B2B marketing has a structural problem that no amount of new tooling has solved: the way brands try to reach buyers increasingly does not match the way buyers actually make decisions. The gap between the two is where most B2B marketing spend quietly disappears.
The decision is made before you arrive
The most uncomfortable finding in recent B2B research is also the most actionable. In 85% of cases, rising to 95% in 2025, buyers ultimately purchase from one of the vendors on their Day One shortlist. On average, buyers don't engage with sellers until they are two-thirds of the way through their journeys. (6sense, 2025)
That changes everything about how brand presence should be thought about in B2B. The marketing challenge is not to persuade buyers at the point of contact. It is to be credible, visible, and already trusted long before that contact happens. Most B2B marketing budgets are still structured around the wrong moment.
Selling to a committee, not a person
The individual decision-maker was always something of a fiction in B2B. It is more fiction now than ever. Typical B2B purchases involve teams of about 10 people, with buying groups spanning multiple functions such as IT, operations, finance, and end users. 52% of buying groups now include decision-makers at VP level or above, and 79% of purchases require CFO approval. (Demandbase / TrustRadius, 2024–2025)
The implication for marketing is significant: content, messaging, and campaigns built around a single persona are structurally misaligned with how purchasing actually happens. Different stakeholders need different arguments at different stages. A message that works for a CMO will not move a procurement lead. Marketing that does not account for committee dynamics is not really B2B marketing. It is B2C marketing with longer lead times.
The stall problem
86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process, and 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with their chosen providers. (Forrester, 2024) These numbers suggest a systemic failure not of lead generation but of deal progression, the phase where most B2B marketing has historically had least involvement and least visibility.
Stalled deals are rarely a sales problem alone. They usually signal a failure of internal consensus on the buyer's side, which is itself often a failure of supplier communication: too much generic content, not enough material that helps buyers make the case internally. The most effective B2B marketing increasingly looks less like demand generation and more like decision facilitation.
Marketing and sales: still not speaking
Only 8% of companies report strong alignment between marketing and sales departments, despite aligned organisations achieving 32% annual revenue growth. (AMW, 2025) That gap is not a cultural curiosity. It is a revenue problem with a measurable cost.
The misalignment tends to produce the same symptoms: marketing optimises for metrics that sales finds irrelevant, sales ignores content that marketing spent months producing, and no one has a clear picture of where qualified pipeline actually comes from. Closing this gap requires shared definitions of what a buyer looks like at each stage, not just shared tools or shared meetings.
The measurement trap
B2B marketing has more data than it has ever had and less clarity about what that data means. The volume of available metrics creates a selection problem: teams optimise for what is easy to track rather than what is strategically important. Reach, engagement, and content downloads tend to dominate dashboards. Pipeline contribution and revenue influence tend to be the harder, slower, more contested numbers, which is precisely why they are often underreported.
The measurement challenge in B2B is not technical. It is political. Agreeing on what success looks like requires alignment between marketing, sales, and finance that most organisations have not yet achieved. Until that alignment exists, the metrics conversation will keep producing the wrong answers to the right question.
References
- 6sense. (2025). The B2B Buyer Experience Report 2025. 6sense Research. Link
- Forrester. (2024). The State of Business Buying, 2024. Forrester Research. Link
- Demandbase. (2025). State of B2B Marketing: Key Trends & Insights 2025. Demandbase. Link
- TrustRadius. (2024). B2B Buying Behavior Report 2024. TrustRadius. Link
- AMW Group. (2025). Proven B2B Marketing Strategies That Drive Business Growth in 2025. AMW. Link
