"Scott Brinker's Martech for 2026 report offers a lucid map of the terrain GTM teams must now navigate: a marketplace no longer defined by sequential buyer journeys, increasingly shaped by agentic AI, destabilized by volatility and governed by nonlinear patterns of evaluation and decision-making. Yet during the same period in which martech blossomed into a sophisticated, multi-layered discipline, GTM effectiveness collapsed."
"The data is unmistakable. Across datasets representing 478 B2B companies, GTM effectiveness has fallen from 78% in 2018 to just 47% in 2025. The decline is not cyclical. It is structural. And it has accelerated sharply over the past three years. Let's repeat that: less than $0.50 of each B2B GTM dollar is effective. More than 50% is wasted spend."
"The environment shifted from stable to volatile, from linear to nonlinear, from internally influenced to externally dominated. Buyer decisioning collapsed. Lag dynamics expanded. Volatility became structural. The deterministic metaphors that underpinned 20 years of GTM thinking - funnels, stages, journeys and attribution paths - could no longer make contact with reality."
Martech investment, sales specialization, data-driven marketing, and AI adoption increased even as GTM effectiveness fell from 78% in 2018 to 47% in 2025 across 478 B2B companies, reflecting a structural and accelerating decline. Less than $0.50 of each B2B GTM dollar is effective, producing over 50% wasted spend. Martech industrialized deterministic GTM logic—funnels, stages, journeys, and attribution paths—at the same time markets shifted toward volatility, nonlinear evaluation, agentic AI influence, and externally dominated decisioning. Buyer decisioning collapsed, lag dynamics expanded, and deterministic metaphors failed to align with current marketplace realities, accelerating GTM divergence.
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