A proprietary benchmark or survey data point doesn’t already exist somewhere else on the internet, so a retrieval system has no duplicates that confuse it or get it lost. It’s the origin, which is the single biggest advantage any piece of content can have in a world built on retrieval.
The
Dirty Martini
Digest
Welcome to this month’s edition of The Dirty Martini Newsletter
OH NO…..It’s September….. In the U.S., that only means one thing….Pumpkin Spice season…. It has kind of turned into a love/hate thing. Either you’re a pumpkin spice person, or you’re not….
September is also the start of the Fall Conference Season…. Team Incisiv will be on a plane most of the month, and we hope to see many of you either at Parcel Forum, Groceryshop, or Shoptalk Fall.
It is also the beginning of ‘27 planning season, and sales & marketing in B2B tech has entered a transformative era. How you go to market has changed, and new skills are required. This newsletter will hopefully provide you with some insights you can use.
Let’s get into it.
Enjoy this issue of the Dirty Martini Digest.
The Dirty Details
This month, we’re digging into a subject that many of you know too well - marketing and selling in B2B Tech.. Backing up some work we’ve done recently with Adobe, one of our analysts, Tannya Shukla, provides a great perspective on the changing B2B buying landscape:
Marketing to the Buying Committee That’s Harder To Access
Marketers are racing to see the buying committee. The bigger gap is that most high-tech marketing was built to generate leads, when the job now is helping an invisible group reach consensus.
Complex B2B purchases, as we know, run through a large, cross-functional buying group, spanning IT, security, finance, procurement, operations, and the business.
Most of its members spend the bulk of their evaluation researching independently rather than meeting suppliers. Most of the work happens where the vendor cannot see it: in peer conversations, community threads, analyst reports, and independent research that shape a shortlist before anyone fills out an RFP..
Many marketing operations are built and measured to generate and count individual leads, while the job has quietly become helping an invisible group of people reach internal agreement. Closing that readiness gap is what now separates the vendors that make the shortlist from the ones that never learn they were in the running.
The Committee Is Real, and Often Invisible
As committees now drive most decisions, what makes them hard to serve is that most of it never identifies itself. The person who fills out a form or takes a call is frequently a scout, gathering information for colleagues who will shape the decision without ever contacting the vendor. This is why the conversations that carry the most weight happen off the vendor’s channels.
In Incisiv’s 2025 research with Adobe, 89% of high-tech B2B firms rank referrals as their single most important customer acquisition channel, which is to say the buying conversations that matter most are the ones marketing can measure least.
89%
of high-tech B2B firms rank referrals as their single most important customer acquisition channel.
AI Is Compressing the Search Marketers Cannot See
The part of the journey that happens without the vendor is getting shorter and denser. A buyer who once worked through dozens of articles and reports can now ask an AI assistant to synthesize the field in minutes, which moves even more of the evaluation into a space the vendor cannot observe.
22%
of organic search volume will shift to AI-powered platforms within 24 months, Incisiv and Adobe project.
92%
of high-tech marketers are already adapting by creating content that answers specific buyer questions.
Adapting the content is table stakes. The deeper change is in how those tools work. They return a synthesized answer built from a handful of sources instead of a page of links, so being one of the sources an AI draws on, and one the buyer trusts in their own research, is becoming the entry ticket to the shortlist. Expertise that is not discoverable and authoritative enough to be surfaced is simply not in the room.
Marketing Is Still Built to Count Leads
Most high-tech marketers know the committee is harder to gain access to. Unfortunately, their operations have not caught up.
Buyers now move across an average of ten channels in a single purchase, according to McKinsey. Pulling that scattered activity into one view is exactly where high-tech marketing falls short.
10
channels
is the average a buyer now moves across in a single purchase, according to McKinsey.
18%
of high-tech B2B firms have fully integrated, accessible customer data, Incisiv and Adobe find.
The signals that would show an account building toward a decision stay scattered across systems, product usage in one, content engagement in another, third-party intent in a third, so no one sees them as a single pattern.
