The B2B buying process has undergone a fundamental shift, and most marketing programmes have not kept pace with it. Buyers are better informed, more sceptical of sales-led engagement, and more likely to form strong preferences before they ever speak to a vendor. Gartner research consistently shows that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their purchase journey in direct engagement with potential suppliers — the other 83% is spent on independent research, peer consultation, and internal consensus-building. Marketing that is designed to "generate leads for sales to close" is structuring itself around the 17%, and leaving the 83% to chance.
This is not a marginal problem. It is a structural misalignment between how buyers make decisions and how sellers have organised their go-to-market motion. The teams closing it are building durable competitive advantage. The teams that have not noticed it yet are experiencing it as a lead quality problem, a long sales cycle problem, or a churn problem — without identifying the upstream cause.
What independent research actually means in practice
When buyers conduct independent research, they are not simply reading product pages and comparing pricing tables. They are reading industry analysis, seeking out peer perspectives through communities and review platforms, consuming long-form content from practitioners they respect, and forming views about which suppliers understand their specific problem and which are simply trying to sell a product. The content a buyer encounters during this independent research phase shapes their shortlist before the sales process begins — and the suppliers who are not part of that content environment are often not on the shortlist at all.
Dark social and the invisible influence
A significant portion of B2B research happens in channels that are invisible to standard attribution models — private Slack communities, WhatsApp groups, LinkedIn DMs, email forwarded between colleagues. This is sometimes called dark social: word-of-mouth that happens digitally but leaves no trackable footprint. The implication for marketing is that brand reputation and content quality matter more than most attribution reports suggest, because their primary impact is on decisions that are never directly attributable to a campaign. Teams that measure only what is directly trackable are systematically underestimating the value of activities that influence decisions through these invisible channels.
The B2B suppliers that get on the shortlist before the sales process starts are the ones who were present during the research process — not the ones with the best sales deck.
What B2B marketing needs to look like now
If buyers are forming views during independent research, marketing needs to be present and useful during that research. That means creating content that addresses the actual questions buyers ask — not the questions the sales team wants to answer, but the questions that buyers type into search engines, post in communities, and ask peers. It means building a body of content that is genuinely useful to someone trying to evaluate whether they have the problem you solve, before they have concluded that they need a solution like yours.
It also means being honest about the limitations of your approach, the cases where your solution is not the right fit, and the alternatives a buyer might consider. Content that is demonstrably written in the buyer's interest — rather than the seller's interest — earns the trust that gets a brand onto the shortlist and into the serious consideration set. Content that reads like a sales brochure does the opposite.
The buying committee problem
B2B purchase decisions involving spend above a threshold are rarely made by a single person. The average enterprise purchase involves six to ten stakeholders, each with different concerns, different information needs, and different definitions of risk. Marketing content that is written for one persona — typically the most senior buyer — is failing to address the other five to nine people whose concerns could stall or kill a deal. Effective B2B marketing maps content to the buying committee: not just the economic buyer, but the technical evaluator, the end user, the procurement team, and the internal champion who will have to sell the decision internally.
The practical implication for your marketing programme
The most immediate change most B2B marketing teams can make is to audit their content against the questions their buyers are actually asking — not the messages the business wants to communicate, but the questions buyers type into search engines, ask in communities, and raise with peers. Those questions are often very different from the topics marketing has been covering, and the gap is where most B2B content programmes are losing the most ground.
The second change is to stop designing marketing programmes around "generating leads" and start designing them around "being present and useful during the buying journey." The leads will follow — but they will be better quality, further along in their thinking, and far less dependent on sales to move them to a decision. That is the commercial value of aligning marketing to how buyers actually behave, rather than how sellers wish they would.