marketing leadership

Between the Lines Newsletter
It’s Not a You Thing.
- February 26, 2026
The Conundrum of Common Problems, Isolated Solutions
It’s a WE problem.
We wait twenty months to get our CAC dollar back.
We have lost half our marketing email deliverability.
We have lost a third of our organic search.
We bought AI to go faster. We are going slower.
We see our website traffic is down, our post responses are down.
We’re down.
You know what all of these problems have in common?
We.
WE share these problems.
But are WE sharing the solutions?
Rivers burning. Paybacks dropping. Wishful thinking.
Those aren’t just snappy headlines to grab your attention.
We are living the same challenges in the same market at the same moment.
But we seem to be… alone.
The Try Harder Trap
The effort is not in question.
If you are encountering these “challenges” your effort is not in question.
Nor is your intelligence.
Nor is your will or your focus or your skills.
Walk into any enterprise organization right now and you will find smart, seasoned professionals working hardon truly confounding problems.
They are gritting their teeth, driving themselves.
Do more. Test new go-to-market approaches.
Do it differently. Rebuild the channel mix.
Do it over.Recast the forecast.
Do the prompt one more time.
The urgency is not manufactured.
It is everywhere, and it is accelerating.
And that urgency is becoming more urgent.
Nearly half of 4,702 CEOs across 105 countries said they do NOT believe their business will be viable in a decade without significant reinvention.
The hard work gets harder.
We are all trying harder.
Everyone is working on this.
Everyone is working on this.
Separately.
Going it Alone
Between the lines of these common problems lie thousands and thousands of leaders going it alone.
Right now, across this market, at the moment you are reading this, hundreds of leadership executives are trying to solve the same exact problems.
The collapse of search is not a “you problem.”
The cratering of email effectiveness is not a “you problem.”
The explosion of AI is not a “you problem.”
Hundreds of marketing leaders are rebuilding their channel strategy from scratch without knowing that three peers at comparable companies have already tried what they’re about to try, and failed, and learned something critical from it.
Hundreds of senior leaders are wrestling with how to govern AI inside their organizations. Yet 53% of those same C-Suite execs won’t even admit to their teams that they, too, are struggling with their own use of AI. I feel them.
But the shadow cast from this “lonely shame” models the worst in Leadership, and it darkens the culture.
It’s a shadow that an Ernst & Young survey of 1,000 U.S. workers found: 59% spend more time wrestling with AI tools than if they’d done the work by hand. But they keep trying.
The message from the top? Figure it out.
Not, in all honesty, “Hey, I’m struggling with this, too.”
To my kindred Marketing Leaders: the most recent Gartner CMO Spend Survey said that the majority of you do NOT have sufficient budgets to execute your strategy. Across the conference room table, your CFO’s pressure has intensified year over year. 63% of marketing leaders report it.
Grow faster. Get leaner. Raise your game. With less.
And do it yourself.
Without talking to anyone who has solved this.
Under the false assumption that those people can’t be found.
How do you search for it on LinkedIn?
Oh, wait, there are literally thousands telling you they have it ALL figured out!
Based on their years and years of leading big businesses and big teams and big budgets!
Right.
It feels like the Genuine Leaders with Solutions That Work live on the moon.
Listen to Yourself
Over the last few months, In the 100+ direct conversations I’ve had with Senior Leaders across this $2.5 Trillion “niche” market of B2SMB, the same themes surface with a consistency that stopped surprising me a long time ago.
“We’ve been asked to spend half as much to get twice as much,” one CMO of a mid-tier payroll services provider told me. “It was not a gentle ask.”
Another VP Marketing, leader in tech hardware: “We can’t keep up with how fast our site traffic is dropping. We can’t get a click. We know what’s going on but that isn’t helping us solve it.”
Said a Fortune 500 CSO, a woman who has been selling successfully to SMBs for decades : “AI is our competitor. It’s the only salesperson our customers will listen to.”
A phone call with one of my favorite SaaS founders – a call that was a full-scale bitch on our collapsing KPIs – ended with him saying, “Nice drowning with you!”