The committee is hard to see, and harder still to serve with an operation built for a buyer who no longer exists: the single named decision-maker moving through a linear funnel.
Enabling Consensus Is the Job Now
If the work is helping a disparate group reach agreement, three things have to change in how marketing operates.
Content.
A buying group reaches a decision only when each member arrives at the same yes for their own reasons (e.g., the CFO on the business case, the CISO on security and risk, IT on integration and architecture, procurement on commercial terms, the business sponsor on outcomes)
That asks more of content than personalization usually does. Personalization tailors a message to a person; a buying group needs a body of evidence deep enough that five people with different priorities can each find their own reason to reach the same decision. Few firms are built for it.
Only 5% of high-tech firms are scaling the content production this takes, and the ones that do report 38% more throughput at 25% lower cost.*
Organizational.
Marketing, sales, SDRs, and customer success need a shared view of account activity and a shared read on what buying momentum looks like, which is what a channel-organized structure prevents.
Only 36% of high-tech teams see the account as the right unit to organize around, while 35% are still structured around channels or media.*
Metrics.
Counting individual contacts cannot show a committee moving toward a decision. Things like account engagement, stakeholder coverage, and how quickly a group advances from awareness to serious evaluation can.
For example, six engaged stakeholders spread across security, IT, finance, and procurement is a stronger signal than twenty downloads from a single contact. An account that moves from first touch to product evaluation in a few weeks says more than a pile of unconnected leads. This works only on a foundation many firms lack: clean account data, shared definitions of each buying stage, and honest agreement on which behaviors actually signal intent.
The Advantage Is Being Ready for a Buyer You Cannot See
Perfect visibility into the committee is not coming. Privacy regulation, consent requirements, and shifting browser standards keep narrowing what any vendor can track, and AI is moving more of the journey out of view. Chasing complete visibility is a race with no finish line.
Readiness is the most useful goal. A vendor can serve a buying group well without seeing every member of it. What it needs is enough account-level intelligence to recognize momentum, and an operation coordinated enough to respond with the right evidence before the shortlist hardens.
The high-tech marketers who win the next few years will be the ones whose operation is built to help a committee they cannot fully see reach a decision, and to be useful to that committee before it introduces itself.
About This AnalysisThis analysis draws on Incisiv’s 2025 research with Adobe, the State of Customer Experience in High Tech B2B in an AI-Driven World (buyer acquisition channels, AI-search adoption, data integration, personalization, content operations, and marketing operating models). The average number of channels buyers use per purchase is from McKinsey’s B2B Pulse survey.
- McKinsey, B2B Pulse / Five Fundamental Truths (average channels per purchase): mckinsey.com
- *Incisiv and Adobe, State of Customer Experience in High Tech B2B in an AI-Driven World (2025): business.adobe.com
Straight from the Shaker: Tech Marketing & GEO: Winning with Primary Data
Get practical insights and best practices straight from our industry experts as we shake up and serve up our knowledge to help you improve your go-to-market strategies. We share tips each month to help you stay ahead of the game.
Search, regardless of platform, is still the primary starting point for most people. As traditional Search Engines increasingly give way to Search in a frontier model, smart marketing executives understand that SEO is very different from GEO. Now the race is on to understand the tools and processes that enable companies and their solutions to be better indexed in the AI engines. Last month, I wrote a piece on the power of PR in getting a leg up in GEO. This month, I’ll be discussing an even more powerful tool – primary data. Below is an excerpt, reduced for NL purposes. The full piece can be found here. Let’s dive in…
Why primary data wins the indexing game
Primary data (e.g., research, benchmarking, anonymized shopper data) is a unique dataset that differentiates it from what is already indexed. It’s a way for frontier models to like you more because you’re feeding it new data to learn from. Here are four value drivers from primary data and their effect on GEO:
Feed that same proprietary data into your own GenAI tools and the payoff compounds: messaging, marketing collateral, and sales-meeting prep all get noticeably better. Why? The word of 2026: Context. Materials get grounded in something real instead of the same generic talking points every competitor’s chatbot can produce on command.
