INBOX INSIGHTS: Looking Ahead to 2027, B2B Marketing Missing Topics (2026-11-04)

INBOX INSIGHTS: Looking Ahead to 2027, B2B Marketing Missing Topics (2026-11-04) :: View in browser

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Looking ahead to 2027

This week I’m at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, talking about how to build a smarter Ideal Customer Profile. If that term is new to you, an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the written picture of who you serve: what they’re trying to get done, what’s in their way, and what gets them to say yes. If it’s not new to you, you built it a couple of years ago, and it lives somewhere on a shared drive with a clever name like “Marketing Mary.” (No shame, we have Strategic Sarah.)

The core argument of my talk is that most ICPs are built on assumptions. A team decides what the customer cares about, writes it down, and builds content and offers on top of it without going back to ask the customer if any of it is true. These are broad strokes, not true for everyone.

Up until recently, we’ve been doing a version of this, too. We realized we were sitting on our own goldmine of data. A few weeks ago I ran an analysis of our sales call history to figure out which topics we should be covering and how to update the messaging on our website. When I dug into that, versus what I assumed our customers cared about, the gap wasn’t massive, but it was important. We were creating terms that made sense to us, and not reflecting back what our customers were actually saying.

So now, it’s your turn. We want to hear directly from you. What will 2027 look like to you? What are your pain points? What topics are you hearing about that you could use more information on? The question isn’t what the trend reports say 2027 will look like. The question is what you actually need from us, and I’d rather hear it in your own words than from a one-question poll.

Here’s what’s already on our desks

1) Chris is going deep on agents and local models. His session at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum this week covers what an agent actually is and how to use one for B2B marketing, with a heavy focus on prospecting. In 2027 he’s taking that further: agents that run on your own hardware, how to keep AI costs from getting away from you, and making the skills you build portable between Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT (so you’re not starting over every time you switch tools).

2) I’m focusing on where you don’t need AI at all. And when you do, how to bring it in smarter. A lot of the people I talk to don’t know where to start, and sometimes the honest answer is that the starting place isn’t AI. The majority of my Claude workshop at MAICON, and my talk at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, focus on what you, the human, can do, before you bring anything into AI.

3) We’re making it easier to find what you need. We working on clearer learning paths in the Trust Insights Academy and better access to all our free resources. We’ll be relauching the the podcast and the livestream to better align with our audience’s questions. And Chris wants to come speak on your stage and give a workshop to you team. He’s eager to hit the road, so let us know if you’re interested!

Tell me what you need

Let’s keep it simple. Just reply to this email and answer one, two, or all three. A sentence is fine. A paragraph is also helpful.

Where are you with AI right now: not using it, experimenting on your own, or trying to roll it out across a team?
What’s one problem on your desk that you’d want Chris or me to take on in 2027? (content, podcast, course, etc.)
What did we publish this year that you actually used, and what could we stop doing?

If you’re game to respond, I’ll aggregate the responses and publish the data so we can all be in this together. When I talk to people, the first thing shared is usually, “We’re so far behind!” The truth is that you’re not alone in that feeling. AI is moving so quickly that a very, very small percentage of people are truly caught up to what’s happening today, let alone implementing it.

We (all) tend to operate in a bubble. We build content calendars, and then sometimes ditch them because if you’re like me, you forgot you had to write something and then just wing it. I’d rather build next year around what you tell us than around what I assume.

What will you be focused on in 2027?

Reply to this email or join the conversation in our Free Slack community, Analytics for Marketers!

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss why six enduring marketing problems have slipped out of conference agendas and what their absence means for you.

You’ll learn why flashy AI sessions overshadow practical needs such as clean customer records, knowing which campaigns bring buyers, and email delivery. You’ll discover how to turn overlooked challenges into focused lessons for teams by combining data analysis, AI tools, and human judgment. You’ll see how better data maintenance will support stronger forecasts, marketing decisions, and customer retention in the years ahead. Watch to learn how you can use the newest tools to fix current problems instead of chase distant promises.

