2025 B2B Playbook: Revenue Activation Insights from 100 Senior Marketing Leaders
Executive Summary: The Clarity Gap
B2B marketing leaders aren’t short on data. They’re short on unified, actionable clarity.
Despite more dashboards, more tools, and more data than ever, today’s revenue teams are moving slower—paralyzed by misalignment, noise, and conflicting signals.
We surveyed 100 senior marketing leaders to explore what’s really holding B2B marketing teams back from confident, revenue-driving execution.
What their responses revealed: More activity isn’t the answer— clarity is.
What Marketing Leaders Are Saying About Revenue & Buying Clarity
We are not absolutely leveraging to the maximum efficiency every intent signal and piece of data that we have. We could be doing better with all of this [data]. We’ve started saying no to new data sources. We need to know: does it work? Can we integrate it into the real world—our website, our events, our sales cycle? We’ve got our hands full with what we already have.
Michael Eggerling
VP of Marketing
We definitely have a lot of different signals. It's not like one specific single we trust over the other. It's multiple signals indicating that there is intent. It's less about [trusting] this form of intent over others. Just trying to see across multiple different signals.
Natalie Marcotullio
Head of Growth & Product Marketing
You can be inundated of data, so you have to be careful of what you're looking for.
Irina Jordan
Head of Demand Generation
What’s Broken in Revenue Activation
Signal overload is clouding decision-making. Marketers can’t tell what’s real, what’s relevant, or who's ready to buy.
- The #1 challenge B2B marketing teams face when prioritizing audiences is a lack of unified data, followed closely by outdated, incomplete signals and resource gaps.
- 91% of marketing leaders are concerned about missing revenue from hidden opportunities within their total addressable market (TAM).
- 9 in 10 worry about the cost of misprioritizing audiences, citing missed targets, low pipeline quality, and wasted resources.
What's Causing the Disconnect
It’s about shared signal clarity.
When marketing and sales operate from different views of buyer readiness, teams default to inefficient behaviors: over-segmentation, blanket nurturing, premature handoffs, or no action at all.
Alignment isn’t about meeting more—it’s about making decisions from the same data.
What You'll Find in This Report: We’ve combined quantitative survey results with qualitative insights from leading B2B marketers to expose where revenue activation is breaking down and how today’s best teams are closing the gap.
Where Revenue Activation is Breaking Down
Across organizations, campaigns are running, content is shipping , and outbound is in motion. But pipeline is still stalling.
The issue isn’t execution—it’s focus. Signals that should guide targeting and timing are often scattered, outdated, or misread, making it harder to act with confidence.
Our research uncovered four specific ways this “clarity gap” is holding teams back and where the most effective revenue teams are gaining ground.
Intent ≠ Insight
Revenue signals promise clarity, but too often, they create confusion.
B2B marketers are collecting more data than ever. Most rely heavily on first-party interactions, intent platforms, and sales feedback to identify and prioritize their audiences. But despite these inputs, many still struggle to determine which signals actually matter. The problem isn’t access—it’s actionability.
Siloed, outdated, and incomplete data is eroding confidence and making prioritization harder. Marketing leaders say there’s a widening gap between available signals and the insights they can confidently act on.
Most Effective Signals
for Identifying & Prioritizing Opportunities
The majority of B2B marketing leaders are leaning on first-party or firsthand feedback and interactions to identify and prioritize their target audience or accounts.
What Marketing Leaders Are Saying About Revenue & Buying Signal Effectiveness
In terms of intent signals that we're looking at — all of the traditional sort of firmographics along with analytics into what they're engaging with. Definitely when we've got intent platforms involved, then you get a lot more information... that can really provide some valuable information in terms of highlighting differentiators or even knowing what issues to focus on when you're creating your content.
Meghann Hawes
Director of Strategy & Growth Marketing
One of the great things for us was we started to look at intent. Imagine if you can only focus on people who are interested. Who are already self-identifying through intent signals either through content syndication, things that they've already identified. They're already coming in double vetted, BANT qualified.
