Saving your 2026 pipeline means leveraging tactics from 1985 and 2035
If your pipeline feels lighter and your sales and marketing strategies feel tighter than they did a few years ago, you’re not alone… There is an AI-pocalypse that is collapsing business development best practices.
PPC leads cost more and close less often. The live webinar audiences thinned out, and no one is downloading your gated white paper. Cold emails land in a folder full of AI spam that no human will ever read.
Unfortunately, most revenue leaders built their go-to-market playbooks in the golden age of Internet marketing, laminated them during COVID, and have kept running the same plays for the last three years… even though the world changed with the rise of ChatGPT in late 2022.
In 2026, the go-to-market strategies are splitting into two extremes, and those old inbound, ABM, and PPC playbooks are collapsing. On one extreme, businesses are going all in on AI, automation, machine learning, personalization, predictive analytics, and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). On the other end, some successful businesses are reverting to business development as if the Internet were never invented: phone calls, handshakes, handwritten notes, and long lunches.
Gary Vaynerchuk put it bluntly earlier this year:
“Extreme AI, extreme analog. Don’t get caught in the middle.”
I call it Back-to-the-Future Business Development. To save your 2026 pipeline, you have to gas up the DeLorean and hop between two timelines… back to 1985, where relationships close deals, and forward to 2035, where AI answers your buyers’ questions before you ever meet them.
The magic of the DeLorean was that Doc Brown bolted a powerful flux capacitor onto a car that Marty already knew how to drive. That’s the whole premise of the Iron Man Approach I recommend with Human-First AI Marketing®: timeless human relations, wrapped in the best technology available.
(Sorry for combining two Sci-Fi metaphors, but it had to be done.)
Great companies of now and the foreseeable future will run both extremes. Everyone else stuck in the middle is about to get erased from the family photo.
Stuck in 2021
The post-COVID marketing world is where most businesses still live, and they are falling behind quickly. They post to social with less and less engagement. They send templated emails that get fewer opens and even less clicks. They pay more for leads, wait for RFPs, and wonder why everything feels harder. They’re stuck in the COVID bubble of working from home and doing all their outreach through a screen, hoping someone shows up to the next webinar or downloads one of their PDFs.
Back To The Future promised us hoverboards by 2015. What we got instead was a bunch of sales and marketing professionals hovering around a laptop waiting for leads to come in.
The buyers are leaving the middle fast… Pew Research Center watched the actual browsing behavior of 900 Americans and found that when an AI summary appears on a search page, clicks on regular results drop from 15% to 8%, only 1% of visitors click anything inside the summary, and people become far more likely to end the browsing session entirely. Search traffic has dropped 50-80% for most industries.
The PPC, SEO, and inbound well that filled itself with leads for over a decade is drying up due to AI.
(Not to mention the water actually used to cool AI data centers…)
Cold email tells the same story. Every benchmark report I can find shows reply rates have fallen by more than half since 2019, and your own inbox shows why. They are overwhelming, generic, and easily ignored.
The RFP game might be the clearest picture of the collapse. AI handed every competitor Biff’s sports almanac. Smaller players can now find and answer every RFP. Global firms can submit from anywhere. Enterprise sellers are being forced downmarket as their own leads dry up, and most proposal teams now draft their submissions with AI, so the stack on the buyer’s desk has gotten taller and more identical at the same time.
Everyone has the book with all the winning scores in it, so the bets pay nothing.
More RFPs were awarded on trusted relationships this year than on any other factor, and professional services research shows firms with existing relationships win roughly 60 to 90% of their pursuits, while cold submissions win about 15%, and the winners typically started building the relationship 18 to 24 months before the RFP ever dropped. That’s old school 1985 business development.
The research on the middle’s AI strategy is also brutal. MIT studied 300 enterprise AI deployments and found that more than half of AI budgets get spent on sales and marketing tools and that roughly 95% of generative AI pilots deliver no measurable return, while measurable returns are hidden in unglamorous operations work. Most companies are buying AI tools without changing their behavior, which is like using the DeLorean to pick up groceries.
Businesses stuck in 2021 can’t compete without better AI or better relationships. You probably need both; most have neither.
I am seeing that most GTM teams either forgot how to do BD the pre-Internet way or never learned it, and they haven’t mastered the AI era yet. That’s a bigger problem than your mom trying to make out with you…
Back to the BD Basics
The first way out of the AI-pocalypse is to get back to 1985 and pick up the strategies and tactics your grandpa used to build his business: networking, direct mail, PR, promotional products, referrals, trade shows, and the timeless craft of building relationships and earning trust one human at a time.
