Certainty is the enemy of growth. The funnel is fundamentally flawed. Brand is the bookend AI cannot replace.

Chris Bagnall has spent nearly three decades in B2B marketing, first client side for five or six years, then into agency land around 2000 or 2001, joining a very small media agency that grew fast to become the world's largest B2B tech media agency. Over the years he saw a gap for a B2B marketing and creative agency that genuinely knew how to execute rather than hand everything to PR, social and media shops, which he found woeful at delivery. He founded Transmission 12 years ago. It is now close to 250 people, eight offices around the world, and the largest independently owned B2B agency in the world.

He has always advocated the generalist agency. There is no new big channel coming on board the way digital, mobile and social once did. Clients do not want multiple single-service agencies. They want specialism, but they also want connected generalism that works at global scale, and that model has proved successful.

Customer obsession is about anticipating needs and offering meaningful interactions that create real value for the buyer, not just marketing and sales opportunities for yourself. It means sitting in the customer's seat and understanding what they have done before so you can predict what they want next, the Amazon or Netflix style applied to B2B. CRM, by contrast, is inherently inwardly focused, a reporting and storing mechanism for internal needs rather than putting the customer front and centre.

B2B is developing personality, tone of voice and cultural relevance, and thank God it finally got there. There has been a lot of thought leadership and research pushing what good looks like, but it is seeing really good B2B in action, thought through and delivering results, that gives marketers the ammunition to take to the board and prove that a non-boring, scientific, culturally relevant approach pays dividends. It is not dollar-in, dollar-out marketing. It exponentially increases the value of the brand and marketing's contribution to growth.

Too often cultural relevance means slapping a logo on a Formula One car or a football shirt. Transmission took HP's business to business side back into sponsorship, having not been in it since the Spurs days 15 or 20 years ago, and brokered a deal with Wrexham. The client had seen Welcome to Wrexham, so rather than just putting a logo on the shirt, they got HP inherently involved in the community and got Ryan and Rob creating tongue-in-cheek content that was culturally relevant to the small and medium sized business audience they cared about. It is about taking it exponentially further than face value.

When Cannes Lions launched a B2B awards category five years ago after nearly 70 years, Transmission decided that if they turned up, they had to turn up with something interesting. They published the power of B2B brand awareness, then the CMO to CFO divide, helping marketers talk the language of the board because the way marketers talk is gobbledygook to the rest of the organisation, then the world's first behavioural science study in B2B.

One study asked how to build a board-ready CMO, surveying 500 respondents and interviewing 15 to 20 board CMOs, of which there are few, because only about 3% of boards have marketing representation. From that they built a diagnostic tool that lets any marketer find where they are not board-ready, whether a skills, capability or experience gap. The goal is business savvy senior marketers who understand that marketing needs to be more about business.

Over the last 20 to 25 years marketing was marginalised into performance tactics, because being good at digitally savvy marketing is freaking difficult and getting harder. As marketers were pushed into a promotions department, other stakeholders picked up product, price and place. In the board's commercial reality, if you are not intertwined with those aspects you cannot demonstrate your value, so Transmission teaches clients to sell what they do internally and stop talking in speeds and feeds.

The MQL to SQL funnel is outdated and fundamentally flawed. Certainty is the enemy of growth: demanding predictable outcomes limits testing and risk and stagnates potential. With 95% of buyers out of market at any time, chasing short-term demand means fishing in a tiny bucket. There is a whole industry that gets fat on driving volume, and buyers who were never engaged properly go unresponsive. The question is, what even is a lead?

Most brands are ill-equipped for where this is going, with no excuse. The messy middle, the research and consideration stage, will be largely replaced by AI, which only cares that content is relevant, findable and personalised to the persona, vertical, country or language. But the two bookends belong to brand: brand gets you into the consideration set at awareness, and at decision no board signs off a supplier it has never heard of, however well it performs in studies. ServiceNow's new CMO from Salesforce is the example, cutting content by a third because it was slop and rebuilding the mix.

We used to use organic strategies to drive paid. Now it is going the other way: you test precisely on paid, and when something works you find tactics to scale its reach organically. That 180 will grow over the next 12 to 24 months. If you are not taking this seriously, and some people are not, you are going to be out of business pretty soon.

Twenty five or thirty years ago the advice was to specialise and dine on it for a career. Now it is the reverse. Whatever you studied, you cannot rely on it looking the same in one to five years, so betting everything on one expertise is a risk. Become a generalist, pick something adaptable across industries, and think more like an entrepreneur: understand how business works, because you do not know where the industry is going.

Qualcomm Snapdragon is doing A1 marketing, smart sponsorships and culturally relevant work, better than other chip manufacturers. The buzzword to retire is funnel marketing. The technology to watch is AI, and specifically Claude, plus AI replicating what software development has done over 25 to 30 years at a staggering pace, which is why a lot of software companies' share prices are in the toilet.