Episode 227: The funnel’s gone dark: B2B buying in the age of LLMs

Hello everyone, welcome to the B2B Marketing Podcast. My name is David Rowlands, I'm head of product at B2B Marketing and Properly. And today I'm joined by Geoffrey Siddari who is the Chief Innovation Officer at Marketbridge. Geoffrey works at the intersection of marketing, technology and bio-behavior and recently joined us at the Properly Leaders Forum to explore how AI is fundamentally changing the way B2B buyers discover, research and ultimately choose suppliers. So today we're going to pick up that conversation. Looking at why the traditional fun all rather is going dark, what's replacing it and what all of this means with B2B marketers and their budgets heading into next year. So Geoffrey, welcome, welcome aboard the podcast. How are you doing today? Hey David, thanks for having me. I'm doing great. It's great to reconnect with you since the event. Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for joining us. So let's dive straight into it. At the Properly Leaders Forum you spoke on stage about how the B2B funnel has gone dark in your words. So before we go any further, can you just explain exactly what you mean by this? And in your view, what has actually happened out there? Yeah, I think the statement gone dark and want people to think that has disappeared. It's just a lot of our systems that we're using have gone dark and being able to understand what individuals are doing, right? The buying committee itself has built a new path into brands through LLMs. You have groups like Forester saying that a large percentage 90, 94% of business buyers now use AI. You have other research stating that on your day one short lists of say three to four brands that you're researching 95% of the time, one of them is going to be picked. And most of the work that a buyer or the buying committee is doing is done in systems that you can only influence, but you can't track the engagement with. So the darkness is more in the measurement and attribution side. It's definitely not in the buying committee or buying behavior that that is still really active. But yeah, that's that's the perspective that we have right now. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And do you feel that that that darkness around the measurement side of things is actually kind of having this impact on markets where they're just doing more and more of the same old stuff sort of desperate for those results that one day they would have got. But actually, it's kind of it's it's pointless work because it, you know, marketing has fundamentally changed. It doesn't work the same way that it used to. I think there's a lot of stress in the system. I think you have you have budgets that are are thin, thinner, maybe fewer people being asked to do more with less money. But then you have traditional channels that have been established whether they're paid or owned or direct engagement. And the value of those they they need to do slightly different work. Then the influence you need to have in the LLM. So then you have you have teams be trying to figure out, well, this is the maybe third or fourth time. I've had a rearchitect my entire website to influence some buying journey or buying behavior. Whether it was customization or customer journey setting or custom landing pages now. We have to create content for an LLM to ensure that we're not only referenced in a response. But hopefully we can become preferred the preferred brand in that response. Knowing that a lot of zero click activity is happening based on that response. So I think there's just a lot of stress of marketers feeling like they're technologists. And then the budgets being forced to reference actual performance. Meaning a dollar spent equals a dollar earned. And the the conversations that are being had inside companies are tricky when you go and ask for money in a channel you can't necessarily measure. But you know for a fact that it's impacting the buying journey. So how do you invest in something that's hard to measure knowing that all of your buyers are starting their journey engaging in the LLMs during the journey. And then lastly, the pyramid systems are also using their internal LLMs in the selection of tools. So it's a it's a it's a hard and it's happened so fast. Usually you've had you know a couple years to work through the transformation of three years. Now you've you've had this point of basically the last year. This is the shift has moved aggressively. And in 2027, those that wait similar to past channels like social social media, those that wait are going to spend more money to catch up and drive impact in the preference or reference of the brands in in responses. So it's a it's a stressful time. Sure. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And you know it's something we certainly see across the the B2B marketing, but the whole industry really. So one of the things you spoke about is that the modern buying journey you describe more as a wave rather than a traditional funnel. So with that in mind, can you describe what that wave looks like and what that means to be marked as? Yeah. I see it as a yeah, as as a wave of of individuals going into the LLM or into the machine and then into the own channel and then back into the machine and then cycling around between the machine and the own channels and humans. Because as a as a buyer, you now have the opportunity to leverage a solution like in LLM to ask questions, gain immense amount of research, do comparative analysis between products or services or solutions that you want to buy without without leaving that LLM. But then there is value going into a brand's website, doing additional research, going to their social channels and then doing searches on social to see who else may reference them from an influencer standpoint. But then as the buyer becomes a buying committee, you know, multiple people fluctuating between owned and earned channel earned activity along with the machine. So it is a when a majority of the activity drops below into the lower part of the wave. Maybe that's called low tide where they're dropping into this the machine area. You lose visibility and then when they come into the high side of the wave into the channels where you have influence whether it's channels you're managing content on paid media that you're engaging with them influencers that you have or key opinion leaders that