For years, marketing sat at the centre of B2B growth. If revenue slowed, the answer was often more campaigns, more content, more tools. That logic still shows up in board meetings and planning sessions. But in 2026, it feels less reliable than it used to.
I think most growth problems you face today do not start in marketing. They start earlier, often before a single campaign goes live. They sit in how you define your market, how sales and marketing interact, how your CRM actually gets used, and how decisions move through the business. That is why marketing is no longer the growth engine. Go-to-market is.
This is not a rejection of marketing. You still need strong positioning, clear messaging, and consistent demand generation. But marketing now operates downstream of choices that shape outcomes far more than any campaign ever could.
Ask yourself a simple question. When growth stalls, do you really believe better emails or a new website will fix it. Or do you suspect the issue sits deeper in how your business goes to market.
Go-to-Market – The underlying force for good
Go-to-market work rarely feels urgent. Campaigns feel urgent. Product launches feel urgent. Sales targets feel urgent. GTM design sits quietly underneath all of that. It shapes who you target, what you sell, how you price, how sales engage, and how systems support the process. When those elements drift out of alignment, marketing ends up carrying weight it was never designed to hold.
We see this often at Remora. Teams ask for lead generation support, but when we look closer, the problem looks different. The ICP is vague. Sales qualifies leads one way, marketing another. The CRM holds partial data that no one fully trusts. Reporting focuses on activity rather than progress through the buying journey. Marketing executes well, perhaps even very well, yet revenue remains uneven.
You might recognise this pattern. Marketing delivers volume. Sales pushes back on quality. Leadership asks for growth forecasts that no one feels confident giving. The instinct is to optimise the funnel. The real need is to redesign how the funnel exists in the first place.
CRM – A vital part of your go-to-market infrastructure
Consider CRM as an example. Many companies treat CRM as a marketing or sales tool. In practice, it is part of your go-to-market infrastructure. It encodes how you define a lead, when ownership changes, how value gets measured, and what success looks like. If those definitions are unclear or contested, no amount of marketing automation will create clarity.
The same applies to AI. There is pressure to deploy AI across marketing and sales. Content generation, lead scoring, chat interfaces, forecasting. These tools promise speed and efficiency. But AI reflects the system it sits within. If your GTM design is fragmented, AI scales the fragmentation. It does not resolve it.
Perhaps this feels uncomfortable. Marketing often becomes the visible surface of growth, so it absorbs frustration when results disappoint (something Zafar and I are well aware of!). That can be unfair, but it is common. The more honest view is that marketing performance mirrors GTM health. Weak signals upstream produce weak outcomes downstream.
Think about how buyers behave now. Long buying cycles. Multiple stakeholders. Non-linear journeys. Heavy self-education before first contact. If your GTM model still assumes a clean handoff from marketing to sales, you are likely forcing modern buying behaviour into an outdated structure. Marketing then appears ineffective, when the structure itself no longer fits reality.
This is where the shift matters. Go-to-market work focuses on decisions before execution. Who exactly are you built to serve. Which problems do you solve better than anyone else. How does revenue actually move from first touch to long-term value. What role does marketing play at each stage, and where should it stop.
None of this removes the need for strong marketing. It reframes its purpose. Marketing becomes an amplifier of a clear GTM strategy, not a substitute for one.
You might be thinking that this sounds like theory. It is not. Small changes at the GTM level often unlock disproportionate impact. Tightening ICP definition reduces wasted spend. Aligning sales and marketing qualification criteria improves conversion without new leads. Clarifying ownership inside the CRM speeds follow-up and improves forecasting. These are not dramatic moves, but they compound.
GTM to unite your team
There is also an organisational angle. GTM decisions cut across functions. They force conversations between marketing, sales, product, and leadership that do not always happen naturally. That can create tension. It can also create progress. Avoiding those conversations pushes the burden back onto marketing execution, where it does not belong.
I sometimes hear leaders say they want marketing to be more strategic. What they often mean is that they want marketing to compensate for gaps elsewhere. A better approach is to treat go-to-market as a leadership responsibility, with marketing as a core component, not the sole driver.
This is where 2026 feels different from even a few years ago. Tools are abundent. Channels are crowded. Buyers are cautious. Growth comes less from doing more, and more from deciding better. Go-to-market is where those decisions live.
If marketing is no longer the growth engine, what does that mean for you. You may have to step back before the next campaign. It could mean asking whether your systems reflect how your buyers actually buy. It may mean accepting that some growth problems cannot be solved inside the marketing function alone.
That realisation can feel slow or inconvenient. It can also be freeing. Marketing works best when it operates within a coherent go-to-market strategy, not when it tries to create one by itself.
At Remora, we think this shift will define the next phase of B2B growth. Marketing still matters. It just no longer carries the whole engine. Go-to-market does.
If you want to discuss your go-to-market challenges and see how we at Remora can help, then just get in contact by clicking here.