To be clear: NO ONE is giving up.
These are passionate over-achievers, all of them. They are not wired to surrender to a trend. Or bad numbers. Or job insecurity.
But I’ve now started asking, “Who do you talk to about this?”
And I am met with a shake of the head. Chin down. Clicking on a keyboard.
Look! Over There! Another You!
The 2024 MGI Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report, which surveyed 700 professional associations, found that 67% of professionals cite peer networking as the #1 reason they join.
I can attest. I’ve witnessed it first hand.
My “associations” include: NRF, NTA, SMPTE, 4As, LMA, and the rest of my career’s worth of alphabet noodles.
And then of course B2SMBI for the last 8 years (!)
I am the first to say that my career was built on the shoulders of peers who were generous (and strong) enough to lift me.
So I’m not surprised that the demand for peer connection is rising.
Because peer wisdom works.
The dialogues – the genuine, smartly focused problem solving sessions with fellow practitioners – are not found within your own four walls. Or on LinkedIn. And never on Teams.
We don’t solve problems on earnings calls. Or in performance reviews. Or frankly around every Executive Committee table I have sat around (6 in all) and even led.
The solutions live inside not just a single peer, but in the brains of a few connections, or a dozen, or hundreds.
Or maybe at the end of a long call when someone drops their guard long enough to say what is actually true.
What is actually true: the B2SMB market that I love so dearly is one of the most fragmented professional communities in business.
Peers simply do not talk to peers.
Problems that are universal are being solved as if they are unique.
In a bizarre twist, we take the fragmentation of our 33 Million customers and apply it to our own behaviors.
Lessons already learned the hard way are being learned again, by someone else, at full cost.
Is Isolation a Strategy?
I have to wonder. Because isolation really looks like a strategy.
I suppose in this market, at “this level,” you are supposed to have the answers.
That is the job.
You are the senior person in the room. You are the one the organization looks to when the channels stop working and the numbers go sideways and the board starts asking harder questions.
Admitting you’re not sure what to do next feels like a confession of failure.
So you don’t admit it. You go back to your team and work harder and optimize the funnel one more time and tell yourself the answer is just around the corner.
Small wonder, then. Your behavior.
Research published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2024 found that psychological safety is a prerequisite for sharing behavior.
Without that safety, people hide what they don’t know. At this level, not knowing is the one thing you cannot admit. So the knowledge that could solve the problem stays locked in your office.
61% of Senior Leaders say that isolation is actively impairing their performance.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness and isolation put a clinical frame on it: professional isolation reduces task performance, limits creativity, and impairs reasoning and decision-making.
71% of small and mid-size business Leaders experience that isolation at least occasionally.
I don’t quote those stats to brainstorm a motivational poster with you.
This is not a YOU problem. This is not a ME problem.
I just want to point out another twist of irony: that we value peer wisdom, connections, our network, and yet we take on our job alone.
Sad that in our “industries”, we have few mechanisms for peer-to-peer problem solving at scale.
There are conferences where everyone show-ponies their highlights. There are LinkedIn post-players that are always performatively “right.” There are chats that feel more like video-game trash-talking than anything.
There are few places where real, unguarded collaborative problem solving happens.
So the problems WE are facing compound and remain YOUR problem.
The CAC crisis gets worse because everyone is independently testing the same failed channel strategies without knowing they are duplicating work that has already been done and already failed.
The channel collapse accelerates because no one is coordinating a response to a shared infrastructure problem – I’m looking at you, Google.
The AI confusion deepens because the executives who most need to govern these tools are the least likely to admit they haven’t figured them out yet.
Isolation doesn’t just slow the solutions.
It compounds the damage. Geometrically, down the chain.
Putting Our Heads Together
In 2024, researchers Terekhin and Trinh published a systematic review in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, synthesizing the full body of existing research on peer development groups. Their conclusion: structured peer groups are a legitimate, documented intervention that improves executive effectiveness.
That word – intervention!
Our shared problems – problems that are mounting every day, that are becoming radioactive – require an intervention.
