cost. Open access. Content that educates prospects on their own terms, without forms, without friction, without a BDR interrupting the moment they show interest. A strategy that shows your prospects you are there to help them at every stage — so that when they are ready to move, you are already the obvious choice.

That is not fiction. We have spent years building and refining exactly that strategy, and everything is available to learn on this website with no access restrictions. We practice what we preach. You can work through it yourself, or you can bring us in to fast-track the process inside your business.

The current approach does not work. MarTech is not the answer. Getting this right is about attitude towards prospects, not budget size. The right type of technology, used in the right way, costs very little. What it requires is clear thinking about how buyers actually behave — and the courage to build for that instead of the funnel mythology everyone else is still following.