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While staying on top of AI trends is definitely important, there are many other things that will shape how marketers operate this year.
We have a piece that is entirely focused on AI in Marketing Ops in 2026 here. But in this article, we’re going to put all things AI aside.
Some of the most meaningful shifts happening right now are about fundamentals: how we define our audience, what we measure, how teams work together, and whether we’re operating proactively or reactively.
Here’s what our leadership team thinks marketers should be paying attention to in 2026.
The truth is, B2B purchases aren’t made by individual leads. They’re made by buying groups (a collection of people who decide together on what the best solution is). And while we’ve been moving toward account-centric models for well over a decade now, our systems are still person-focused.
Our processes and metrics are still lead-focused, at least at the beginning. Account-level orchestration and buying group workflows exist, but they’re duct-taped together manually because the underlying systems weren’t built for it.
But that’s starting to change. We now have the data and analytics capabilities to actually investigate buying groups, and this will have a huge impact on how we run our processes.
Going forward into 2026, marketers should think about what this shift means in practice. Ask yourself questions like:
If a buying group has ten people from a company, you can’t attribute the “MQL moment” to a single person’s most recent interaction. You’ll have to create ways for BDRs to understand what the buying group is interested in, what all recent interactions were, and who the warmest contacts are within that group.
The language we use will eventually start to follow the reality. Stages like “MQL” may come out of the funnel entirely, replaced by something more account-level and business-ready.
There’s been a tendency for teams to micro-analyze everything. But the core metric needs to be simpler: revenue, and what’s driving revenue. Everything else should feed into that.
While traditional funnel metrics like lead-to-MQL conversion rates are useful, in a world where the funnel shape is changing, it makes more sense to figure out what avenues are truly driving revenue and measure those instead.
For example, metrics like website visits, open rates, and click rates can look impressive on a report, but if none of that is transitioning to revenue, they’re not telling you much.
The same applies to how organizations operate.
Reactive marketing teams tend to optimize for outputs like leads, clicks, MQLs, etc. But those are lagging indicators. They aren’t direct proof that what you’re doing is working.
A lot of companies have been operating out of a “reactive model” for marketing and data. If you think you may be doing this, a simple tell is when someone asks “why” you did something, you have to pull a report to give them the answer.
For example, when asked, “Why did that lead get prioritized?”, you answer that the model scored it that way. Or “Why did we run this campaign?”, your answer is because it worked last quarter.
These are responses to signals, but they don’t articulate clear intent.
Reactive teams discover the meaning of things after the fact. They let tools define their priorities, instead of defining priorities themselves and picking tools that align. And they treat dashboards as explanations, not evidence.
In 2026, expectations will be that teams can articulate intent, not just respond to what happened.
We covered this in our AI trends article, but it’s worth repeating here because it’s not just an AI issue.
Data lives in silos. Marketing, sales, and customer success all manage their own version of it, even though it’s the same person moving through the funnel. That fragmentation creates inconsistencies and gaps that compound over time.
Before adding new technology, teams need to rebuild trust in their data. This means standardizing fields, fixing routing rules, and cleaning up years of messy inputs. Going back to identify the sources of those messy inputs will be key to transforming your business.
And while high-quality, desilod data certainly isn’t a new concept, it continues to be a central focus for marketing teams in 2026.
Reach out to us here if you want to get more from your marketing investment in 2026 (free 30-min call with one of our consultants).