The Playbook · v1.8
Read in any order. Open whichever module matches what you're shipping this week. The full playbook is included with every CoreCMO plan, and it's written to be useful before you have a Brief, sharper once you do.
These modules are the marketing foundation of your GTM operating system, since positioning, ICP, and messaging are what the rest of go-to-market runs on. The Sales & RevOps pillar extends the same operating system into revenue operations. The Operator Brief you build here is already the shared source every team and every AI reads from.
FIRST TIME HERE?
The sections below are the library. The starting point is your Operator Brief — the populated document that grounds every prompt and agent in the system. Fill it once, then every module reads from your real values. Open your Operator Brief →
THE MACRO RESET — THE INVISIBLE BUYER JOURNEY
Most of the playbook below was written for a world where the buyer's research path ran through your website. In 2026, that world is going.
The data the senior operators cite: 73% of B2B buyers now use LLMs to conduct their research (Loganix, 2025). 75% complete the full buyer journey before they ever contact a brand (Gartner CSO research, 2025). Among IT leaders, advanced AI adoption is up 700% year over year, with 64% at "advanced or leading-edge" levels. Organic web traffic to vendor sites is down across the board — HubSpot is the most public example, but the pattern is industry-wide.
What this means for the marketing function: the buyer is shortlisting vendors before vendors know they're being evaluated. The decision happens in conversations with AI tools, in founder DMs, on curated peer-network platforms, in podcast recommendations, in analyst reports, in the comparison threads that surface in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Then the qualified buyer arrives at your site already "solution aware" — usually for a demo, not for research. Your owned content has to win the LLM citation game first, the human-eyeball game second.
Every section below is true in itself. But read them through this lens: the function's job is no longer to drive buyers to your site. It's to be the brand the AI shortlists, the brand the founder DMs about, the brand the analyst cites, and the brand the customer story flows from. The new AI Operating Model and the AI-era PR depth in PR & Comms are the sections that name the shift directly. The rest of the playbook earns its keep when you read it as the operating discipline that makes the new buyer journey win, not the old one.
Source attribution: Loganix 2025 B2B Buyer Behavior Study; Gartner CSO 2024–2025 research on B2B buying behavior; G2 March 2026 B2B Buyer Survey.
The modules map to four pillars. Strategic Foundation — TAM/SAM, ICP, personas, right-to-win, competitive intel, pricing, win/loss, brand, best-in-class, and the AI operating model. Channels & Execution — the surfaces that turn strategy into pipeline, plus the orchestration above them: campaign architecture, product launch, and the website everything points at. Measurement, Influence & Alignment — the disciplines that keep it honest, from KPIs to executive comms. And Sales & RevOps — the revenue operating system beneath it all, from sales workflow to ARR reporting.
Strategic Foundation
The market math. The customer math. The competitive math. The pricing math. The brand math. And the operating discipline that makes the AI layer compound rather than amplify weakness.
Does the market exist? Is it big enough to underwrite the revenue plan? Top-down + bottom-up TAM, SAM filters, SOM math, CFO defense memo. The model the board can audit.
Who you sell to. Vertical scorecard, buying committee structure, easy-wins methodology, the 8-step ICP construction, beachhead market entry.
One persona per buying-committee role. Seven dimensions per persona — goals, priorities, challenges, objections, metrics, watering holes, trigger events — plus the propensity-to-buy signal layer.
The empirical truth about where you win consistently. 3-intersection framework, two-signals method, the statement shape, the agent that watches drift weekly.
Proactive competitive intel. The Market Intelligence Agent crawls competitor sites, hiring pages, and changelogs weekly — so Sales never finds out from a buyer first.
Pricing is a strategic lever, not a finance function. Value-based philosophy, tier architecture, value-metric selection, discount policy, competitive position.
The most direct feedback loop in marketing. Structured win interviews + loss interviews + quarterly thematic synthesis.
Brand work is the highest-leverage discipline in B2B SaaS. The same conviction-pillars-voice block onboards every AI agent in your stack.
