The traditional B2B buying journey looked reassuringly simple.
Awareness → Consideration → Decision
- Marketing generated awareness and leads.
- Sales took over when someone showed enough interest.
- Eventually, the prospect made a decision.
Real B2B buying was never quite that tidy.
Today, it’s even less so.
Buyers can research solutions, compare vendors, read reviews, ask AI tools for recommendations, watch demos, evaluate pricing, talk to peers, and build an internal business case before ever speaking with your sales team.
And “the buyer” often isn’t one person.
Forrester’s 2026 research found that the typical business buying decision now involves 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, with even larger groups involved in complex or strategic purchases.
Meanwhile, Gartner found that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience.
That doesn’t mean sales is becoming irrelevant.
It means the job of both marketing and sales is changing.
The B2B Buying Journey Isn’t a Funnel
Marketers love funnels because they’re easy to visualize.
Someone becomes aware of your company, moves into consideration, becomes a lead, talks to sales, and eventually becomes a customer.
But buyers don’t know they’re supposed to follow your funnel.
They move backward and forward.
They disappear and come back.
They research one solution, change priorities, investigate another, bring in additional stakeholders, revisit their requirements, compare vendors again, and return to questions they thought they’d already answered.
Gartner describes B2B buying as a series of buying tasks that customers repeatedly revisit rather than completing in a predictable linear order.
That means a prospect visiting your pricing page doesn’t necessarily mean they’re ready to buy.
Someone reading an introductory blog post isn’t necessarily at the beginning of their journey.
And someone who downloaded a guide six months ago may suddenly become your most engaged prospect.
Your marketing needs to recognize those signals without assuming every person will follow the same path.
Buyers Are Doing More Research Without Sales
One of the biggest changes in B2B purchasing is how much buyers can accomplish independently.
Gartner’s 2026 research found that 69% of B2B buyers prefer a completely digital, self-service buying experience.
They have more information available than ever before.
Buyers can use:
- Search engines
- AI assistants
- Vendor websites
- Review sites
- Analyst research
- Online communities
- Social media
- Webinars
- Videos
- Case studies
- Peer recommendations
- Product trials
By the time someone fills out your demo form, they may know significantly more about your company than your marketing data suggests.
That changes marketing’s role.
Marketing isn’t simply generating enough interest to get someone to talk to sales.
Marketing is increasingly responsible for helping buyers evaluate your organization before they’re willing to talk to sales at all.
AI Has Added Another Research Layer
Search isn’t the only place buyers are looking for answers anymore.
Gartner found that 45% of B2B buyers used generative AI during a recent purchase, primarily to gather information about vendors and products.
Forrester’s research indicates AI adoption in business buying is even broader depending on how usage is measured.
That means your potential buyer might ask an AI assistant:
- What should I look for in a commercial insurance provider?
- How does Supplier A compare with Supplier B?
- What are the drawbacks of outsourcing payroll?
- Which logistics providers are best for a company our size?
- How much should outsourced HR services cost?
- What should I ask before hiring a commercial cleaning company?
Your website is no longer only persuading the person reading it.
Its content may also influence the systems helping that person conduct research.
This makes clear, specific, well-structured content increasingly valuable.
Generic thought leadership isn’t enough.
Buyers—and the AI systems helping them—need useful answers.
You’re Marketing to a Buying Group, Not Just a Lead
One of the biggest mistakes B2B marketers can make is treating one contact as the entire opportunity.
Imagine your marketing platform identifies Jane as an engaged lead.
She’s opened emails, downloaded a guide, attended a webinar, and visited your pricing page.
Great.
But Jane may be only one member of a much larger buying group.
Other people evaluating the purchase might include:
- The person who will use the product every day
- A department leader
- IT
- Finance
- Procurement
- Legal
- Security
- Operations
- An executive sponsor
- An outside consultant
Each has different questions.
The marketing manager wants to know whether the platform will make their team more effective.
IT wants to understand integrations and security.
Finance wants to understand cost and ROI.
Procurement wants to compare terms and vendors.
Leadership wants to understand the business case.
If your content only persuades Jane, you’re making Jane do the work of persuading everyone else.
Create Content That Helps Buyers Build Consensus
Modern B2B content shouldn’t only convince an individual that your solution is good.
It should help that individual convince the rest of the organization.
That requires content for different questions and stakeholders.
For example:
For practitioners
Provide feature information, workflow examples, how-to content, demos, and use cases.
For leadership
Focus on business outcomes, efficiency, risk, competitive advantages, and strategic value.
For IT
Provide information about integrations, data architecture, security, implementation, and technical requirements.
For finance and procurement
Make pricing structures, expected costs, implementation requirements, and potential ROI easier to understand.
For the broader buying group
Offer case studies, comparison guides, implementation plans, FAQs, and other resources that make the decision easier to evaluate internally.
This is buyer enablement.
Instead of asking, “What content will generate a lead?”
Ask:
“What information does this buying group need to make a confident decision?”
That’s a much more useful content strategy.
Longer Buying Cycles Need Better Nurturing, Not More Emails
Complex buying groups naturally create friction.
