B2B Reads: Microsoft’s B2B Grip, Production Bottlenecks, and Budget Battles

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 (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.

Has Microsoft Quietly Become The Most Important Company In B2B Marketing? by Reuben Webb, The Drum
Microsoft now touches nearly every stage of how a business actually buys: LinkedIn for identity, Copilot and Bing for research, its ad network for media, Dynamics for the CRM record, and Teams for where the work happens. No other company holds that much of the chain at once, and most of B2B marketing hasn’t clocked it yet.

Knak Survey Finds AI Hasn’t Fixed The Production Bottlenecks Behind Missed Launch Dates by James Hickey, Demand Gen Report
85% of enterprise marketing teams missed a campaign launch date last year, and it wasn’t a creativity problem. It was approvals, revisions, and four people touching a single email before it ever went out. AI is great for a first draft, but getting that draft out the door is still human.

B2B Marketing Is Moving Faster Than Its Foundations Can Handle by Mark Ogne, Forrester
88% of B2B marketing orgs have adopted AI, but most still can’t say what it’s actually doing for the business. Forrester’s take: teams keep bolting new capabilities onto data and measurement foundations that were never built to hold them, and it’s costing them credibility.

B2B Marketing Teams Face Their Hardest Budget-Allocation Test Yet by MarketScale Newsroom, MarketScale
ABM, intent data, content personalization, and AI tools are all fighting over the same shrinking line item, and CFOs have stopped accepting “strategic investment” as a good enough answer. A new benchmark survey wants to show which of those bets are actually paying off.

Lessons From An Event Marketing Expert: The B2B Playbook That Drives Impact by Shirin Ali, Forbes
Events without a clear strategy are the first line item to get cut. This one breaks down why acquisition and retention audiences need completely different programming, and why what happens after the event matters more than the event itself.

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.