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last time on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Livestream, we covered practical use cases for AI in the affordable luxury market. Catch the episode replay here!

This week on So What? we’ll talk through our key takeaways from MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2026. Are you following our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to follow us!

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In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about using conference agendas to not only understand a topic or an industry, but understand the gaps in it. We’ve covered in the past how to use conference session data, such as session descriptions and session titles, and what the speakers speak about, to understand what the market demands.

Conference planners go through an extensive vetting process to understand what the audience wants, what the audience is willing to pay for – in some cases, thousands of dollars to attend an event. The sessions and keynotes at a conference reflect what they think is worth investing in from a speaker perspective, what sponsors are willing to pay for, and what attendees are willing to pay for. What is equally informative, however, is what’s missing, what isn’t there.

This week, Katie and I are at MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston. MarketingProfs B2B Forum keeps its finger on the pulse of B2B marketing and marketers, led by the fearless Ann Handley and the entire team supporting the event. For the past few years, of course, we’ve presented about AI and analytics, and we’ve been attending MarketingProfs events in some capacity since 2008.

If you were to go back in time, or if we were to look at B2B marketing in general as an industry, what’s fascinating is what’s no longer on the agenda. What are the gaps? What are the things that have been deprecated?

There are some things that have fallen by the wayside and would make no sense to talk about now, such as review sites like Foursquare, which went out of business recently, or MySpace, or any of the individual platforms that have come and gone. There’s no point, for example, in talking about companies that were acquired and then digested.

But the topics, the methods of thinking, the challenges that were appropriate in a certain period of time may still be happening. Marketers still struggle with classic challenges like Google Analytics attribution, but those topics don’t capture the imagination. Those topics don’t put butts in seats. A conference planner, even though they might recognize the value of a Google Analytics session, isn’t going to put it on the agenda because it’s not what attendees want to hear about and are willing to pay to see.

However, in terms of the value that it drives and provides, there is still value in the boring stuff, in the things that don’t put butts in seats. In fact, I’d argue that there’s even more value in that content because those problems haven’t been solved, and continue to be a pain.

On this week’s podcast, Katie and I talked about the 6 topics that have vanished from the stage but not from your to do list:

CRM data decay (25–30% annually)
Broken multi-touch attribution
2024–2026 email deliverability mandates (DMARC/DKIM/SPF enforcement)
Tech stack sprawl
Zero-click search cannibalization
Customer Retention/Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

Are any of those topics things that you still care about? They’re certainly things we still care about, and they’re gone from the stage and have been. In fact, in looking at the changes in the conference agenda over the past few years, AI went from one session back in 2021 (about 2% of all conference content) to 50% of sessions this year.

As Katie is often fond of saying, new tech doesn’t solve old problems. So if those old problems are still there, new tech, like AI, isn’t necessarily going to make those problems go away, but it can help you solve them faster and better. To do that, however, you have to acknowledge that those problems still exist and that they’re still worth solving.

Almost every AI course is the same, conceptually. They show you how to prompt, how to set things up – the cooking equivalents of how to use a blender or how to cook a dish. These are foundation skills, and while they’re good and important, you know what’s missing from all of them? How to run a restaurant successfully. That’s the big miss. We’re so focused on the how that we completely lose sight of the why and the what.

This is why our capstone course, the AI-Ready Strategist, is different. It’s not a collection of prompting techniques or a set of recipes; it’s about why we do things with AI. AI strategy has nothing to do with prompting or the shiny object of the day — it has everything to do with extracting value from AI and avoiding preventable disasters. This course is for everyone in a decision-making capacity because it answers the questions almost every AI hype artist ignores: Why are you even considering AI in the first place? What will you do with it? If your AI strategy is the equivalent of obsessing over blenders while your steakhouse goes out of business, this is the course to get you back on course.

👉 Take this course now to become an AI leader

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