Do you feel like the lights have gone off on your B2B marketing?

Marketing influence is going dark. It is not going out.

There is a quiet anxiety running through marketing leadership right now.

The dashboards are still green. Pipeline reports still tick along. Campaigns are still going live. Yet something feels off.

Deals are arriving more formed than they used to. Buyers already know your name. They understand your pricing logic. They have compared you with competitors. They may even know where your weaknesses are. And when the opportunity finally appears in the CRM, marketing seems to have had little measurable influence on it.

That does not mean marketing has stopped working.

It means the most important parts of the B2B buyer journey are increasingly happening somewhere your dashboards cannot see.

The buyer journey has moved out of sight

The numbers behind this shift are hard to ignore.

6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report found that buyers now purchase from a vendor on their Day One shortlist 95% of the time, up from 85% the year before. The same research found that 94% of buyers order their shortlist by preference before speaking to sellers and that the preferred vendor goes on to win nearly 80% of the time. In other words, the shortlist is formed before you can see the buyer. The winner is often chosen before any sales conversation takes place.

That changes the role of marketing. Your CRM is no longer capturing the buyer journey. It is capturing the aftermath.

So where is the real influence happening? In all the places that have always been awkward to measure. Slack groups, WhatsApp threads, LinkedIn DMs, internal procurement debates, peer recommendations and conversations over coffee. You do not, and will not ever see them.

And now there is a new layer sitting on top of all this: generative AI.

6sense found that 94% of B2B buyers are using large language models during the buying process. Magenta Associates’ 2025 research found that 66% of UK decision-makers already use tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity to research suppliers, with 85% of AI users saying they have discovered a new vendor, product or supplier through an AI-generated response.

That is a huge shift. The buyer can now run one of the most informed, high-intent research sessions of the whole journey, without ever clicking your website, triggering a cookie, filling in a form or appearing in your attribution model.

No click. No UTM. No fingerprint. Just influence. We’re increasingly in the dark as marketers.

Recommendation is the real engine

Strip the modern B2B journey back to its mechanics and you find something reassuringly old fashioned at the centre of it. People ask other people.

TrustRadius’ 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect Report found that 78% of buyers creating shortlists selected products they had heard of before starting their research. For enterprise buyers, that figure rose to 86%. Gartner has also reported that 61% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience.

That reframes two things commercial leaders often misread.

The first is branding. Branding is not the colour palette, typography system or tone of voice document. Those things matter, but they are outputs. The purpose of branding in B2B is to be remembered and recommended.

It is the work you do so that when a buyer asks, “Who should we be looking at?”, your name is the one that gets typed into the message.

The second is content marketing. Content does not exist to generate downloads. Downloads were always a proxy and often a poor one. Content exists to be discovered and discussed. It should give your buyers, their peers and their internal stakeholders something useful enough, sharp enough or true enough to pass around the rooms you will never be invited into.

If your content is not being talked about, shared privately, cited by AI or used inside buying groups, it is probably not doing the job you need it to do. Even if the open rate looks lovely.

Last-click attribution has been quietly distorting strategy

The reason so many marketing functions have drifted away from this is not incompetence. It is incentive design.

Last-click attribution has trained a generation of marketers to chase what can be proved quickly, rather than what shapes demand properly.

If a tactic produces a tracked lead this quarter, it gets credit, budget and a place on the dashboard. If a tactic shapes a buyer’s perception over eighteen months and contributes to a deal that arrives looking unsourced, it gets nothing.

Over time, budget moves towards the bottom of the funnel. Paid search. Retargeting. Conversion assets. Demand capture. Or, to be a bit more honest, demand harvesting.

None of that is wrong. But it is incomplete.

Professor John Dawes’ 95:5 rule, developed with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and published with LinkedIn, makes the point clearly. At any given time, only a small proportion of your potential market is actively buying. The rest are out of market, but they are not irrelevant. They are forming memories, opinions, preferences and future shortlists.

Optimising only for the in-market minority feels efficient. It is also why many B2B marketing teams hit a ceiling they cannot explain.

You can only convert demand that already exists. The harder, more valuable work is creating the conditions for future demand. And much of that work will never show up cleanly in last-click attribution.

Getting comfortable with not seeing everything

This is the wake-up moment for CMOs.

A significant share of marketing’s most valuable work will never be cleanly attributable. The peer recommendation. The half-remembered podcast. The analyst’s offhand comment. The founder’s LinkedIn post that landed in the right inbox. The ChatGPT session that put you on a shortlist.

These things will continue to drive pipeline that appears to have come from nowhere.

Trying to force perfect visibility onto this activity through ever more elaborate attribution models is the wrong response. It creates false confidence and, worse, poor decisions.

The better response is to change the conversation.

Boards do not care about MQLs, CTRs or attribution windows. They care about revenue, customer satisfaction, market reach and growth confidence. So marketing needs to connect its work to those measures more directly.

That means talking about:

Brand recall and consideration in priority segments

Share of search and share of voice

Visibility in AI-generated answers

Customer advocacy and referral strength

Net revenue retention and customer experience

Sales confidence in the stories, proof points and assets they use

This is not a softening of accountability. It is a sharpening of it. The measures are harder to game, which is exactly why they are more useful.

What this looks like in practice

For commercial leaders, the answer is not to abandon performance marketing. It is to rebalance the plan around the work performance marketing cannot do on its own.

That means investing in the assets that make a brand easier to think of and easier to recommend.

A clear point of view. Distinctive creative. Content with something real to say. Customer stories with proper proof. Executive voices worth listening to. Brand campaigns that build memory before the buyer is in market. Websites that help people self-serve. Sales enablement that reflects how buyers really decide.

The lights have not gone off. They have moved rooms.

Marketing influence is going dark. It is not going out.

The buyers are still there. The conversations are still happening. The decisions are still being shaped. They are just happening earlier, more privately and across more fragmented channels than most reporting models were built to understand.

The brands that win will be the ones that accept this and act accordingly.

They will invest before the buyer is ready. They will create content worth discussing. They will build brands worth remembering. They will use creative to make complicated stories stick. They will make customer experiences worth recommending. And they will have the confidence to explain to the board why the most valuable marketing work does not always leave a neat trail of breadcrumbs behind it.

Because when the next buyer starts building their Day One shortlist, the question is not whether your dashboard can see them.

It is whether they can remember you.

LINKS TO USE IN THERE

Vercel – How we’re adapting SEO for LLMs and AI search
https://vercel.com/blog/how-were-adapting-seo-for-llms-and-ai-search

TrustRadius – 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect Report: The year of the brand crisis
Media kit with stat snippets: https://solutions.trustradius.com/2024-b2b-disconnect-media-kit/