Strategic Marketing Operations Leader hiring & growing marketing operations superstars @ Salesforce/Slack!

Sara McNamara

Vector 👻

Founding RevOps lead. Focused on marketing, sales, CS, GTM strategy, and product...creating dope things and growing Vector into a rocket ship...follow or connect to watch the journey :)

Founding Revenue Operations & GTM Strategy Lead

Marketing Ops Community

Community member

The Marketing Operations Strategist

I write a bi-weekly newsletter: The Marketing Operations Strategist with Sara McNamara 🐈‍⬛☕

Join 3,000+ marketing operations professionals who are supercharging their careers and GTM efforts by signing up for my newsletter 📈💰

Writer + Founder

Sara McNamara LLC

Aside from my digital marketing/marketing operations career, I've often consulted with startup companies on the side. I've done CRM, marketing automation, martech and salestech consulting; from day to day administration, to strategic roadmap creation and execution. I also work on more holistic strategies like lead scoring, price book implementation, attribution, reporting, and more.

Revenue Operations Consultant

Clay

Use this link to get 2,000 free Clay credits: https://clay.com/?via=294087

Help your RevOps & growth teams implement any outreach idea. First, maximize data coverage with 75+ enrichment tools & our AI agent with just your Clay account. Then, use AI to craft relevant outreach at scale.

Clay for Creators is a program that supports the next wave of go-to-market content creators.

Clay Creator + Content Partner

Zapier

As the leader in easy automation, Zapier empowers businesses to automate workflows and move data across 7,000+ apps. Zapier works with what you work with, across your apps and tech stack, so you can make magic happen.

I create content to showcase the power of Zapier. :)

Check it out and get a 2 week free trial here: https://try.zapier.com/8t2xe97oxmpj

Ambassador

Default

Default is the all-in-one platform.

Fast-growing GTM teams use Default's forms, scheduling, routing & enrichment to convert more leads into pipeline while automating revenue operations.

Automate inbound workflows that are killing your pipeline with Default.com.

Content Creator

Knak

Knak is a no code email and landing page creation platform for enterprise marketing teams. Discover the future of codeless email and landing page creation!

Pavilion

Run by high-growth leaders, for high-growth leaders.

Pavilion is fueled by an international community of sales, marketing, success, and RevOps leaders from the world’s fastest growing companies. Together, we teach new skills, forge meaningful connections, and help our companies grow.

Executive Member

Revenue Collective is a private membership organization for commercial growth operators.

Our Membership consists leaders from Sales, Marketing, and Operations.  We have chapters in New York, London, Denver, Boston, Toronto, Indianapolis, and Amsterdam and will be expanding to most cities in the world over the next 18-24 months.  

Our membership includes executives from companies such as Facebook, Greenhouse, CB Insights, Namely, Drift, Catalant, Vend, Rogers Communications, Lyft, Shopkeep, Intralinks, WeWork, and many more. 

Our community is designed to support the professional development of revenue leaders at high growth companies, facilitate the sharing of best practices, and serve as a trusted private community where Members can openly discuss business critical issues with the comfort of privacy and confidentiality.  

Our Membership is invitation only.

Associate Member

Hyperscayle LLC

At Hyperscayle, I serve as a fractional Revenue Operations leader for clients. I am a strategic partner for clients, helping them build and tweak strategy while working with an internal team to execute on those strategies.

--

Hyperscayle is a revenue operations advisory and implementation firm.

We help companies grow and scale by streamlining how marketing and sales work together across the lead-to-cash lifecycle.

We enable growth by removing complexity to build true partnerships between traditionally siloed teams, supported by a solid foundation of data, processes and systems.

DM me if you’re interested in getting our help to accelerate your business. 💰💬

Director of Revenue Operations

Hi, I'm Sara. 👋

I work with Marketing, Sales, Revenue Ops, and CS leaders to:
1. Optimize GTM efforts as much as possible; promoting efficiency, productivity, and scalability
2. Help define strategy and "how we will get there" utilizing tools and processes
3. Recruit and mentor superstar teams of GTM professionals
4. Continuously look for new opportunities for innovation
5. Guide teams successfully through massive amounts of change
6. Clean up, standardize, and extract insights from data

I'm one of the leading voices in Marketing Operations and Revenue Operations...I love mentoring and teaching others what I have learned (and continue to learn) throughout my career. 📣

Whether it's working directly with C-suite executives to understand their strategy and how we can leverage tools (and more) to get there, consulting with everyday marketers to optimize their efforts, partnering with sales professionals to improve lead pass, or even making technical adjustments in a martech or salestech system...I can do it all! And this isn't a coincidence; it's by design. I love ongoing learning and am always taking courses or certifications to learn more and to expand my toolset so I can best help my customers. 🤓👩‍🎓

Follow me to learn more about marketing, marketing operations, sales operations, and revenue operations!

