By the time a B2B buyer speaks to your sales team, there’s a good chance they’ve already made up their mind about you. They’ve researched their options, spoken to people they trust, and formed opinions about which companies belong on their shortlist. The sales conversation might be your first interaction with them, but it’s rarely their first interaction with your brand.
That was one of the ideas that stayed with me after attending LinkedIn’s B2Believe Summit. Much of the conversation centered on how buying behavior is changing, particularly as AI becomes part of the research process and buyers rely more heavily on their networks to inform decisions.
For marketers, the challenge is understanding how to influence those decisions earlier, recognize meaningful buying signals, and connect that activity to commercial outcomes.
The buying journey is happening before the first conversation
Buyers have always done their homework. What’s changing is where that research happens and how much of it takes place beyond a brand’s visibility.
AI tools are increasingly part of that process, helping buyers compare providers, understand products, and evaluate potential solutions. At B2Believe, one session cited a figure suggesting that 94% of buyers consult an LLM before speaking to sales. Whether that becomes the norm across every industry or buying category, the direction is clear: buyers have more ways to form an opinion without engaging directly with a company.
That makes three questions particularly useful for B2B marketers: Is your brand discoverable? Is it credible? And is it winnable?
Discoverability determines whether buyers and the tools supporting their research can find you. Credibility comes from the evidence available to validate your claims, including customer experiences, peer recommendations, and the conversations happening across professional networks. Winnability is perhaps the most interesting of the three. It’s whether a buyer can realistically picture your business as the right choice for them.
Product education and mid-funnel storytelling have an important role across all three. Buyers need enough substance to understand what a solution does, assess whether it’s relevant, and build confidence in their decision. A strong brand impression might get you considered, but the information surrounding that brand helps determine whether you stay on the shortlist.
This also changes how we should think about content’s contribution to pipeline. Some of the most influential interactions may never appear as a conventional lead or attributable conversion, even when they play a meaningful role in the eventual decision.
Win the buying group, not the individual lead
One observation from the summit particularly resonated with me: B2B marketers have become comfortable talking about account-based marketing, but many are still running strategies designed to acquire individual leads.
There’s a disconnect there. Buying decisions are made across organizations, often involving people with different priorities, levels of influence, and definitions of value. Reaching one engaged individual doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve made progress with the company.
The same issue appears in how campaigns are optimized. A low CPM can make media performance look efficient, but that efficiency means relatively little if the audience being reached is unlikely to contribute to pipeline. Likewise, a high volume of leads can obscure whether the right accounts are actually moving toward a decision.
The more useful question is which companies are engaging, who within those companies is showing interest, and whether that engagement suggests the buying group is progressing.
That requires a more deliberate approach to targeting and creative. A finance stakeholder evaluating commercial value needs different evidence from an operational lead assessing implementation. Both may influence the same purchase, but a single message is unlikely to address their concerns equally well.
The opportunity is to build relevance across the buying group, using account-level engagement to understand where interest is developing and which conversations marketing can help move forward.
Intent is only useful when interest meets fit
Another idea from B2Believe was a simple definition of intent: interest plus fit.
It’s a useful distinction because engagement is easy to mistake for opportunity. Someone downloading a report, visiting a product page, or interacting with an ad may be interested in what you have to say. That doesn’t automatically mean their company is a viable customer or that the engagement signals an impending purchase.
The value comes from understanding those behaviors in context. Does the account fit your ideal customer profile? Are multiple relevant stakeholders engaging? Have similar signals preceded successful opportunities in the past?
This is where many B2B marketing teams face a more operational challenge. They have access to considerable amounts of data, but the systems connecting those signals to meaningful action remain fragmented.
A high-intent account might be identified without a timely follow-up. Qualitative feedback from sales might contradict what campaign reporting suggests. Teams can end up debating which dataset is correct rather than investigating what the differences reveal about the buyer’s experience.
AI creates an opportunity to make that process more useful, particularly through its ability to analyze patterns across different sources of information. But better analysis only creates value when it informs what happens next.
Speed to lead, for example, remains an important conversion indicator. If a business can identify meaningful intent but takes too long to respond, the sophistication of its targeting offers little advantage.
The priority should be to identify which signals genuinely correlate with pipeline progression, establish a clear response to them, and ensure that marketing and sales are working from a shared understanding of what constitutes an opportunity.
Measure the influence that eventually becomes pipeline
If buyers are forming opinions long before they enter a measurable sales process, marketers need to be more deliberate about how they evaluate the activity that influences those opinions.
Impressions and clicks still have a place in campaign reporting, but they provide limited insight into whether marketing is helping the right accounts progress. Equally, optimizing every campaign toward immediate conversion risks undervaluing the activity that creates consideration in the first place.
One example shared at B2Believe involved LinkedIn’s clean room capabilities, which were used to connect brand awareness exposure with an increase in closed deals. It’s an interesting direction for B2B measurement because it creates opportunities to examine how earlier marketing interactions relate to eventual commercial outcomes.
That doesn’t mean every brand campaign should be judged by the same immediate revenue metric as a conversion-focused campaign. Measurement needs to reflect what each stage of the journey is designed to achieve, while still connecting those stages to a broader understanding of pipeline and revenue.
It also means being willing to experiment with proxy measures when direct attribution is incomplete. Account engagement, buying-group reach, and movement through the pipeline can provide useful evidence, particularly when tested against eventual sales outcomes.
The bigger opportunity is in connecting these measures. Brand activity influences consideration, consideration produces signals, and those signals should inform how targeting, creative, and sales engagement evolve. When those parts operate independently, marketers lose visibility into how their work contributes to the final decision.
Build the system around how buyers actually buy
One of the most practical frameworks shared at B2Believe brought together five areas: signals, targeting, creative, execution, and measurement.
What I like about this framework is that it encourages marketers to examine how well those capabilities work together. Strong audience data means little if creative doesn’t address the buying group’s priorities. Relevant messaging loses its effectiveness if execution is disconnected from emerging intent. And even a well-run campaign becomes difficult to improve if measurement stops at media metrics.
For B2B teams, a useful starting point is to assess where those connections are weakest. Are you identifying the accounts most likely to buy? Are you reaching the people who influence the decision? Can you recognize when their behavior changes, and does that information shape what happens next?
The biggest takeaway I left B2Believe with is that marketing needs to be organized around a buying journey that’s already underway, often long before a prospect identifies themselves.
Buyers are arriving with more information, stronger opinions, and higher expectations. The opportunity for marketers is to earn a place in those early decisions, then build a connected
