The AI Measurement Gap: Why Sales Growth Remains Invisible

Companies are investing aggressively in growth, but their ability to understand what's driving that growth isn't keeping pace.

Why is this important? Growth isn't coming only from new business. In fact, existing customers account for a significant share of revenue, referrals are the largest source of new pipeline, and service remains the leading reason customers leave.

Across sales, marketing, customer experience and technology, the data raises a similar question: before adding more, do companies know what's already working?

The 2026 TMSA Sales & Marketing Benchmark Report released by the Transportation Marketing & Sales Association (TMSA) details four reasons why the industry is investing in growth faster than it knows why it’s happening:

1. 83% of organizations reported revenue growth, yet 69% finished at or below 90% of quota. Before assuming missed quotas are a sales performance problem, companies need enough information to understand what's behind them. Only 21% publish win rates at the individual salesperson level. Without that information, it's difficult to know whether the problem is the salesperson, the sales process or simply a target that was too high.

2. The industry's biggest growth investment is new business, but much of its growth comes from current customers. Hiring more “hunters” is the most common growth plan in this year's study. 63% plan to increase the number of new business salespeople, nearly double the 32% reported in 2024. Organizations most commonly spend $150,000-199,999 per sales employee. 44% say it takes seven months or longer for a new salesperson to become fully productive, and 35% lose at least one in five salespeople voluntarily each year. At the same time, nearly nine in 10 organizations get at least 25% of their revenue from retaining and growing existing customers. Customer referrals are the largest source of new pipeline, and growth from existing accounts ranks third. Yet only 25% plan to add account managers. Service quality remains the leading reason customers leave (39%), even as formal CX strategies have become more common. 59% of companies have a “formal and sophisticated” CX, up from 39% in 2024.

3. Measurement has been a persistent industry challenge throughout the history of this benchmarking study, and the 2024–2026 comparison shows little evidence of progress. Companies continue to invest in sales and marketing, but many still cannot clearly connect those investments to results. Only 21% publish salesperson-level win rates. Just 37% have a documented agreement between sales and marketing, 47% define both marketing- and sales-qualified leads, and 76% are no better than “somewhat confident” in their ability to measure ROI from the beginning of the sales process through the sale. Most importantly, “we can't measure it” is not the same as “it isn't working.” Among organizations investing in tradeshows, 47% report positive results. Yet, 37% of organizations investing in tradeshows don't measure the return at all.

4. The AI challenge has changed dramatically since 2024. Marketing use of AI has risen from 49% to 81%, and the industry's earlier restrictions on AI use have largely disappeared. Now sales and marketing face different problems. Too many tools that don't work together is their top AI concern, cited by 51%. Marketing has almost the opposite problem: only 29% report that AI is well connected to the rest of their marketing technology. Yet companies continue to add technology: 55% plan a CRM deployment within the next 12 months, while simplifying the technology they already have ranks near the bottom of their priorities at just 13%.

Key takeaways:

·        Across seven editions, the benchmark shows an industry that has continued to invest in growth while confronting many of the same underlying challenges. Technology has become more connected, AI adoption has accelerated and customer expectations have changed. At the same time, sales training, performance measurement and the ability to connect investment with results remain persistent concerns.

·        Formalized onboarding rose from 55% to 85%, formal CX strategies increased from 39% to 59%, and the share reporting disconnected sales, marketing and CX systems fell from 21% to 9%. Yet service quality remains the leading reported reason for lost business.

·        36% describe the relationship as highly aligned, and another 45% say it is mostly aligned. Only 16% acknowledge misalignment.

·        60% are only somewhat confident they can measure ROI across the funnel, against 19% who are extremely confident, and 16% who are not confident or do not measure it at all. The pattern holds even among the most positive respondents. Of the 50 organizations claiming no significant alignment barriers, only 14 are extremely confident in their ability to measure funnel ROI, seven are not confident or do not measure it at all, and 12 have neither an SLA nor plans for one.

·        In 2024, 49% of marketing functions used AI tools and roughly 28% reported that their organization did not allow AI use at all. This year, usage stands at 81% and the prohibition figure is under 2%. Only 5% of organizations now report no meaningful AI adoption.

·        Stated priorities cluster around pipeline generation and visibility rather than cost reduction, though the spread is shallow and no single priority is named by more than 39%. The useful signal is at the bottom of the list: adding conversation intelligence (11%), tech-stack simplification (13%) and formal AI governance (15%) rank last, even though tool fragmentation is the most-cited AI obstacle in sales at 51%.

·        In sales, AI is used for conversation analysis and call recording (43%), drafting emails and call prep summaries (42%) lead, followed by lead scoring and automated follow-up (31% each). In marketing, AI helps with content generation leads at 50%, followed by research and competitive intelligence (46%) and analytics and reporting (41%).

·        66% of organizations increased their budgets for AI and efficiency tools year over year, and 81% of marketing functions now use AI. Despite that growth, the share of sales and marketing budgets dedicated to AI remains modest, particularly in marketing. 74% of sales respondents allocate between 2-9.9% of their budgets to AI, compared with 46% of marketing respondents. At the other end, 13% of marketing respondents allocate nothing to AI, compared with just 3% of sales respondents. AI and efficiency tools also rank last among sales budget priorities, with only 5% placing them among their Top 3.

·        Hiring more new-business salespeople is the industry’s biggest growth bet this year. 63% of organizations plan to increase hunter headcount, the largest planned increase of any role and more than double the 25% planning to add account managers, where 68% expect no change. Pricing (36%) and customer service and CX (32%) are the next-largest planned additions.