This article is the first in a “What’s new, what’s next” series examining how B2B buying has quietly but fundamentally changed. Each piece explores a different pressure point in the modern buyer experience and how brand-led demand systems can reduce friction by enabling buyers to move forward on their own terms. The ideas stand alone, and they’re not meant to be read in order. Buyers don’t move that way anymore.
B2B marketers have spent the last decade chasing one big question:
Why did buyers stop responding?
And to be fair, there are plenty of good explanations.
Digital transformation gave buyers more information than ever. Channels multiplied. Buying groups grew. Decision cycles got longer and more cautious.
But none of those explains what’s really happening. Buyers now decide how and when they gather information. Sellers still message as if buying happens in fixed steps. That gap creates friction.
Because buyers didn’t stop needing help. They just stopped tolerating friction.
It wasn’t a dramatic rebellion or some big refusal. It was more like a quiet decision that happened over time: “I’m not doing this the hard way anymore.”
So, buyers changed how they buy. They started choosing when to engage, what to explore and who to involve. Research moved earlier. Opinions formed sooner. Conversations with sellers became optional, not required.
Marketing and sales teams saw the symptoms. Response rates dropped. But they often missed the real reason.
Buyers didn’t vanish. They just learned how to keep moving without getting slowed down.
Buyer control isn’t emerging. It’s already the default.
A lot of B2B teams still talk about self-directed buying like it’s forming, like buyers are experimenting with independence and may eventually swing back to old habits. It’s tempting thinking, because it sounds manageable. It suggests there’s still time to catch up. But that time has passed.
Buyers didn’t drift away from guided journeys. They outgrew them.
Information became abundant. Peer access got easier. Waiting for permission didn’t make sense anymore. And once the buying process stopped pushing back, control shifted — quietly, but permanently.
Today, buyers do a lot of work before they ever raise their hand. It just happens in places sellers can’t easily see.
They compare options behind the scenes. They share content internally that never registers as “engagement.” They test assumptions in conversations that will never show up in a CRM. They build internal alignment before anyone outside their organization even knows they’re looking.
That’s the tension: too many teams still plan around a linear buyer journey that no longer exists.
Buying doesn’t move forward. It moves around.
Most B2B decisions don’t follow a straight path. They zig. They zag.
A buying group might feel ready one week, go quiet the next, then come back with a completely different question — not because they lost interest, but because something shifted internally.
A new stakeholder shows up. A risk gets raised. A budget assumption changes. Someone asks, “Wait, are we sure this solves the right problem?”
So, buyers revisit steps they’ve already “passed.” They recheck options. They reopen the shortlist. They pause to build confidence, then move again once they’ve rebuilt alignment.
That’s what modern progress looks like: not a steady march forward, but movement in all directions as clarity and consensus catch up with the decision. And it’s why “early-stage engagement” can be misleading.
From the outside, it may look like a buyer is just starting to explore. Internally, they might already be deep in it, pressure-testing vendors, aligning priorities and narrowing what really matters.
By the time a buyer reaches out, they’ve often already:
- Formed a point of view
- Narrowed their real questions
- Built preferences (even if they won’t call them that yet)
- Started socializing the decision internally
But here’s what most teams miss: even after a buyer reaches out, progress still doesn’t stay linear. Buyers don’t “enter the funnel” and keep moving forward. They move back and forth between learning, evaluating, validating and aligning — sometimes all in the same week.
So serious buyers can look invisible. They don’t go quiet because they don’t care. They go quiet because they’re trying to keep the process moving without interruption.
Activity isn’t always momentum anymore. Silence isn’t always disinterest. Sometimes it’s just a buying group doing what it must do to keep the decision moving.
Internal alignment matters more than external touchpoints
In modern B2B decisions, consensus forms behind closed doors. Content circulates without attribution. Trust builds through clarity, not constant presence. Buying groups make progress internally while the selling organization stays on the outside.
Meanwhile, marketing and sales teams measure what they can see.
That gap creates frustration on both sides: Marketing and sales chase signals that no longer correlate with decisions. Buyers avoid anything that introduces effort, pressure or noise.
And that brings us to the system behind a lot of this.
Friction doesn’t kill demand. It delays it.
Here’s the part that sneaks up on sellers: friction doesn’t usually destroy demand outright. It just adds drag.
Sales cycles stretch because confidence takes longer to build when effort increases. Deals stall after strong starts. Interest fades without a clear reason. And when that happens, marketing and sales teams often respond by adding pressure. More follow-up. More sequences. More “just bumping this up.” It’s understandable. But it often backfires.
Buyers don’t slow down when they lose interest. They slow down when effort increases and every forced step introduces doubt.
The damage doesn’t always show up neatly in pipeline reports. It shows up as lost momentum, prolonged evaluation and decisions that move elsewhere.
Friction rarely kills demand. It just gives buyers a reason to keep their distance longer than they should have to.
Enabling decisions instead of chasing signals
This is the exact gap our BrandDemand™ marketing model was built to address. The goal shifts from generating response to enabling decisions.
That means fewer forced steps, fewer artificial gates and more clarity where buyers actually pause.
BrandDemand™ marketing clarifies value early, reduces uncertainty throughout evaluation and supports buyers wherever they choose to engage. It treats trust as the mechanism — not the byproduct. And when buyers feel understood and unpressured, progress tends to accelerate on its own.
Demand grows through consistency, relevance and credibility, not interruption and persistence.
Buying still needs guidance. It just needs the right kind.
What’s next
The systems guiding most demand efforts were built to manage attention, not support decision-making.
What’s new isn’t buyer behavior. What’s next is whether marketing and sales adapt — or keep optimizing around a model that no longer fits.
The first step is letting go of the idea of the traditional funnel.
In the next post, we’ll explain what needs to replace it.
That’s not something that can be automated with AI. That’s something you’ll need to architect.
