Our 2026 GTM Scorecard for Growth Leaders

Why safe GTM stalled differentiation in 2025 and how precision, focus, and buyer confidence will define growth in 2026.‍

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In 2025, most GTM organizations didn’t fail, but they played it safe.

Markets were volatile. Budgets tightened. Buying cycles continued to slow. Paid returns diminished. Boards demanded efficiency while still expecting growth. In response, many GTM leaders did what felt rational at the time: they played it safe.

Positioning softened. Bets were spread across channels. Metrics clung to familiarity, even when they no longer reflected reality. AI was tested, however cautiously, often left in isolation.

That instinct was understandable. But successful GTM teams will require bolder decisioning and precision in 2026. 

2026 GTM Imperatives

‍In this next year, growth leaders need to focus on doing less, but with an emphasis of being better than anyone else. They will know their buyers intimately (which is why ICP matters so much), and instead of broad-brush campaigns, they will learn how to prioritize high-intent accounts and relate with buying centers better than their competitors. AI has also erased the advantages of bigger budgets. Once you do the hard work to deeply understand your buyer, you can launch a AI GTM engine very affordably, that scales through intelligent automation. (More on this topic coming soon too!)

Yes, today’s GTM needs to go deeper. But once precision in knowing buyers has been achieved, automation and intelligence can supercharge these GTM powers. 

To help you pressure-test your approach, here’s a FY26 GTM scorecard to ask the right questions in the year ahead. We’ll also follow with blog posts in a 4-part series that will deep-dive into each category of ‘Position, Focus, and Grow’ including our recommended martech tools to help you gain the most from your GTM strategy in 2026!  

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Positioning: From “What We Sell” to “Why We Win”

2025: Broad, Safe, and Interchangeable.

Messaging focused on feature breadth, industry coverage, and newly-branded AI capabilities. Here’s a classic example: 

We orchestrate cross-channel engagement, automate workflows, and provide intelligent action. Our AI-powered agents make tasks effortless. We help companies be more efficient.”

How many times have we seen these words? Yes, in 2025, most B2B messaging was interchangeable.

2026: Bold, Decisive with a Sense of Urgency

In 2026, winning positioning answers a harder question: why do we win, especially when it matters most? Growth leaders will:

• Connect deeply to what keeps your buyers challenged, and how you are solving their problems beyond features.
• Name the cost of the status quo without using your solution
• Anchor positioning to deepen a sense of urgency to act now

FY26 positioning test:  If a buyer remembers only one sentence about your company, would it explain why they should choose you... immediately?

Focus: From Experimentation to Deliberate AI Adoption 

2025: Experiments Did Not Offer Clarity and Focus

• Paid channels became more expensive and less predictable
• Organic growth required patience many teams didn’t have
• Legacy martech solutions were reassessed, resized, and re-evaluated

The result? Many GTM teams tried new playbooks by testing, pausing and restarting often without a clear primary motion. At the same time, AI entered the GTM stack, mostly as experimentation across content generation, AEO, market research assistance, and email drafting.

Useful? Yes. Transformational? Not yet.

2026: Automation + AI as a Growth Engine

In 2026, focus will need to be deliberate where AI stops being a sidekick to become GTM infrastructure. However, AI without focus accelerates the wrong motion. For example, the goal is not automating more outbound rather than focus and accelerate smarter outbound. Leading GTM teams will:

• Use AI to prioritize who matters most, not just create more activity. Thankfully, the days of cold prospecting should be forever-over. 
• Automate top-of-funnel motions using enriched insights - why have sellers work leads that haven’t been primed?
• Deliver personalization at scale especially through outbound motions, where it matters most! The latest tools can now help you hyper-personalize, which has always been marketing’s ultimate goal. 

More content isn’t the goal. But content delivered to the right account, at the right moment, with the right message with as much automation that makes sense. 

2026 focus test: Where do you want sellers to spend their time? Can they conduct outreach more effectively? For the rest, how can you orchestrate automation, insights, and content to intelligently nurture non-priority accounts? How is your current martech or sales ops platforms helping you to move faster or decide better?

Grow: Moving From MQLs to Buying-Center Confidence

2025: A slow death to the MQL.

I’ve long questioned the value of MQLs as a meaningful growth metric for multiple reasons.

• First, they are rarely a reliable indicator of true buying intent.
• MQLs often fuel tension between sales and marketing. 
• MQLs obscure marketing’s contribution to revenue, especially in an attribution-based model.

Yet, MQLs remain a core target metric for many CMOs, even as classical attribution models are now outdated in a B2B buying center focused strategy. To compensate, teams began layering in buyer signals such as website behavior, content engagement and a highly-buzzed term 'intent data.'

This was progress but still largely reactive. Signals triggered actions, but they didn’t fundamentally change how marketing’s contribution to growth was measured or forecasted.

2026: Pipeline Quality and Buying-Center Intelligence

In 2026, growth leaders move beyond MQLs as their primary contribution and even beyond signals. It’s important to get clear on where marketing will contribute value - and accurately measure this.  For example, can marketing own the high-volume inbound motion? For broader GTM initiatives, how can marketing play a role to bring deals to closure faster or drive awareness in certain account segments, and how will you accurately measure this contribution? (Hint: this often happens outside of MQL-oriented campaigns!) Leading GTM teams will:

• Assess full-funnel pipeline health to remove roadblocks to buyer indecision.
• Understand conversion at every stage - and what's needed to successfully move from gate-to-gate.
• Deploy marketing strategically vs just an engine for MQLs and measure according to the objective.

Remember - this work needs to be focused on a clear ICP so you can drive repeatability in GTM motions. Pipeline reviews will no longer ask:  “How many MQLs did we generate?' They’ll ask:

• Who is engaged across the buying group? Where is confidence building or eroding?
• Where can we gain the most value from marketing to drive deeper and focused engagement?
• How can marketing broaden market awareness, optimizing our reach and influence (especially as B2B buyers do most research on their own.)

2026 growth test:

In deal reviews, can your team articulate the health of an opportunity beyond its stage and explain who still needs to believe to align consensus in the buying decision? How is marketing helping to automate awareness and engagement accounts, while helping to drive account conversion across full-funnel pipeline?

This month marks the start of a new 2026 GTM race. Let's sharpen our positioning and focus - to gain the most growth in 2026!

Want to learn more? Stay tuned for a deep dive in our upcoming FY26 Positioning Guide!