84% of B2B companies are stuck in the same loop.
Hey, it's Christina. Welcome to the first edition of The Commercial Growth Brief. Every week, I filter the noise across B2B marketing, sales, AI and go-to-market into what actually matters for commercial growth. Got a question about commercial growth? Comment and I'll cover it. In this week's edition:
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The HeadlinesAI search is cutting your traffic but sending better buyers.Brainlabs tracked 54 advertisers and found organic sessions down 10.5% since AI Overviews, while AI referral traffic rose 163% and key events surged 335%. If your board is panicking over a traffic dashboard, the dashboard is the problem. Over half of B2B firms are ramping up brand, but only 8.5% are thinking long-term.Marketing Week surveyed 300 B2B marketers. 58.4% say brand focus has increased in the last 12 months. But less than a tenth say their main focus is on long-term strategy. Brand is back on the agenda, but the execution still defaults to short-term. Forrester: $1M+ B2B deals are going self-serve, and alignment breaks first.Forrester expects most seven-figure B2B transactions to run through digital self-serve channels. The work moves from closing to controlling the inputs: validated buying-group contacts, consistent messaging, and tight hand-offs when intent spikes. |
84% of B2B companies are stuck in Gartner's brand "doom loop" Gartner surveyed 426 senior marketing leaders and found 84% of companies caught in a cycle they call the brand "doom loop." Measurement is underfunded, so impact is unclear, so the C-suite grows sceptical, so budgets tighten, so measurement stays underfunded. Meanwhile, marketing budgets have been flat at 7.8% of company revenue for the third straight year. 56% of CMOs say they lack the budget to execute their 2026 strategy. And Gartner predicts that 40%+ of CMOs who push for bigger brand budgets this year will lose C-suite influence because they cannot connect the ask to business outcomes. Right now, translation is the bottleneck. Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey, via Geisheker |
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The IAB's "4 P's of AI Visibility" framework If your organic traffic is dropping and you are not sure whether your brand even appears in AI answers, this is where to start. More than 20 companies will happily sell you a tool to find out, and most of them measure different things differently. The IAB published Measuring Visibility in the AI Era, the first industry standard for measuring brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Four categories: Presence: Do you appear at all? Prominence: How often, how high? Portrayal: What do they say about you? Persuasion: Does any of it drive action? It also separates "directional" signals from "decision-grade" data, which is a useful filter before you buy anything. Free to download.
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You're not failing at marketing. You're treating the symptom.This is the conversation I have with almost every founder I work with at the growth stage. Briefing campaigns before anyone has checked whether the positioning converts. Measuring success in impressions when the number that matters is pipeline. Changing the agency when the agency was never where the problem sat. Putting budget behind a message that was never going to land. Comparing your pipeline to businesses with years more commercial foundation. Keeping the conversation with your marketing partner pleasant instead of honest. Measuring the team by volume because it is easier to see than impact. Doing more when what you need is less, but clearer. It is all the same thing underneath. You are treating the symptom instead of fixing what is causing it. And the symptom keeps coming back until you do. If any of this sounds familiar, let's have the honest conversation.
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