Twelve months ago, a decent chunk of B2B pipeline came from three things: standing in a hall at a trade show, buying someone a coffee, and getting into their office. All three disappeared inside a fortnight. What's striking now isn't that they disappeared — it's how many SaaS companies are still running a funnel designed on the assumption they'll be back by summer.
What actually changed
Not the buying committee — that was already growing before any of this. What changed is where the committee does its work. Evaluation moved almost entirely into channels the vendor doesn't control and can't see: a Slack group, a peer's WhatsApp reply, a G2 tab left open for a week, a founder's LinkedIn post read at 11pm. By the time someone fills in your demo form, the shortlist is usually already drawn. You are being told the outcome of a decision, not invited into it.
The funnel most teams are still running
Capture an email, drop it into a nurture sequence, score it, pass it to sales at an arbitrary threshold, book a discovery call where the rep asks questions the buyer answered for themselves three weeks ago. Every step of that assumes the vendor controls the pace of the evaluation. None of them do any more. The discovery call that opens with 'so, tell me about your business' now reads as a vendor who hasn't done their homework.
- Buyers research anonymously and at length before identifying themselves
- The person who fills the form is often not the person who chose you
- Most of the influential conversation happens where you have no visibility
- First contact with sales now happens far later in the process
What to build instead
Assume the evaluation happens without you and design for that. That means your public material has to do the job a sales call used to: pricing that's legible without a conversation, an honest comparison against the two competitors you actually lose to, a security page a technical buyer can forward internally, implementation detail that answers 'how long and how painful'. Every question you make someone book a call to answer is a question they'll answer by asking a peer instead.
How to tell if it's working
The metric I care about at this stage isn't lead volume — it's how far along the evaluation is when someone finally raises their hand. When your public content is doing its job, first calls get shorter, more technical, and closer to a decision. In one engagement last year, we changed nothing about lead volume and still shortened the sales cycle materially, purely by moving objection-handling out of calls and onto the site. Fewer, better conversations beat more of them.
The trade shows will come back eventually. The buying behaviour won't reverse — people who learned they could evaluate software without a single meeting are not going to volunteer to go back to meetings.
Want to apply this to your business?
Book a free 30-minute strategy call and we'll diagnose your specific growth blockers together.
Book a Free Call