B2B Reads: AI Sales, ABM Fixes, and Agency Spend Shifts

Summary

Some of our favorite B2B sales and marketing posts from around the web this week.

Every Saturday morning we share some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the web from the last week or two (so it’s fresh!). We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please let us know.

The Human Edge in the Age of AI Sales by Tom Burke, Forbes
Automate the research and the account mapping, not the conversation. That’s Tom Burke’s take on AI in sales: buyers can spot a mail-merge instantly, so the humans on your team need to show up sharper and better prepared to create value through relationships.

Why Most B2B ABM Programs Fail Before the First Campaign Goes Live by MarketScale Newsroom, MarketScale
Most ABM programs are dead before launch. Gartner data shows buying groups spend just 17% of their purchase journey with vendors, so a target list built on brand prestige instead of real intent signals is basically an expensive cold-call list.

Your Next Customer Is a Machine: Marketing When 94% of B2B Buyers Ask AI First by Nital Shah, Forbes
Have you asked ChatGPT what it thinks of your company? Most marketers haven’t, and that’s a problem now that AI is doing the introducing before a human ever visits your site.

AI Is Changing How Customers Choose Your Business by Graham Kenny and Ganna Pogrebna, Harvard Business Review
AI is quietly becoming the middleman in every customer relationship you have. Three small businesses figured out how to manage that instead of ignoring it: one screens AI-generated inquiries before wasting engineering time on quotes, another rewrote its site copy after checking how AI tools described it to potential guests.

As AI Use Expands, B2B Marketers Become More Selective About Agency Spend by Karen Tran, Forrester
B2B marketers are pulling back on agency budgets across the board. Expectations for digital marketing agency spend increases dropped from 51% to 31% year over year, and content agency spend from 41% to 26%. It’s not that agencies matter less, it’s that AI made teams pickier about what’s worth paying someone else to do.

Have a wonderful weekend and thank you for reading! If you have B2B news sources you rely on we’d love to hear about them. Please share them with us.