The New B2B Reality: How Buyers Are Shaping the Funnel Before Vendors Even Notice

If I had to describe the last year in B2B marketing, it’s this: buyers are doing a lot more work on their own, and they’re doing it earlier than most vendors want to admit.

More often than not, a buyer doesn’t “enter the funnel” when we notice them. They’ve already been reading, asking around, comparing, and forming an opinion before they ever visit a product page or raise a hand. They’re piecing together an understanding from all over the place: trade and editorial coverage, analyst perspectives, peer recommendations, vendor content, review sites, communities, and now AI-driven summaries that compress hours of research into minutes.

That shift has been building for years, but in the last year it felt like it crossed a line. The early part of the journey has become quieter, more distributed, and easier to complete without a direct interaction with a vendor.

And that has a blunt consequence: if you’re not consistently investing in educating the market, you’re way less likely to be known, or trusted, when it’s time for a buyer to finally narrow the field.

The Shortlist Is Forming Before We Show Up

One of the most consistent patterns I hear (and see myself doing too) is that buying teams arrive at evaluation already leaning toward a small set of preferred options. By the time procurement is involved or a formal comparison begins, the buyer’s “real” shortlist may already exist in someone’s head.

For a buyer, that’s efficiency. They have limited time, limited attention, and too much noise. So they reduce the universe early.

That’s where a lot of marketing frustration comes from. We’ll look at pipeline numbers or conversion rates and feel like we need to react faster, when what we actually need is to show up earlier.

AI Didn’t Create The Problem; It Accelerated It

What’s changed in how buyers research is how quickly they can do it, and how much can happen without leaving a trail that neatly connects back to vendor-owned channels.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools aren’t just another traffic source to optimize. They’re becoming an early lens through which buyers understand categories, risks, tradeoffs, and language.

This is why the companies that perform best in the age of AI prompts will be the ones that invest in digital education continuously, not in bursts. Not “more content” for the sake of volume, but clear, useful material that meets buyers where they already are.

The Problem Isn’t Measurement; It’s Where We’re Looking

When visibility gets harder, we cling to what we can count: website activity, inbound requests, form fills, known account engagement. Those signals still matter, but they’re often late.

A demo request is rarely the start. It’s sometimes a checkpoint after a buying group has already aligned internally and is validating direction. A sudden burst of activity may not mean “interest is arriving,” but more that “interest is consolidating.” So, when we treat those moments as the beginning, we make decisions with incomplete context.

That gap shows up most painfully for sales. If sellers are operating off a narrow set of cues: inbound leads, CRM activity, and whatever first-party behavior is visible; they’ll often miss accounts quietly building momentum off-site, and they’ll over-index on the accounts that happen to be loud.

This is why signals tied to real people matter so much; not only in the places they convert, but in the places they learn too. When those signals are credible, they give sellers a reason to re-prioritize. They also make outreach more relevant because it’s grounded in what buyers have actually been engaging with, not what we assume they care about.

The question isn’t “how do we get more leads?” It’s “how do we earn a place on the shortlist before the shortlist exists?”

What I’d Carry Into 2026

I don’t think 2026 will be defined by one channel or one platform. I think it will be defined by whether organizations accept a new starting point.

The teams that win will do a few things consistently:

• Treat education and brand as an ongoing commitment, not a campaign.
• Expand their definition of “signals” beyond last-click lead behavior and build a better view of what buyers are consuming everywhere.
• Connect marketing and sales around shared, person-level insights so sales effort follows real activity, not vapor.
• Use first-party data more intentionally, reinforced by verified identity, rather than pretending their website is the whole world.

At the end of the day, the simple fact is that your buyers are everywhere. If you want to be on their shortlist, you can’t only exist on your own site. You need to show up where they learn, where they compare, and where they ask each other what’s real.

You need to be present there too.

Josh Baez, Sr. Manager, Demand Generation at NetLine, is a B2B marketing leader with 10+ years of experience across demand generation, ABM, and content strategy, focused on turning buyer insight into measurable pipeline growth. Based in Seattle, he’s known for blending creative storytelling with data-driven execution to help brands cut through noise, align with sales, and drive real revenue. Josh is the Sr. Manager of Demand Generation at NetLine.