David Sim
VP - Head of Growth Marketing & Operations
Marketers’ Top Challenges
Identifying Opportunities
The biggest challenges B2B revenue teams face today in identifying new opportunities are limited resources (53%), incomplete or insufficient data (51%), and budget constraints (45%).
Prioritizing Opportunities
The biggest challenges B2B revenue teams face today in prioritizing target audiences or accounts are lack of unified data (55%), lack of resources (54%), and outdated or incomplete data (50%).
What Marketing Leaders Are Saying About Challenges Identifying& Prioritizing Opportunities
We have to be incredibly focused with our resources. And so precise prioritization isn’t just a goal. It’s actually essential.
Kristen Van Laren
Head of Marketing
TAM Audits
For those that say TAM audits have moderate to significant positive impact, 93% of them perform audits at least annually with nearly 2 in 3 auditing at least 2x each year. This group also says market intelligence platforms (70%), lead generation platforms (58%), and CRMs (56%) are ranked as the most effective for identifying new opportunities.
Audit Frequency
70% of B2B marketing leaders perform TAM audits at least once a year.
Audit Effectiveness
86% say TAM audits have a positive impact on their revenue growth.
Most Effective Tools
for TAM Identification
Market intelligence platforms (65%), CRMs (56%), and lead generation platforms (55%) are ranked as the most effective for identifying new opportunities.
Activity ≠ Acceleration
Campaigns are launching Engagement is tracking. But deals are still stalling.
Marketing teams aren’t short on activity. They’re short on meaningful movement.Despite measuring success by pipeline and revenue impact, too many teams are still chasing surface-level signals without knowing which behaviors indicate real buying intent.
As a result, they’re working harder to move deals that aren’t actually ready, while missing the ones that are. Clarity means knowing where accounts are stuck, when intent is validated, and how to focus resources where they’ll accelerate revenue.
Key Performance Indicators
Nearly 3 in 4 B2B marketing teams measure success based on pipeline generated or influenced. 90% of B2B marketers measure success on revenue or pipeline contributions.
What Marketing Leaders Are Saying About Measuring Marketing Performance
It’s totally conceivable marketing thinks they are killing it… but if those leads are not turning into opportunities that are then being won, is it really meaningful to anyone?
Nick McGuire
Head of Demand Generation
Just because someone does download something doesn't mean they're ready to buy... They're probably looking for education. I think some of the signals can be misleading in a sense of someone took an action on our site. They're checking out all these different pages. They're listening to our podcast. Okay, that shows intent. Great. That's one checkbox, but let's add some other checkboxes to that.
Charlie Riley
Head of Marketing
Revenue Generation Approach
More than half (58%) of B2B marketing teams use a blend of broad demand generation and ABM as their primary approach to generate pipeline and revenue.
Top Activation Challenges
B2B revenue teams cite maintaining engagement through long sales cycles (53%), delivering relevant or personalized messaging (43%), and measuring ROI effectively (43%) as their top revenue activation challenges.
What Marketing Leaders Are Saying About Revenue Activation Challenges
We're operating on a ton of assumptions. If we don't have some way to add exactly a layer of context around it, then we're looking at everybody the same way. Operating under false assumptions is honestly worse than not operating at all.
Claudia Ring
VP of Growth & Revenue Marketing
We're trying to do a lot of market segmentation… figuring out how to get really good detail on the qualifying triggers that are important to us.
Justin Johnson
Head of Marketing
We all have full buy-in of what our North Star is... And so everything we’re doing together should be pushing that vision forward.
Nathaniel Miller
Head of Marketing
Most Impactful Channels
While channel effectiveness varies by funnel stage and audience among other factors, B2B marketing leaders say the most impactful channels to progress buyers through their journey are sales outreach, website, industry events, paid advertising, and email.
