Stagflation playbook: balance brand durability with CAC efficiency
This week: How AI is creating hybrid human-agent teams, why agility beats budget in the AI race, and how to prove marketing’s impact on revenue. And the new rules for navigating privacy, plus what economic headwinds mean for your 2026 planning.
The Agentic Shift: How AI is Redefining GTM Teams
The debate is no longer about whether AI will replace sales and marketing jobs, but how it will redefine them. The future of go-to-market isn’t a battle between humans and machines; it’s a blended model where humans orchestrate teams of AI agents to achieve new levels of productivity.
This new structure creates what some are calling the Agentic Enterprise, where AI handles scale and humans eliminate friction. According to a recent McKinsey report, high-performing companies are redesigning entire workflows around AI, not just plugging in new tools. This shift creates entirely new roles and redefines existing ones.
For CMOs, this means preparing for a significant shift in team structure and skill sets. The most valuable employees won’t just use AI; they will manage and direct it to drive business outcomes. As the 2025 State of Go-to-Market report shows, AI-native companies are already allocating more headcount to post-sales roles to support technical onboarding and adoption. As Box CEO Aaron Levie explains, AI makes specialized skills abundant, allowing a single person to do more, but it also raises the bar for what a job entails.
BIG IDEA: The future of GTM is a hybrid model where AI agents handle scale and humans manage strategy and remove friction.
WHY IT MATTERS: Your competitors are already using AI to build leaner, faster, and more efficient GTM motions; upskilling your team to manage this new reality is not optional.
- Aaron Levie notes that AI agents reduce the cost of trying new ideas, which fundamentally changes the scope of work an organization can take on.
- Jason M. Lemkin observes that the Age of AI is creating change on a scale not seen since the early days of the web, and he expects a wave of executive retirements as a result.
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The Accountability Mandate: Rethinking GTM Measurement
In a market where every dollar is scrutinized, marketing teams are under immense pressure to prove their contribution to the bottom line. Yet, a staggering number of marketers still struggle to connect their efforts to revenue.
This disconnect often stems from a reliance on outdated attribution models that fail to capture the complexity of the modern B2B buyer journey. The problem with traditional last-touch attribution is that it oversimplifies a long and winding path. As the team at HockeyStack demonstrates, B2B buyers interact with multiple touchpoints—ads, blog posts, webinars, peer reviews—before ever speaking to sales. Attributing a deal solely to the final click on a demo request form ignores the crucial brand-building and educational content that influenced the decision.
To gain credibility with the C-suite, CMOs must shift from vanity metrics to revenue-focused KPIs. As brand marketer Liam Moroney points out, you can’t answer "how will you increase results?" without first understanding the total addressable demand. This means adopting multi-touch attribution models, tracking brand recall through search, and providing a holistic view of the entire funnel, from first touch to closed-won revenue.
BIG IDEA: If you can't connect your marketing activities directly to pipeline and revenue, you're measuring the wrong things.
WHY IT MATTERS: In a budget-conscious environment, the ability to prove marketing's ROI is no longer a nice-to-have; it's essential for survival and growth.
- Liam Moroney argues that marketing earns a strategic seat by talking about the broader market and its trends, not just emulating sales and finance.
- Dev Basu advises that dashboards must connect activity to revenue outcomes like pipeline coverage and CAC payback, not just traffic and MQLs.
The Human Element: Brand and Influence in the AI Era
As AI automates scale, the most valuable currency in B2B marketing is becoming something machines can’t replicate: human trust. This is driving a clear shift from corporate-led to people-led marketing, where the authentic voices of founders, executives, and employees are cutting through the noise.
Data shows this isn’t just a feel-good strategy; it’s a powerful GTM motion. According to TechGrowth, 58% of decision-makers rely on influencer insights for business decisions, and 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations over traditional ads. This is why employee advocacy programs are gaining traction; they turn your team into a distributed marketing engine, building credibility through authentic, personal stories.
For CMOs, this means empowering internal experts and founders to build personal brands. It’s no longer enough to have a polished company page; reach is now driven by the collective influence of your people. This can take the form of founder-led content, which builds trust with early customers, or strategic B2B influencer marketing that leverages the credibility of established industry experts. The goal is to create a network of trusted voices that validate your brand and its message.
