It's all about the numbers. Why marketing needs to challenge them more.

As most B2B marketing leaders are now held accountable for revenue contribution, as well as pipeline and attribution, it's more critical than ever they understand what those numbers are built on. Marketing's voice in shaping revenue goals is rarely strong, and the number is almost always delivered top down.

Targets are typically anchored in assumptions that imply a stable relationship between activity, conversion, and output. That assumption is breaking. As B2B buyer journeys continue to shift, and as AI reshapes how software is built, adopted, and consolidated, those assumptions need to be re-evaluated.

For me, SaaS is where this is most visible.

According to Omnius, the median SaaS growth rate compressed to 12% in 2025, down from 30% in 2021. This is less a dip and more a structural reset, happening alongside rising infrastructure costs and increasingly blurred category boundaries driven by AI. More notably, the rise of agentic AI has widened the gap between companies that have embedded AI into their architecture and those that have simply added it as a feature.

The divergence this creates is stark. Palantir and Salesforce are not comparable products, but they share a market context — large enterprise software businesses navigating the same conditions in the same year. Palantir's stock surged 135% in 2025, making it the top-performing stock in the S&P 500, driven by genuine enterprise adoption of its AI platform. Salesforce, meanwhile, saw its stock fall by around 25% as customers delayed implementations and questioned ROI. Same market, same year, opposite outcomes — driven less by marketing or sales execution, and more by the depth of structural advantage each business had built over time.

For marketers, this is where frameworks like T2D3, Neeraj Agrawal's "triple, triple, double, double, double" model for SaaS growth, are worth revisiting. However, the predictable, capital-rich environment that made those growth curves repeatable no longer exists in the same form, so it is less a roadmap today. Instead, it’s a useful lens, a reminder of what structurally advantaged growth actually looks like and how few businesses are truly positioned to achieve it.

At the same time, capital availability for SaaS has tightened significantly, with AI companies absorbing 61% of all VC deal value in 2025 (Omnius). Many traditional SaaS businesses are now competing for a shrinking pool of capital against compressed revenue multiples and, in this context, signing up to benchmarks that are now closer to outliers than norms is less ambition and more mismatch.

Marketing leaders need to be aware of this as unrealistic growth targets quickly become a marketing performance problem that was never marketing's to own. When GTM execution falls short, the fault line is almost always seen to run through marketing, rarely through the number itself.

And it's not just SaaS. Across B2B, conditions are shifting. Economic pressure is slowing decisions, AI is changing how businesses compete, and buyers are more cautious, harder to convert, and navigating more complex processes. Yet many revenue targets are still set as if none of that has changed. The result is a gap between what the market can support and what marketing is expected to deliver.

That is why marketing leaders need to do more than execute. They need to build strategy from a deep understanding of their market and its real potential and, more importantly, bring that insight into the room. That means understanding not just what campaigns can generate, but what the product justifies, what the sales organisation can convert, and what the market will actually bear.

It means reading the numbers critically, distinguishing between growth that is structurally available and growth that requires the business to outpace conditions it cannot control. And it means speaking the financial language needed to challenge the CEO and CFO when these assumptions don't stack up - providing the data to back it up.

There are no prizes for committing to a number you already know will be difficult to hit. The value lies in knowing the difference, and having the standing to say so.

Confidence in this environment isn't about accepting the target regardless. It's about understanding the assumptions well enough to know whether a credible marketing strategy can be built around them.

Recognise this? Element 8 works with B2B marketing leaders to build strategy grounded in market reality — and helps you challenge the numbers with confidence. Let's talk.