Have you ever wondered why your campaigns are full of “leads”… but empty of real results?
In B2B marketing, it’s easy to fall into the “click illusion”: dashboards pretty, rising click-through rates (CTR), and reports with upward-trending charts, among other metrics. It seems like everything is going well. But when you pull the “conversion thread,” you realize: those who clicked are not the decision-makers.
The gap between a curious lead and a real buyer is wider than many imagine. And recent data from Dreamdata, a B2B attribution platform, shows why:
- The average journey in B2B marketing lasts 320 days (10 months and 2 weeks) from the first touch to closing the sale.
- Only 1 in 100 accounts is actively in the market that quarter.
- 80% of buyers already have a supplier in mind before starting their search.
In other words, clicking is not deciding. And deciding takes time.
I’ll share three more points that challenge many market convictions:
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’re 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. Decisions do.
It’s common for companies to celebrate when media campaigns bring lots of visits or downloads. But when these leads move to the sales team, frustration begins:
- “They don’t have the budget.”
- “They don’t have the authority.”
- “They don’t even know what they’re looking for.”
An essential question was missing at the start of the strategy: what is the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and who actually signs the contract?
The mistake of campaigns based solely on channel
Another recurring mistake: developing campaigns for “those who browse,” not for those who decide. This happens when the briefing focuses on generic segmentation, not decision-making behaviors.
In B2B marketing, the buyer is rarely a single person. There’s a committee. There are influencers. There are gatekeepers. And they can all click. But few decide.
According to Dreamdata, the average time between an ad click and generated revenue is 235 days (almost 8 months). This means most who click aren’t even part of the final decision.
What to do differently: sell to the decision-maker, not the curious
If you want to sell to those who decide, start here:
- Precisely define the ICP: role, industry, digital maturity, real pain points.
- Work on two fronts: Account-Based Marketing (ABM) for decision-makers through surgical and personalized campaigns; and inbound for influencers through educational and distributed content.
- Create content that speaks the decision-maker’s language: C-Level executives don’t want to know how it works. They want to know what solves their problem.
- Integrate marketing and sales with clear purpose: alignment is more powerful than automation. Your conversion rate will thank you.
The role of marketing isn’t just to generate clicks. It’s to educate the market, position value, and attract those who can truly say yes. The rest is noise. Vanity metrics. And wasted budget.
Working with B2B marketing increasingly means understanding that we don’t sell to those who click, we sell to those who influence and decide. And those who decide have often been influenced months before the first sales conversation.
So, if your next campaign is designed with the signer in mind, not the engager, you’ll see the difference in results, sales cycles, and conversation quality.
