Your campaigns are running, leads are coming in, yet revenue still isn’t materializing? The problem rarely lies in the budget. It’s about who shapes today’s buying decisions: people with established mindsets and AI assistants with their own distinct patterns.
Guest article by Nobus
Many mid-sized B2B companies are familiar with this situation: the website has been modernized, campaigns are running, and the reporting looks solid. Yet the sales pipeline is not filling up as it should, and revenue is not following suit. The obvious response is to do more of the same: increase the budget, add more channels, generate more leads.
But the problem usually lies elsewhere. In recent years, it has not only changed where purchasing decisions are made, but also who prepares them.
The Decision Is Made Before You Even Know About It
Today, B2B buyers want to conduct their own research for as long as possible. According to a Gartner survey of 632 B2B buyers, 61% prefer a buying process without any sales interaction.
The 6sense Buyer Experience Report 2025, based on nearly 4,000 respondents, shows what this means in practice: the first contact with a supplier takes place, on average, only after 61% of the customer journey has been completed. And in 95% of cases, the eventual winner was already on the shortlist on day one.
In other words, by the time a prospect contacts you, the race is often already largely decided. Not by your sales conversation, but by the impression that has formed in their mind beforehand.
The New Gatekeeper: AI
What is new is where this impression is formed. According to Forrester, 94% of B2B buyers now use AI during the buying process. Twice as many buyers name generative AI or conversational search as a more important source of information than any other, ahead of vendor websites, product experts, and sales teams.
At the same time, traditional search is losing its ability to generate clicks. An analysis by the Pew Research Center of around 69,000 Google searches found that when an AI summary appears, users click on a traditional search result in only 8% of searches. Without an AI summary, that figure rises to 15%.
What does this mean for your marketing? AI increasingly pre-screens the initial shortlist. If your company does not appear there, or is described inaccurately, it may never even be considered.
Why More Leads Won't Solve the Problem
Leads are valuable, but only when they encounter a brand they already trust. Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute developed the so-called 95:5 rule: at any given time, up to 95% of business customers are not actively looking for your offering.
Marketing that targets only the 5% who are ready to buy is competing with every other provider for the same small share of the market.
The remaining 95% will make their decision later, choosing the provider that comes to mind first and feels familiar. Lead generation and brand building are therefore not opposites. Effective lead generation processes capture as much existing demand as possible. Strong brand awareness ensures that this demand reaches you in the first place.
This leads to three strategies that truly matter in the age of AI.
Strategy 1: Understand How People Really Make Decisions
Even in B2B, people make the decisions. And people are not nearly as rational as Excel comparisons might suggest. Behavioural economics has shown for decades that, under uncertainty, we rely on quick, intuitive shortcuts: what feels familiar seems safer. What others recommend appears more credible. What feels consistent inspires trust.
One factor carries particular weight in B2B: risk avoidance. Buyers do not just want the best solution. Above all, they do not want to be held responsible for making the wrong decision. Marketing that communicates only features and prices is therefore answering the wrong question.
The Gartner survey also illustrates how important consistency is: 69% of B2B buyers experience contradictions between what a company says on its website and what its sales team tells them. Every contradiction erodes trust, and trust is the real currency in B2B.
What this means in practice:
- Don't just ask what you communicate. Find out what your target audience actually takes away from your messaging. A brand's self-image and external perception are often further apart than expected.
- Communicate the risks you help customers avoid, not just the services you provide.
- Make sure your website, sales team, social media, and proposals all tell the same story.
Strategy 2: Understand How AI Agents "Make Decisions"
This is where things get interesting. AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot do not have psychology in the human sense, of course. However, they display recurring patterns in how they weigh information and which providers they recommend. Metaphorically speaking, we could call this the "psychology of AI agents". Understanding these patterns allows you to align your marketing accordingly.
1. Familiarity is rewarded.
A recent study by Chu and Hou (2026) tested how large language models recommend products. When product attributes were identical, the established brand was preferred in every case tested. However, even a small, verifiable advantage offered by a competitor was enough to largely eliminate this lead.
For smaller providers, this means that clear, verifiable points of differentiation are more important than ever.
2. Consistency builds trust.
Language models build their understanding of a brand by combining information from multiple sources. If a company describes itself differently on its website than on LinkedIn, in industry directories, and in specialist publications, the resulting picture becomes unclear. And unclear brands are less likely to be recommended.
3. Third-party sources carry more weight than self-promotion.
What others write about you, including trade publications, partners, review platforms, and guest articles, feeds into the responses generated by AI systems. Self-promotion alone is not enough.
4. Clarity beats creativity.
AI needs to understand what you stand for, whom you serve, and what makes you different. Vague claims such as "Your partner for success" cannot easily be matched to a specific search query.
5. When everyone does the same thing, the advantage disappears.
The same study also shows that if every provider uses the same optimization tactics, the advantage disappears for everyone. Genuine differentiation cannot be replaced by tactics.
Strategy 3: Position Your Brand for Both Humans and Machines
Here is the interesting part: what convinces people and what AI agents favour overlap significantly. Both reward familiarity, consistency, external evidence, and a clear statement of what a brand stands for.
That is why effective marketing today does not start with choosing the right channel. It starts with a different question: How are we actually perceived by customers, prospects, and the systems that provide them with answers?
Only once this perception is clear does it make sense to scale it through campaigns, content, and lead generation processes. Approaching things the other way around risks amplifying an image that does not benefit your business.
What You Can Do This Week
- Ask AI. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot to describe what your company does and which providers they would recommend in your market. The results offer an honest reflection of how your brand is perceived.
- Ask three customers. Why did they choose you in the first place? Their answers often differ significantly from your advertising messages.
- Check for consistency. Place your website, LinkedIn profile, and sales materials side by side. Do they all tell the same story?
- Describe what makes you different in one sentence. If this is difficult, the problem is not your copywriting. It is your positioning.
Conclusion
When the sales pipeline and revenue fail to materialize, applying more pressure is rarely the solution. Today, purchasing decisions are prepared earlier, more quietly, and increasingly with the help of AI.
The companies that win are not necessarily the loudest. They are the ones that are perceived most clearly, both in the minds of their target audiences and in AI-generated answers.
Understanding how both humans and AI "make decisions" helps you build marketing that does more than generate leads. It generates revenue.
Sources
- Gartner (2025): Gartner Sales Survey Finds 61% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Buying Experience. Press release, June 25, 2025. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-sales-survey-finds-61-percent-of-b2b-buyers-prefer-a-rep-free-buying-experience
- 6sense (2025): 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report. https://6sense.com/report/buyer-experience/
- Forrester (2026): B2B Buyers Make Zero-Click Buying Number One. Blog post by John Buten, January 22, 2026. https://www.forrester.com/blogs/b2b_buyers_make_zero_click_buying_number_one/
- Pew Research Center (2025): Analysis of click behaviour in Google searches featuring AI summaries, July 2025. Summary available at 9to5Google: https://9to5google.com/2025/07/23/google-ai-overview-link-click-study/
- Dawes, J. (2021): Advertising Effectiveness and the 95-5 Rule. LinkedIn B2B Institute / Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Summary available at Marketing Week: https://www.marketingweek.com/peter-weinberg-jon-lombardo-95-5-rule
- Chu, X. & Hou, Y. (2026): Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems. arXiv:2606.17443. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17443
About the Author
Chris Lindenthaler is the founder of NOBUS and holds a bachelor's degree in business psychology, specializing in market and advertising psychology. Through NOBUS, he helps companies across the DACH region understand how their brands are actually perceived and use these insights to make their marketing more effective.
Find out more at nobus.at.
