Somewhere between a pipeline review and a budget discussion, nearly every marketing organization is having the same conversation right now, asking: what is Marketing actually responsible for — and, more importantly, how would you even know if it was working?
Metrics like Pipeline Generated, MQLs Delivered, and Cost per Lead made sense when Marketing controlled the top of the funnel and handed warm leads to Sales at a clearly defined moment. But AI’s proliferation across GTM functions is putting real pressure on that handoff model — and the KPIs built around it just don’t stand up to the way Sales and Marketing operate together today. In fact, they’re measuring the wrong things entirely, and doing it with an alarming degree of confidence.
But the fix isn’t a better dashboard. Because, ultimately, Sales and Marketing share a number, and it’s time for Marketing to act like it.
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Despite the seemingly nonstop chatter about AI, one of the most important shifts in how CMOs should view their role is more philosophical than technological. It starts with being honest about something many organizations haven’t fully absorbed.
Sales carries a revenue number. Marketing generates pipeline, builds brand, and creates the conditions that make selling easier or harder. Historically, those two functions have been treated as “church and state”: measured, reported, and if we’re being candid, blamed separately when things go wrong.
In my view, the CMOs building the most effective marketing organizations right now know that if Sales misses, that’s a Marketing miss too. Not because Marketing owns the close, but because everything upstream of it is Marketing’s work, from category perception and signals, to the messaging the buyers carried into the first conversation and the brand impression that kept them from churning.
Pipeline has evolved into a shared outcome, and the scorecard needs to reflect that. I don’t mean that Marketing and Sales should be reporting separate numbers; I’m talking about a single revenue view where Marketing is measured on pipeline that closes and on accounts it influenced after the deal was done.
AI’s impact on marketing has been most immediate in the ideation process. Brainstorming a campaign angle once required a room full of people and a two-hour whiteboard session, while drafting 10 headline variations could consume a copywriter’s entire morning. Now, synthesizing research, pulling themes from customer interviews, and mapping competitive positioning happens dramatically faster, saving an average of 11 hours per week. But generating more, and faster, still requires a human filter for what’s actually good vs. what’s just fast and technically competent but emotionally flat. It’s the ability to look at 10 AI-generated campaign concepts and know which one actually fits the moment, the market, and the brand. And it’s the read on whether a message will land with a skeptical CFO in a difficult budget cycle. Still, that’s a constraint on quality, not on output. And output is where things get interesting.
One practical consequence of AI-assisted ideation is that content velocity is now a legitimate competitive advantage. At the end of 2025, eMarketer identified that more than half of U.K. and U.S. content and creative professionals were using AI to accelerate creation, tagging and organization. With the introduction of increasingly powerful LLMs since, one can only imagine that number has jumped considerably. So much so that a campaign that once took six weeks to move from brief to copy to landing page, email sequence, and beyond, comes together in days.
Speed from signal to market also matters in a way it didn’t before. How quickly does a competitor announcement become a response piece? How fast does a customer insight become a campaign angle? How rapidly does a new analyst report get synthesized into sales enablement? These are all indicators of a marketing organization operating in real time. In a market that moves as fast as B2B SaaS does, that operational tempo increasingly determines outcomes.
Beyond velocity, the broader measurement framework deserves a hard look. Marketing teams are largely still in the habit of measuring pipeline by what they sourced. Yet, the deals they touched, accelerated, or kept alive are just as valuable as the ones they originated. Revenue contribution should be tracked at the account level over time, not captured as a single point-in-time volume number that obscures how Marketing actually moves deals forward. Brand health matters too, because awareness and perception in the right segments shape the quality of pipeline long before it ever enters a CRM.
Concretely, this could mean swapping out traditional linear MQL-to-pipeline volume and conversion rates for a more dynamic 4D Pipeline metric, one compiled from a synthetic pipe analysis that adjusts in real time based on account interactions and opportunity progression throughout the revenue cycle and quarter timeline.
Shared metrics are most effective when they’re forward-looking, and this kind of predictive pipeline model would bring together buying signals, multi-threaded engagement activities, and conversational intelligence themes and sentiment, along with account health scores and telemetry from existing customers.
With these inputs, it’s able to act predictively — moving beyond point-in-time snapshots to project future quarter close and prescribe near-term actions (e.g., increasing marketing campaign budgets, engaging executives with critical accounts, or upselling expansion opportunities).
Of course, none of this happens overnight. The will is usually there, while the infrastructure rarely is. And measuring any of it cleanly is harder than it looks; getting there requires new instrumentation, harder conversations with sales leadership, and a genuine willingness to retire metrics that feel productive but are increasingly disconnected from outcomes that actually matter.
Understanding what needs to change and actually building for it are two different problems, and the gap between them is where organizations stall.
The leaders who have a better chance of pulling ahead are the ones willing to do the harder organizational work: building a real revenue partnership with Sales as an operating model rather than a stated value, with shared metrics, shared pipeline reviews, and shared accountability when the number moves in the wrong direction. Alongside that is building the muscle to use AI as a force multiplier without outsourcing the human judgment that makes Marketing worth anything. That means hiring for taste and discernment alongside technical fluency, and being honest about where the technology genuinely helps and where it produces volume without value.
The CMOs who figure both of those things out will have built something genuinely difficult to replicate. And the ones who don’t will find themselves with a lot of content, a fast team, and a number they can’t explain.
Laurie Ehrbar brings over two decades of experience driving GTM innovation and scale to her role as CMO. Known for building strategies and teams that accelerate brand momentum and breakthrough growth, she’s powered organizations from emerging tech to Fortune 100 powerhouses. Previously, she advised EQT (revenue/AI) and held executive roles at ServiceNow, Smarsh, and Bizagi. At Clari + Salesloft, she focuses on expanding market leadership and value delivery.
(Truth) As a teenager, he and a friend built an illegal device for making free long-distance calls, and used it to prank-call the Vatican.
(Truth) At an early job, he was eating a special diet that he thought meant he wouldn’t have to bathe as often, and his co-workers were upset about that, so they made him take the night shift.
(Rumor – not verified) Other co-workers said that his preferred method of stress-relief was soaking his bare feet in the office toilet.
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and ranked #1 on Forbes 2026 Midas List
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, college drop-out, and one of the youngest to ever make the Forbes list of the nation’s richest people
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, expelled from the University of Colorado Boulder for hacking the university’s computer system, on Forbes 250: America’s Greatest Innovators (2026)
Tim Rutten (CMO, Backbase) joins Sam, AJ, and Asad to debate the answer.
What was their pick and why? Listen to the episode to find out:
*Or find the correct answer below.
Rewiring GTM from the Top-Down
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Jul 28
Everyone is talking about whether AI is going to take jobs. It will for some; it would be a disservice to pretend otherwise. But the bigger story is what this transformation looks like on the other side.
Quiz Pro Quo Correct Answer: B. Steve Jobs
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