Even as we inch further down the funnel, demand-minded marketing teams tend to shine. They excel at optimizing the conversion rate between leads and opportunities, for example. The mechanics of the pre- and upper-funnel—awareness, engagement, nurture—are well understood, measurable, and adjustable.

But there’s one metric that often proves more stubborn: opportunity-to-win rate.

Maybe it’s because there are so many cooks in the kitchen—demand gen, product marketing, sales, sales development, sales enablement, revenue ops—or perhaps because the “human element” starts to enter the equation. Either way, turning around a declining win rate is one of the toughest challenges go-to-market leaders face.

The cost of generating a qualified opportunity is already high—and with digital saturation, it’s climbing even higher for many B2B companies. That makes win rate arguably the most critical performance metric in any go-to-market system. Improving it even slightly can boost top-line performance and relieve pressure on the top of the funnel. After all, the better the win rate, the fewer leads a marketing team needs to generate.

Yet when opportunity-to-win rates start to decline, the root causes are rarely clear—or confined to a single department. The truth is: restoring win rate is a multi-factorial, cross-functional challenge.

Sometimes the problem is entirely self-inflicted—like sunsetting post-opportunity marketing programs or changing how opportunities are defined in CRM. Other times, it’s largely external: new competitors enter the market, budget freezes hit, or regulatory shifts slow deal velocity.

That’s why we created this visual checklist. It’s intended to be a collection of “prompts”– to ask your colleagues in companies with a conventional tech stack, or your GTM-integrated LLM (for companies that have taken a more aggressive posture around AI tooling). While this resource alone may not single-handedly reverse a declining win rate, hopefully it helps point you toward the change—or combination of changes—that can.

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The post Declining Win Rate — Here’s Where to Look appeared first on Battery Ventures.

Over the last year, that focus has deepened as we’ve studied how AI is impacting selling. We launched our Battery CRO Dinner Series, bringing together more than a hundred CROs to exchange best practices, and hosted another 125 CROs and revenue leaders at our 2025 Battery Kick-Off sales summit, organized by our Operating Partner Bill Binch, a former CRO himself. Across these conversations, one theme came through clearly:

Today’s buyers expect immediacy, precision, and personalization at a scale humans alone can’t deliver.

That theme is core to our newest investment. We’re thrilled to announce Battery is leading the Series A financing of 1mind, the company behind a new class of AI-powered GTM “Superhumans.”

Meet the GTM Superhuman

1mind builds photorealistic, intelligent AI teammates, or Superhumans, that engage, qualify, demo, and convert customers across web, in-app, email, and even live Zoom interactions. These agents have a face, a voice, and a deep understanding of their respective companies’ products and playbooks.

Modern buyers expect fast, self-serve, personalized experiences, not forms and multi-day handoffs. 1mind meets buyers on their terms, offering instant, relevant conversations any time, including 2 a.m. on a holiday. Superhumans remember every prior interaction: They pull the right case study instantly, handle objections with accuracy and empathy, and don’t exaggerate to get a deal over the line.

Superhumans take the first touch in parts of the funnel where no SDR ever reached: late-night traffic, free product tiers, and high-volume SMB segments that were previously too costly to serve. But many customers quickly find sales-adjacent use cases, like customer support and success. After all, a Superhuman’s knowledge isn’t limited to why a prospect should buy a product. They can also help customers realize maximum value post-purchase.

At HubSpot, 1mind’s Superhuman “Fiona” was deployed on its free SMB product – a part of the business with no human engagement. Fiona produced a +75% lift in free-trial signups, +25% lift in closed/won, and an 88% engagement rate. After seeing those results, HubSpot expanded Fiona’s footprint fivefold.

Across enterprise customers spanning B2B software and logistics, healthcare, and the public sector, 1mind’s Superhumans consistently outperform chatbots and traditional SDR benchmarks, cutting sales cycles from months to weeks.

