If I can break these two problems down into what’s always been a factor, and what is changing, I believe that will be the simplest way of getting to the root of the issue.
In addition, I will demonstrate what actions you can take to alleviate these problems, and even, capitalize on them; to ensure that you are riding the wave of the major changes that are happening, rather than fighting upstream against them.
First off, why are high quality leads getting harder to deliver? There’s a myriad of reasons for this. One of the key problems is the constant war for people’s attention. Back in the day, there used to be a few key ad channels, and a sure fire way of delivering from them; Create new prospects with email, and google and linkedin ads. Then the Sales Development Representative would close out the first meeting, and pass the promising ones to sales to seal the deal.
I’m sure you can see the problem here; Nowadays there’s a plethora of platforms and channels that your prospects are scouring for information, as well as connecting with like-minded communities on: from Quora for in-depth b2b discussions, to review sites like G2, and Truspilot, to video channels, Podcasts (every thought leader seems to have one now), not to mention, Reddit, X, Facebook, Meta, Instagram/Tiktok (Yes, B2B companies are really using both these days, I’ve worked at some of them).
Then there’s private communities like Whatsapp, Skool, Linkedin groups, Slack, Circle (this is a big one in Cybersecurity), Shopify community, AWS, Hubspot, Salesforce Trailblazer, GitHub discussions, blogs (like mine) and other niche channels.
Audiences have become ultra segmented (not in the traditional way by job title, country, company size or sector) but by the way they find and absorb information. And that is before we’ve even mentioned AI.
And of course, the fact that it's harder to reach prospects by phone these days doesn't help either.
What can you do about this problem? I would use both feeback, qualitative research, and data, to discover what are the five or six most powerful channels (in terms of how your attribution model shows they drive sales revenue) and double down on them.
Secondly, I would ensure that you create content that is feeding directly into AI search engines. There’s plenty of research to show that you can accomplish this fairly simply and effectively: For B2B, AI will draw from key channels like Quora, reddit, Wikipedia, Linkedin, and surprisingly, your own guides, if they are well written, authoritative, and provide real answers.
On the one hand, b2b content teams seem to often lack the experience or understanding of their audience to double down on these opportunities. I suggest spending time with prospects to understand what their business challenges are, and even what they do and how they spend their time. 9 times out of 10, content is too focused on what our company does, and who we are ‘Whizzletech is the leader in fintech solutions (it’s clearly not) and we want to make the world a better place (also hard to prove and unlikely, I think you just want to make money, right?)’
Where you can really make a positive impact and drive sales it to understand. What is their actual business objective? — revenue, growth, cost reduction, efficiency, market share, retention, etc. What would get them fired? (‘What keeps you up at night?) What would get them promoted? (A quantum leap in the efficiency with which they do their job). You get the picture! Ultimately you are also looking to find the prospects who are BANT qualitied, and who have a 9 or ideally 10/10 problem. Obviously you will struggle with those who think your solution is merely ‘a nice to have’. But companies have driven themselves out of existence trying to fool themselves into believing a lot of buyers with 5 or 6 out of ten pain points, will buy in this quarter.
Focus on the prospects who have the greatest need of your solution, when they are in market (only 5% of them will be at any one time), with a targeted personalised message (that solves their pain), in the channels that they operate in.
Finally, I will add that AI is creating a massive opportunity here. It is like the first years of Google when only 5 or 10% of the market understood and capitalised on the changes, by running those first basic advertisements. If you can crack the AI code now, and keep innovating, you will likely reap a massive growing annual harvest from it.
For those who manage to harness AI, they will cut down on the lengthening b2b sales cycle, and improve their conversion rates significantly. AI is condensing the vendor selection process. If you can categorically position yourself as the leader, and continue to persuade, your prospect won’t be felled by the two biggest reasons why they end up as closed lost (Insufficient Budget, and No decision).
How you get there is another challenge in itself. Gartner's newest CMO Spend Survey has a chart that should worry anyone setting a marketing budget this year. Marketing spend as a percent of revenue sits at 7.8 percent in 2026, up from 7.7 percent last year. Functionally flat. That number is also 18 percent lower than it was four years ago.
Here's what makes that flat line matter: 70 percent of CMOs in the same survey say becoming an AI leader is critical to their 2026 plan. Only 30 percent say their organization is actually ready to scale AI capabilities. Fifty six percent say their budget isn't enough to deliver on this year's strategy at all. Perhaps your best bet is to focus on those who are most passionate about solving these problems – who are prepared to take well calculated risks to achieve your goals?
Certainly it seems like with diminishing or flatlining budgets, and exponentially growing demands, some radical resets are necessary to accomplish CMO goals in the next five years.
Now that we’ve covered off on the lead generation challenges (making sure you have the right ‘raw materials’ to pass to your sales team), let’s move on to the biggest conundrum today; why are lead to sales conversion rates falling, and sales cycles lengthening at the decision stage?
Again, AI is partly to blame for this trend. And those who crack the AI code will also be in the prime position to drive higher revenue, with stronger conversion rates, and more efficient sales funnels.
The best way I can describe the change is this: the funnel has been pinched at the top and stretched at the bottom. AI has collapsed discovery, comparison and elimination into a single step — prompt, compare, recommend — and a shortlist now forms fast, often before a seller ever hears from the buyer. You would think that would make everything faster. It hasn’t. It has made the start faster and the finish slower.
Faster to a shortlist. Longer to a signed decision. If you take one idea from this piece, take that one, because nearly every falling conversion rate I have investigated recently decomposes into those two halves: the buyer did their choosing before you knew they existed, and then their organisation took months to let them act on it.
