Debunking B2B GTM Myths That Limit Growth
10 min
Executive summary
B2B revenue growth in 2025 requires a deliberate shift from demand capture to brand-led, buyer-driven go-to-market (GTM) strategies. For CMOs and senior marketing leaders, this means owning the entire buying journey, creating measurable brand preference long before buyer signals emerge, and aligning GTM investments with the realities of buyer psychology.
Most buyers shortlist vendors before sales involvement, highlighting strategic brand investment as a revenue imperative.
Key insights:
B2B GTM strategies have entered a new era—one defined not by volume, but by value. As economic uncertainty continues, the growth-at-all-costs model has proven unsustainable. In its place, we see a shift toward brand-led, buyer-driven strategies that emphasize relevance, trust, and efficiency over high-volume, transactional demand generation.
Today’s buyers are no longer motivated by the fear of missing out (FOMO), but rather by the fear of making the wrong decision (FOMU). This heightened risk sensitivity has led to larger buying groups and lengthier decision cycles, introducing new complexity into the B2B market.
As a result, traditional marketing playbooks have lost their effectiveness. Success now requires a buyer-centric, account-based approach designed to meet evolving expectations with precision and empathy.
This whitepaper examines the outdated assumptions limiting B2B GTM performance and offers proven, strategic approaches to help your brand build influence and trust throughout the buying group.
“Marketers have tried every GTM motion—product-led, sales-led, inbound, outbound—except the one that actually matters: buyer-led.”
CMO, INFUSE
5 top marketing myths debunked
1. BOFU strategies result in consideration
Strategic brand visibility is now a critical lever for market share growth. Today, buyers enter the sales process already informed and prepared with a clear view of their preferred vendors. According to the 6sense Buyer Experience Report 2024, 95% of buyers already know four of the five vendors they will consider on day one. By the time buying signals appear, their shortlist is largely defined.
This shift reframes the role of marketing leadership. For CMOs, the challenge is not one of prospect volume, but of proactive market positioning. Early-stage brand engagement shapes the competitive field before formal evaluations begin, ensuring your organization is not overlooked when decisions are made.
According to the INFUSE Voice of the Marketer 2025 report, brand awareness is the top marketer-owned responsibility—and yet only 30% of GTM budgets are allocated to it, despite its measurable impact on revenue outcomes.
Improving pipeline velocity and increasing win rates begins with establishing brand relevance early in the journey. It is not just about being known, but about being known by the right buyers, ahead of the moment they decide.
2. Buyers start from scratch
According to the 6sense Buyer Experience Report, 90% of buyers have prior experience with vendors, and 85% ultimately select from their day one shortlist. Supporting this trend, the G2 Buyer Behavior Report 2024 found that nearly half of buyers (49%) begin their process with just one to three solutions in mind.
In many cases, these buyers have already encountered your brand via campaigns, analyst coverage, peer recommendations, or digital research. Awareness exists, but consideration and preference may not. This disconnect presents a high-value opportunity: shaping early impressions to influence outcomes further down the journey.
Improving win rates in this environment depends on more than visibility and requires creating positive recall—familiarity paired with credibility—that elevates your brand above past perceptions and competing narratives. This is accomplished by delivering consistent, relevant, buyer-led experiences long before formal engagement begins.
Positioning the brand early, clearly, and credibly ensures your organization is not only on the shortlist, but considered with confidence when decisions are made.
3. You only need to win over one decision maker
Driving purchase decisions in B2B often hinges on one key factor: internal consensus. According to Edelman–LinkedIn research, 40-60% of buying journeys stall with no decision, primarily because buying group members fail to align.
These journeys are increasingly complex, typically involving large buying groups that average ten stakeholders, each with distinct roles, priorities, and expectations. Every member conducts their own research and often champions a preferred solution.
At the same time, buying cycles can extend over many months, with meaningful sales engagement not occurring until two-thirds of the way through. In many cases, contact with sales does not happen until the group has already formed internal assessments.
Success requires supporting the entire buying group—not just an individual champion—and calls for more than top-of-funnel messaging, such as persona-specific content that enables buying group alignment and accelerates internal decision making.
By equipping buyers with content that clarifies trade-offs, builds shared understanding, and reduces internal friction, marketing leaders can help move complex deals forward with greater speed and confidence.
“Marketing’s job is no longer to get you into the room. It is to help the room agree.”
CMO, INFUSE
4. Marketing can impact a quarter’s results with a new business campaign
Buying cycles are long, and marketers need to be at least nine months ahead of sales. 6sense research shows that B2B buyers are already 70% through their purchasing process before engaging sellers, and 85% have established purchase requirements before contact is made.
The reality is that any campaign launched with the hope of delivering immediate pipeline will almost certainly arrive too late to influence current-quarter revenue.
This is compounded further by longer sales cycles, larger buying groups, and the defensive, risk-averse stance buyers are taking. Working with consultants or analysts (something 59.5% of buyers now do) extends buying cycles from an average of 6.5 months to 13.6 months. (Voice of the Buyer, 2025)
Even without these extended timelines, the complexity of modern B2B buying means that marketing influence must start well before opportunities reach the hands of sales.
The Voice of the Marketer 2025 report reinforces this reality: winning or losing a deal happens before a salesperson ever gets involved. Marketers who aim to impact revenue this quarter should focus instead on accelerating existing opportunities through tailored content, enablement, and buyer-specific outreach while maintaining long-term brand-to-demand programs to fill future pipelines.
In short, the most effective way to impact a quarter is to have already been marketing to that quarter’s buyers for the past nine months.