You can talk to 1mind’s Superhuman on their site, and below are a few other customer Superhumans you can test out:

• Fiona, Hubspot’s Superhuman
• Bobbi, BostonDynamic’s Superhuman
• Quincy, Quickbase’s Superhuman

We’re teaming up again

This investment also marks a reunion. Founder & CEO Amanda Kahlow has spent her career reimagining how companies connect with buyers. She previously founded 6sense*, which pioneered account-based marketing and helped usher in a data-driven sales era. While building 6sense, she saw firsthand that finding buyers wasn’t the hard part – closing them efficiently was. That insight became the seed for 1mind. We first partnered with Amanda 12 years ago on the 6sense journey and we’re thrilled to be working together again.

To bring 1mind to life, Amanda partnered with Sachin Bhat, a former head of engineering at Rippling and a repeat founder himself. Together, we feel, they’ve assembled a team with rare depth – marketers who understand the GTM motion and engineers who know how to build agentic AI that operates in the real world.

Looking ahead

Today, 1mind’s Superhumans are driving millions in additional revenue across dozens of enterprise customers, with expansion into customer success and onboarding already underway. Tomorrow, we believe they’ll form the foundation of an entirely new GTM operating system – one where every company can deploy a personalized, perfectly trained digital teammate to engage buyers and accelerate growth across the entire customer lifecycle.

We’re proud to lead 1mind’s $30M Series A, partnering again with Amanda and the entire 1mind team as they build the future of intelligent, human-like GTM engagement.

The post Our Investment in 1mind: The Future of GTM Superhumans appeared first on Battery Ventures.

I expected, or perhaps hoped for, a new atomic unit quantifying marketing’s value, like the MQL was for the Inbound era. But it never came. For now anyway, AI appears to be transforming how marketing teams operate — but not necessarily what they’re measured on. The playbook has changed, but not the scoreboard.

Every leader I spoke with agreed that AI has reshaped their workflows (data flows, campaign development, account enrichment), content strategies, and speed of execution. Yet when it comes to the metrics they report to their boards, almost nothing has changed. (Actually one CMO felt like they did have a new, albeit unofficial, KPI: How many AI tools the marketing team is testing. As you might expect, this leader felt like being measured on tool deployment vs. business impact was akin to looking through the wrong end of the telescope.)

Ultimately, most marketing leaders said their primary KPIs still ladder up to the same goal as prior to the rise of AI: driving predictable revenue. One executive put it bluntly: “Do the right thing for the business — that hasn’t changed.”

Even in AI-native companies, where one might expect a new KPI to emerge first, the metrics that reach the board deck are consistent with SaaS businesses: pipeline sourced, lead-to-opportunity and opportunity-to-closed/won conversion rates.

The Cockpit Dashboard is Changing, Even if the Seatback Dashboard Isn’t

I often say CMOs have two dashboards – the operational one they use to fly the plane, and the synthesized one they use to assure the passengers they’ll land on time. Think of them as the pilot’s instrument panel and the passengers’ seatback display. Each serves a different purpose. While the seatback display may remain unchanged, the data marketing teams use to run the business is evolving.

Several CMOs described abandoning traditional top-of-funnel metrics like organic traffic and MQLs, focusing instead on their presence in LLMs. One leader said their board’s biggest concern is “whether or not the company shows up ChatGPT.”

That’s an entirely new kind of visibility metric — one that didn’t exist two years ago. But even this innovation rolls up to familiar outcomes: capturing purchase intent.

Elsewhere, marketing leaders are experimenting with AI-powered enrichment workflows that automatically capture account-level insights or even fill in invisible form fields. Again, these may be new plays in marketing’s playbook — but they ladder up to something familiar: conversion efficiency.

Green shoots?

A few emerging metrics hint at where the next wave of change may come from.

At one AI-driven company, the CMO added a new funnel stage — “evaluation” — to better capture the behavior of users exploring the product directly. At this company, marketing is beginning to resemble customer success in that it’s responsible for identifying “a-ha” moments that correlate to purchase or expansion, and then driving users into those features.

