B2B Reads: AI ROI Reality, Lead Quality Over Volume, and Selling Before Building

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.

Gartner Survey Finds Only 22% of Organizations Have Successfully Scaled AI Across Multiple Business Units by Gartner Newsroom, Gartner
Only 22% of organizations have actually scaled AI across multiple business units, even as 85% of leaders plan to spend more on it this year. The twist: the AI use cases everyone’s racing to adopt, like chatbots and code generation, aren’t the ones producing the strongest returns. The quieter, less hyped applications are.

Stop Treating Lead Quality and Volume as Opposites by Melissa Washburn, MarTech
Marketing keeps whiplashing between “we need more leads” and “these leads aren’t good enough,” as if quality and volume are the same lever with two settings. Washburn’s point is that they need completely different signals and channel tactics, and the real question is what the business needs right now, not which metric looks best in isolation.

Personalization No Longer Wins. Relevance Is the Real Competitive Advantage by Ed See, Adweek
Ed See’s point is that most brands are personalizing hard and still missing the mark, because personalization only answers “who is this person,” while relevance answers “what should we do right now, and what happens if we don’t.” His fix is connecting identity, behavior, and business signals into one system, and knowing when not to send a message at all.

3 Questions That Reveal Whether Your Startup Idea Will Sell by Lou Shipley, Inc.
Lou Shipley once watched a startup order branded towels before confirming that anyone would actually pay for its product. His advice, after decades teaching at HBS and MIT: sell first, build second. He shares three questions to ask before you write a line of code, not after.

What Primates Can Teach Us About Social Media Marketing by Nicholas Spiro, Adweek
Nicholas Spiro pulls together decades of primate research, grooming rituals, face recognition, jealousy over a cucumber, to explain why some content builds real community while the rest just farms outrage. His argument: the campaigns that actually move people lean on vulnerability, not vanity metrics.

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.