Sarah Mitchell

Marketing

Better Is a Losing Strategy: Why B2B Winners Design Categories Instead of Competing in Them

AI has collapsed feature differentiation and 64% of B2B buyers can't tell vendors apart. The way out of a commodity fight isn't a better product, it's owning the category. Here's the case for category design in 2026 and a playbook to start.

Sep 14, 2026 10 min read

Business Growth

The Boardroom You Booked as a Dinner: Why the Customer Advisory Board Is B2B's Most Wasted Retention Asset in 2026

B2B buyers now spend just 17% of the journey with your reps, and most use them only to fact-check AI. A room of your best customers, run as a system instead of a dinner, is the retention and roadmap asset almost nobody uses well.

Sep 14, 2026 10 min read

Marketing

The Shortlist Gets Written Without You: How Thought Leadership Quietly Became a B2B Deal Gate

Buyers now build their shortlist from your published thinking, judged by people who never take your call. Why 86% would invite a strong thought leadership producer to an RFP while only 38% of producers expect it, and what to do about the gap.

Sep 14, 2026 10 min read

Business Growth

The AI Margin Squeeze: How Surging Inference Costs Are Quietly Rewriting B2B SaaS Pricing, COGS, and the Rule of 40 in 2026

AI product gross margins now average 52% — thirty points below the SaaS benchmark — and inference eats 23% of revenue at scale. Inside the dual-tracked margin reporting, tiered model routing, and post-AI-COGS Rule of 40 reshaping every B2B SaaS board deck in 2026.

Sep 14, 2026 13 min read

Business Growth

The AI Churn Wave: Why AI-Native SaaS Is Retaining Customers at Half the Rate of Traditional B2B — and the Upmarket Playbook That Fixes It

AI-native SaaS is retaining just 48% NRR against the 82% B2B median, and the under-$50 tier is losing 77% of its revenue gross every year. Here is the five-move upmarket playbook the early-mover cohort is using to close the gap.

Sep 14, 2026 12 min read

Business Growth

The Part-Time Corner Office: Why B2B Companies Are Renting Their Growth Leaders in 2026 — and Building a Better Org Chart in the Process

The fractional executive market has topped $5.7B and Gartner expects 30%+ of midsize enterprises to keep one on retainer by 2027. Here is why renting proven go-to-market judgment on a defined outcome is quietly beating the permanent six-figure hire.

Sep 14, 2026 11 min read

Marketing

Your Podcast Guest List Is Your Target Account List: The B2B Show Strategy Nobody Measures Right

The median podcast episode gets 28 downloads, and the best B2B shows don't care. The smartest teams treat their guest list like an ABM target map and turn conversations into six-figure pipeline.

Sep 14, 2026 11 min read

Business Growth

The AI You Can't Charge For: Closing the B2B Monetization Gap in 2026

80% of B2B software companies now ship AI and 70% say it is eroding their margins, yet most still cannot price it. Why the monetization gap opened, and the hybrid pricing playbook closing it in 2026.

Sep 14, 2026 10 min read

Marketing

The Honest Metric: Why B2B Marketing's Smartest Teams Started Asking Buyers a Question Their Software Can't Answer

Self-reported and last-touch attribution agree about 2.5% of the time, and 38% of pipeline now comes from channels no tool can see. Here is the 2026 measurement stack that replaces false precision with numbers a CFO will actually trust.

Sep 14, 2026 12 min read

Business Growth

The RevOps Reckoning: Why 60% of B2B Companies Will Abandon Revenue Operations — and What the Other 40% Know About Data That You Don't

Gartner predicts 60% of B2B organizations will revert to functional silos because they treated RevOps as an org chart change. Here are the three data foundations that separate the companies compounding revenue from the ones quietly giving up.

Sep 14, 2026 11 min read

Customer Success

The Customer Success Revenue Shift: Why Your CS Team Should Own More Revenue Than Your SDRs by 2027

Your CS team already knows your customers better than anyone. With 94% of companies now tying CS to revenue targets and AI enabling 94% churn prediction accuracy, the smartest B2B companies are turning customer success into their most efficient growth engine.

Sep 14, 2026 12 min read

Sales

The AI SDR Experiment That Backfired — And What 847 Meetings Taught Us About the Future of B2B Prospecting

AI SDRs can book 3x more meetings, but hybrid sales teams generate 2.3x more revenue. The data on 847 AI-booked meetings reveals why the future of sales development is neither pure AI nor pure human — it's a redesigned system that compounds over time.

Sep 14, 2026 12 min read