Another leader is developing a new KPI entirely: a “propensity-to-buy” score that combines external behavioral signals and unstructured call data. If this metric sticks, it could become an upper-funnel target for the AI era.

And across the board, there’s greater attention to speed, efficiency, and productivity — though few CMOs are currently reporting on these as KPIs.

AI as a Force Multiplier

One CMO described AI as a “force multiplier.” It hasn’t changed what their team aspires to achieve, but it has changed the rate at which they pursue targets. They develop campaigns more quickly, more easily produce content, and capture more signals to inform targeting strategy. Taken together these three AI-augmented practices allow this company to launch more campaigns concurrently to more and more relevant audiences.

But the outcomes — pipeline sourced, closed/won velocity — are consistent with the past.

Some CMOs warned of “too much of a good thing.” In addition to the marketing leader who quipped about the phantom “tools being tested” KPI, another cautioned that AI can introduce friction: “Sometimes AI interferes with productivity — we now have six tools to visualize an org chart before just using PowerPoint.”

Interestingly, as AI reshapes discovery — especially in the “zero-click” world of LLM answers — several leaders pointed to a renewed emphasis on brand. With search advertising less effective and content increasingly unclickable, marketers are rediscovering the importance of being known and trusted before the query is ever typed.

That credibility, built through public content, becomes the foundation of visibility in the AI ecosystem. Some felt it may give rise to a new era of PR, as LLMs often reference off-domain mentions of a brand.

What’s Next: Maybe … More of the Same?

All signs point to a lag between technological change and measurement change. The tools are evolving faster than the metrics. One CMO estimated it’ll take another six months before AI-related KPIs make their way into board decks; another wondered if a change would, or even should, happen at all. In the end, marketing’s goal is to help generate revenue. AI may have altered how we pursue that goal, but not the goal itself.

The post The AI Era Hasn’t Changed CMO KPIs (Yet) appeared first on Battery Ventures.

This slide compares the classic inbound B2B sales funnel to the emerging AI funnel. At first glance, they look similar: Both start with a query, move through a series of tech-enabled operations, and—if all goes well—end in a sale. But the similarity ends there. The difference begins at the very top.

In the inbound era, everything started with a Google search. The buyer’s education began there—and the vendor who captured the lead was the one who ranked for the right keyword and offered an attractive conversion asset.

Now? The buyer starts with a prompt, not a search. The query giveth; the prompt taketh away.

That single shift flips the power dynamic. Where the first click once opened the door for a vendor to educate a buyer, today’s buyer enters the conversation already educated. When knowledge parity replaces information asymmetry, every step that follows must change.

For example, when an LLM has pre-educated your buyer, it’s no longer realistic to expect them to offer up their contact information in exchange for your gated asset (whitepaper etc.). So what to do instead? For starters, strip out all forms; format your website to answer product-specific questions; offer 24×7 sales development coverage through super- intelligent chatbots; automate emails for those who bounce; and, of course, enrich each of these AI-generated interactions with buying-signal insights.

Granted, this new process may break your attribution model, but attribution models were built with the assumption of a form-fill—and LLMs have dramatically reduced the need for a buyer to ever fill out an online form.

Your sales team will also need to reconsider their role in this new era in which the LLM, not the rep, acts as the “trusted advisor.” Naturally, the rep’s initial job is to complete the queued-up transaction. But beyond transacting, I believe the AE’s role will be to sell the roadmap—show the buyer where the product is headed—and foster brand affinity by becoming the buyer’s human connection in a hyper-automated process that until this point may have felt sterile.

It’s not just sales-led motions that need to evolve today. If your company runs a product-led motion, the new race is to get the buyer into the product as fast as possible. Generative code and vibe coding are making feature differentiation less sustainable. So it’s imperative that users experience your product’s value quickly and without friction. Instant value realization becomes the hook.

Ultimately, the era of technology helping humans sell is ending. The era of humans helping technology sell has begun. The next question we’ll all be asking is this: What happens to the funnel when agents—not humans—become the buyers?

The post From the Inbound Funnel to the AI Funnel appeared first on Battery Ventures.