There is an uncomfortable conversation happening in B2B leadership teams right now. Pipeline is softer than it should be. Win rates are slipping. Sales cycles are getting longer. The instinct, as it always is, is to look at sales.
More training. New tools. A different incentive structure. A reorg. Most of it isn't working the way it used to.
Here's why. The commercial model most B2B technology and telco companies are still running was built for a buyer who picked up the phone. That buyer is gone. The person buying from you now does most of their thinking before anyone from your company has spoken to them. They read. They ask peers. They check Reddit. They watch a webinar at 1.4x speed. They build a shortlist quietly and rule people out without telling them. By the time sales gets a call, the decision is three-quarters made.
This isn't new. Forrester and Gartner have been pointing at it for the better part of a decade. What's new is the gap between how visible this shift has become and how little most companies have adjusted to it.
Sales hasn't stopped mattering. But sales can't carry the commercial number on its own anymore, because most of the buying journey now happens in places sales can't reach. Trust gets built somewhere else. Objections get answered somewhere else. Shortlists get made somewhere else. And the function that's supposed to be active in those places — marketing — is being asked to do more, with less, at exactly the time it matters most.
The IPA's recent effectiveness work has shown brand investment in B2B running at lows it hasn't sat at in a decade. LinkedIn's B2B Institute has been making the same argument for years, anchored in Les Binet and Peter Field's research: at any given time, only about 5% of your potential buyers are in-market. The other 95% aren't ready to buy anything from anyone. The job of marketing is to be remembered by them, so that when they do enter the market, you're already on the list.
Cutting marketing budgets in that environment isn't prudence. It's a commercial mistake dressed up as a cost decision.
But this isn't a defence of marketing. It's a challenge to how most B2B companies still organise their commercial function — because the real problem is bigger than the marketing-versus-sales conversation suggests.
Sales and marketing are not two departments handing work between them. They're not even two-thirds of the picture. The companies pulling ahead are the ones who have stopped treating product, marketing and sales as separate things at all.
This is the part most enablement platforms get wrong. They start at sales. They treat marketing as the supplier of content. They treat product as a fixed input — features that get handed over, wrapped in messaging, and pushed out the front door. The commercial work is assumed to begin once the product is built.
It doesn't. The commercial work begins inside product. That's where the language about what something does and why it matters first gets shaped. That's where the buyer's actual problem either gets understood or gets quietly translated into engineering priorities. And that's where the feedback loop from the field has to land, because every signal sales picks up in real conversations — what buyers struggle with, what makes them hesitate, what makes them decide — should be informing what product builds next and how marketing positions it.
Most companies don't run this as a loop. They run it as a relay. Product builds. Marketing wraps. Sales sells. Customer feedback, if it travels at all, comes back through quarterly reviews and gets filtered down to the next planning cycle. By the time anything reaches product, the signal is months old and four people removed from the buyer who generated it.
The buyer experiences the seam. They feel the gap between what the website promised and what the salesperson said. They feel it when a feature that mattered in their conversation never makes it into the roadmap. They feel it when the marketing they read three months ago describes a different company than the one they're now talking to.
That seam is where revenue leaks. Quietly. Constantly.
You can't ‘training-program’ your way out of it. You can't ‘tooling’ your way out of it. You can't hire a new CRO and expect the model to fix itself within unreasonable timelines.
The work is structural. It's reshaping how the commercial function operates so that product, marketing and sales are running off the same understanding of the buyer, with a real loop between what's heard in the field and what gets built and how it gets sold. It's accepting that creativity isn't a marketing department indulgence. In a world where buyers are mostly absent and mostly bored, being memorable is a commercial requirement. And it's recognising that the buyer's experience of you starts long before sales is involved and continues long after the contract is signed.
The companies that figure this out won't talk about it as a marketing transformation or a sales transformation. They'll just notice, six quarters in, that pipeline feels different. That deals close more cleanly. That the buyer arrives in conversations already half-convinced.
The ones that don't will keep looking at sales and wondering why none of the usual fixes are landing.
