Most marketing plans still assume a funnel: awareness, consideration, decision, a neat line a buyer walks down until they reach you at the bottom. Real B2B buying doesn't work that way, and treating it like it does is why so much marketing effort gets spent on the wrong stage.

The buying group, not a buyer

Gartner's research on B2B purchasing puts the typical buying group for a complex purchase at six to ten people, each carrying their own information, often with conflicting priorities. There is no single decision-maker moving through your funnel in a straight line. There is a group, reforming and renegotiating, sometimes adding new stakeholders halfway through a process you thought was nearly closed.

This is also why a single "decision-maker" persona is the wrong unit to market to. You are not nurturing one person to a yes. You are trying to be the easy, obvious, low-risk choice when an entire group eventually has to agree.

Why the line doesn't hold

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's research on B2B category buying adds the other half of the picture: most of your market is not "in the funnel" at all at any given time. The same 95:5 split that applies to brand awareness applies here — roughly 95 percent of B2B buyers in your category are not actively purchasing right now, and won't be for months or years. They move in and out of being "in market" as budgets, projects, and priorities shift, not as a steady walk through your content calendar.

That means a buyer can re-enter the process at any stage, with new stakeholders who saw none of your earlier content, asking the same foundational questions your first blog post already answered. The funnel doesn't reset for them. It never existed as a line to begin with.

What this means for how you market

If the buying group reforms unpredictably and most of the market isn't ready yet, two things follow. First, broad reach matters more than precision targeting of "decision-makers": you need to be visible to everyone who might eventually sit in that six-to-ten-person group, not just the title that signs the contract. Second, being easy to find and easy to remember matters more than a perfectly sequenced nurture path, because you don't control when someone re-enters the process or who they bring with them.

The deeper point

This isn't an argument against structure. It's an argument against assuming the structure is linear. Build content and presence that works whenever and wherever a buying group reforms, not content that only works if every prospect dutifully completes step one before step two. Distinctive, easy-to-recall marketing earns its returns mostly through this kind of unpredictable re-entry, not through forcing people down a funnel that was never really there.

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