Refining Your 2026 Go-To-Market Plan

In this season finale of the B2B Growth Show, Paul, Lauren, and Jeremy walk through a practical toolkit for refining your 2026 go-to-market plan—starting with an objective Pipeline Growth Assessment and moving into a workbook-driven planning process you can complete with leadership, sales, and other teams.

Your 2025 playbook won’t work in 2026 because buyer behavior has shifted. Traditional traffic is down as buyers increasingly get answers directly from Google and AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, without ever visiting websites.

Instead of optimizing only for clicks and visits, modern B2B marketing must focus on building trust before buyers ever reach your site and treating the places buyers learn (e.g., social, communities, “answer engines”) as the new homepage.

Key Takeaways

• Stop “copy/pasting” last year’s plan. “Rinse and repeat” planning breaks when markets and buyers shift.

• Web traffic isn’t the only (or best) signal anymore. Buyers increasingly self-educate via search and AI answers.

• Trust must be built pre-intent. The goal is to become a go-to resource while buyers are passively learning (future buyers).

• Use the Pipeline Growth Assessment to remove subjectivity. It produces an overall score and breaks performance into buckets like plan alignment, documentation, ICP/content alignment, and pipeline optimization (“plumbing”).

• Focus on the “three levers” that actually move pipeline: go-to-market, pipeline optimization, and revenue acceleration.

• Revenue acceleration = late-stage enablement + advocacy. Equip sales with proof points (battle cards, testimonials), improve win rates, and systemize advocacy capture.

 Notable insights

• Common friction point across companies: getting “contacts” to become true hand raisers—often due to unclear ownership, weak nurture, and lack of visibility/lead scoring (“plumbing”).

• A practical example of fixing the hand-raiser gap: adding a lifecycle stage called “learner” and treating learners differently than leads.

• Planning with real numbers creates clarity. The team references working backward from a concrete revenue requirement (e.g., $675K in new contracts) as a pass/fail planning anchor.

Practical Guidance You Can Apply

• Use the toolkit flow for 2026 planning: Assessment → report → workbook (with cross-functional input) → optional 1:1 follow-up or facilitated workshop.

• Work backward from outcomes. Start with the business outcome, define drivers, then define influencers (actions) that reliably create those drivers.

• Adopt a full-funnel “pipeline acceleration” cycle: activate audience → establish authority → nurture relationships → grow/retain via advocacy—supported by sales/marketing alignment and buyer-signal tracking.

• Shift measurement away from MQLs/traffic. Use the workbook’s measurement definitions to align marketing metrics to pipeline + revenue influence.

• Pick 2–3 building blocks to double down on. Don’t try to “spin 20 plates”—choose the channels/tactics that best match your gaps (e.g., events, LinkedIn, video), then translate that into a one-page plan leadership can fund.

Call to Action

• Take the Pipeline Growth Assessment, review your report, and use the guide/workbook to lock in your 2026 plan with leadership and sales.

• If you want help connecting the dots, schedule a 1:1 session or consider a facilitated workshop to align stakeholders and finalize the plan.

• Check the events page and register for upcoming sessions (including topics like events strategy and answer engine optimization).