The B2B Marketing Reset

The old B2B marketing playbook no longer matches how people actually buy.

The old playbook assumed a few things. That buyers move through a clean sales process from top to bottom. That they research on your website. That sales gets to talk to them early. And that marketing’s main job is to push as many leads as possible into the top of the pipeline.

None of that is true anymore.

Buyers research long before they call you. Most of that research happens offsite, often inside an AI tool. The shortlist is built before they contact you. If they have not heard of you, you are not on it. Performance marketing has been pushed so hard, for so long, that costs are climbing and returns are falling across the board. And when marketing presents to the board, it still talks about activity instead of money.

The people we spoke to for this briefing agree on what is wrong and what to do about it. The fix is not a new campaign. It is a reset of how the whole function works.

The 5/95 rule is one of the most established pieces of B2B marketing research. It comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, where Professor John Dawes did the underlying work, and the LinkedIn B2B Institute has put it in front of every CMO in the world.

The rule is simple. At any given moment, only about five per cent of your audience is looking to buy. The other ninety-five per cent are not. But they are the people who will build the shortlist eighteen months from now, when they do enter the market. And what gets them on the shortlist is whether they remember you.

Nobody disputes the research. Yet almost every marketing budget still pours its money into the five per cent who are buying today. The ninety-five per cent who will build next year’s shortlist get almost nothing. That gap is a cost the company is carrying, and nobody on the balance sheet has put a number against it.

The problem the people we spoke to keep returning to is not the rule. Everyone has seen the rule. The problem is the gap between what the research says and how the budget is actually spent.

Chris Bagnall, CEO and founder of Transmission, built the largest independent B2B agency in the world over close to three decades. He is direct on what is broken. Asked which marketing buzzword the industry should retire, he names two words. Funnel marketing.

The funnel, in his view, no longer describes how B2B buyers actually behave. Buyers do not move down a tube in one direction. They build shortlists, often inside AI tools, often without ever visiting a brand’s website. Marketing teams chasing top-of-funnel volume are chasing a behaviour that does not happen anymore.

His alternative is what he calls customer obsession. Work out what customers actually need. Have conversations that are useful to them, not just useful to your sales team. Move from internal lead targets to actually understanding the buying group: what they read, where they research, and how they decide who to put on a shortlist.

Jen Brown, a director at Engaging Interactions, has led B2B marketing inside enterprise software for longer than she will admit on tape. Her replacement metric is simple. The unit of measurement is the account, not the lead. She uses what she calls the contact-to-account ratio. If a multinational target has ten contacts in your customer database, you have not engaged it. You have logged it.

She also rewrites the MQL. The marketing-qualified lead becomes the marketing-qualified account. The signal is the spread of activity across the whole buying group, not the number of times one champion has clicked a link.

Victoria Dyke, co-founder of Ziggy, makes the same point in money language. What the people running the company actually care about is ratios, not volumes. The win rate. How fast deals move through the stages. What a customer is worth over their lifetime against what it cost to land them. Reporting lead volume on its own gives the room information that does not connect to any spending decision they are about to make. Switch the report to ratios and suddenly marketing has something the boardroom can actually act on.

The replacement for the funnel is the Infinity Loop. Picture a figure of eight on its side, ∞. Some people draw it as a bowtie, but it is really just a continuous customer lifecycle. Engage. Capture. Expand. Retain. Expand again. Marketing is held responsible the whole way through, not just at the lead handover at the top.

Ben Smith, director of global marketing at Reachdesk, gives the loop its real-world shape. A typical enterprise deal does not have one buyer. It has six to eight people on the buying committee, each with their own concerns, their own preferred content, and their own preferred channels.

Industry research from Gartner, which Bagnall referenced on the same panel, shows that around eighty per cent of the buying decision now happens offsite. The buyer only visits your website once they have already drawn up a shortlist. By the time marketing sees a signal that the account is interested, the thinking has already been done.

That means the work has to happen earlier. Across the whole buying group. On the places they actually go to research, not the places you wish they would. A top-of-funnel pipeline cannot do that. It was not built for it.

Paul Cash, founder of Rooster Punk, explains why brand got pushed into the “nice to have” column in the first place. Before the internet, B2B was a relationship business. The way you sold something was a charismatic salesperson with a phone, an acetate presentation, and a trade catalogue. They built trust over years. They carried client relationships from one company to the next. Whether you trusted them personally was the whole deal.