An intervention conducted in a circle.
With people living the same business crises alone.
Here’s what such a gathering is NOT:
a vendor pitching a solution
a consultant diagraming one
a self-proclaimed SME power-pointing one
an influencer with an infographic
anyone who claims expertise based solely on number of followers
We need to re-discover our campfires.
Pull up some logs. Talk. Listen.
The ground rules are simple:
No bullshit.
No performative anything.
No shame.
Because no one in the circle believes you are doing anything wrong.
YOU ARE NOT DOING ANYTHING WRONG!
The math breaks.
The playbooks burn.
The tools fail.
The solutions escape us.
But I am willing to place any bet on the table.
WE will crack some codes.
WE will walk away more capable.
Won’t call it a comeback.
We’ve been here for years.
Our solutions will come.
As WE return.
Between the Lines Newsletter
The River Is Burning
- February 4, 2026
The River Is Burning
Dave Walker

Fortune 50 CMO | Founder, B2SMB Institute | Building the Operating System for Enterprise→SMB Growth | Publisher, Between the Lines

On June 22, 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire.
Not a small fire. Not the first fire, either. The river had burned at least a dozen times since 1868.
But this fire was different. It made Time magazine. It sparked outrage. It became the catalyst for the Clean Water Act of 1972.
The river burned because we filled it with garbage. Oil slicks, industrial waste, debris so thick that it could catch fire from a spark. We knew it was polluted. We just kept dumping.
Today, the river of business communications is on fire.
Email inboxes. Search results. LinkedIn feeds.
Every channel we depend on to reach buyers is burning.
And just like the Cuyahoga in 1969, it’s burning because we polluted it.
The difference? We’re still dumping.
The Cuyahoga River – June 22, 1969. The smoke – and the stench – made its way to New Jersey the next day.
The Channels Are Turning to Ash
Without drama, let’s start with what’s actually happening. The data is as stark as it is unambiguous.
Every major channel you’re using to reach buyers is in flames.
E-mail is dying in plain sight. If you’re sending to Office365, only one-in-two emails now reaches the inbox. That’s not a typo. Inbox placement dropped from 77% to 51% in a single year. For Outlook? Seven-in-ten emails are filtered away before anyone sees them.
High-volume senders got hit hardest. If you’re sending a million emails a month, your inbox placement crashed from 50% to 28%. You’re spending the same money to reach half as many people, and most of what gets through lands in spam.
The problem isn’t your content. It’s not your subject lines. Microsoft and Google have made a decision: they’re going to filter aggressively, and they don’t care if your email is ‘legitimate.’ They care about engagement rates, authentication protocols, and sender reputation. And if you’re a B2SMB company trying to prospect at scale, you’re fighting an algorithm that assumes you’re spam.
Search is no better. 73% of B2B websites lost significant organic traffic between 2024 and 2025. The average decline across all B2B websites was 34%. Even if you rank in the top three positions, you’re getting less than half the clicks you used to. Why? Because 60% of searches now end without any click. Google answers the question with an AI Overview, a Featured Snippet, or a direct answer box. Your website never gets seen.
Paid Traffic is cratering. Salesforce paid traffic is down 79%. And if you thought organic search was a safe haven? HubSpot lost 70-80% of its organic traffic in three months. These aren’t small companies with bad SEO strategies. These are category leaders with massive content libraries, and they’re watching their traffic evaporate.
Yes, of course AI is having an impact. The buyers you’re trying to reach? They’re not “searching” anymore. 67% of B2B decision-makers now use ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity to do their initial research. That number was 12% two years ago. By 2027, 95% of B2B decision-makers will start their research with AI. They’re not clicking through to your website. They’re getting their answers in a chat window.
LinkedIn engagement is sliding too. Down 8.3% in the first half of 2025. If you’ve built a large following, congratulations: the algorithm punishes you for it. Large accounts get three impressions per follower. Small accounts get 16. The more you’ve invested in building your audience, the less LinkedIn shows your content to them.
Every channel is failing. Email. Search. Social.
