Five Lessons from Get in Front Milwaukee That No AI Could Have Written

On October 1st, I spent a full day in Milwaukee talking about AI with some of the sharpest B2B marketers I know. When I got up to close the day, I shared something I’d noticed from the back of the room: for a day about AI, the AI itself barely showed up.

Sure, it probably helped build a few slides. Every insight that mattered came from the people in that room, though. Marketers shared what’s working, admitted what isn’t, and challenged each other’s thinking all afternoon. I’m proud our team hosted a conversation that honest.

Here are the five lessons I’d put in front of any B2B marketing leader right now, plus one thing you can do with each as teams start planning for 2027.

1. Why does data activation matter more than data volume?

Our CEO, Rob Sanchez, opened the day with a message the room needed to hear: relax. He has watched B2B marketing move through direct mail, the internet, email, and intent data. I’ve watched the same cycle, and the teams that resisted each shift always fell behind. AI moves faster and makes more noise, yet it follows the same pattern.

His bigger warning was about focus, and it is advice I’d give any marketing leader today. AI vendors are flooding teams with pilots, and most are spreading themselves across too many at once. Access to data has become table stakes. The teams pulling ahead are the ones who activate it.

My colleague Lynn Tornabene, our Chief Marketing and Product Officer, brought the numbers. In our 2026 B2B Marketing Edge report, marketers who could prove their data’s value in pipeline were more than twice as likely to significantly beat their goals. Their edge came from using buying group data fully, across every channel and in step with sales.

Try this: Pick one account you want to grow. Map every person who touches the decision, including the quiet approver who can stall a deal in the final week.

2. Who should get your next marketing dollar?

Every marketer knows the game. Finance hands you 20% more tomorrow, so which channel gets it? The School Specialty marketing team threw out that question and asked which customers deserve the investment instead. As a strategist, I loved watching that session.

They stopped judging performance at the district level and dug into individual schools, where strong district numbers had been masking real losses. With every site visible, they sorted customers into retention, reactivation, and acquisition, then built the entire company’s revenue plan from those segments. Marketing, sales, and finance now work from the same numbers.

The payoff showed up in conversations that used to be painful. A seller in the field now hears “reactivate eight more sites than last year” in place of a vague target, and finance speaks the same language. Adam Halfmann, VP Marketing & Digital Strategy at School Specialty, reminded everyone why that alignment matters: finance rarely hands you 20% more. More often, they ask for 20% back.

Brent Wiltz, GM of RTIC Outdoors’ Custom Shop, reached the same conclusion from a different direction. He measures spend by audience across months, which makes the revenue tail far easier to predict.

Try this: Add a segment label to every account in your system. Once the value lives on the account, you can measure against it.

3. How do you get AI to recommend your brand?

Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder and CMO at Orbit Media, gave the room a fresh way to think about search. Buyers now do their consideration-stage research inside AI models, and those models skip the list of options and go straight to a recommendation.

Your website has to do more than rank. In Andy’s words, your job is to train AI to act as a sales rep for your brand. Answer every real sales question your buyers ask, back every claim with proof, and retire vague headlines that give a model nothing to work with.

Lane Talbot, Senior Content Solutions at LinkedIn pushed the panel further, pointing out that most B2B creative is forgettable. That leaves plenty of room for anyone willing to write well and take a stand. Andrea Duffy-Cabana, Senior Director Paid Media, on our team, kept the discussion grounded. Third-party voices shape most AI recommendations, Google still drives the bulk of traffic, and you can’t improve what you don’t track.

Then Andy delivered the line I’d tape to every content team’s monitor: if AI can write it, don’t publish it.

Try this: Block an hour, play the role of your buyer, and quiz AI about your category. Note who it recommends, work out why your brand didn’t make the list, and close those gaps.

4. Why are champions your most powerful sales reps?

In the final keynote, Roy Wollen, a B2B marketer and lecturer from Northwestern University, took aim at two things marketers love: the funnel and the linear buyer journey. He argued neither ever really worked, and AI has made that impossible to ignore. I agree with him.

Today’s buyers prefer to run their own research and hold off on talking to sales until they need something specific. So, who persuades the rest of the buying group? Your champion does.

Roy’s model puts target accounts, in-market signals, and champions at the center. Champions advocate for you behind closed doors, talk about you online, and lend the third-party credibility AI engines look for. They usually reach out to sales when they need help convincing their peers, and that’s your opening.

He added a twist worth remembering. Signals work in both directions, and some tell you an account is ready to buy while others warn you a customer is close to leaving. Catching that early beats any win-back campaign.

Try this: List your top five champions. Ask what each one needs to sell your brand internally, whether that’s a business case, an ROI model, or a story from a customer just like them.

5. How do you simplify a complex B2B program?

Brent Wiltz didn’t come up through marketing. He’s an operator who took over a B2B custom shop that had grown by accident and asked one question: how do we find net new buyers? A year later, that program had reshaped the channel and changed how the whole company thinks about data. It has since delivered $2.7M in incremental revenue and a 6.7x incremental ROAS.

His playbook is simple, and it’s one I’d steal for any program. Fail fast, since a win only tells you to keep going. Chase small gains, like moving a click rate by one point. And when you ask for budget, show what it will cost the business if you don’t get it.

The breakout roundtables pointed the same way. Marketers want a golden record (one trusted view of every account and contact) they can use without rework, content that sounds unmistakably human, and a simple rule for working with AI. One comment focused on the “human sandwich”: human input, AI as the tool, human output.

Get in front of what’s next

I left Milwaukee with a renewed sense of confidence in this community. The marketers in that room know more than they give themselves credit for, and they can connect more spend to revenue than ever before. Now it’s time to tell that story.

I’m already counting down to our next Get in Front event, and I’d love to see you there. Register your interest. Until then, our data analysts and strategists are ready to help you turn your data into action. Book a session with our team, and let’s map out how you can demand more from your pipeline.