are supporting the solutions or services or your approach to the problem. And then you have your earned side where others are writing about you. All of that plays together in a new way, right? Like the channels that you own are still important and the channels you invest in are super important. It's just the knowledge that individuals that are engaging with them have for the most part a higher level of education and understanding of your brand and other brands. So using those channels in a more informed way is also super important. So that the channels that you've been investing in and that you got your budget for in 2027, super critical thinking around the messaging and the narrative and the content that you're putting in those channels have to reflect that an individual coming to those channels now may have spent a minute or hours researching your product or brand or competitors prior to. So your level of education is different now that you have to bring to them and pulling them into the sales side of the engagement. So it's a tricky buying journey and one that we can't really see the whole time but at the same time the channels that you have are insanely critical but when individuals get there or interact with them their psychology and preferences is new and different because their level of education is so much higher. Sure. Yeah, that makes total sense and in terms of sort of ranking in these LLMs and making sure that your brand name is synonymous with whatever challenge it is someone's looking into. How do you think Marxers can actually win in that area? Is it a case of just keep putting out great content? Is there specific things they should be thinking about when setting up their channels and their content for the year ahead? What's the best way that they can really appear in chativity or chord or whichever element they may be using? Yeah, I think there's kind of a there's a few steps into this one creating a baseline report just understanding how you appear. I've worked with brands that were number one in the industry as a product leader and found out that their ranking or preference by the LLMs was quite a bit lower than anyone would have imagined and it had a lot to do with from a content standpoint but without that baseline report you don't know how you appear so you don't know the level of the situation you're in so if you you are a high-performing brand and you are a high-performing brand in LLM's, then the risk or the level investment you need to make could be just a maintenance investment versus a brand that is a leader and their lagging in both branded and non-branded searches where they're either in non-branded searches, they don't show up at all or in branded searches, they're actually not even preferred. Their competitors may be preferred, so then it's understanding with that baseline report, where are their competitors being cited, what channels could it be? I would assume people know that Reddit is a big influencer, but it has dropped. LinkedIn is a big influencer, G2 is a big influencer for certain brands, and then your own channel is also super important. But then the earned media, how are you coordinating with your COMS team or your integrated communications, PR agency, to figure out are you pitching content to both humans and the machine knowing that your Tier 1 outlets for your brand, the humans are going to read our specific list, but the Tier 1 outlets now based on this baseline report that the machine is going to read are also insanely critical. So, how are you structuring, getting that baseline report and then understanding, what is the focus you need to have on your own website, both on the technical side and the content side, what is the focus you need to have in social to figure out how you leverage channels like LinkedIn to support your effort by seeing how your competitors are being supported there. And then what is your focus on a book pitching to the machine priority outlets, as well as the outlets that you're pitching to for human consumption about press releases or announcements that you're making about your business. You know, the wave analogy to use I think makes total sense, you know, people are sort of working in lockstep with AI across the journey, it's not just used in one specific part of that journey, but what I'm interested to know is what are the specific metrics or if not metrics specific things you should be looking to drive. And to different points in the wave when it comes to AI's role within that slightly garbled question, but what I'm driving at is if people are using AI in different ways across the journey, then presumably we need to be measuring it in different ways at those relevant points, if you see what I mean. Yeah, it's the issue right now is that the current channels that you are measuring those metrics don't change how you measure the channels that you're investing in are still the same. The problem is in the machine engagement, the ability to track and understand how an individual asks a question, and then once they ask the question, do they come to your website and being able to track attribution back to an individual's engagement with that question is still really difficult. There are some technologies that are in development where this could become visible, but still it may be a sampling of all traffic. So right now, I think your best bet is to look at the machine side of measurement focusing on how your brand again is showing up and branded and non branded searches, are you showing up as a referenced brand or a preferred brand and the goal is to be a preferred brand in both. It's very difficult, but understanding how how you're showing up and then also the share of voice, how are you ranking against other brands, those are really the core metrics that you can see across the range of different tools that are out there. But then when someone engages in that content and comes to your your businesses website, the attribution of that traffic is where it breaks. Again, there are technologies and companies working on trying to bring insight to life around this area, and I think in 2027, you'll see offerings where businesses that invest now and understanding their baseline of what is their visibility, what is the brand's performance and branded and non branded searches, but then preparing for an enhancing, making all the. Making all the corrections on your website, making the adjustments in how