- More people need to agree.
- Budgets need approval.
- Security reviews happen.
- Procurement gets involved.
- Priorities change.
- Deals stall.
The answer isn’t to send another “just checking in” email every seven days.
Marketing automation should help you stay relevant over a longer period without treating every contact as though they’re on the same timeline.
That could mean using:
- Behavioral triggers
- Engagement scoring
- Dynamic segmentation
- Topic-based nurturing
- Website activity
- CRM data
- Lifecycle stages
- Automated re-engagement
- High-intent alerts
Someone casually researching a topic shouldn’t necessarily receive the same communications as someone repeatedly visiting pricing, integration, implementation, and case study pages.
Your nurture strategy should change as their behavior changes.
Stop Treating the Sales Handoff Like a Finish Line
The traditional lead-generation model encourages marketing teams to think in terms of a handoff.
Marketing owns the lead, then sales takes over.
But buyers don’t experience your organization as two departments.
If marketing has spent six months learning what a prospect cares about, sales shouldn’t have to begin the relationship by asking basic questions your systems already know the answers to.
Marketing engagement can provide valuable context:
- Which content did they download?
- Which emails did they click?
- Which topics interest them?
- Which events did they attend?
- Which pages did they visit?
- How recently did they engage?
- Which products or services appear most relevant?
That information should help sales understand why someone may be interested before the first conversation begins.
And marketing shouldn’t necessarily disappear once sales gets involved.
Instead, marketing can continue supporting the buying group with relevant case studies, educational content, event invitations, implementation information, and other resources while sales manages the direct relationship.
The handoff becomes coordination.
Sales Still Matters, but Its Role Is Changing
Buyers may want to conduct more research independently, but that doesn’t mean they want to complete every complex purchase without human help.
In fact, Gartner found that 69% of B2B buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with sales representatives.
That’s an important distinction.
Buyers don’t necessarily need sales to provide information they can easily find themselves.
They need sales when context, validation, expertise, and confidence matter.
A salesperson becomes more valuable when they can say:
- “Here’s how this would work in your environment.”
- “Here’s what organizations like yours typically run into.”
- “Here’s what implementation would actually require.”
- “Here’s the tradeoff between these two approaches.”
- “Here’s what you’re not considering yet.”
Marketing can help sales reach that point by educating the buyer before the conversation and giving the salesperson better context when it begins.
Connect Marketing and CRM Data
Sales and marketing alignment is difficult when the two teams aren’t looking at the same customer.
Marketing sees campaign engagement.
Sales sees CRM activity.
Neither sees the whole relationship.
Connecting marketing automation and CRM data helps create a more complete view.
Marketing can use CRM information such as:
- Account
- Industry
- Opportunity stage
- Customer status
- Product interest
- Sales owner
- Lifecycle stage
Meanwhile, sales can gain visibility into marketing engagement and intent signals.
That allows both teams to respond to changes.
- If an opportunity advances, marketing communications can adjust.
- If an active opportunity suddenly starts consuming high-intent content again, sales can know.
- If a prospect becomes a customer, acquisition campaigns can stop.
- If an old opportunity re-engages six months later, marketing can surface that activity.
That’s what alignment looks like operationally.
It’s not another weekly sales and marketing meeting –– it’s shared data driving coordinated action.
Measure More Than Lead Volume
If B2B purchases involve larger buying groups and longer, less-linear journeys, measuring marketing primarily by lead volume becomes increasingly limiting.
A form fill is useful.
But it doesn’t tell you whether an account is progressing toward a purchase.
Consider looking at signals such as:
- Engagement across an account
- Number of engaged contacts
- High-intent website activity
- Content consumption
- Buying-group engagement
- Opportunity creation
- Pipeline influenced
- Sales velocity
- Conversion by lifecycle stage
- Revenue
One highly engaged account with four active stakeholders may be far more valuable than 50 isolated leads who downloaded a top-of-funnel resource.
Your measurement strategy should reflect that.
Give Buyers Confidence, Not Just Content
Today’s B2B buyer doesn’t have an information problem. They have an information overload problem.
They can find thousands of articles, comparison pages, reviews, AI-generated summaries, videos, social posts, and vendor claims.
The marketer’s job isn’t simply adding more content to the pile; it’s to make the buying decision easier.
That means:
- Answering questions clearly
- Being specific about what your solution does and doesn’t do
- Providing proof
- Making comparisons easier
- Helping different stakeholders understand the value
- Making pricing and implementation less mysterious
- And connecting digital behavior with sales conversations so buyers don’t have to start over every time they interact with you
The B2B buying journey has changed because buyers have more control.
The organizations that adapt won’t try to take that control back.
They’ll make it easier for buyers to move forward.
Build Marketing Around the Way B2B Buyers Actually Buy
The emfluence Marketing Platform connects marketing automation, behavioral data, email, SMS, segmentation, lead scoring, and CRM data so marketing and sales teams can better understand engagement and coordinate the customer journey.
Instead of forcing every prospect through the same funnel, you can use the signals buyers provide to deliver more relevant marketing and give sales better context when it’s time for a conversation.
