Revenue growth fell this year. Marketing budgets went up. That gap is exactly where the best B2B marketers are doing their best work.
Working with Ascend2, we surveyed over 630 marketing leaders across North America, Europe, and APAC for our fifth annual B2B Marketing Edge report. The findings don't just document the pressure marketers are under. They show exactly what the marketers who are winning are doing differently.
The headline finding is uncomfortable but honest: fewer companies achieved significant revenue growth in 2025 than in 2024. The number dropped from 36% to 28%. Volatile economies and rapidly shifting buyer behavior hit hard. From AI search, to CTV, and Reddit, the channels marketers need to show up in keep multiplying, while the data, analytics, and internal alignment needed to work across all of them consistently haven't kept pace.
And yet 63% of marketers got a budget increase for 2026. Almost half are very confident in their organization’s budgeting process. That's not a contradiction. It's the market rewarding the marketers who built the case for budget before they needed it.
The question is: how are they doing it?
This year's report digs into four areas where performance gaps are most pronounced. None of them are theories. Each one is a pattern that shows up repeatedly across the data, and each one is within reach for any marketing team willing to prioritize it.
What separates Data Heroes is that they have measurement models connecting what they spend on data to what's actually closing. That visibility is what builds confidence and gets budgets renewed.
For the first time, the report asked directly about buying group implementation. More than third of our respondents (38%!) say they've fully defined and activated buying groups as central to how they go to market. That's meaningful progress.
The number of challenges cited tells a more honest story, though. From technical limitations to cross-team coordination, most organizations implementing buying groups are still finding their footing.
The upside for those who get it right? Improved sales alignment, higher win rates, and better conversion from opportunity to closed revenue.
Just 18% of marketers have a complete attribution model that tracks all the way through to closed revenue. We call them Attribution Leaders, and the numbers speak for themselves: 45% exceeded their goals versus 24% of everyone else. They're more confident reallocating spend across channels, and they carry the internal credibility to go after bigger budgets.
Attribution isn't a reporting exercise. It's what turns pipeline from a hope into a plan.
Right now, 41% of marketers globally say they frequently reallocate spend based on performance data. The rest are stuck. Slow approvals, locked annual budgets, and platforms that can't support real-time decisions are holding them back.
The marketers who can move fast when the data tells them to aren't just more efficient. They're delivering better results, and they're more confident in the data driving those decisions.
Forrester put it well: "Volatility can benefit those who adapt faster, focus harder, and lead more deliberately."
B2B marketers can't control global economies, interest rates, or how fast AI reshapes buyer behavior. What you can control is the quality of the data you build on, the rigor of your measurement, the strength of your alignment with sales and finance, and the agility of your campaigns. Those are the levers. The marketers pulling them hardest are the ones seeing the best results and the ones getting the budget to go further.
That's not a coincidence. It's a repeatable pattern. And the 2026 B2B Marketing Edge report breaks it down in full: what the most successful marketers are doing, where the gaps are, and the practical steps available to any team ready to close them.
Demand more from your marketing. Start with the data.