Outpace Competitors in 2026

B2B marketing today is defined by potential. But for most teams, the friction from internal silos and slow approvals is killing momentum. With 89% of teams reporting that internal breakdowns impact revenue, go-to-market (GTM) teams must rewire their operating model to evolve alongside the customer.

In 2026, leaders can escape these slumps by mastering three strategies: improving internal communication and alignment, speeding up campaign execution, and delivering standout, personalized messaging.

Stop Working in Silos

Over half of GTM leaders report that the disconnect between product, marketing, and sales is the single greatest roadblock to customer-centric experiences and growth. When marketing promotes unconfirmed features, sales cannot effectively guide the buyer journey. Leaders must retire this scattered approach and establish a collaborative headquarters where all customer strategy lives, from identification to addressing pain points and beyond.

To eliminate this internal chaos, teams need to create one centralized space where client information can be updated and distributed across departments, allowing marketing to launch product feature campaigns using sales-vetted messaging that reduces messaging inconsistency. This centralized system allows teams to collect input from partners outside the core GTM teams (like legal or finance) directly, avoiding unnecessary emails or calls as well as quick collaboration that respects everyone’s time.

Finally, teams must conduct essential planning, such as defining target customers and their journey, utilizing new artificial intelligence (AI) tools to collect insights to ensure that every customer interaction is intentional. For instance, AI can analyze support transcripts and sales calls to surface previously unknown pain points and needs for a specific audience, allowing the marketing teams to custom-build a targeted campaign from scratch.

Speed Up Campaigns

Speed is the new currency in marketing. Successful teams must bypass friction and transition from strategy to action instantly. To accelerate execution, teams must leverage available tools, such as the centralized collaboration platform, to guide teams through structured thinking methods. This moves the team quickly from confusing ideas to clear, measurable action plans that prevent creative energy from dissipating.

Next, simplify approvals. Leaders need to standardize and speed up decision-making and campaign sign-offs using pre-built approval paths designed for specific marketing goals. For example, establishing a pre-approved, two-step path for blog content and a five-step path for high-budget video production eliminates the guesswork that causes delays. This stops campaign managers from chasing signatures and frees up time for high-level strategy.

Additionally, teams should capitalize on AI to assist with content drafts, data analysis, and organization. For instance, AI can quickly categorize thousands of customer support transcripts to identify the most common buyer objections, which can then be immediately addressed in the next campaign’s FAQ or ad copy.

Put Personalization First

In a content-saturated world, only relevant and personal outreach breaks through the noise. But teams can’t personalize effectively when bogged down by administrative chaos.

To shift from “talking at” the customer to “working for” the customer, teams must increase accountability, as it’s the foundation for personalization since delivering targeted experiences requires discipline and clarity. Teams must connect every task to top-level business objectives by using real-time performance dashboards. When team members see exactly which projects are tied to leading goals, it prevents the resource drift that fuels chaos and ensures energy is reserved for granular personalization, like gathering specific data or creating unique assets.

The final goal is to master targeted account outreach that requires close coordination across marketing, sales, and product teams to craft genuine personalized campaigns to specific, high-value target audiences. For example, after sales confirms the strategic goals of a key account, marketing can then deliver an email sequence referencing their specific challenges and industry reports. This level of specificity can result in higher meeting acceptance rate for sales.

The opportunity for 2026 is to fundamentally redesign the B2B marketing engine. By adopting a mindset centered on collaboration, speed, and specific campaigns, teams can escape the friction, leave innovation slumps behind in 2025, and drive meaningful growth.

Christina Bottis is the Chief Marketing Officer at Mural, the leading visual work platform. She brings two decades of go-to-market, demand generation, product development, and leadership experience to Mural, where she oversees the company’s global marketing strategy.