The category your buyers file you under is quietly costing you more than your price tag, and your next pipeline problem is probably starting inside ChatGPT.
This week's edition covers:
- Kevin's Take: the category buyers file you under is costing you more than your pricing ever will
- The Signal: Signal: your buyers are starting in ChatGPT and calling sales earlier, so your old timing is off
- Tools & Tactics: 6sense data now flows straight into Claude and ChatGPT, plus nine peer-tested B2B plays you can lift
- Quick Links: what AI engines actually reward, three quiet Meta changes reshaping your audiences, why GTM engineers who wire the stack together get paid more
Kevin's Take
The category buyers put you in is doing more damage than your pricing
I think the most under-discussed reason B2B deals die is category confusion, and Alex Shartsis makes this case well in a recent piece about how buyers use product category as a mental shortcut, and if you're miscategorized or straddling two categories, you're being silently compared to competitors on terms you can't win.
What got me about his argument is that most lost deals we blame on price or features are actually category losses that happen before we ever get in the room. The buyer already slotted us next to a set of alternatives we would never choose to compete against, and then judged us on the criteria of that category, not ours.
We've seen this play out at Mighty and True over and over. When a prospect walks in thinking we're a creative agency, we get compared on hourly rates and design portfolios. When they walk in thinking we're a marketing operations shop, we get compared on tech certifications and MarTech stack depth. Same company, same team, very different conversations, and only one of them ends in a good fit. The old workflow used to be that you'd hammer messaging and positioning docs and hope the market absorbed it over time.
The new workflow, and I think a lot of CMOs are still behind on this, is that we have to name the category out loud in every first touch, every landing page, every sales conversation, because if we don't name it, the buyer will name it for us, and they'll almost always name it wrong.
One thing I've found useful is to just ask prospects on the first call what category they'd put us in before we say a word about ourselves. The answers are humbling. Half the time it's not what we thought, and that gap is the deal we were about to lose without ever knowing why. Fixing the category is cheaper than fixing the funnel, and it's a conversation most marketing teams still aren't having with their sales team.
That's it for this week. Talk soon.
— Kevin Kerner, CEO, Mighty & True
The Signal
The B2B tech brands winning inside ChatGPT search (1 min read)
42DM's AI visibility benchmark report analyzes how B2B tech companies surface in LLM search layers, using their proprietary SAIO methodology built over 18 months of research. The findings argue 2026 market leadership requires visibility inside AI search, not just SEO and product strength.
Why it matters: If your buyers are starting their research inside ChatGPT and Perplexity, your current SEO playbook isn't putting you in the answer set.
Buyers now contact sales earlier in a shorter cycle (1 min read)
6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers finds first sales contact now happens at 61% through the buying journey, up from 69%, while average cycle length dropped from 11.3 to 10.1 months.
Why it matters: This shifts exactly where you need to show up with content and signals before your reps ever get a call, so your demand gen and sales enablement timing needs to move earlier too.
Tools & Tactics
6sense opens its GTM data to Claude and ChatGPT via MCP (1 min read)
6sense launched an MCP Server in open beta that exposes its proprietary GTM data—account insights, predictive buying stages, 6QA scores—directly to AI agents like Claude and ChatGPT. This lets agents query and act on intent data without leaving the chat interface.
Why it matters: If your team already runs on 6sense, this means your AI agents can pull predictive account and intent data on the fly instead of you exporting reports and manually feeding context.
Nine B2B marketing plays working right now (1 min read)
Exit Five recaps nine B2B marketers sharing their best-performing plays from 2026 so far, drawn from their B2B Blitz Live Session. The roundup covers specific campaign examples, tactics, and lessons from practitioners running these plays inside real B2B teams.
Why it matters: You can steal nine peer-tested B2B plays for your own pipeline without waiting to reinvent them from scratch.
Quick Links
News & Trends
- What B2B buyers and AI engines actually reward — MarketScale published a multi-source B2B marketing field report combining a cross-platform AI-visibility benchmark, a 12-year content corpus, and buyer-call signals to show what co
- Three Meta ad policy changes are reshaping your audiences — Meta is rolling out three changes affecting ad performance: removal of the off-Meta activity opt-out (regrowing retargeting/lookalike audiences), a European location fee tied to th
- Why GTM engineers who wire systems together earn more — Maja Voje's survey of 500+ GTM Engineers finds that pay and performance correlate with the ability to wire together CRM, Clay, automation, and AI tools into one working system, not (via Maja Voje)
- The GTM stack is going AI-native — Matteo Tittarelli's biweekly GTM Pulse rounds up six shifts: Claude's new Slack agent Tag, Clay's Audiences repositioning, Zoom acquiring Common Room, Userled 2.0 for agent-driven (via Matteo Tittarelli)
How does your team compare?
The Mighty and True self-assessment compares your team's AI operating model, content velocity, and pipeline systems against mid-market B2B tech peers. Takes 10 minutes. You get a scorecard with concrete weak points you can attack this quarter.
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