you're engaging in cited materials, whether it be earned journalistic materials or earned social content, putting that in place now. So when those tools do come online in 2027, you're able to start seeing some level of connection between search LLM search activity and individuals coming to your website engaging with your brand through different channels. But it's just there's no there's no defined metric that a CMO could go to a CFO and say, I need to adjust 10% of my budget from the channels at particular typically been investing in in order to move it over to this channel. I know all of our buyers are starting the journey in just know that when we make this move is going to be very difficult to give you a report on how that generated revenue is going to be a tough conversation. It's a little bit like when individuals back and say 2010ish needed to set up a business social media account and the CFO is like, well, why do we need to business social media kind of second of drive revenue and now it's just second nature everyone has. It's an order to communicate and this is just again another way to communicate to buyers in a way that you can't really attribute to sales, but over time, I think the technology will catch up to the user behavior to be able to track. Well, I think that's why you know models are the way the so useful because they they present the importance of these things without having to boil it down to if we invest exit will turn into why you know one of the biggest sort of long standing issues in marketing is obviously this kind of obsession with vanity, vanity metrics where we're trying to drive you know likes or shares or comments back in the day. And it's actually very hard to talk to a CFO about what that means and so I think there's a danger here where we should be driving, you know, we should be investing and making sure that our brands appear as preferred brands and elements. But the you know the danger is that when we're speaking to a CFO, we use the wrong language and they start kind of looking at us. That is sort of questioning, are we doing the right things? Do you think that's fair comment? That's fair. No, I think that's super fair. The understanding how you set brand awareness, brand perception and brand sentiment through both your own channel and earned content doesn't necessarily directly drive. Sales, however, there are studies where if you can you can improve brand awareness and brand perception and brand intent through research, so research doing studies against your buyers and you can see that their intent is growing with the brand due to their awareness and if their awareness is growing based on your performance. Performance in LLM prompt results, then there isn't attribution back to or not an attribution, there is a connection back to to sales that if buyers have higher intent in your brand and you're performing in a channel where you're the preferred brand and responses. You should start be you should you should be able to show there's correlation to that back to sales through historical analysis of brand preference, brand intent, driving into brand selection and knowing that your website itself as as you're getting people to your website. If you think about how people engage with that channel differently in the content you're creating and making sure that you're you're able to track where people are engaging what content they're engaging how that links back to the prompts that have been submitted. There's a way to model the impact, but there's just going to be a while before you can measure the dollar for dollar impact. Yeah, of course, yeah, it makes total sense. So going back to something you mentioned in your session, you discussed that unpaid voices are actually substantially more influential than paid ones. So in your view, does that start to transform PR into a demand-gen channel or am I getting way too ahead of myself on that one? No, I think, I mean, look, influencers today have impacted the B to C space in a way that I think has transformed brands that could disrupt the spades faster through influencers than through paid. Now, in the B to B space, you have buyers that have grown up in a world where others provide their opinion and it influences them. Now, from a paid versus unpaid as businesses, they you have individuals and you've had them for a long time where they're champions and you've you've engaged with them. ways. You've used them for feedback on your product or service. You've, you know, you've used them to as a focus group to understand why they're so passionate about what you're selling. And I think the opportunity is to to curate those individuals along with executives or other thought leaders in your business to have a voice about your brand. And then there is the ability to curate key opinion leaders, both from an education standpoint, letting them know more about what you're doing, bringing them in, having them being individuals that will speak about your brand as they speak about other brands on their YouTube channel or LinkedIn profile and content they're creating. So the influence of key opinion leaders or B2B influencers is critical. And it's a two for one or even three for one play is that when you engage with an individual that will speak about your brand, you get valued content that go and impact the LLM preference. You also get an individual that's engaging with buying committee. Then maybe if you're doing an ABM strategy, there may be brands that are following specific influencers and it's helpful to know who that influence what brands that influencer is connected to who's following them and using that as a way to target how you how you build this key influencer bench. And then lastly, you you build just strong rapport with individuals that can then influence other individuals key influencer can influence a journalist a key influencer could influence an analyst. So others that are writing about you will take lead from certain key opinion leaders. So having the bench of individuals speaking about you on channels that you may not have thought of what you what you will see and though it's a little more difficult in the B2B space, you will see disruptive brands come in and be influencer first LLM first and they will rise to the top faster so they will be considered in a in a world where a traditional established brand that isn't there is going to start feeling pressure from brands they wouldn't have