B2B buyers take an average of 272 days from first contact to closing a deal, according to data from B2B marketing attribution platform Dreamdata, with the vast majority of that journey taking place before a sales conversation ever begins.
Nick Turner, chief executive of Dreamdata, noted that while the average sales cycle of 78 days only captures the period after a prospect has engaged with a salesperson, it represents just 19 per cent of the total buying journey.
The remaining part of the journey, he explained, occurs before any sales contact at all, during a period when marketing teams are responsible for building brand familiarity and providing prospective buyers with material to research independently.
The figures, drawn in part from a dataset of roughly 300 paying customers and more than 1,000 free-tier users in the company's 2026 LinkedIn Ads B2B Benchmarks report, span companies ranging from those selling to SME's to those closing six and seven-figure enterprise deals. Trends were tracked via 66 million sessions across over 3.5 million customer journeys.
"Today, a deal is often won or lost before you know it's begun. For over seven months, marketing is responsible for turning cold prospects into warm, sales-ready deals," the company stated in the report. "Much of the research, education, and internal alignment now appears to happen before a lead becomes a [Marketing Qualified Lead]."
Turner argued that the conventional marketing funnel, which assumes prospects move sequentially through defined stages from awareness to action, no longer reflects how B2B purchasing decisions are actually made. While 81 per cent of the B2B customer journey takes place before the sales pipeline, just one year ago, the company had that number pegged at 70 per cent.
Citing Dreamdata's own research, he said a typical buying decision now involves between 10 and 12 individual stakeholders, each of whom may be at a different point in their own evaluation at any given time.
"It's not that the funnel has lost support, but that the definition of the funnel has changed," said Turner. "You can't think of the typical buying journey as being incredibly linear, because it's not."
This complexity, he said, creates friction when sales teams attempt to move prospects into conversations before they are ready. Turner cautioned that pursuing volume over accuracy in lead scoring risks alienating buyers rather than converting them.
Turner identified a pattern he sees repeatedly among prospective Dreamdata customers, which he calls the "ROI approver": a marketer who approaches measurement already convinced their existing strategy is working, often because they are under internal pressure to demonstrate results.
"They come to you, they measure it, and then they find out, oh, I'm actually not right, and that looks very bad internally," he added. "If you come to measurement with the idea of, 'hey, I know this is working, and damn it, I'm going to prove it,' that's going to be a problem."
He contrasted this with what he considers a more productive approach, in which marketers treat measurement as a genuine test rather than a confirmation exercise, arguing that objectivity ultimately serves both the marketer's credibility and the company's long-term performance.
"The right way to approach measurement is to come to it with a lot of objectivity and just say, 'you know what, I think this works, I'm not really sure, I need to find out if I'm right,' and taking that approach is a much better path towards career success to success for your company, and so on."