Then the internet showed up. The salesperson got replaced with a product catalogue and a contact form. The trust got nothing. Marketing started arguing about product features while the deal moved somewhere else, and lost the thing that actually closed deals in the first place.

His answer is what he calls the 3 Yes Model, part of his broader framework The Great Redesign of B2B Marketing. Every B2B deal needs three yeses, in order. Most marketing teams put all their money into the third one. They are trying to close people who have not said yes to the first two yet. That is what the long deal cycles are telling you.

The case for the first two yeses is now settled. Milka Privodanova, VP of marketing solutions at LinkedIn, points to internal research showing that the brands chosen by B2B buying groups were already known to roughly eighty per cent of the buying group on day one of the formal evaluation. Recognition is not what you get for making the shortlist. It is what gets you on the shortlist in the first place.

The commercial case is just as direct. He points to Workday’s Rock Star campaign, which launched at Super Bowl LVII in February 2023 with Ogilvy. It featured Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Idol, Joan Jett, Paul Stanley, and Gary Clark Jr. The campaign reached a buying group the standard lead-generation playbook could not reach.

The numbers, reported by Workday’s CMO Emma Chalwin, are clear. Brand consideration up sixty-five per cent. Global awareness up fourteen per cent. The number of people who said they could trust Workday up twenty-four per cent. And leads up fifty per cent, after years of slow lead growth. The work won a Gold Cannes Lion for B2B Craft.

The point is straightforward. Brand work today is the revenue you book in eighteen months. When buyers are not in the market, they are still building the shortlist they will use when they are.

Dawn Miley, senior director of growth marketing at Adobe, makes the case from the inside. When you invest in brand consistently, the rest of your marketing budget works harder. Performance ads convert better when the audience already recognises you. The argument inside the budget cycle is not brand versus performance. It is whether you keep the multiplier on or turn it off. Cut brand under cost pressure and you have moved money away from where it earns the most. You have traded next year’s growth for this quarter’s number.

Most B2B marketing teams are still organised around the channel. A paid team. A content team. An SEO team. A social team. An events team. A field team. Each one is measured against how its channel performs. The whole team, by design, is channel-led. Brown is blunt. That is the wrong design. The team should be organised around the audience: who you are talking to and why, before what and how. The channel is the output of the strategy. It is not the strategy itself.

This matters because the buying group is now spread across channels in a way the old structure cannot follow. Smith maps the people you are trying to reach: the champion, the wider user base, procurement, finance, and the C-suite signatory who actually approves the deal. Each one sits in a different place. Each one wants different content. Each one is on a different timeline. If you are organised around channels, you produce a plan that fits the channel calendar, not the people who are deciding whether to buy from you.

The decision itself has moved away from the straight line the old playbook was built for. Smith describes the new shape as a plate of spaghetti. The thinking is happening in advance, across the whole buying group, in the places they actually go for research. The work has to be done at scale, in the right tone, person by person.

Brown describes the replacement. The team should be organised around named accounts and the audiences inside them. Marketing, customer experience, and sales work together on the same accounts, sharing the same signals. The channel teams support the account programme. They do not run it. This is not fast. She describes a two-year transition: crawl, walk, run, sprint. Patience is the price of admission. Teams that try to do this by buying account-based marketing software, without redesigning how the team is structured, will fail. The software does not solve the real problem.

The Job Swap. Who Does What Now.

This is not abstract. It is named people doing different jobs. The matrix below is blunt. Which old role goes. Which new role replaces it. Each pairing is a job that changes, a budget line that moves, and a reporting line that resets.

Industry research from Spencer Stuart and Heidrick & Struggles draws the line clearly. Roughly sixty-six per cent of Fortune 500 companies have a CMO or marketing leader on the management team. Only around four per cent of Fortune 1000 boards have a marketer on the Board of Directors.

The CMO sits on the team that runs the company. They almost never sit on the body that decides where the money goes. That is why marketing is treated as a cost, not an investment. There is no one in the room who can argue otherwise.

