Emerging B2B Go-to-Market Trends for 2026
In response, we’ve identified seven emerging GTM trends that many teams are already starting to encounter, reshaping sales motions, pricing strategies and operating models. Understanding how these shifts are playing out is becoming increasingly important for teams looking to sustain growth, reduce churn and support long-term account expansion.
- More complex, AI-shaped buyer journeys that are harder to influence
- Larger buying committees and longer, more structured buying processes
- A growing shift to “land and expand” sales motion
- Greater shared responsibility for value realization
- Outcome-linked pricing models
- Tighter alignment across Marketing, Product, Customer Success and Rev Ops teams
- Internal AI adoption across GTM teams
Together, these trends are prompting many organizations to reconsider how they sell, price and deliver value, with a stronger focus on alignment, clarity and measurable impact across the entire customer lifecycle.
The Evolving Buyer Landscape and Buying Committee
The buyer journey is becoming more complex as AI and agentic search increasingly influence how prospects find, consume and evaluate information. Buyers are arriving better informed, engaging later in the process and are looking to vendors to play a more consultative role across marketing and sales.
At the same time, buying committees continue to grow and buying cycles are stretching. With tighter budgets and more constrained access to capital, organizations are applying greater scrutiny before approving spending. This added governance often gives buying committees more leverage, leading to more challenging negotiations, shorter contracts and higher expectations for early, visible value.
As a result, GTM teams are often engaging buyers later in the process, while being asked to add greater strategic value when they do. Success increasingly depends on navigating a wider group of stakeholders with credibility, patience and a clear view of how value will be delivered.
The Strategic Shift to “Land and Expand”
In new business, large upfront deals and traditional 12-month contracts are becoming harder to close. As a result, many organizations are seeing improved results by starting with the smallest version of the product that can deliver clear value, then expanding over time.
Expansion can take many forms, including longer terms, broader scope or increased overall value. In practice, many teams are finding that a more disciplined land-and-expand approach works best: starting small, proving value quickly and defining a clearer path for growth.
To support this approach, closer alignment across product, onboarding, customer success and customer growth teams is becoming increasingly important. Once early value is established, these teams play a key role in maintaining momentum and supporting expansion over time.
Redefining Value Through Pricing and Delivery
Delivering value is increasingly seen as a shared responsibility beyond the point of purchase. As buyers place greater emphasis on early and visible impact, many now expect suppliers to play a more active role in helping them realize value, particularly before expansion takes place. This shift is leading many organizations to rethink how their marketing and revenue teams support time-to-value and how they define value for different customers.
At the same time, pricing models are increasingly shifting away from seats and feature access toward approaches that better reflect actual value. Following early examples from companies like Salesforce, more vendors are beginning to explore outcome-linked pricing, a trend that is likely to gain momentum as AI and agentic capabilities mature.
This shift also brings greater accountability for vendors. Pricing linked to outcomes tends to demand a clearer definition of value, closer alignment across teams and greater confidence in delivery. For many organizations, this is proving to be as much an internal operating challenge as it is a commercial one.
Integration of Marketing, Product, Customer Success and Rev Ops
Executing land-and-expand strategies and retaining revenue in this environment increasingly benefits from closer coordination across Marketing, Product, Customer Success and RevOps teams. Strong alignment can help teams spot expansion opportunities earlier, identify churn risks sooner and respond more quickly when they appear. In response, some organizations are also bringing these functions under a single leader to simplify decision-making and reduce friction across increasingly complex customer journeys.
This reflects a broader shift in how many organizations are thinking about growth, with increasing emphasis on internal alignment and execution alongside market demand.
Internal Adaptation Through Integration and AI
While the benefits of AI for engineering and product teams are well-documented, internal AI adoption across GTM teams is still evolving. Many teams are prioritising AI tools that improve effectiveness by making information easier to access and reducing manual handoffs, while others are still working through how best to realize value from AI in their internal use cases.
Whether companies rely on third-party platforms or build their own solutions, this trend is likely to continue evolving. As pressure to do more with smaller teams persists, AI-enabled efficiency is increasingly being shaped by better tools and more considered operating models.
Taken together, these trends suggest a clear direction of travel. Future growth is increasingly being driven by precision, alignment and provable value rather than scale alone. Organizations that are adapting their GTM models to land small, realize value quickly, expand deliberately and embed AI internally into everyday workflows are likely to be best positioned to sustain growth, protect margins and deepen customer relationships over time.