This week, we're talking with Dagmara Szulce of the ANA and Daniel Sills of NewtonX about their new Confident B2B Marketer report. Marketer confidence jumped from 39% to 59% in a year, but finance leaders are nowhere near as sold. We look at why the gap exists and the fastest way to close it.
—Elena
59% of B2B marketers now say they can prove marketing's financial impact.
That's up from 39% a year ago. The ANA and NewtonX asked 150 finance and revenue leaders the same question. Only 45% agreed, and just 12% said that confidence holds up once budgets get tight.
Confidence and credibility aren't the same thing.
What's driving the jump in marketer confidence?
Dagmara and Daniel point to discipline. Confident marketers built four things: clean data pulled together from scattered systems, real support for complex buying groups, tighter alignment with sales, and a clear line from marketing to revenue.
Why doesn't finance agree?
Different vocabulary. Marketing might mark a deal as pipeline the moment someone fills out a form, while finance waits until the contract's signed. Match the two up and the numbers won't agree, and once they don't, nobody trusts the dashboard.
How are confident marketers protecting brand budgets this year?
They bring the case to finance before the campaign launches. One SaaS CMO in the report stopped citing broad brand metrics and picked one number instead: people who already know the brand before they land on the site buy more often. That number was easy to defend, and it survived the budget cuts.
What's the one fix worth making first?
Before your next budget conversation, agree with sales and finance on a few basic words: what counts as pipeline, what counts as a qualified lead, and how ROI gets calculated. Szulce called this the single most useful thing a CMO can do all year.
“The Confident B2B Marketer 2026.”
This report from the ANA and NewtonX breaks down the 12 behaviors that separate confident B2B marketers from the rest, plus the first side-by-side survey of marketers and finance leaders.
Confidence isn't proof.
“The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.”
— Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel laureate
This newsletter comes from the hosts of The Marketing Architects, a research-first show answering your biggest marketing questions. Find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.