More Leads ≠ More Pipeline
You’re not short on leads. You’re short on clarity.
Most B2B marketing teams are sitting on the right accounts, but they’re just focused on the wrong ones. Our research shows that 91% of marketing leaders are concerned about missing revenue from hidden, high-intent opportunities buried deep in the dark funnel.
Despite re-evaluating account prioritization strategies frequently, marketers say incomplete, outdated, and siloed data is making it harder—not easier—to confidently activate the right opportunities. The result: wasted spend, low-quality pipeline, and missed revenue targets.
TAM Reach
On average, B2B marketing leaders say their strategies currently reach total addressable market. 42% of their total addressable market.
It's been more about focus of really lasering in that ICP, going super narrow into very small niches and targeting them with very specific industry messaging and use case messaging.
Matt Serna
Chief Marketing Officer
We don't want to play the volume game. We want to play the quality game. So for us, it's truly about making sure we've got the right contact at the right company and that that company fits our ICP.
Justin Johnson
Head of Marketing
Marketing teams have gotten so much more in lean. Our budget is slashed. We're having to be incredibly smart with what we do. And the last thing you want to do is burn your target market with irrelevant messaging. So we're getting a lot smarter about how we target people. We're getting a lot more intelligent about like who is our actual market.
Michelle Brammer
Director of Growth Marketing
Dark Funnel Impact
On Unidentified Opportunities
- 91% of B2B marketing leaders are concerned about missing revenue from unidentified opportunities in their total addressable market.
- 98% say identifying hidden opportunities could help them achieve significant revenue growth.
On Mis-Prioritized Opportunities
- 93%of B2B marketing leaders say they re-evaluate their audience or account prioritization strategy at least once a year with more than half (55%) re-evaluating at least once a quarter.
- 90%of B2B marketing leaders are concerned about missing revenue due to incorrectly prioritizing audiences or accounts.
On Mis-Prioritized Opportunity Consequences
B2B revenue teams say not properly prioritizing audiences or accounts primarily leads to missed opportunities and revenue targets (83%), lower pipeline quantity and quality (70%), and wasted resources (60%).
More Campaigns ≠ Unified Execution
More campaigns won’t fix misalignment. If anything, they can magnify it.
B2B marketing teams are under pressure to scale, but without shared clarity on which signals matter and when to act, scale turns into noise. Despite nearly all marketers saying alignment is critical to revenue activation, only a fraction feel fully aligned with their sales counterparts. That disconnect means promising leads get ignored, campaigns underperform, and resources go to waste.
It’s not a strategy problem. It’s a clarity problem. Without a unified view of account readiness, marketing and sales are left interpreting different data, prioritizing different accounts, and operating on different timelines.
Sales & Marketing Alignment
3 in 4 B2B marketing leaders say sales and marketing alignment very significantly impacts revenue activation success, but only 37% of B2B marketing leads say they are fully aligned with their sales counterparts.
Activation Alignment
Impact of Alignment
What Marketing Leaders Are Saying About Sales & Marketing Alignment
I think the feedback loop is very important for sales and marketing. You have to check your ego at the door. Not every lead marketing is going to send a salesperson is going to be great. It's always testing... But sales can't just say, well, that was a crappy lead. Well, OK, why? Were they not ready to buy? Did they not have budget? Are we targeting the wrong demo?
Charlie Riley
Head of Marketing
We are working towards a more unified go-to-market framework of how we measure success, not just across marketing channels but our sales channels, our events channels, like we are all in this together.
Jacob Tache
Director of Marketing, Recurring Revenue
Strategy Goal
Most B2B marketing teams are focused on accelerating pipeline (42%)or improving account prioritization strategies (24%) in the next 12 months.
Quality vs. Scalability
B2B marketing teams are balancing quality and scalability by collaborating with sales teams, testing and optimizing campaigns, and segmenting audiences for personalized messaging.