The cause is a translation failure. When marketing reaches the boardroom, it still talks in speeds and feeds. Lead volumes. Channel metrics. Quarterly campaigns. The Board is having a completely different conversation. They are talking about return on the money you spent. The cost of winning a customer against what that customer is worth over time. The revenue this work will deliver over years, not the next quarter. The two languages do not meet.

Miley describes what happens inside the budget cycle. If you cannot explain a brand line in money terms, that brand line is the first thing cut when the budget tightens. If you cannot show how reorganising around customers will move the win rate, you will not get the funding to do it. In a lot of companies, marketing has become the team that argues for activity. Not the team that proposes how the company should spend its money.

What Marketing Says. What the CEO Is Thinking.

The translation failure is fixable. The protocol below is the gap between the language marketing still uses and what the CEO is silently thinking when they hear it. Every line on the left is a sentence senior marketers say today. Every line on the right is what is actually going through the CEO’s head.

Dyke names the skill that fixes this: commercial literacy. The ability to understand how the business actually makes money. What the unit economics are. Where the real constraints sit. And how to talk about all of it, in a room full of the people running the company, in language they recognise.

Smith puts the practical fix in place. At Reachdesk, seventy per cent of the senior marketing leader’s variable pay is tied to qualified pipeline. The other thirty per cent is tied to closed revenue, on the same numbers and the same timelines as the sales leader. When the pay is shared, the goal becomes shared. The friction between sales and marketing that companies spend management hours refereeing simply disappears. The reset is not to bring sales and marketing closer in spirit. It is to tie the pay to a single revenue number, and then watch what happens.

Privodanova reports that ninety-five per cent of B2B buyers now use AI tools at some point in their buying decision. LinkedIn is the single biggest source of professional information those tools cite. Dragos Marica, associate director at Directive Consulting, adds that around sixty per cent of search is now zero-click. The traffic decline you can see in any Google Search Console is the visible symptom of a much bigger shift: research is moving away from your website, into AI tools.

The buyer is offsite. The research is happening inside an AI tool. And what those tools cite is original expert content from credible sources. They are not citing the optimised marketing copy that previous SEO disciplines were built around.

The implication for the four resets is direct. You cannot fix the pipeline without fixing the brand, because the brand is the input the AI tools are looking at. You cannot reorganise around customers without a content engine that produces the kind of expert content the tools actually cite. And you cannot make the case for the language reset without the numbers that show how often AI tools cite us, where, and to whom.

Tom Ollerton, founder of Automated Creative, names the operating problem this creates. The volume of creative needed to show up in the right places, in the right languages, for the right audiences, at the right speed, is now beyond what a manual creative team can produce. Marketing needs a system that combines machine-scale production with smart tagging, so the senior team can answer not just what creative ran but why it worked. He demonstrates this through a tagging system that turns the dashboard from a list of outputs into something that explains why a result happened.

Nial McKinney, co-founder of Creative Engineers, makes the same point from the consultancy side. The bottleneck is not the AI tooling. It is the system around it: the people, the processes, and the way they all join up. The job is to produce the right volume of content without weakening the brand. He builds the change at manager level, not from the top. Managers are the ones who own the workflows. They can install change at the speed AI is moving.

The Reset at a Glance

The five lines below summarise the audit across all the people we spoke to. Each one is written so it can be read out in a board meeting. The senior marketing leader should be able to answer each line in the language of the right-hand column, with evidence.

The ledger below records the five resolutions, with named owners and signed deliverables. The 90-day window covers the audit, the reallocation, and the first measurable change.

The people we spoke to are not asking for small changes.

They are describing, from inside their own day jobs, a way of working that has stopped working. And a fix that is no longer optional. There is no real argument left. The decision has moved off our website. The shortlist is built before we are contacted. The research is happening inside an AI tool that picks expert content over marketing copy. And the list of people who might actually buy is being redrawn every week.

If we cannot talk about money, we will not get the money. If we do not build a content engine, we will not be cited where it counts. If we do not reorganise around customers, we will keep chasing the five per cent who are buying today. That alone is too small a market to grow the company off.

This does not arrive as a crisis. It arrives quietly, one quarter at a time, as we keep doing the same thing in a market that has stopped responding to it.

The Voices Behind This Briefing

This briefing is built from interviews conducted on The Business of Marketing podcast.