This works for a simple reason. As digital channels splinter, flood with AI content, and go global, the only way to differentiate is to be hyper-local, hyper-personal, and to do the things AI agents can’t do and hyperscalers can’t afford to do. No AI will join your chamber of commerce mixer. No hyperscaler will take your prospect to lunch. Nobody can automate the personal connection with your friends and neighbors.
I landed my first local client this year from a Newburyport Chamber of Commerce event. We shook hands and exchanged cards. We met for coffee. We traded paperback copies of the books we’d each written, and here’s the un-scalable part… we actually read them. Then I invited him to lunch to talk about working together, and we closed the deal.
Yes, we also connected on LinkedIn, exchanged emails, sent a proposal in Gamma, and signed through DocuSign. The technology processed the deal, but the relationship was built in person, over coffee, between two people who did their homework and had the conversations the old-fashioned way, across the table from each other, unrecorded, with no phones or laptops out.
Your grandpa’s tactics are crushing more digital strategies. The ANA’s Response Rate Report shows direct mail pulling a 4.4% average response against email’s 0.12%, mostly because nobody else in your category is licking stamps anymore. AI spam is almost non-existent in the mail.
Forrester’s events research shows B2B marketers moving budgets back into in-person events, with a majority planning more intimate gatherings rather than bigger ballrooms.
And in content marketing and social media, the AI backlash is now measurable: a 2026 consumer survey found the share of people who trust a brand less when it leans heavily on AI nearly doubled in a single year, from 20% to 39%. The avalanche of AI slop has made actual human contact the premium channel.
I launched Avenue9 with this human-first strategy in mind for myself. I do podcast interviews to build relationships with guests and hosts, attend in-person client meetings, attend networking events, give speeches on real stages in front of a live audience, and I even joined a men’s group to meet more people in my hometown. I recently flew to North Carolina to network and meet with two clients, and one of them renewed while I was still in town.
My travel budget is up, so is my close rate.
Get Going 88 Miles Per Hour Toward 2035
The second way out of this AI tsunami is to race toward the future and go all in on getting up to speed with AI.
Fair warning: All in means more than a ChatGPT subscription and some image generation. Plenty of companies in the doomed middle believe they’ve “adopted AI” because the CEO asks Claude’s opinion sometimes.
The buyers are already living in 2035. Forrester surveyed 18,000 business buyers and found 94% used AI during their most recent purchase, with 55% comparing vendors inside AI tools before ever contacting one. G2’s research says half of B2B software buyers now start their research with an AI chatbot instead of a search engine.
The shortlist is being drafted in a chat window you can’t see. But just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it is not happening. Look at your own behavior… You have begun to act differently, and so have your clients.
Getting up to speed means out the strategy, systems, and stories of the future. You have to figure out where your audience has gone and figure out how to be standing there when they arrive.
AI strategies include generative AI for content, machine learning for personalization, predictive analytics for lead scoring, and AEO to become the recommended answer in AI search. It means using AI to be hyper-vigilant, hyper-targeted, and relevant on every touch. No wasted opportunities, no generic outreach, no “just checking in.”
The Flux Capacitor
Here’s a twist Doc Brown would appreciate… the two extremes belong to one GTM machine. The car came from 1985, and the flux capacitor sent it to the future, and the human stayed in the driver’s seat. Neither one time-travels alone.
We can wrap grandpa tactics in technology and change our destiny. The handshake at the chamber event, followed by an AI-researched, perfectly timed follow-up. The direct mail piece, targeted by AI to the fifty accounts that are actually in market. The podcast conversation, distributed by AI so thoroughly marked up that the machines cite you as the expert.
Gartner has identified the opportunity. Buyers doing self-directed AI research form wrong conclusions, carry them into purchases, and discover the gap at implementation. That’s why 69% of B2B buyers already turn to a human sales rep to validate what AI told them, and why Gartner predicts that by 2030, 75% of buyers will prefer sales experiences that put human interaction first. The AI will eventually be sending your buyers back to you if you are ready, but you have to understand how to work with both.
Companies that master one extreme will survive the next decade. Companies that master both will own their categories. You have to be good at sales and marketing from ten years ago, and good at what it will be ten years from now.
Where is your next best client actually going to meet you… in an AI answer, or across a table?
You can follow me for more Human-First AI Marketing strategies, or if you see me out in real life, come say hi.
That still works.