What's Causing the Disconnect About Quality vs. Scalability
A lot of folks have gotten this feeling of garbage in, garbage out—so much noise in your inbox that nothing resonates anymore. But when you get that one nugget that solves your problem at exactly the right time, you not only trust who sent it—you buy from them.
Michelle Brammer
Director of Growth Marketing
Navigating the Noise
How Leaders Are Closing the Revenue Clarity Gap
B2B revenue leaders know the playbook: Run campaigns, capture demand, fill the funnel.
But when performance stalls and targets are missed, it’s not due to lack of effort—it’s due to lack of clarity.
While many teams are overwhelmed by disconnected signals, high-performing organizations are building smarter systems for focus. They aren’t chasing more leads. They’re creating alignment around opportunity readiness. Instead of reacting to every signal, they’re activating the right ones with precision.
The data reveals a consistent pattern: the best teams focus, refine, and align.
How Leaders Are Closing the Revenue Gap
Identify the Right Opportunities
- Perform TAM audits regularly: 93% of marketers who report strong impact from TAM audits conduct them at least once per year; 63% do so at least twice.
- Use trusted tools: High-impact teams prioritize market intelligence platforms (70%), lead generation tools (58%), and CRMs (56%) to uncover hidden revenue signals.
- Focus reach, not expanding it: On average, marketers reach just 42% of their total addressable market—but top teams are doing this by design, focusing on high-intent subsegments.
Prioritize What and Who Converts
- Reevaluate prioritization often: 87% of marketers who say audience prioritization drives revenue impact revisit their strategy at least twice a year; 60% do so quarterly.
- Align with sales earlier: Teams are integrating sales feedback, intent data, and historical conversion rates to rank accounts—not just segment them.
- Avoid the cost of misalignment: 83% of respondents say misprioritization leads to missed revenue targets; 70% cite lower pipeline quality.
Activate By Readiness, Not Volume
- Align by stage, not spray: Leading marketers are matching campaigns to where buyers are in the journey—not defaulting to high-volume tactics.
- Blend strategies intentionally: 58% of marketers use a mix of demand generation and ABM—and activate differently depending on audience readiness.
Tailor Approach by Goals
What Marketing Leaders Are Saying
About How They’re Overcoming RevenueActivation Challenges
Think about the humans you’re selling to. Think about the humans you’re selling with, and talk to that part of the buyer. That’s what’s going to stand out—and that will eventually turn into real pipeline and revenue.
Sarah Reece
Director of Demand Generation
The sales and marketing team should actually be one revenue team. The goal should be that we are trying to achieve revenue for the company.
Tosin Thomas
Head of Marketing
We educate them on the product, on the software, on our offerings, what we can and can't do. And then really when they come to our door, we're just holding their hand through that process and then answering whatever questions or objections they have. But ultimately we're trying to like answer their objections before they even have a call with our sales team. That's really what the approach has been.
Ryan Williams
Head of Marketing
About the Survey
Predictiv surveyed 100 senior B2B marketing leaders around the world to better understand the challenges, trends, and best practices in pipeline and revenue generation strategies.
About Predictiv
Predictiv helps B2B revenue teams uncover hidden opportunities, prioritize with confidence, and activate full buying committees.
Through a mix of unified revenue opportunity signals and first-party campaign execution, Predictiv empowers marketing and sales teams to close the clarity gap between signal and sale.
Whether you’re running account-based plays or broad demand programs, Predictiv delivers the visibility, strategy, and support needed to accelerate time-to-revenue.
How We Can Help
Full-FunnelFirst-Party Campaign Execution
Content syndication, email marketing, display advertising, and appointment setting-planned and executed entirely in-house.
Sales & LeadIntelligence Data Platform
Prospecting, enrichment, and pipeline-ready targeting, built for B2B teams that want to activate their market, not just analyze it.
If you’re ready to see more of your market and more of your revenue, let’s talk.