BIG IDEA: In an increasingly automated world, the most effective marketing is human-powered.
WHY IT MATTERS: Your brand's credibility is no longer just what you say about yourself; it's what your team, your customers, and trusted industry voices say about you.
- Brian Halligan reflects on the long-term impact of personal influence, noting how rewarding it is to see people inspired by his past content go on to have stellar careers.
- Adam Goyette quips that the cringey "viral" tactics of the past, like flash mobs, have simply been replaced by the modern equivalent: LinkedIn thought leadership selfies.
The Walled Garden Tightens: Navigating Privacy and Signal Loss
The technical foundations of digital marketing are cracking. A wave of privacy changes from Google, Apple, and Microsoft is forcing a fundamental rethink of how B2B brands reach and measure their audiences.
The changes are coming from all sides. Following Google and Yahoo, Microsoft began enforcing new bulk sender requirements in May 2025, meaning that senders without proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configurations will see their deliverability plummet. Meanwhile, the deadline for implementing Google’s Consent Mode v2 passed in July, and marketers who haven’t correctly configured their consent signals are facing significant data gaps in GA4 and Google Ads. To top it off, Safari 26 is rolling out advanced fingerprinting protection by default, further constraining cross-site tracking.
For CMOs, the message is clear: the era of relying on third-party tracking is definitively over. Deliverability and first-party data are now table stakes. You must treat email authentication as a top priority to avoid the junk folder and ensure your consent management is correctly implemented to maintain ad measurement capabilities. As the privacy landscape in ad-tech continues to fragment, building direct relationships with your audience is the only durable strategy.
BIG IDEA: The technical bar for effective marketing has been permanently raised; what was once best practice is now the bare minimum for survival.
WHY IT MATTERS: If you don't master email authentication, consent management, and first-party data strategies, your ability to reach and measure your audience will rapidly degrade.
- Jason M. Lemkin states, "Humans should touch customers’ data as little as possible… Customers have an expectation of privacy for their data. Take it seriously."
Economic Realities: Navigating B2B Marketing in a Stagnant Market
While tech markets are buzzing with AI-driven optimism, the broader economic picture is less rosy. Key indicators are pointing toward a period of mild stagflation, forcing marketing leaders to balance long-term brand building with short-term efficiency.
Economists like Tyler Cowen are flagging the risk of sticky costs combined with slower demand, a sentiment echoed by the Penta-CivicScience Economic Sentiment Index, which recently hit its lowest point since July 2022. Cyclical signals, such as a 15.7% year-over-year drop in heavy truck sales reported by Calculated Risk, suggest a cautious outlook that is likely to extend B2B sales cycles and increase CFO scrutiny on every dollar of marketing spend.
For CMOs, this environment demands a dual-pronged strategy. On one hand, it’s crucial to defend brand investment, which builds the long-term demand resilience needed to weather a downturn. On the other, you must ruthlessly optimize for CAC efficiency on performance channels. This is a time for realistic pipeline pacing and scenario planning, not growth-at-all-costs. While AI-driven productivity gains can help offset some pressures, the fundamental challenge is navigating a market where buyers are more cautious and budgets are tighter.
BIG IDEA: Mild stagflation is the new operating reality, forcing a strategic balance between long-term brand investment and short-term efficiency.
WHY IT MATTERS: If your marketing plan doesn't account for longer sales cycles and increased budget scrutiny, you risk being caught flat-footed in a market that punishes inefficiency.
- Brian Halligan reflects on the current economic reality, noting, "I know so many good companies that got trapped by a sky high 2021 valuation."
- Des Traynor points out that selling to European companies is a "heavier lift" due to data residency rules and risk aversion, a factor that is exacerbated in a tight economy.
Sound Bites
That’s all for this week. The throughline is clear: AI is a powerful accelerant, but it can’t fix a flawed strategy. The leaders who will win in 2026 are those who are doubling down on the fundamentals—a deep understanding of their customer, a differentiated message, and a relentless focus on proving their impact on revenue.