Score yourself harder than your board would. The quarterly self-audit + the six traps that end CMO tenures.
The operating discipline every other area of the playbook assumes. 3-layer LLM ops, the Marketing Agent Org Chart, buy-vs-build matrix, governance.
Channels & Execution
The sections that turn the strategic foundation into pipeline.
The orchestration layer above the channels: campaign types, the offer ladder, the brief, channel sequencing, and the funnel math that sizes a campaign before you run it.
Launch tiering, the one-objective brief, the messaging hierarchy, the T-minus runway, sales enablement before launch day, and the 30/60/90 follow-through.
What the site is actually for, the page set that must exist, on-page message hierarchy, conversion paths and friction, and testing that respects your traffic.
Topic clusters, on-page SEO, the comparison-content pattern, FAQ content production. Where the content engine actually compounds.
Answer Engine + Generative Engine Optimization. The dedicated home for the operating thesis: SEO/AEO/GEO triad, llms.txt, robots.txt, cross-surface positioning enforcement.
MQL nurture, lifecycle programs, the email-deliverability discipline, the newsletter cadence.
Founder LinkedIn, exec voices, company-page cadence, the comment strategy. The single highest-leverage B2B channel.
Channel mix by ACV, target CPL calibrated to the business, paid search vs. paid social, retargeting discipline.
Tier-1 selection, intent-data sources, 1:1 playbook for the top 20.
Tier-1 flagship through Tier-4 webinars. Event lifecycle from T-12 months to T+30 days.
G2, Capterra, peer review sites, the 92%-of-buyers-read-reviews stat. Cadence, response discipline, and Buyer Intent integration.
Tier-1 Champions, case-study cadence, expansion playbooks, the community that builds itself.
Earned media for the AI era. The shift from press releases to LLM-citation framing. The CFO defense for the PR line in the budget.
Recruit, enable, co-market with, and measure many partners across 12 partner types. The full partner lifecycle, MDF, and the partner scorecard.
The webinar as its own motion: objective first, demand-led topics, the promotion runway, show-rate economics, the sales one-pager, and post-event lead routing.
Where to advertise, distribute releases and place articles. Map where buyers gather, read where competitors place, score every candidate the same way, and derive the budget from your allocation rails.
Measurement, Influence & Alignment
The six disciplines that keep everything else honest — including the cross-functional alignment that makes a marketing leader an operator.
Pipeline model by ACV/stage, win-rate math, MQL/SQL definitions, the number you own.
MMM patterns by stage, the MMM engine, channel attribution, the refresh cadence.
Annual marketing budget, brand vs. demand allocation, brand bets, agency roster.
Weekly Pipeline Call, Monthly Pipeline Council, Quarterly Revenue Handbook, enablement layers.
Weekly ELT Dashboard, Monthly State of Union, board snapshot, CEO 1:1, CFO check-in.
Marketing's role across Product, Sales & CS. RACI for contested zones, PMM org design, first 90 days for a new VP/CMO.
Design the function itself: org chart, jobs-to-be-done, functional workflows, and the tech stack that backs it — shaped to your stage, motion & ownership.
Sales & RevOps
The revenue operating system beneath marketing — sales workflow, pipeline, and the reporting the CFO trusts. Same modular shape, same agents.
The end-to-end lead-to-closed-won process: stage definitions, systems of record, SLAs, and the sales RACI.
When and how to create opportunities without duplicates. Pipeline hygiene rules, data standards, and forecast categories.
A consistent lead and deal lifecycle with stage discipline, SLAs, lead scoring and routing, and partner-lead handling.
The sales-side partner program: onboarding, deal registration, commissions, and tiers. Pairs with Partner & Channel Marketing.
ARR definitions, the ARR bridge, NRR/GRR math, and the reconciliation SOP the board trusts.
Bookings definitions, bookings vs. ARR vs. revenue, TCV/ACV, and the bookings SOP.
The RevOps systems map — CRM, CPQ, billing, warehouse, BI — systems of record vs. reference, and data hygiene.