The buying process your sales team is not seeing
The most significant shift in B2B buying behaviour over the past several years is not the channels buyers use or the content they consume. It is how far along the decision process buyers are before they ever speak to a vendor. Research from Gartner and similar sources has consistently found that B2B buyers complete 60 to 70 percent of their decision-making process before initiating contact with a sales representative. By the time someone books a meeting or responds to an outbound reach-out, they have already researched the category, formed a view of the major options, and often have a strong preference that will be difficult to displace.
The implication for marketing is significant: the marketing that matters most is the marketing that reaches buyers during the research phase they are completing invisibly, before the sales conversation starts. If a brand is absent from that research phase, it may not be in the consideration set when the buyer is ready to talk. No amount of excellent sales execution recovers from not being in the consideration set.
The consensus buying problem
The second major shift is the growth of consensus buying. The average B2B buying decision now involves between six and ten stakeholders. Each stakeholder has their own priorities, their own concerns, and their own information-gathering process. The champion who wants to buy your product has to build internal consensus with colleagues who are less convinced, and they need content and evidence to do that work effectively.
Marketing that reaches only the primary buyer misses most of the buying committee. Content that speaks to the technical evaluator's concerns is not useful to the finance director making the business case. Thought leadership that resonates with the marketing director does not equip the IT director to answer their own questions. Effective B2B marketing maps the buying committee and produces content that serves each stakeholder's specific evaluation needs, not just the primary contact's.
The B2B sale is won or lost in conversations you are not in. The buying committee discussion about your product happens without you. Marketing is what puts the right information in the room before that discussion starts.
Dark social and the invisible research phase
The research that B2B buyers do before contacting a vendor happens increasingly in channels that are invisible to marketing analytics. Conversations with peers in professional communities. Recommendations shared in private Slack groups. LinkedIn posts seen but not clicked on, or saved for later reading. Vendor discussions in subreddits or industry forums. Podcast content consumed while commuting. None of this appears in referral data or UTM tracking.
The buyers who arrive having already consumed a significant amount of your content, already heard about your company from a trusted peer, already formed a positive impression from your thought leadership, are substantially more likely to convert and to convert faster. But because their research journey is invisible, its contribution is systematically undervalued in attribution models that only see the touchpoints that left a trackable footprint.
Understanding this changes how marketing investment should be justified. The brand building and thought leadership that create the invisible familiarity that precedes the tracked conversion are not less valuable because they are less measurable. They are often more valuable, because they shape the starting point of every sales conversation.
Self-service information expectations
B2B buyers in 2024 expect to be able to find the information they need to make a purchase decision without asking a sales representative. Pricing transparency, detailed product information, technical specifications, implementation requirements, integration capabilities: these are the things buyers research before contacting sales, and the vendor website that requires a sales conversation to access them creates friction that sends buyers to competitors whose websites are more forthcoming.
This does not mean publishing a price list for every product, which may be inappropriate where pricing is genuinely complex or highly variable. It means providing enough information that a buyer can assess feasibility and rough fit before committing to a conversation. The sales conversation that starts with a reasonably well-informed buyer who has already assessed basic fit is more efficient and more likely to close than the one that starts from zero.
What marketing needs to do differently
The marketing motion that fits the current buying process invests heavily in being present and useful during the invisible research phase. It produces content that maps to the questions buyers are asking at each stage of their evaluation, not just at the awareness stage. It builds the thought leadership that creates the ambient familiarity that precedes the conversion. It serves multiple stakeholders in the buying committee, not just the primary contact. And it makes the website a self-service information resource rather than a brochure that requires a sales conversation to supplement.
This is not a radically different marketing strategy from what has always worked. It is an updated version of the same strategy, calibrated to a buying process that has shifted significantly toward self-direction and away from vendor-led education.