Any competitor’s AI tool can generate more generic commentary in short order, which minimizes the value of that very commentary (yes, I get the irony here…). Nobody can generate your dataset. If you’re the only place a number exists, you’re not cited once. You become the place both humans and machines come back to.
Let’s face it, the writing style of AI is pretty easy to pick up on these days. We also know that generative models are prone to making things up. Real, current, verified research gives AI-assisted content a foundation that, when queried by the smart people that ask the right questions in their queries, holds up.
So what does this all mean? AI indexing rewards saying something nobody else can say, backed by proof nobody else has (and of course, can be referenced by a bunch of media). Generic thought leadership is dissolving into the same commoditized soup the models were trained on. Primary data doesn’t dissolve. The more content AI generates, the more valuable real data becomes.
Dive deeper into our cross-industry research and content.
Take a look at some of our latest insights:
Second Round - Incisiv Announces Partnership with Omni-talk Retail
Omni Talk and Incisiv Partner to Enable NRF 2027 Big Show Sponsors to Maximize Their Show Value
Cutting through the clutter and noise of NRF is becoming a bigger challenge. Omni-Talk and Incisiv have created a three-phase campaign that gives sponsors and exhibitors thought leadership and exposure before, during, and after retail’s biggest week, including a feature spot on a Times Square billboard
Full details on the partnership and programs can be found HERE.
Incisiv on the Road:
Check out our SHOW PREVIEW for the must-attend sessions and events.
On Stage: our Chief Insights Officer, Gaurav Pant - Wednesday, September 23, 9:00 AM - 9:40 AM ‘Tapping Data Analytics and AI for Productivity and Profitability’:
AI is driving measurable productivity and efficiency gains across retail and CPG—boosting on-shelf availability and streamlining workflows. This session opens with a deep dive into how retailers and brands are embedding AI into operations, followed by a panel of retail and brand executives on:
- Where AI agents cut administrative burden and drive the most impact?
- Using data and technology to unlock productivity and profitability.
- Guardrails for safe, scaled agentic AI.
The Speakeasy at Groceryshop— An Executive Dinner: We are headed for the Four Seasons Las Vegas for a private dinner with grocery executives. Our exclusive sponsor, Scandit, will be joining us for the first time, and we’re super excited to share the latest trends and build great relationships.
The Happy Hour at Groceryshop - Incisiv clients and friends - reserve an hour to hang with the Incisiv gang at RiRa on September 22nd. If you’ll be in Las Vegas and would like to join, register HERE.
The Speakeasy at Shoptalk Fall 2026 — An Executive Dinner & Private Distillery Tour - We are diving into the Nashville experience and producing our dinner at Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery. At Shoptalk Fall 2025, we had over 20 high-profile retailers join us and anticipate a similar audience for 2026. We are partnering with Manhattan and Talkdesk but do have one sponsorship still available. Reach out to Mara Dosso (mara.dosso@incisiv.com) for more details.
The Happy Hour at Shoptalk Fall 2026 - Incisiv clients and friends - reserve an hour to hang with the Incisiv gang at Big Machine Distillery on September 29th. If you’ll be in Nashville and would like to join, register HERE.
New York Community Dinner Series. Our next Dinner is on September 17th in conjunction with Manhattan, and we are focusing the conversation on Bringing the Sexy Back to the Store. We have a GREAT group of retailers and brands registered and are looking forward to the evening.
New York Community Dinner Series 2027. We are building our calendar for our quarterly dinner series in 2027. If you’d like to discuss a date or theme that fits your schedule, now is the time to reach out! Email Mara Dosso (mara.dosso@incisiv.com) and we’ll schedule a call.
Believe it or not, NRF 2027 is coming! Our biggest Speakeasy of the year, The Speakeasy @ NRF, will take place Saturday, January 9th at Zuma. Over 50 retailers will join to kick off the 2027 NRF Big Show. For more information on how to get involved, email Mara Dosso (mara.dosso@incisiv.com) or Bill Little (bill.little@incisiv.com).