These aren’t temporary dips. These are structural collapses.
The Cuyahoga River fire burned so fast and so hot that nothing could put it out. But that didn’t stop firefighters from trying.
The B2SMB Go-to-Market Crisis
The channels are burning, but there is no fire sale from the channels.
Your go-to-market costs are exploding.
In the last 18 months, sales and marketing effectiveness has been cut in half.
The median Sales & Marketing multiple dropped from 6x in 2024 to 3x in 2025.
Translation: you’re generating half the revenue you were with the same marketing budget. Top performers fell from 22x to 7x. One-third of previous efficiency. Gone.
This isn’t about your team’s execution. This isn’t about your messaging. The channels themselves now require twice the spend to deliver the same results. The river is so polluted that it takes twice as much effort to reach anyone.
Customer acquisition costs have increased 222% over the last eight years.
In 2024 alone, CAC jumped 14%. The median company now spends $2 to acquire $1 of annual recurring revenue. Bottom-quartile companies spend $2.82 per dollar.
The math doesn’t work. There is no sustainable business spending two dollars to make one.
HubSpot – whose content is in my opinion best-in-class – used to get the majority of its pipeline from blog traffic. Now it’s 10%.
The inbound marketing model that powered a generation of B2SMB growth is effectively gone.
The stock market sees it.
HubSpot shares down 51% in calendar 2025. Monday.com down 36%. Salesforce down 31%. These companies aren’t failing because of bad products. The market is repricing them because it sees what they see: the GTM channels are on fire. You can’t build a go-to-market model when email gets filtered to spam, search traffic collapses 34%, and your LinkedIn posts reach three people. The infrastructure itself is collapsing.
Everyone is spending more to reach fewer people, and the people you do reach are less likely to convert because they’re drowning in noise.
That’s not a strategy. That’s a death spiral.
Who Set This Fire?
The Cuyahoga didn’t catch fire on its own. Factories dumped waste. Oil companies dumped sludge. Ships dumped garbage. A few big polluters created most of the problem.
The same is true for business communications.
We like to blame ‘the algorithm’ or ‘AI’ for the collapse. But AI didn’t pollute the river. We did.
75% percent of marketers are using AI tools to generate content.
54%t of sales teams are using AI to write personalized outbound emails.
63% of content creators are using AI-assisted scriptwriting.
42% of YouTube creators are using AI to generate thumbnails.
74% of new web pages now contain AI-generated content.
Over half of ALL articles are primarily AI-written.
Does anyone want to hit Polymarket and bet if any one of these numbers will stop growing?
The internet is drowning in content, and we’re the ones flooding it.
AI doesn’t produce worse content than humans – it produces infinitely MORE of it.
And we’re happy to apply the “more is more” playbook.
When marketers can generate 50 blog posts in the time it used to take to write one, that stuff is going somewhere. The river overflows is choked. The channels aren’t collapsing because AI content is bad. They’re collapsing because there’s too much of everything.
This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a behavioral problem. AI tools aren’t inherently bad. But when three-quarters of marketers use them to flood every channel with more content, more emails, more posts, the flow slows to a crawl.
Meanwhile, like any pollution crisis, the problems accelerate to a tipping point. The Cuyahoga didn’t catch fire because of one factory’s waste. It caught fire because decades of accumulated pollution from hundreds of sources finally reached critical mass. One spark, and the whole river ignited.
That’s where we are now. The river is burning.
It’s not a few bad actors flooding the channels. It’s all of us. Every marketer with a ChatGPT subscription writing five emails instead of one. Every sales person using AI to personalize a thousand prospecting messages. Every LinkedIn poster using Claude to polish their hot take. All of us, armed with tools that let us produce ten times the content in the same amount of time.
The channels weren’t built for this volume. And frankly, nor were we.
WE can’t handle it. We can’t read a thousand emails! We can’t evaluate 50 search results! We can’t process 500 LinkedIn posts! So the platforms filter for us – aggressively. Microsoft sends half your emails to spam because users are drowning. Google answers questions with AI Overviews because people can’t wade through pages of content anymore. LinkedIn shows your post to three people because the feed is overflowing.
