B2B Reads: Agentic Marketing, B2B Buying, and ABM Benchmarks

Summary

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

After a brief hiatus, B2B Reads is back! On Saturday mornings, we like to share some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the web. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please let us know.

How Gen AI is Disrupting B2B Buying Decisions by Amit Joshi, Ivy Buche & Caroline Schwaer, Harvard Business Review
GenAI is quietly reshaping B2B buying in industries like pharma, manufacturing, and banking. AI assistants are now determining which vendors surface during decision-making, often overriding traditional sales and relationship-based advantages. Any GTM team not thinking about “generative readiness” yet should start now.

What the 2026 ABM Benchmark Survey Reveals About B2B Growth Strategy by James Hickey, Demand Gen Report
The 2026 ABM Benchmark Survey shows 84% of B2B marketers use ABM to drive revenue, with 56% targeting new accounts and 28% focused on expansion. Nearly half (47%) now integrate ABM with demand generation, reflecting a more mature, unified approach to B2B growth.

Salesforce Pushes Agentic Marketing from Planning to Pipeline by Constantine von Hoffman, MarTech
At its Connections event in Chicago, Salesforce showed off a new set of agentic marketing tools that can handle lead qualification, content creation, campaign launches, and performance optimization with minimal human involvement. Marketing automation is moving quickly from AI-assisted to AI-driven.

Leading B2B Firms Twice as Likely to Have ‘Fully Implemented’ Gen AI by Emily Manock, Marketing Week
McKinsey surveyed nearly 4,000 B2B decision-makers across 13 countries and found market leaders are twice as likely to have fully implemented gen AI. Among those leaders, 60% reported double-digit revenue growth in 2025. The difference isn’t which tools they use; it’s whether AI is woven into actual revenue activities or sitting in isolated pilots.

Agentic AI Is Changing How Brands Show Up, But Marketers Can’t Lose Focus on What Happens Next by Helen Edwards, Marketing Week
Getting your brand to appear in agentic AI results is important, but it just lands you on the shortlist next to every other brand that figured out the same thing. Helen Edwards argues the real competition starts after that, and it’s still won by the things AI can’t evaluate: design, experience, and how the brand actually feels to people.

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.