"{{firstName}}, check out this AI tool that can replace MOPs!"
"{{firstName}}, are you leveraging AI in the best way?"
"{{firstName}}, this bot will do your email QA for you -- "
"{{firstName}}, check it out, I replaced my entire ops team with AI for a week (startup has 3 people in it)"
"{{firstName}}, the future of MOPs is AI"
"{{firstName}}, AI will take your job"
"{{firstName}}, your MAP and ChatGPT can now directly integrate (can't seem to do anything but tell you what you already know about your data)"

THEN WHY IS IT STILL SO HARD TO DO BASIC OPS THINGS LIKE GET INTEGRATIONS TO RELIABLY WORK AND PERFORM DATA CLEANSING???? 🫠🤣 😭

👻 RevOps & GTM Strategy Lead @ Vector. Alum: SFMC Champion, Marketo Fearless50, LeanData OpsStar of the Year 🏆 Sharing everything I learn here + newsletter. ex-Cloudera, Slack

"Hey, we're about to have a strategy meeting -- can I invite you/your team?"

Ops professionals:

(P.S. Btw everyone in ops deserves a workplace like this -- it's already hard enough doing the job, you don't need a second job of convincing your boss that your job matters!)

If you @ me in Slack with a vague request… just know a bot is judging you before I ever see it. 👁️👄👁️

I got tired of having to constantly keep an eye out in the RevOps triage channel, so I built a little system to do the dirty work for me.

Now, anytime someone posts in #revops:

1️⃣ The bot reads the message and decides if it’s a real request, bug, feature ask, or ops issue

2️⃣ Responds asking for any other information needed (basically, if the requester is super vague — lol)

3️⃣ If it is ticket-worthy, the bot:
      • Assigns a priority
      • Creates a Linear ticket with relevant info filled in
      • Writes a proper title
      • Files it under the RevOps project
      • Assigns it to a human so it actually gets done

4️⃣ If the ticket is urgent, it tags me in the thread for awareness.

End result: No more staring at the queue, worrying about missing an urgent ticket, or having to manually follow up vague ticket-requesters. 😅

If you want the exact template + instructions, comment "REVOPS BOT" and I’ll send it over. I’m also open to ideas on how to improve it! For example, you can upload your specific documentation and have it be even smarter. :) Is your team doing anything like this? 👀

#ZapierPartner #sponsored #automation #revenueoperations

Brand partnership • 👻 RevOps & GTM Strategy Lead @ Vector. Alum: SFMC Champion, Marketo Fearless50, LeanData OpsStar of the Year 🏆 Sharing everything I learn here + newsletter. ex-Cloudera, Slack

ops professional to ops professional...put yourself first. learn fun stuff just to learn fun stuff. run little experiments that excite you. take breaks to take walks in the sunshine in the afternoon. put every compliment you get into a brag book, and look at it when you have tough days. join ops communities -- and complain and laugh together. get your nails done. keep up with your workout routine. find the humor in corporate politics.

turn on your dnd on slack and watch an episode of your favorite show or practice your favorite hobby during your lunch break. truly log off during PTO. during a regular work day, log off at 5, there will always be "more I could do." i repeat, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE WORK THAT COULD BE DONE!!! don't let brown-nosers get you down. always find time to be silly -- or the seriousness of everything will wear you down.

do work that makes you proud, but, more importantly, live a LIFE that gives you joy and makes you proud. 🥲 

your career is a marathon, not a sprint. this is a job, not a life. the only way you'll not only survive, but thrive, is if you always make sure YOU are #1. 🫵 🥇

what are you doing to put yourself first these days? 👀 💅

the other day, I wanted to demo a Customer Success Platform...and the rep spent 20 of the 30 minutes showing me their "new CRM" (a random new product I hadn't inquired about)...even when I interrupted twice to try to redirect to the real purpose for the call 🫠🫠🫠🫠

