It’s true. Most B2B buyers are halfway down their decision path before you even know they exist. They’re Googling, lurking on Reddit threads, watching competitor demos on YouTube, and swapping notes in closed Slack channels. All long before your carefully crafted campaign “touches” them or a friendly sales message hits their inbox.
It’s humbling, isn’t it? You spend months perfecting the messaging, fine-tuning the nurture flows, lining up webinars et al and still, they’re making up their minds somewhere you can’t see and can’t reach.
6Sense recently revealed in their research, the first 70% of the B2B journey is shaped by everything but your intent to influence. Buyers arrive with opinions, frameworks, and a shortlist in hand. The illusion that we can architect their experience from curious to close? Shattered.
So what does that mean for us, the marketers and founders and sellers on the other side?
It’s a strange kind of freedom.
What if we actually stop chasing? What if we focus on being findable and trustworthy in all the places buyers look before they care about us? All those micro-moments where someone learns, compares, forgets, and remembers again. The part that’s happening in shadow, well before “hand-raisers” ever appear in your pipeline. That’s where the real decisions are made.
The old playbook – having everything in your control, force-fitting everyone into a funnel – is starting to feel a bit tired.
Presence, relevance, and (real, not staged) credibility are everything.
For those of us who have worn the t-shirt, it’s both frustrating and liberating to release the urge to steer. We can only make ourselves visible for the moment buyers surface and say, “Okay, I’m ready. Show me who you are.”
When you stop trying to pull all the strings, you actually start seeing the process for what it really is: unpredictable, messy, and entirely human!