For years, B2B marketers have clung to the idea of a buyer journey they could map, model, and measure. Neat funnels with predictable flows. Carefully designed campaigns that nudged prospects from awareness to decision.
But, if you haven’t noticed, that world has gone.
Today’s B2B buyers are self-selecting. They say: “Leave me alone. I’ll call you.” They research on their own terms, explore in unpredictable loops, and often appear only when they’re ready to buy. That reality leaves marketing leaders staring at dashboards full of gaps: untrackable influence, invisible persuasion, and results that don’t line up with the tidy flows we built in the past.
So where does that leave us?
A Discipline in Flux
We’re in an in-between phase. Mechanistic buyer journeys are broken, but the industry hasn’t yet agreed on what replaces them. Agencies have been rebranding, merging, and inventing new language – but beneath the surface, most are reaching back to old habits.
Marketers talk about buyer journeys because campaigns need the structure to be planned effectively, content needs to be created, and websites need to be relaunched. But there’s a danger here: if we lean too heavily on old assumptions, we’ll simply recreate the very structures buyers are rejecting.
This is not a three- or six-month fix. The forces reshaping B2B buying are too big and too complex. The discipline itself is shifting and it may take another year before a new, accepted model emerges.
Positioning Matters More Than Ever
One overlooked truth is that confused messaging, or a fragmented portfolio or unclear offering undermines clarity, creates confusion and as a result impacts understanding and trust. If your business, brand, product and service positioning isn’t crystal clear, buyers simply won’t know how to engage – they won’t know what you offer in a way they can compare to others.
When the journey is invisible, clarity becomes a competitive weapon. Buyers need to instantly understand what you stand for, how your portfolio fits together, and why you’re relevant to their challenge. If you don’t state your position early and decisively, you won’t even make the consideration list.
From Marketing Enablement to Buyer Enablement
B2B has historically focused on sales enablement or marketing enablement. The question was always: how do we help our teams close faster?
Perhaps that now misses the point entirely. The real question is: how do we help buyers buy?
- Give them content they can self-navigate.
- Make it easy to digest, share, and apply.
- Support their exploration, rather than forcing them through nurture tracks.
This shift from enabling teams to enabling buyers is subtle but profound. It’s no longer about trying harder to capture demand. It’s about creating the conditions for demand to grow.
The Sales–Marketing Power Shift
This evolution is also reshaping the balance of power inside organisations.
In many mid-sized UK B2B companies, sales has always led and marketing has supported. Over the last five years, marketing promised bigger influence – seats at the board table, ownership of growth – but too often underdelivered.
Now, sales is regaining authority. That’s not bad news. It’s a reality check. Marketing must recalibrate expectations and focus on what sales leaders actually need: a regular stream of good-fit opportunities, backed by content and positioning that makes conversations easier.
The future isn’t sales versus marketing. It’s sales and marketing, redesigned together for a buyer-led world.
AI, Digital Complexity, and “Quality In, Quality Out”
Another factor in the broken journey: digital transformation has created complexity faster than businesses can adapt. Buyers expect personalised experiences, fast responses, and seamless digital touchpoints.
AI offers huge potential here. Intent data and machine learning can flag which accounts are warming up, what topics they care about, when to engage and with which message. But AI is only as good as the inputs. Quality in, quality out. Like the good old days of producing detailed briefs for creative teams.
For mid-sized businesses, the challenge is to use AI with discipline: clear positioning, good data hygiene, and human oversight. Otherwise, digital complexity just creates more noise.
Most of us have now experienced the modern frustration of AI-generated low quality output, followed by a refinement of the prompt. QIQO.
Measuring the Invisible
Attribution has always been messy, but now it’s almost impossible. Buyers are persuaded in invisible spaces – WhatsApp groups, Slack communities, LinkedIn threads. They arrive at your door already educated, influenced, and often leaning toward a preferred option.
So the question isn’t: “Can we track every touch?” It’s: “Can we deliver a presence and positioning strong enough that, when they do emerge, we’re already on the list?”
Clicks and form fills no longer tell the whole story. Influence is happening off the radar. Success looks like being consistently present, clear, and credible enough that the invisible buyer feels confident to call.
A Time to Be Brave
This is not a moment for marketing to cling to funnels or demand-gen volume. It’s a moment to be braver than we’ve been in a decade.
- To test new approaches.
- To accept some failure along the way.
- To stop over-optimising what’s broken, and start shaping what comes next.
The broken buyer journey isn’t just a problem. It’s an inflection point. Those who recalibrate now – aligning with sales, enabling buyers, experimenting with AI, and sharpening positioning – will be the ones who shape the discipline that replaces the old funnel.
That evolution won’t be neat. It won’t be fast. But it will decide which companies remain relevant in the new era of B2B.
👉 What about you? Are you still trying to fix the funnel, or are you ready to rethink what buyer journeys really mean in 2025? Drop Mark Wiseman-Smith or Marc French a message to start the discussion.