IMO 3 of the worst things a sales rep can do:

- be too scripted/stiff (and unable/unwilling to deviate from the script)

- refuse to show the tool/show 1 million slides

- fail to read the room (you can usually see this easily on a recording -- a topic is brought up and an attendee has a quick micro-reaction, read those!!!)

but honestly, #2 is probably the worst, especially if you have an ops audience...you'll lose trust and attention so quickly 😬

has anything like this ever happened to you? still experiencing slide deck demos? 👀

Ops after surviving the 9th layoff cycle, 10th reorg, and 11th shiny object syndrome purchase and churn (*cough* ABM *cough*) in the last 5 years 🫠

MOPs reading all of these marketing leader anti-6sense/Demandbase posts after years of trying to convince leadership that a tool is not a strategy and it was a waste of time/money

Martech tools these days: imagine a simple to use, $40,000/year, flat-fee GTM tool 😀

Ops: heck yeah, that sounds so good 😍

Martech tools these days: oh sorry I forgot to mention, that’s just the base fee and we are credit-based per actual automation, so you’ll have to do a math equation EVERY time you create a new workflow or have to adjust one 😀 oh and there’s no way to set credit usage limits per workflow

Ops: 😭

If you've run a campaign ops team, you've shaved a few years off of your life. 🫩

ESPECIALLY if it was in the Enterprise world. It's so stressful:

The struggle to keep up with never-ending requests.

While also switching tools every 3-4 years.

While also keeping up with releases and updates.

While also having a good SLA with a team that is 2x-10x your size.

There's always that marketer who simply refuses to plan ahead, and always has an urgent ticket.

It seems like every time you turn around, Outlook is rejecting an email template, a marketer is trying to go rogue with unapproved images, and a marketer is upset that "they could do it more quickly on their own."

(Spoiler alert: they *wish*, LOL. 🫠)

For a while, the answer was decentralization...MOPs creates templates with guardrails, marketers can then go in and tinker text/images and submit for final approval.

This was a big step forward. But that also happened in what...2011? And it didn't get us out of the business of still taking on too much non-strategic work in campaign ops. 😬

Knak has a *huge* release coming out tomorrow that I'm stoked about. Finally, some new innovation in this space....register and attend tomorrow to find out the deets and how to get your hands on the amazing new release! You might see me there, too... 😉

info (.) knak (.) com / knak-ai-2025 to register 👀 

#KnakPartner #sponsored #email #ai

Friendly reminder to folks about legally required advertising disclosures here on LinkedIn (and across just about every other social media channel) 👀: 

1. Use Brand Partnership toggle at the top of the post ↖️ 

2. Use hashtags like #(Vendor)Partner #ad #sponsored. Usually you need at least 2 of these.

It isn't just the legally required thing to do...it's also just the *right* thing to do for your audience, who trusts you ❤️ 

((Seeing a lot of obviously sponsored posts (not in disclosure, in stiffness/lack of same voice) on here with ZERO disclosure 🫠 Come on y'all!))

What's the lore behind how you got into ops (marketing ops, revenue ops, sales ops)? 👀 

For me, I thought I wanted to go into journalism but worked PT at a local station and hated it. Then I switched to digital marketing, which I loved, but I found that I loved the technical/process side more....so I never went back to pure marketing. 😅

When you all DM me about burnout, I get it. I get it because, in a past role, I was running both campaign ops and technical ops. For both “running the business” and “changing the business." At an enterprise company. 😅

It was so rewarding, but so stressful. So so stressful.

When Knak gave me a preview of their new AI email building functionality, it sent me directly through memory lane. The late nights fixing email styling issues, the effort it took to get a new template up and running…even when I hired agency support, a lot of the work ended up coming back towards me, because it’s:

1. Hard work 😫
2. ...not the most fun work.

“But Sara, what does that have to do with AI?”

Knak sponsors The Marketing Operations Strategist newsletter, and I am so thankful to them for that. But this post Is about more than promoting a product.

It’s about where I think MOPs is going.

I think MOPs is careening towards 4 areas:

1. Consolidation into RevOps
2. Technical upskill into integration engineering/architecture
3. Extreme focus on understanding the whole business, ESPECIALLY the humans involved
4. Moving away from pure ops and into more creative opsy marketing roles

And any role or task that isn’t related to these 4 areas will start to vanish over time.

