Image above, source: Demandbase
I’ve spent almost my entire career in b2b sales and marketing, most of it in software. And I am seeing changes in the business that are unprecedented, and are hitting companies like a perfect storm.
- Plummeting conversion rates and ROAS on advertising, compounded by the already existing issue of often very small target audiences (as compared to B2C)
- Difficulty in attributing revenue, since a sale involves such a flywheel of both marketing and sales collateral and channels, that sometimes it would take a marketing analytics genius to unpick what caused that sale.
- The continual march of new technologies, like ABM platforms, Intent, and list building tools, AI – the game changer, and now, often hard to fathom AI hybrids like Clay (try explaining that to someone unfamiliar with it – ‘its like a cross between zoominfo and seamless AI, except it also ingests data from lots of other intent and list building tools like bombara’).
- The unrelenting pressure, which I’ve never seen before in my entire career, to prove ROI on every single action. In the 'roaring' 1990’s you could throw money around to get sales, these days CFO’s want military precision in the way marketing (and sales) budgets are allocated.
- Falling lead to sale conversion rates, which sometimes can accompany declining average order values at the same time – in countries or sectors with low or negative growth, for example.
Yes, B2B sales has certainly changed dramatically in the last thirty years. Some of those changes have been slow and incremental, for example the changes in business intelligence, from using magazines and trade publications to research prospects (yes, that did happen in the ‘olden days’ as my 17 year old son Jack calls any time pre-2000), to basic computer research (but google was very basic back then), to the adoption of tools like zoominfo and discoverorg, that provided you with both list building and business intelligence features – this would take us from the 1990’s, up until say 2018.
Others have been dramatic and disruptive – with the adoption of AI, which hit us all hard at the start of the 2020’s. Continuing that business intelligence example, where now where you can get a full breakdown on a prospect in seconds using a variety of AI tools.
But possibly the most alarming change, and one that is baffling teams across the world, from small startups, to huge behemouth companies, is the lengthening of the sales cycle
Dreamdata** just dropped their 2026 LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks Report, and the data confirms what we already felt:
- The B2B sales cycle is getting longer, more complex, and more demanding.
- The average B2B customer journey now takes 272 days — up from 211 last year*
- Each deal involves 10 stakeholders and 88 touchpoints across 4 channels.
- And 81% of that journey happens BEFORE a prospect ever enters the sales pipeline.
That means buyers are spending roughly 7 months doing their own research before they ever talk to you. This aligns with other research I’ve read that show that 80%+ of the sales evaluation is completed before a b2b prospect even talks to your sales person. With AI that number will no doubt increase.
So what is going on, and why?.... and I’m sure an even more important question you are asking: How can I fight this trend, and start to shorten our sales cycles?
Firstly, Looking at the data across B2B (Saleshive) this is the pattern
What’s particularly interesting about this data to me is that it matches what I’ve seen in reality working at a variety of mainly b2b saas companies, from Zscaler, Visual IQ (Now part of Nielsen), and Hansen, working on average annual deal sizes of $1M -$5M, to working at companies like Mention Me, or Mintago, where it was at the other end of the spectrum, $20,000-$75,000. But across the board I’ve seen slower sales cycles, especially in low growth regions.
Why B2B Sales Cycles Are Stretching
Expanding Buying Committees: A typical complex B2B purchase now requires consensus from 6 to 10 distinct decision-makers (ranging from IT and security to finance and procurement). Every stakeholder added introduces another calendar, new objections, and internal misalignment
Intense Budget Scrutiny: Due to broader economic slowdowns, purchases that previously required a single manager's signature now need multiple sign-offs, often terminating in a strict review by CFOs or procurement teams
The "No Decision" Paradox: The fear of making a bad software or vendor decision has increased. Research shows that 40% to 60% of B2B deals end in "no decision" because champions cannot justify the business case internally, or because the team is overwhelmed by information.
What can we do about it?
Gen AI is restructuring the entire B2B buying journey. AI is not just adding a new channel, but displacing the controlled channels (sales reps, distribution networks, owned media) that B2B go-to-market has always relied on.
Buyers now use AI tools to discover vendors, compare options, and evaluate fit long before they ever talk to a salesperson, which means much of the influence happens before sellers even know a buyer exists.
This means that the current ‘80% of buying done before a prospect even talks to a sales person may move up to 90 or even 95% over the next five years’.
Obviously, the sales person who can make the most of that 20%/10%/5% of influence they have at the end of the buying cycle is critical.
If the sales person is not armed with all the buying information they need, they will loose out to better informed, and supplied sales people (even if those sales people are not as technically proficient or experienced).
How the funnel changes
The old funnel ran on controlled channels and a slow, resource-intensive evaluation phase. Buyers worked through offerings, use cases, pricing, and internal alignment over months.
Gen AI is inverting the shape: the top widens because buyers can access a far broader set of vendors via AI synthesis, but options get eliminated much earlier and faster.
75% of US B2B technology buyers now finish their purchase journey in 12 weeks or less, versus 11 months in 2024. That is a fast and dramatic compression. IDC's predicts that 62% of traditional B2B demand generation will be AI-led by 2028.