considered were a competitor before. And the only reason why I mean you can compare this to upstart consumer brands that go influencer first social first and come in and disrupt an entire industry in a matter of weeks. So it's a the buyers that are coming over from that are going to be watching and listening to influencers and those aren't necessarily the decision makers right now, but they are individuals in the buying committee that will lean on the decision maker based on their opinion they're getting from these individuals that are talking about your business. Yeah, that makes sense. I suppose one of the flip side of that is that small and more agile businesses they obviously have the advantage in terms of speed, you know, they can get they can perhaps work with influence faster and as you say maybe that means they sort of rise to the top of LLM search outputs faster. But once they're sort of bigger more, you know, traditional competitors get their act together basically does that mean that the share amount of investment and money they're pumping into it is going to mean that they start to, you know, dominate those channels, you know, is there a real risk here that one or two businesses in any given category really just sort of always appear in LLM and it squeezes out competition? No, I don't think so. I mean, I think the number of people that want to be a B2B influencer will grow because certain reports that were put out by LinkedIn recently about the influence and impact of influencers, the number of individuals speaking in other channels like YouTube, so that the breadth of influencers I think will grow and then from a business standpoint, starting say with just your executives, making them your initial influencer and putting building an exec comps program and then from there who are the other thought leaders behind the products you're selling and then building a bench of individuals or key opinion leaders that can support different angles or elements of the services you provide. It's one, it's a commitment. I mean, every one of those things is a commitment. You have to create content, you have to like curate the engagement with the individuals that are going to be putting out the content. Then you have to have people that are comfortable being on video, how do they create a persona themselves to engage with the buyers? But I think upstarts, yes, they could go and gather 100 influencers and make an impact, but also established brands will take a different tact, have a more established brand approach, but I think there's enough room for both and I would hope. I guess we'll have to see because I would hope that the LLMs would be able to determine the difference between the two when individuals are asking the question and the cited material being used along with the success of the different businesses will be awaited where one is defined as a new upstart in the space and one is established as seen as an established brand with a future vision that will compete. So I guess we'll have to see in that world, but from an influencer standpoint and a key opinion leader and exec comm standpoint, I think there's enough room for both. From a branded standpoint, it's a no-brainer. From a non-branded prompt standpoint, I guess we'll have to see how research comes out in 2027 on the impact of influencers and how that's driving non-branded search results. Sure, sure thing. I've got one final question for you, Jeffrey. At the very beginning of the podcast we spoke about there's a lot of change in marketing, the sheer pace of technological evolution. That, let's be honest, that's leading to a lot of stress in the marketing profession, just having to keep up and adjust everything so quickly. Obviously, the effect of a lot of this change as well is that, as you've quite rightly said, the funnel has gone dark. So that's just sort of adding to the stress that we're dealing with. If you were a marketing leader in control of a budget heading into 2027, what would you suggest they start with? There's obviously a huge amount going on, but what should they really focus on and what should they be prioritising to set themselves up for long-term success? Yeah, I would say two things. One, I would assume most brands that have created a baseline report thought about as they go into 2027, where they invested their money on their own channels to improve the content for machine visibility, but also improve content to know that individuals coming to the website are going to have an elevated level of understanding. In the other channels that you're investing in, how are you working with your internal teams and your agencies to optimise them? You're optimising your media spend so that you're targeting individuals in ways knowing that the majority of them have already educated about your brand or targeting to ensure it reflects that they've engaged with your brand in the machine and then other direct channels that you have going to different businesses or contacts, making sure they reference or are relevant to individuals that you would assume have educated themselves. So it's just moving the budget and channels that you were already investing in to understand that individuals and buying committees are more educated, but then moving 10 plus percentage of the budget that you were planning in 2027 to focus solely on how your content is being cited in machine responses to the individual and making sure that you correct things or you try to impact answers that where you want to show up, you impact answers that are inaccurate, trying to fix that and then lastly just making sure that you continue to invest because it's a non-stop effort, a lot like SEO, where once you start it's a continuous investment process. So the focus would be on moving budget over to the LLM to ensure that you're enhancing content but also enhancing the channels that are impacting the LLMs and then lastly making sure that the money that you are investing in channels you've traditionally invested in is being optimized because the buyer is more educated. Fantastic. Jeffrey, that's a wonderful place to leave it. So thank you so much for your time today and thank you to all our listeners for listening in. You can check out more of the B2B marketing podcast on Spotify and we will see very soon in the next one. So thank you all very much and Jeffrey, thanks for your time. Bye-bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]