Why?

Because companies are consolidating wherever they can (think: getting rid of middle management), AI is still pretty terrible at understanding architecture and integration building management, and AI definitely cannot “read the room” and understand how to navigate the politics at a company.

SO. What do we do about it?

IMO, pick your lane. And pick it soon, at least directionally….so you can figure out what skills you need to build to get there.

When it comes to campaign ops, I think we will see less and less email building, and more and more focus on creative copy refinement…and I have to say, in the Enterprise space, I couldn’t be happier for MOPs teams. It’s been a real slog, having to manage everything manually…and mind-blowing to think that we won’t have do to that anymore. Check out Knak if you are in a large org and see what I’m talking about. 🤯

Is this the new campaign ops “team” (aside from some creative/tech managers)? Do you disagree? 👇

#KnakPartner #sponsored #marketingoperations #ai

Some buddies at Huntress are looking for a GTM Engineer to help them with Clay, Vector 👻, and more...they have a pretty dope GTM stack!

Who's looking for a new gig? You'd get to work with the amazing Aimee Schneider and Kimi Corrigan!!

LinkedIn is expensive because it's the only platform where you can actually target B2B buyers precisely — by job title, seniority, skills, company size. They charge a premium for that specificity.

But it's also a supply and demand marketplace. Fewer eyeballs + more ads = higher costs. At 1am, you might be paying a fortune to compete against nobody for nobody.

Our new Vector 👻  Bid Agent finds all these inefficiencies — the best time of day, best time of week, the right audiences — and automatically adjusts your bids to get you the most outcomes for your spend. It’s AI that’s…actually useful. 😅

Our early customers are seeing 25-60% more clicks, engagement, and website visits with the same budget. 😍

One customer spent $700/day to get 16 clicks on their best day of the campaign. 

With Bid Agent, they got 16 clicks for $300 — on their worst performing day. 🤯

Check it out at vector (dot) co/product/bid-agent 📈

Super proud of The Marketing Operations Strategist community on beehiiv in 2025 -- THANK YOU to so many of you for being a part of the journey! 
☕🐈‍⬛ 🙏 

P.S. While I have you, what do you want to learn about in 2026? 👀👂

The Marketing Operations Strategist -- Beehiiv Rewind 2025

Your website is actually generating way more pipeline than you think. 🖱️

You just can’t see it, score it, or act on it...so it dies quietly, unless you're super lucky and they just happen to convert on a CTA. 😅

That’s why Clay’s new Web Intent functionality is such a big deal — it finally gives GTM teams visibility into which *companies* are hitting your site and what they’re doing on the site. And it's a waterfall, which means you get good coverage. 🙌

BUT that’s only ONE part of the bigger picture. 👀

I added this new functionality to my full Clay for Marketing playbook that shows how to use Web Intent alongside the other high-impact marketing workflows inside Clay, including:

🌐 How to use the new Web Intent release to identify visiting companies and surface real buying signals

👯 How to find lookalike accounts that resemble your best customers and expand your TAM

🎼 How to run ICP matching + account scoring using enrichment, firmographics, tech stack, hiring signals, and more

🔍 How to identify buyers and decision-makers from any account list (not just website visitors)

📂 How to build smart ABM and outbound lists using Clay’s enrichment + filtering

💌 How to create automated outbound, nurture, and ABM workflows that require zero engineering

and more!

Web Intent is the newest functionality, but the guide is a full “start here” manual for building Clay-powered marketing workflows. 🩵

If you want the full guide, drop "ALGORITHM" (🤣😅) in the comments and I’ll send it over. 👇

#ClayPartner #sponsored #ABM #marketing

Hey! Is anyone aware of any guide to all of HubSpot's latest AI capabilities? 👀

peel ai

Co-Founder and CRO

Strata EQ

Strategic Advisor

Go Dark Cyber AI

Fractional CRO

Integrate

SVP, Growth Sales

Vice President, Global Accounts - West

Integrate is an advertising technology and services provider that offers a Centralized Media-Management Platform.  We empower media buyers to plan, launch, analyze and optimize their marketing strategy across a regulated ecosystem, unifying performance, digital and traditional media.  Our solutions increase operational efficiency, ad performance and brand security.