Buck the increasing Sales cycle trend with smart search strategies
You'll have no doubt spotted the contradiction. Everything above says B2B sales cycles are getting longer, yet here's IDC forecasting an AI-led buying surge that makes them dramatically shorter. Both are true. They're just describing different parts of the funnel.
The lengthening happens at the back end: more stakeholders, tighter procurement, CFO sign-off. That's structural and it isn't going away. But the front end, discovery, research, shortlisting, is where AI-led buyers move at a completely different speed.
A buyer who once spent months researching now lets an AI assistant synthesise the options in an afternoon. The committee still takes its time; getting onto the committee's shortlist now happens in days.
That's the opening. The average cycle is lengthening, but a fast-growing pocket of AI-native buyers, concentrated in the US, where these shifts usually begin, is compressing the early stages hard.
Get your content built for how those buyers actually search, and you don't just keep pace with the trend. You can pull your prospects through the slowest, most expensive part of the funnel before your competitors even surface as an option.
Two opposing truths in one market is a lot to hold at once. It feels like cognitive dissonance. But sit with it, and the contradiction dissolves: the cycle is lengthening and compressing at the same time, in different places, for different reasons.
From an SEO perspective, using a famous analogy, you don’t want to be the organisation producing the absolute top flight best buggy whips, as the age of the motor car begins. Yet so many organisations are stuck in the old models.
McKinsey’s 2025 B2B Pulse Survey finds that only 19% of respondents are implementing use cases involving gen AI tools for B2B buying and selling.
A pilot study conducted by Digitas UK, a subsidiary of Publicis Groupe, examined B2B fintech payment solutions in the UK and U.S. markets. The findings revealed that more than 80% of the sources leveraged by LLMs originated directly from the brands themselves, such as Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, and Visa.
Caitriona Gallagher, strategy partner at Digitas, said: “This makes sense because these brands have significant amounts of content on their sites to help support B2B buying journeys, including product comparison content and sector/audience led content".
So even if your industry is in a category that you don’t think warrants much of your own in-house quality technical content, AI will still be pulling search data for your prospects from the internet.
And if you don’t have anything out there, content wise, your company will fall at the first discovery phase (Awareness/Consideration/evaluation) of your prospects AI driven buying journey. And as I already explained, the trend is moving to faster choice of vendor at the outset using AI research capabilities.
So if your content is not adapting to the new world, you could be left out in the cold, with your company not even being considered as an option at outset, let alone making it to the final decision stage, and eventual sale.
When I first worked in sales over 25 years ago, there was complete information asymmetry on the part of the seller. The buyer had very little information to go on – trade magazines, perhaps some scraps of information on the then nascent internet.
As time has passed, that balance has swung the other way completely. In the past, the sales person controlled perhaps 80% or more of the information that the buyer went on, but now, as discussed those numbers are reversed and may even move to 10% or less.
We live in a world where the sales people have fast diminishing opportunities to make their mark on the prospect. So the sales person who is best informed will win most of the time.
The Dark Funnel (AKA 'Iceberg'): Why 80% of Your Buyer's Journey Is Now Invisible to You
That is where tools like Demandbase, 6sense, clay, hubspot, alongside bespoke AI solutions, can make a decisive difference. These tools enable you to get into the heads of your buyers: find out what problems they have (maybe even before they themselves can articulate them), what motivates them to buy, where they are in the buying cycle, and when the 95% of buyers finally jump to that sales nirvana of being ‘in market’.
Some companies are sprinting ahead with these tools and methodologies; For example, in the Enterprise B2B SaaS markets I've worked, we started to transition from the MQL-SQL-Sales model a long time ago, to the 'Buying groups' model. This is where we recognise that it is never one lead that drives a sale, but rather a group of decision makers - say, the initial sponsor, a mid management decision-maker, alongside, perhaps a CIO, a CFO, and a technology lead.
Whilst others are even struggling to get the most basic data and insights, even from their own prospects and customers! You feel like saying 'hey, 2015 called and they want the Martech and CRM stack back' (this joke comes from the team at Akamai, who used to laugh at my wife, Catherine, still using a blackberry when everyone else was on Iphones already - I'm glad to say I instrumental in that 'transition' process, so no one was laughing at her anymore).
Peer to peer content, research, and review sites
When I purchase Hubspot CRM, and Marketing Automation for the UK and Italy arms of an international company just prior to its IPO, I was pretty nervous about making the right decision. There was an array of options available to us; from building in-house, keeping our existing, but rudimentary Pipedrive/Mailchimp infrastructure, or using combinations of Salesforce/Hubspot/Marketo/Dynamics and other providers out there.
What helped me enormously in that critical final purchase stage, was the array of high quality peer-to-peer review sites, like trustpilot, google, and most importantly for me, G2 - the most professional and reliable of them all. That was in addition to reading the best research from companies like Forrester, Gartner and IDC.
I guarantee that your prospects will be doing the same. And the biggest trend of them all is the peer-to-peer content, which has skyrocketed - G2 crowd, Quora (I'm pretty active on that one), Linkedin, and to a lesser extent, reddit. These are also sites that AI use to drive their search answers.
The best salesperson in the world won't sell your product as well as a brilliant customer recommendation. Win the reviews, win the revenue, and faster than your competitors.