Why the end of the sales cycle is slowing down
There are four drivers, and any one of them alone would stretch a sales cycle. Together, they are where all the elapsed time went.
1. The buying group has roughly doubled — and gained an external layer. Gartner puts six to ten decision-makers around a complex purchase, each arriving with four or five pieces of research of their own. Forrester’s State of Business Buying now counts thirteen internal stakeholders plus nine external influencers — call it twenty-two people around one decision — with nearly nine in ten purchases spanning two or more departments. Every extra person is another calendar, another set of concerns, and another chance for someone to say ‘not yet’.
2. Finance has become a stage, not a signature. According to G2’s 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, finance involvement in buying decisions leapt from 31% to 46% in a single year, and nearly half of buyers have watched a CFO veto a deal that had already been approved — rising to 54% where there is a dedicated AI budget. Procurement now sits as a decision-maker in over half of buying cycles, engaged from the start rather than stamping the end. The uncomfortable implication: if your business case cannot survive a finance review you are not in the room for, you do not have a business case.
3. The payback window shortened while the approval lengthened. Three in four buyers who have been through a late-stage veto now expect positive ROI within six months of signing, and they push for contracts of under twelve months at more than double the usual rate. Read that as a single message from the market: prove it faster, and let me commit for less.
4. The real competitor is no decision. Dixon and McKenna analysed 2.5 million recorded sales conversations for The JOLT Effect and found that 40–60% of qualified pipeline is lost not to a competitor but to no decision at all — and 56% of those losses stem from indecision and fear of getting it wrong, rather than genuine attachment to the status quo. Forrester finds 86% of purchases stall at some point. Which brings me back to those two closed-lost reasons I flagged earlier. In my experience, ‘insufficient budget’ is rarely a price objection; it is usually a business case that did not survive an internal conversation you never saw. Budget losses and no-decision losses are mostly the same loss wearing different labels — and that matters enormously, because indecision is addressable in a way a genuine budget freeze is not.
Put the four together and the lengthening cycle stops being a mystery. Cheap, AI-assisted looking gives your champion more options and less proprietary insight, and the organisation compensates with scrutiny. Compression at the top is causing the expansion at the bottom. Which means the response has to work both ends of the funnel at once — and they need different tools.
The front end: win the shortlist you cannot see
Three numbers describe the new front end. 75% of US B2B technology buyers now complete the purchase journey in twelve weeks or less, against eleven months in 2024. 82% have sourced software recommendations from an AI chatbot in the last two years. And 94% of buying groups rank their preferred vendor before they ever speak to a seller — with that preferred vendor going on to win around 80% of the time. The shortlist is the new first meeting. Yet McKinsey finds only 19% of firms are actually implementing generative AI use cases for buying and selling — which is precisely the Google-in-2003 land grab I described above. Here is where I would start:
Shift the discipline from SEO to GEO (generative engine optimisation). Ranking is no longer the game; being retrieved and cited is. That means structured, machine-readable content — specification pages, honest comparison tables, question-and-answer guides that give real answers — written so a model can parse and quote them. This is the same point I made about your own guides feeding AI search at the top of this piece, now with a commercial reason to fund it.
Invest in third-party proof, not just your own claims. Review sites (38%) have just overtaken AI chatbots (37%) as the top shortlist-shaping source, and the models themselves lean heavily on third-party corroboration. Reviews, analyst mentions, community threads and peer evidence are now retrieval assets. Budget for earning them the way you budget for paid media.
Run a generative listening audit, then repeat it monthly. HBR’s 4C framework is the best structure I have seen: Coordination of the narrative across functions, Citability of content, Credibility of the sources citing you, and Calibration — auditing how you actually appear in AI answers. GSK ran roughly 6,000 prompts across nine decision points and discovered they ranked first on broad prompts but fourth on the specific prompt where they believed they were strongest. You cannot fix a shortlist you cannot see. Most companies have no visibility here at all, which is itself the finding.
The back end: shorten the approval you cannot control
Once you are on the shortlist, treat it as the starting line, not the finish line. Everything from here is about helping twenty-two people say yes — most of whom you will never meet.
Arm the champion. Your contact is one voice among many, and most of the decisive conversations happen without you in the room. So build every late-funnel asset to be forwarded without a rep present: self-contained, evidence-led, and written for the sceptic who receives it, not the fan who sends it.
Write the one-page business case a finance director can approve. Your numbers, framed to a six-month payback rather than an annual horizon, with verifiable references attached. Given that finance is now a stage in nearly half of deals, this single page will do more for your conversion rate than another nurture sequence ever will.
Offer phased or flexible commitment where the full ask cannot clear the gate. Buyers are demanding shorter terms and outcome-based structures at double historical rates. A smaller yes that survives the CFO beats a bigger yes that dies in the veto.
Triage ageing deals instead of waiting on them. Deals do not mature at stage like wine; win probability decays sharply the longer an opportunity sits still. Build a weekly review of anything stalled beyond thirty days at stage and treat it as an indecision problem — per The JOLT Effect, your job at that point is to help the buyer decide, not to keep helping them buy: narrow the options, make a recommendation, and take ownership of the risk of acting.
And keep the front-of-funnel discipline from the first half of this piece. Concentrate on the five or six channels your attribution model proves drive revenue, on the roughly 5% of your market that is in-market now, and on the prospects with a nine-or-ten-out-of-ten problem — because a doubled buying group and a CFO veto will kill a ‘nice to have’ every single time.
The funnel has not stopped converting. It is converting somewhere you cannot see, and stalling somewhere you do not control. Win the shortlist you cannot see; shorten the approval you cannot control. Do both, and the two forces I opened with — falling conversion rates and rising cost per lead — start running in your favour, while your competitors are still fighting upstream.