West Coast General Manager B2B

Green Dog Rescue Project

The Green Dog Rescue Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping dogs to thrive by socializing in a pack, as nature meant it to be.  We help to alleviate the stress experienced by dogs who come from a "traditional" shelter environment.  

Our mission is to revolutionize the animal welfare world by using a nature-based approach. We provide education in bridging the gap between the languages of dogs and humans.  We offer workshops, pre-surrender counseling, pre-adoption counseling including matchmaking, post-adoption support including in-home training, internships, volunteer programs, and rehabilitation for unbalanced and “at risk” dogs. Our “Pack” model provides a healthier social, physical, and psychological environment resulting in balanced dogs, making them more adoptable and better equipped to succeed in our human world.

Board of Directors

Ziff Davis B2B Focus

Focus’ mission is to make business expertise available to everyone.

When you visit Focus.com, you will find high quality research, 1:1 analyst support, and a thriving community of business and technology professionals. Whether it's data-driven product research, topical briefs, or real-time support, the information on Focus is sourced from real experts – professionals like you. Best of all, it’s free and available to anyone who wants help making better business decisions.

That’s why millions of people have relied on the expertise on Focus to make better business decisions.

Sales

Unbound Technologies

We are the Leader in Social Network Intelligence.

Unbound Technologies mines and illustrates the social network ecosystem delivering a comprehensive understanding of online influencers, brand preferences, lifestyle interests and communities. 


and a lot more...

Director of Sales

TechTarget

National Accounts

Key Accounts

Bitpipe, Inc.

General Markets Accounts

Handyman Online, inc

Account Manager

Co-founder GTM @ peel

I believe that every conversation holds untapped potential — especially the ones we never get to have. That’s why I’m focused on Peel.

Peel rethinks how sales teams connect with prospects and customers, transforming static surveys and delayed feedback loops into live, asynchronous conversations. By making traditional meetings more focused and productive, Peel enables thoughtful, buyer-driven discovery. It’s a new way to engage decision-makers, customers, and prospects — on their terms.

Throughout my career, I’ve focused on creating more effective ways to communicate and connect. From lead generation to tools that support the buying journey, I’ve learned that access and relevance are everything. Peel brings that approach to life.

We’re working with brands and industry leaders to create authentic, insightful conversations that inform growth strategies. Our partners and customers rely on Peel to surface clear, actionable insights — no fluff, just signals that lead to better decisions.

If you’re a growth-minded leader in marketing, sales, or product, you already know that engagement drives enablement. Peel provides that engagement without the friction of endless follow-ups or back-and-forth scheduling. If that sounds like something you need, I’d love to connect.

Ben Henson

Gratitude has moved mountains in my life.  Truly and naturally being grateful has become my most powerful source of strength.

Starting something from nothing is so hard. A business like Peel, a family, a new job, a new attitude. Sometimes completely out of your control life happens to you, not because of your actions, and it is so hard when it does.  I have so many friends going through so many things, both personally and professionally and it is just so damn hard. Even the night sky coming well before I'm ready during these winter months is so hard. 

It seems there's just a hardness around, right now, that is lingering. It seems to be touching everyone I know in some way or another. And when things feel so heavy, the only thing I've ever found to get me through it is an attitude of gratitude. 

Recognizing all the beauty and hard work I see around me. Recognizing the people that go out of their way to help me every day. The people in the mix with me.  I see working their asses off to drive for something better, creating beauty, ease and often a livelihood for others. 

Over the last three and a half weeks or so, I've been meditating every day. The challenge my dear friend Ben posed is, can you meditate greater than zero seconds a day?  Some days that’s 5 minutes, sometimes more.   For much of that, I've focused on gratitude. 

How grateful I am.  How much love I see in the world. 

As we come into this season where many will be with friends and family and so many won't. When this year will close out on sellers, when jobs will close out on thousands, completely out of their control.

Finding the gratitude and the perseverance and the grit, the determination, the energy, the love. 

That's what gets me fired up.  It’s what gets me up for. 5 a.m. starts every day. Working weekends. Working late nights. Gratitude gives me discipline.

Because of a belief in making something better and creating something good that will help others. 

I am grateful.

Two years ago I was preparing to leave Integrate.  My work home for over 11 years.  My colleagues felt like family to me.  I’d grown up with them for the last decade.  We shared in the highs and lows together over and over again.  It was a BIG decision, but one I’d known it was time to make.  I needed to move on, I could feel it in my gut.  

