I was at an American Marketing Association event in Chicago recently, sitting in a room full of sales and marketing practitioners debating a question that sits at the center of everything I do: how do sales and marketing actually win together in 2026?

The panel included Kendra Cato, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Advance Partners; Tony Lenhart, Partner at Brickwork; and John Iwanski, Vice President of Marketing and Outreach at ISMIE. The conversation was sharp, honest, and at times a little uncomfortable, which is usually a sign that the right things are being said.

One thread ran through almost everything: AI has fundamentally changed the sales process, and most companies are still running the old playbook.

Here’s what that means for you as a CEO, and what your sales and marketing teams need to do differently.

Your Buyer Has Already Done the Work

Not long ago, a salesperson’s job was to open the conversation, ask discovery questions, and guide the prospect through an education process. The salesperson controlled the information.

That dynamic is gone.

Tony put it plainly: buyers are showing up to calls having already self-diagnosed their problem (perhaps not correctly, however). They’ve used AI to research the landscape, compare vendors, and narrow their list. By the time they agree to a meeting, they’ve often already formed an opinion about who they want to work with. 

If your salespeople are still walking into first calls with a list of discovery questions, they are behind. The buyer didn’t need the call for information. They needed it to decide whether they trust you.

Every Salesperson Has Become a Marketer

This is the part that makes a lot of CEOs uncomfortable, because it means the job description for a salesperson has quietly expanded without anyone updating it.

Kendra described it this way: because buyers are self-educating before they ever reach out, salespeople now have to build visibility and a point of view before a buyer is ready. When the moment comes, the buyer should already know who your salesperson is and why they’re worth talking to. If your salespeople are invisible online, they are invisible in the buying process.

This is not about your salespeople becoming content creators. It’s about them building their brand as a thought leader and having something meaningful to say. A perspective on their industry. A story about a client who faced a hard problem. An honest take on where things are heading. That’s what builds the kind of familiarity that makes a buyer choose to reach out in the first place.

The CEO question here is straightforward: are your salespeople building that type of presence? And if not, what is your organization doing to help them?

Marketing’s Job Is to Arm Sales, Not Just Generate Leads

Here’s where the conversation got practical, and where I think most mid-market companies leave the most value on the table.

Tony talked about three criteria that matter most when evaluating leads: fit, recency, and intent. Fit is whether the prospect matches your ideal customer profile. Recency is whether their interest is current or has gone cold. Intent is whether there are behavioral signals that suggest they are actually in a buying motion.

Most marketing teams are sitting on this data. Most salespeople are walking into calls without it.

Think about what that means in a world where the buyer has already done their research and the salesperson has one shot to add value. If marketing hasn’t told sales that this prospect downloaded three pieces of content in the last two weeks, visited the pricing page, and fits the ICP precisely, the salesperson is operating blind. They’re being asked to add value without the information they need to do it.

Marketing’s role in the new sales process is not just demand generation. It’s intelligence. Getting the right data to the right salesperson before the right conversation is one of the highest-leverage things a marketing team can do.

The Trust Equation Explains Why All of This Matters

Tony referenced a framework from the book The Trusted Advisor that reframes the entire sales process in a way that makes the stakes clear. It’s called the trust equation, and it looks like this:

Trustworthiness = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-Orientation

Four variables. Three that build trust, one that destroys it.

Credibility is your words and your expertise. Can the buyer actually believe what you’re saying? This is where a salesperson’s visible point of view matters before the call even starts. If a prospect has been reading your perspective for months, credibility is already established.

Reliability is your actions and your predictability. Do you do what you say you’ll do? This one compounds over time. Every commitment kept adds to it. Every dropped ball subtracts from it.

Intimacy is about the human connection. Does the buyer feel secure enough to tell you what’s really going on, the budget constraints, the internal politics, the real reason the last vendor didn’t work out? That kind of candor only happens when a salesperson has earned it.

Self-orientation is the denominator, and that’s the point. It doesn’t matter how credible, reliable, or warm you are if the buyer senses that you’re fundamentally focused on your own agenda. Self-orientation poisons the equation. A high score there drives trust down regardless of everything else.

The old sales motion, script-heavy, discovery-question-driven, pitch-deck-dependent, is a self-orientation machine. It signals to the buyer that the salesperson is there to get something. The new motion has to be different: informed, curious, experience-driven, and genuinely focused on the buyer’s outcome.

What to Do About It

The companies that will win in this environment are the ones where sales and marketing are genuinely working together, not just coordinating on a shared dashboard. A few of the most practical ideas from the panel:

Implement a Collective IQ meeting. Tony described a recurring internal meeting where sales shares what they’re hearing from clients and prospects, and marketing is in the room. The language buyers use, the objections that keep coming up, the questions that reveal where prospects are stuck — that’s the raw material for better content, sharper messaging, and more effective sales conversations. Most companies don’t have a formal mechanism for this kind of knowledge transfer. They should.

Give sales the fit, recency, and intent data before every meaningful conversation. This doesn’t require a complex tech stack. It requires marketing and sales agreeing that this information matters and building a simple handoff process around it.

Build joint metrics. Kendra was direct about this: sales and marketing need a shared number they are both working toward. Not separate scorecards. Not marketing measuring leads while sales measures close rates. One number. One direction.

Make brand compliance a two-way street. Kendra shared a story about creating a piece of sales collateral, handing it to marketing, and getting it back two days later cleaned up and on brand. That’s the model. Sales puts onto paper what’s in their head. Marketing ensures it sounds and looks like the company. It’s not about control. It’s about consistency, and it works when both sides trust each other enough to engage honestly.

The Real Question

John quoted something during the panel that stuck with me: if you’re not growing, you’re dying. Someone else is taking your business.

The companies that figure out how to run a modern revenue engine, where sales and marketing are working from the same intelligence, toward the same goals, with a shared understanding of how buyers actually buy today, are the ones that will take it.

The ones still running the old playbook will feel the gap widening and not be entirely sure why.

If your sales and marketing teams are operating in silos, if your salespeople are walking into calls without the context they need, if your marketing team is measuring activity instead of impact, the problem isn’t a people problem. It’s a system problem. And system problems have system solutions.

That’s exactly the kind of work I do.

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Michelle Krier is the founder of Foxbridge Consulting. Foxbridge helps CEOs and Presidents of B2B professional services companies build predictable revenue engines by aligning sales and marketing. If this resonated, schedule a conversation.