Have you ever thought about why your campaigns are full of “leads”… and empty of real results?
In B2B marketing, it’s easy to fall into the “click illusion”: beautiful dashboards, increasing click-through rates (CTR), and reports with rising graphs, among other indicators. It seems like everything is going well. But when you pull the “conversion thread,” you realize: the ones who clicked are not the decision-makers.
The gap between a curious lead and a real buyer is larger than many imagine. And recent data from Dreamdata, a B2B attribution platform, shows why:
- The average B2B marketing journey lasts 320 days (10 months and 2 weeks) from the first touch to closing the sale.
- Only 1 in every 100 accounts is actively in the market in that quarter.
- 80% of buyers already have a supplier in mind before starting the search.
So, clicking is not deciding. And deciding takes time.
I share three points that break many market assumptions:
1) Thought Leader Ads have up to 2.3x more engagement than traditional formats. This proves that people engage with people.
2) 1/3 of target companies receive fewer than 3 impressions in 90 days. In other words, we are wasting media where it matters most.
3) The journey between Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) takes, on average, 107 days (3 months and 2 weeks). Large companies have journeys that are 49% longer.
The difference between attention and intention
Clicks mean attention. But attention doesn’t pay the bills. Decision does.
It is common for companies to celebrate when media campaigns bring in a lot of traffic or downloads. However, when these leads are passed to the sales team, the frustration begins:
- “They don’t have budget.”
- “They don’t have autonomy.”
- “They don’t even know what they are looking for.”
A crucial question was missing at the beginning of the strategy: what is the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and who actually signs the contract?
The deception of campaigns based solely on channel.
Another recurring mistake: developing campaigns for ‘browsers’ instead of decision-makers. This happens when the briefing is focused on generic segmentations rather than decision-making behaviors.
In B2B marketing, the buyer is rarely a single person. There is a committee. There are influencers. There are gatekeepers. And they all can click. But few decide.
According to Dreamdata, the average time between clicking on an ad and generating revenue is 235 days (almost 8 months). This means that most of those who click do not even participate in the final decision.
What to do differently: sell to the decision-maker, not the curious.
If you want to sell to decision-makers, start like this:
- Precisely define the ICP: role, sector, digital maturity, real pain points.
- Work on two fronts: Account Based Marketing (ABM) for decision-makers through precise and personalized campaigns; and inbound for influencers through educational and distributed content.
- Create content that speaks the language of the decision-maker: C-Level executives don’t want to know how it works. They want to know what solves.
- Integrate marketing and sales with clarity of purpose: Alignment is more powerful than automation. Your conversion rate will thank you.
The role of marketing is not just to generate clicks. It is to educate the market, position value, and attract those who can truly say yes. The rest is noise. Vanity metric. And a waste of budget.
Working with B2B marketing is increasingly about understanding that we don’t sell to those who click, we sell to those who influence and make decisions. And those who make decisions are often influenced months before the first sales conversation.
Therefore, if your next campaign is designed with the signatories in mind, rather than those who interact, you will see the difference in results, sales cycles, and quality of conversations.