I knew I needed to move on but had no clue what I wanted to do.  Big company, small company, my own company?  The options of things I could do felt infinite, but the void of infinite equally felt limiting and well… unknown.  I had a family, responsibilities, my ego, my love of comfort and ease.  Interplay that with a high tolerance for risk, love of adventure and deep belief in myself and again I felt untethered.  Yin and Yang were fiercely at work in my heart and mind.

That’s when I started creating a mind map for what I should do next.  A non linear, throw everything up and see what sticks list of questions and thoughts I could ask myself to try and figure out what came next.  

My first breakthrough came when I realized I didn’t need to answer my own questions, rather keep asking more. Then I started grouping them in key categories like Lifestyle, Technology, Skills, Money.  Each category had a series of questions, sub questions and sometimes even sub, sub questions.  

Ultimately one word kept bubbling up over and over again - W2.  I realized I just did not want to work for anyone anymore.  I wanted to hang my own shingle outside my own door.  The rest of that story is my future being written at Peel.  It wasn’t answering all the questions, or even most of the questions.  I found through this exercise the one question that mattered and I’ve built the last 2+ years based off the one thing I got right.  Your thing is likely different than mine.  Maybe it’s stability, work/life balance, lots of travel or none.  What ‘it’ is matters less than finding it for yourself.

I’m grateful as hell for this community of all of us trying to do hard things together so I’m bringing my mind map to the Thanksgiving table.  It’s yours if you’d find it helpful.  The link in comments will give you instant access.  If you would like a 15 minute chat be it a how to, a pep talk or networking - please reach out to me in DM’s.

Pictured Day 1 of the rest of my life on the South Fork of the Umpqua river

Skill is earned in the conditions most people try to avoid.  Doing hard things is hard.  

The best leaders I've known in my life try to avoid rough water but know they can't so they have prepared themselves and their team.  I'm grateful for the lessons I've learned from you Jeremy Bloom and Tom Click.   The way you guided us all through COVID was leadership in the face of the most unknown experience any of us have experienced (and hopefully will experience) in our careers.  

That already feels like a lifetime ago - but the lessons of that seemingly never ending unknown shaped us all for the better.  

Today I'm grateful for the lessons no one wanted to learn, but shaped our resilience in myriad ways we all still benefit from today.

photo: 2021 deep in the heart of COVID

I'm 100% sure The Doggfather himself is not sitting on LinkedIn at 6 something in the morning.  I seriously doubt he's ever been on LinkedIn.  

Buttttttttt in my own way - kind of like those AI superhero dolls everyone was doing on here in late spring - I did the thing so I could get the outcome.  His post auto emojis comments on every comment so comment I did and now the D O Double G and I are LinkedIn bests and I have the screenshot to prove it!  Thanks Snoop Dogg

Everything we have done Peel is because of a past friction point we felt viscerally as a buyer or seller.

December is the month when teams look across the table and try to isolate these rough spots in their sales processes.  It's better to admit how much evaluation friction still sits between a buyer and a clear understanding of a product and focus on the fix.

A visitor lands on your site with one question in mind: "show me how this works for me".  Instead, they move through a sequence of forms, routing logic, emails, calendar coordination, and multiple conversations where they repeat the same information.

Most never make it through that path.

Instant, asynchronous demos remove the delay. The moment someone is interested, they can see the exact part of the product that answers their question. If the proof lives deep inside a deck or a long product video, it appears immediately. They get a one to one walkthrough without pressure, scheduling, or retelling their story.

Essential as teams head into 2026 planning. When intent appears, the window to convert it is short. Giving buyers an immediate path to clarity is no longer a differentiator.  Without it you get DQ'd.

See how this works in practice:

Open article: Add an Interactive AI Voice to Your Content | Peel by getpeel.ai

Add an Interactive AI Voice to Your Content | Peel

Early 2026 GTM prediction.  Customer Marketing > Prospect Marketing for revenue growth.

Most teams still treat customer marketing as an afterthought, even though it quietly carries more revenue weight than any prospect-facing channel. That imbalance will flip in 2026.