The more we pollute, the more they filter. It’s a feedback loop that accelerates the collapse.
The people trying to do good work are burning out. 52% of content creators experienced burnout as a direct result of their career. A study in Australia found 70% of marketing professionals there reported burnout in the past year. Do you think that’s isolated to Australia?
We’re all exhausted from trying to cut through the noise while the noise keeps getting louder.
What the Clean Water Act Actually Did
The fire in the Cuyahoga had two positive outcomes: the establishment of our national EPA, and The Clean Water Act.
Both combined to manifest our own national awakening that burning rivers were bad, putting into motion profound change.
The new entity and legislation didn’t just regulate riverside factories. Both put a good deal of blame back on us. Both fundamentally changed how we thought about shared resources. Both declared that you couldn’t dump waste into a river just because it was convenient, whether from an 8-foot wide pipe or from the back of a pick-up truck. It held ALL polluters accountable.
And neither EPA nor CWA blamed the river.
It worked because it recognized a simple truth: when everyone pollutes, no one benefits. The river becomes unusable. The fish die. The ecosystem collapses. And eventually, even the polluters suffer because they’ve destroyed the resource they depend on.
We’re at that point with business communications.
Our river is on fire. And we’re the ones who lit the match.
The “clean-up” of the Cuyahoga River was the most expensive environmental recovery ever.
What Comes Next
There is no Clean Water Act coming for business communications. No regulatory body is going to save us. The EPA isn’t showing up to shut down your marketing automation platform.
Which means we have two choices.
The first is to keep doing what we’re doing. Keep sending those emails, publishing the blog posts, posting on LinkedIn. Follow the gurus and throw in some carousels and infographics. Keep buying the AI tools that promise to 10x your output. Keep spending more for diminishing returns while telling ourselves the channels will bounce back, or that we’ll “figure it out.”
The stock market has already told you how that ends. HubSpot down 51%. Monday.com down 36%. Salesforce down 31%. The market is pricing in the death of this GTM model.
The second choice is harder. It requires admitting that the B2SMB go-to-market playbook that worked for the last decade is dead.
That you can’t scale your way to growth anymore. That volume isn’t the answer when volume is the problem. That if the metrics aren’t working we can just measure harder.
It means building differently. Smaller. More deliberate. Focusing on relationships instead of reach. Signal instead of noise. Quality instead of quantity. Communities instead of campaigns.
It means accepting that your CAC is going to stay high and your organic leads are going to stay low until the ecosystem is somehow cleansed, even purged and dredged.
It means recognizing that AI isn’t the enemy – our behavior with AI is.
The tools amplified what we were already doing wrong. They just let us do it at scale fast enough to break everything.
The Cuyahoga caught fire thirteen times before we finally did something about it. Thirteen times we watched it burn and then went back to dumping.
The river of business communications is burning now.
How much longer are we going to watch it burn before we stop dumping?
Dear Reader:
On February 22 the B2SMB Institutewill celebrate its 8th Anniversary.
Our mission and our heritage since our launch has been centered on a simple premise: that we solve problems better together.
B2SMB Leaders in this highly fragmented $2.5Tril Small Business Marketplace are themselves fragmented. Peers don’t talk to peers.
Ironic, because the very best solution I’ve found over 40+ years in business have come from my peers.
During Covid, the Institute exploded, because the value proposition of our network of B2SMB Leaders was painfully clear. We needed each other. We doubled in size.
But I fear the noise – and the burning river – are now smothering our demand for each other.
Maybe I too easily draw parallels between our Covid era and now. But I know that the very real and painful conversations I’ve had with many of you over the last few months have felt the same.
“How’s business?”
“It’s like somebody shut off the water main.”
“Yeah, my e-mails are cratering.”
“So are mine. And I can’t buy traffic. Or leads. Or sales. I’m more embarrassed every day. I’m supposed to be the smart one.”
“Well, the good news is you’re not alone. At least we have each other.”
B2SMBI Circa 2019