5. One touch can convert the whole buying group
A typical buying group will have hundreds of interactions per vendor. The path forward is not about flooding the funnel with content, but rather answering real buyer questions early, contextually, and consistently.
This requires a mindset shift from content marketing to buyer enablement, and from brand presence to brand utility.
Instead of one-size-fits-all assets, marketers must deliver modular, persona-specific insights that help buyers:
To do this well, teams must orchestrate account-based marketing (ABM), digital, and brand in lockstep, not as separate silos.
Align GTM strategies to what your buyers want.
INFUSE demand experts connect you with purchase-ready buyers through precision demand generation—tailored to your ICP’s exact needs, priorities, and pain points.
What does the new buyer-led playbook look like?
Maximizing marketing’s revenue contribution requires delivering impact throughout the full buying journey from the earliest signal of interest to post-sale expansion.
This playbook is built on four components:
Buyer intelligence
Brand awareness
Buyer-enablement content
Brand to demand
Traditional demand capture vs buyer-led strategy
Traditional Demand
Timeline
Buyer-led Strategy
Waiting for intent signals
Month 1-9
Intent detected
Month 10
Sales outreach begins
Month 11
Consensus building
Competing for attention
Month 12
Deal won
Leverage buyer and account intelligence to prioritize early
Utilize advanced buyer signals, technographics, and account-level insights to identify which accounts are most likely to enter the market.
Engage early in the buyer’s journey—well before direct sales involvement—by identifying buying signals such as content consumption patterns, peer discussions, and shifts in technology stacks. This approach can help prioritize marketing efforts toward accounts with the strongest likelihood to convert.
Sources of buyer and account intelligence include:
Launch brand-driven messaging to ensure market recognition
Buyers rarely start from zero; many already have defined a vendor shortlist by the time they initiate the process. Influencing that shortlist involves creating a recognizable market identity that signals trust, relevance, and authority.
Defensive and risk-averse buying groups rely heavily on known entities. Invest in branding that not only builds awareness but also shapes positive recall over time.
Tactics for building brand awareness include:
Map content to buying group needs at each stage
Buying groups are growing in size and complexity, often involving multiple functions with different priorities.
Content strategies should address the specific informational and emotional needs of each stakeholder.
The Voice of the Marketer 2025 report highlights that high-value, buyer-centric content is still underutilized. The modern playbook requires mapping assets to stages of the buying journey (awareness, education, consensus-building, validation) and ensuring each piece enables progress toward a decision.
Analyst reports, peer case studies, and implementation guides often play a decisive role in late-stage evaluation.
Examples of content mapped to the different stages of the buyer’s journey include:
Stage
Goal
Content Type
Awareness stage
Spark interest, educate on the problem space, and position your brand as a credible guide
Consideration stage
Help buyers weigh approaches and understand solution trade-offs
Decision stage
De-risk the decision, validate the choice, and make internal buy-in easy
Post-purchase
Deliver on promises, reinforce brand trust, and set up cross-sell/upsell opportunities
Ensure brand–ABM–demand alignment under a unified measurement framework
Brand awareness, ABM, and demand generation cannot operate in silos. A unified approach ensures that brand-led market positioning fuels ABM targeting precision, which in turn accelerates conversion.
Shifting marketing measurement away from traditional MQLs toward metrics more closely tied to business outcomes (such as opportunity creation, deal velocity, and revenue impact) provides a clearer picture of marketing’s influence on pipeline growth and overall performance.
Below is a step-by-step framework for connecting brand to pipeline and revenue:
Step 1
Aggregate first-party data from brand programs
Step 2
Match first-party records to target accounts
Step 3
Incorporate ABM engagement metrics
Step 4
Link to demand generation outcomes
Step 5
Integrate data in a single reporting framework
Step 6
Analyze the impact on revenue
Step 7
Refine and optimize
Case study: How INFUSE enabled buyer-led GTM to multiply sales-qualified pipeline for Freightos
Industry: FreightTech marketplace
ICP: Logistics providers, global shippers, and freight forwarders
Objective: Accelerate pipeline by reaching the right buyers with tailored messaging
Freightos offers a global freight booking platform that transforms how goods move across borders. To scale efficiently, the Freightos team sought to:
Although Freightos was generating top-of-funnel activity, its SDRs faced slow progression from initial engagement to qualified opportunity—especially across key accounts where multiple buyer personas were involved.
The INFUSE solution: Intelligent buyer activation
Freightos partnered with INFUSE to execute a brand-to-demand playbook that blended intelligence, personalization, and speed-to-engagement.
INFUSE helped Freightos identify and prioritize accounts using:
This allowed INFUSE to identify the most relevant buying groups and engage individual stakeholders accordingly.
Activating buying groups early
INFUSE developed persona-specific outreach strategies targeting sales, operations, and finance leaders.
These programs:
This was not about adding noise—it was about helping stakeholders align earlier, faster.
Real-time buyer signals were sent to sales, closing the gap between marketing and revenue.
Results:
In less than one quarter, Freightos achieved meaningful gains:
Results
Sales-qualified opportunities created
Sales-ready meetings with key accounts
Top-ICP account engagement
Time from prospect to opportunity
Outcome
Up 2.5x
Doubled
Significant lifts across the freight forwarder and shipping segments
Reduced across global regions
This case study highlights how the shift from capturing demand to activating buyers—through brand-led, account-specific engagement and timely, relevant content—unlocks faster pipeline, stronger consensus, and long-term revenue impact.
Key takeaways
Want to turn this playbook into action?
INFUSE demand experts are here to craft a brand-to-demand strategy tailored to your key accounts and buying stages.