Retention and expansion now account for the majority of net-new ARR in SaaS, driven by two converging forces: prospect acquisition costs have risen sharply while product adoption gaps inside existing accounts have widened. In most categories, CAC has increased faster than ACV growth for three consecutive years, while 60 to 80 percent of upsell potential remains untouched because customers never fully activate the product they already pay for.

This divergence signals a structural shift. It is becoming more economically rational to grow revenue from existing customers than to generate it from prospects.

Customer marketing will overtake prospect marketing as the more reliable growth engine. The math is straightforward: existing customers already have context, trust, and a sunk cost in adopting your product. They respond faster to new value. They surface more credible signals. And they convert at a fraction of the effort required to move a cold audience.

Prospect marketing will not disappear, but its contribution will shrink relative to the cost of sustaining it. Teams will face the reality that pipeline generation is constrained by attention, while customer growth is constrained only by how well you surface additional value and reduce friction.

The organizations that make customer marketing the center of their GTM motion, treating expansion, education, and product literacy as core revenue work, will move faster, spend less, and compound more.

TLDR: Hunting works, Farming works.  They are both hard, but farming is more predictable.

image: a variety box of harvested food from our garden.

Most companies still underestimate how hard it is for someone to buy from them. Not because the product is complex, but because the process is.

“Helping someone buy” is not a slogan.  When poorly executed it exposes the gap between how teams believe buyers behave and how they actually behave.

Helping someone buy means accepting three uncomfortable truths:

1. Buyers rarely know what they need with precision. They operate with a rough sense of the problem and a limited understanding of the mechanics. Your job is not to validate their initial guess. Your job is to give them enough context to improve the quality of their decision.

2. Buyers don’t want your process; they want progress. Your 'sales process and Internal steps' like qualification, routing, discovery all serve the seller, not the buyer. When those steps delay clarity, they become conversion losses disguised as pipeline hygiene.

3. Buyers move in bursts, not sequences (read never linear). Attention is episodic. Energy is irregular. If someone leans in, even briefly, the window is open. If you force them into a future scheduled interaction, you’re betting you can recreate that moment later. You usually can’t.

Helping someone buy is the opposite of controlling the journey. It is removing anything that slows the buyer’s ability to understand how the product solves their problem.

This is why the teams outperforming their peers right now are simplifying everything. They give buyers direct access to real insight the moment curiosity appears. They make information self-serve without diluting substance. They collapse the distance between interest and comprehension.

The companies losing ground are still trying to choreograph the buyer. The companies gaining ground are clearing the path.

https://lnkd.in/geeHEi_W

Open video: Transforming Static Content into Interactive Conversations with Talkables on loom.com

Transforming Static Content into Interactive Conversations with Talkables

Throughline analysis of the state of the GTM market today as a B2B marketer:

The system they’re running was built for a world that no longer exists.

Budgets are flat. Teams are lean. Expectations keep rising.
And the traditional GTM stack: outbound, nurture, events, paid is producing diminishing returns while demanding more effort to defend the same pipeline.

Companies don’t have a channel problem or a creativity problem. They have an engagement problem.  Everything depends on creating moments where prospects actually pay attention long enough to move.

Right now, attention is the currency.  GTM teams feel like they’re being asked to deliver revenue with less of it than ever.

That’s the state of the market.  

The silver lining is a refocus.  The same pressure that’s crushing old GTM motions is creating the clearest opportunity in years. When marketers create genuinely new engagement moments, ones that feel native to how people actually want to interact get disproportionate lift.

The constraint is real, but so is the opening. The market is resetting its definition of effective GTM, and the teams willing to rethink how they earn attention are the ones who will pull ahead fastest.

December momentum.  How do we keep it moving as we close out and start a year anew?

The issue so many of us face is feeling all the fatigue, snow blindness, hamster wheel the 12th month in a row habitually brings.  It's freakin' hard.

The positive side is so much newness and freshness will meet us as we start a new year, budget cycle and opportunity January has a habit of bringing.  New focus, dedication and a can do attitude.

Our friends Launch Marketing have produced a terrific piece precisely this.  Take a few minutes and dig in led by a Peel agent here to act as your colleague, and research guide as you explore how to make '26 your best yet!

Open article: How B2B Leaders Can Gain Marketing Momentum—AI Interactive Guide by launch-marketing.talkables.ai

How B2B Leaders Can Gain Marketing Momentum—AI Interactive Guide

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