For most of its history, marketing lived on the expense side of the ledger. It was the function that built awareness and made the company look good. Its budget was treated accordingly: nice to have, first to cut, hard to defend in a downturn.
But that era is ending. There is growing consensus that marketing’s role has shifted and that its job now is to help drive the business and align more closely with sales and its KPIs. A recent survey of senior B2B marketing leaders we conducted with Harris Interactive found that 85% now agree marketing’s job is to prove ROI, not just produce great creative, views, and clicks. The function is now judged on growth, not output.
You can see the shift playing out at the top of the org chart. Spencer Stuart’s 2026 research shows that 62% of CMOs leaving their roles move up rather than out, 9% stepping into the CEO seat. And last year, the same firm found that 37% of sitting Fortune 500 CEOs have marketing experience in their background. Boards are handing bigger responsibilities to people who truly understand customer behavior and product demand because that experience now reads as business leadership, not a speciality kept at arm’s length.
This is a genuinely good moment for marketing. But it comes with a catch and our survey confirms the biggest exposure: 48% of marketing leaders are guessing which marketing actions influence purchasing decisions.
That’s not a reason to walk back the ambition. It’s the clearest signal of the next marketing leadership phase.
BIGGER ROLES COME WITH A HIGHER BAR
Every function that has leaped from cost center to profit driver has gone through the same reckoning. Sales made it decades ago, when forecasting and pipeline math became table stakes rather than a nice-to-have. Product made it when roadmaps started getting tied directly to revenue targets. Marketing is now going through its version of that reckoning, and the 48% figure is the honest admission of an industry mid-transition. Leaders have taken on the mandate to prove impact before their organizations can fully deliver on it.
That gap is closing faster in some places than others. Our survey shows social, display, and audio are the channels marketers lean on hardest to drive pipeline. Yet, nearly half admit they can’t reliably trace which of these activities are closing deals.
That’s an opportunity map. Rebalance toward the channels built to produce evidence to close the 48% gap fastest. Do it while your peers are still guessing.
THE NEXT WAVE OF MARKETING LEADERS
Part of what makes this moment ripe for marketers is a shift in how B2B buying works. Deals now move through a group of internal and external decision-makers. Each reads different content, on different channels, at different points throughout the decision.
Most measurement frameworks were built to track individual leads, not the way B2B deals actually happen. A dashboard will tell you someone downloaded a whitepaper, but not that in the same week, a finance VP read a case study, an IT director sat through a webinar, and a procurement lead clicked a retargeting ad—all signaling that a single deal is advancing.
The entire buying group, not just a single lead, is becoming one of the sharpest differentiators in the field. Eighty-four percent of marketing leaders we surveyed now call improving visibility across channels a top 2027 priority. It’s a skill that currently decides who’s in the room when growth decisions get made.
HIGHER STAKES, BIGGER UPSIDE
None of this comes without pressure. Ninety percent of marketing leaders we surveyed say teams that can’t demonstrate business impact will struggle to justify their budgets going forward.
But it’s worth naming what that pressure represents. A function doesn’t get handed revenue accountability unless the business believes it’s capable of delivering. Marketing has earned a seat with genuine influence over growth. The CMOs stepping into COO and CEO roles are proof the industry is starting to see it that way too. The 48% of leaders still guessing are early to a moment that hasn’t finished playing out. There’s room to move.
WHAT MARKETERS SHOULD DO
Closing the gap between marketing’s new mandate and its current evidence isn’t complicated, though it takes work. Three moves matter most.
First, audit channel investment against pipeline evidence, not against what feels familiar, easy to execute, or simple to report on a slide. With today’s pipeline intelligence tools, marketers can see which campaigns are contributing to opportunity progression versus creating surface-level activity.
Second, rebalance spend toward channels built to surface account-level signal—tactics that show who is engaging, at which account, at what stage of the deal—rather than channels optimized purely for reach and engagement. Platforms that surface in-market account data can help prioritize which accounts are worth that investment.
And third, build the capacity to see buying groups, not just leads, through identity resolution and account-level attribution that connects activity across every stakeholder back to a single buying motion.
None of this means walking away from brand-building or the channels creating awareness. Awareness still matters, but it now means matching effort to funnel parts that can prove what marketing is now being asked to prove.
THE UPSIDE IS BIGGER THAN THE PRESSURE
Marketing has moved from the expense to the growth side. The people running it are increasingly being handed the keys to the whole company. That’s a remarkable amount of headroom for a function that spent decades fighting for a seat at the table.
The 48% of leaders still guessing are standing in the middle of it, with a clear map of what to fix. Proving ROI, knowing which channels move pipeline, and reading buying groups instead of single leads, comes down to one thing: data. The marketers who put it to work first will be the ones running the company.
Keith Turco is CEO of Madison Logic.