For our final Revenue Marketing Raw of the year, I decided to get a little festive and break down the 12 trends that will define revenue marketing in 2026—set to everyone's favorite holiday earworm. No, I didn't actually sing (you're welcome). But I did deliver some predictions that every B2B marketer needs to hear heading into the new year.
Here's the full breakdown.
Day 1: An AI Agent Running Autonomously
Unless you've been living under a rock, you can't miss AI. It's everywhere. But the really big shift in 2026 won't be LLMs or chatbots—it'll be agents.
We're talking about highly repetitive tasks and processes that can now be fully automated. Whether you're using Salesforce's AgentForce, HubSpot's Breeze, or building your own agents with Zapier or n8n, agents are going to take the world by storm.
Here's the thing: AI agents won't replace marketers. But they will expose marketing teams or individuals who aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. If you've got people hiding behind busy work, agents will shine a spotlight on that real fast.
Day 2: Two Merged Tech Stacks
We've been watching this trend for a few years now—marketers consolidating their stacks after years of over-exuberant tech buying. That consolidation is accelerating, partly because of AI.
You can now connect systems that previously couldn't talk to each other. You can build your own capabilities with tools like Cursor or Claude. You simply don't need as much software to market effectively anymore.
Marketing tech budgets are coming down from their peak of over 20% of total marketing spend to around 16%—but honestly, it should be well under 10%. AI is highly affordable and highly scalable. It's time to trim the fat.
Day 3: Three Dead Cookies
The cookie is going away. It's first-party data or die.
You need engaging user experiences—subscriptions, tailored content, live events—that compel people to opt in and share their information willingly. With third-party cookies disappearing, your advertising model, your paid search model, and a lot of other strategies are going to be disrupted.
Your marketing strategy in 2026 must be heavily centered on acquiring first-party data. How do you get people to give you permission? That's not just good for segmentation—it's critical for campaign performance.
Day 4: Four Revenue Dashboards
Some of you might not even have one revenue dashboard, so that's probably a good place to start.
This is really about CMOs finally crossing the divide and speaking the language of finance—talking like a CFO. You've heard my take on attribution: I'm personally against it as a financial measure of marketing's contribution. But for understanding your marketing mix and how to move the needle? Critically important.
It's not about having four dashboards. It's about having dashboards that matter—not measuring soft activity, but measuring conversion, ROI, and understanding how every marketing dollar turns into a dollar of business.
Day 5: Five Qualified Leads 🏆
This is the refrain, folks. Quality over quantity.
And let me be clear: the MQL is dead. Get rid of this model.
A qualified lead is simply something you and sales agree on—they accept it, they work it. But it's more than that. It's the account. It's the full buying committee. It's conversion of that opportunity into revenue.
Unless you're selling to individual consumers, a single lead won't get the job done. Even if you qualify the lead, you need the other 12-15 people on the buying committee—CFO, IT, procurement, legal. Start thinking about qualifying the account and the opportunity, not just the lead.
AI can help you build the right predictive and segmentation models to make this happen. But you have to change your whole model first.
Day 6: Six Predictive Models
If you're not predicting, you're reacting. And only losers react.
Winners predict. They're proactive. Whether it's next-best-action, anticipation, or propensity scoring—we have the tools now. The data is sitting in your CRM and marketing automation systems. Layer AI on top, clean up your data, and start making smarter decisions.
There's really no excuse anymore. And if you're still blaming your data going into 2026? Come on. I've been doing this for 30 years. Every marketer has budget to get more data. I've yet to see a dollar in the budget to clean up data. We all admit our databases suck. The best databases turn over 25% a year. Yet we're not willing to spend money to fix it.
We all say we need clean data to use AI. So what are we waiting for? Clean up the data and get predictive.
Day 7: Seven SDRs Panicking
Yeah, SDRs are panicking. And they should be.
Platforms like Qualified, Gong, and others are doing the job. The best SDR can make maybe 60-70 calls a day. AI agent systems can make thousands of calls a minute, never get tired, stay perfectly objective, and qualify consistently.
And here's the uncomfortable truth: when does a buyer ever really want to talk to a salesperson? They can now interact with chatbots, get information on Slack, Quora, Reddit—AI can do a lot of the outbound.
SDRs either become deal accelerators or job seekers. While I believe it's ultimately AI plus humans that wins, there's no question the SDR function is one of the first sales roles in jeopardy because of AI. Big prediction for 2026.
Day 8: Eight Hyper-Personalized Journeys
One-to-one at scale isn't a dream anymore—it's table stakes.
If you're using Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar platforms, you can literally send out a million hyper-personalized emails where every single word is completely tailored to the individual. Even the best marketer in the world can't do that manually.
If you're still sketching out nurturing campaigns and manually writing all your emails, you're falling way behind. Every single client we've seen apply AI to their prospecting engines is blowing away their best campaigns by far—huge increases in open rates, click-through rates, conversion, and booked meetings.
We're not saying AI should take over for your marketers. We're saying let AI handle the heavy lifting so marketers can be more creative, more strategic, and come up with cooler ideas. Hyper-personalization is critically important in 2026.
Day 9: Nine AEO Articles
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) started the year as a curiosity. What is this thing? Do we call it AEO? GEO?
We're ending the year with everyone saying, "Holy shit, our searches are tanking. Our traffic is going down. Our paid media campaigns aren't converting like they used to. What's going on?"
Buyer behavior is changing dramatically. Within a couple years, 80% of people won't even go to your website anymore. Eighty percent.
You've got to restructure your current website pages with schemas and FAQs. You need to build new web pages designed for perplexity, ChatGPT search, Google AI Overviews, and the LLMs. And you have to overlay that with presence on Quora, Reddit, Slack, and all the dark funnel channels.
It's a massive shift in how we think about marketing. If you're not starting now, you're already behind—your traffic is already suffering and your competitors are getting on it. AEO should be one of your top three priorities in 2026.
Day 10: Ten Systems Integrating
For some of you, getting two systems to integrate feels impossible. But in 2026, there's no excuse.
RevOps and Marketing Ops will continue to drive the heartbeat of the organization. We're going to see RevOps own more and more of the stack. If you still have systems in silos—pieces that aren't connecting—that's career suicide.
Most SaaS platforms now have rich APIs, are highly interoperable, and you can overlay AI on top or use third-party workflow and integration agents like Zapier, Workato, or middleware like Boomi. There is no reason your tech systems shouldn't be integrated and working together.
Day 11: Eleven CFOs Smiling
Most of us would love to get one CFO smiling. Do they ever smile?
Yes—they smile when the money is there. When we can show them the money. Finance leaders are great people. They're going to smile when marketing finally proves ROI.
Finance becomes your ally. Start partnering with them. Don't fear them—embrace them. Work with them. They have tremendous insight. If you focus on showing the ROI of your efforts, you'll have a friend and partner for life.
Day 12: Twelve Pipelines Flowing
Revenue marketing isn't a trend. It's the only game in town.
Revenue marketing has been alive and well for 15-16 years now. With all the systems, tools, and AI capabilities we have, we're smarter and better than ever. Now we need to start showing it.
Let's build revenue engines that are repeatable, predictable, and scalable. It's right there for the taking. You just have to apply the principles.
The Bottom Line
2026 is going to separate the revenue marketers from the activity marketers. The tools are there. The data is there. AI is there. The question is: will you use them?
From myself, Dr. Debbie Qaqish, and The Pedowitz Group—happy holidays. We'll see you in 2026.
This is Revenue Marketing Raw. I'm Jeff.
Watch the full episode: Revenue Marketing Raw
Want to talk about getting your marketing ready for 2026? Let's connect.