Most B2B buyers finish seventy per cent of their journey before a single sales call.
They have read peer reviews, watched demos on YouTube, bookmarked API docs for the commute home.
If your growth plan is still a spreadsheet of cold calls and gated PDFs, you are already chasing people who have moved on.
The evidence is everywhere.
CrowdStrike’s last earnings call put a hard number on it. 82% of new annual recurring revenue came from customers they already serve.
Expansion and retention now out muscle net new acquisition.
In security and SaaS, customers stay where they feel momentum. They leave when you ask them to jump through forms.
The old funnel marches buyers stage by stage.
Awareness. Interest. Consideration. Decision.
It assumes attention is linear. Reality is circular. Prospects dip in and out.
A good white paper pulls them closer. A slow chatbot pushes them away. Think loops not lanes. Demand gravity, not demand generation.
Numbers that matter
Interactive tools that replace lead forms can drop customer acquisition cost by forty per cent.
Accounts that meet product led content first tend to close twice as fast. The numbers hold even in low traffic niche markets.
Less friction means fewer stalls.
Three moves for Monday
Audit a gate. Gartner shares its security forecasts without registration. If they trust an open PDF, why hide your total cost calculator?
Remove one form this week and watch who shows up.
Turn compliance from paperwork into product.
Spin up a self service portal that maps your controls to NIST 800 207 and ISO 27001.
Let prospects tick their own boxes before legal even drafts an NDA.
Tag dark traffic.
Buyers scout in stealth mode. Add intent tags at the CDN. Track which company IP ranges stream your demo at midnight. Feed that signal to the account team. No cold call needed.
The question worth asking
When a CISO bookmarks your API documentation at two in the morning, does your system treat that as intent and route it to the right owner?
Or does it keep sending nurture emails to a shared inbox that nobody reads?
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