I recently spent some time working with a client to carry out research into the typical B2B sales cycle.
For this particular case, we spent time looking predominantly at marketing and selling into financial and professional services organisations. The hallmark of these companies is that they are tightly regulated. They are quite often large, and even when they are small, they are still pretty complicated.
Multiple stakeholders, external market forces, regulatory forces, and stiff competition. The stakes are high in the financial and professional services sectors.
A key part of our research set out to understand:
- Where do prospects typically enter the ‘funnel’?
- What content is most likely to be required at each phase of the funnel?
The process got me thinking; as generative AI upends established processes at a pace, which parts of the sales cycle are most ripe for revolution?
The typical B2B sales cycle
Search online for the typical ‘sales cycle’ or ‘sales funnel’ and you’ll be treated to a buffet of models. Most, though, will boil down to something that looks like this, a seven-phase process:
- Awareness and education
- Discovery and qualification
- Solution design or scoping
- Proposal and pricing
- Legal review
- Contract
- Onboarding
Let’s briefly define each phase.
Awareness and education
This is where the prospect carries out research and receives education on a potential solution. In marketing-speak, this is called ‘top of funnel’.
Our research suggests this is a mostly self-led phase; prospects have, for the past 20(ish) years, turned to search engines to initiate this process. Increasingly, data suggest that LLMs are entering the fray, providing another educational source.
Discovery and qualification
At this stage, the prospect is usually aware of:
- You, or…
- Your category (the type of solution you offer)
Solution design or scoping
We’re dealing here with a model for B2B professional and financial services organisations, so the requirements are more often than not complicated.
This demands the need for a design or scoping phase.
In this phase, it’s the job of the prospect and supplier to understand the challenges requiring a solution and to ‘design’ or scope out a suitable solution.
Proposal and pricing
Arguably, this is the final core phase of the sales and marketing process. It’s when the price is presented and negotiated.
Onward phases
I’ll refrain from outlining the remaining phases; suffice to say, they are the critical housekeeping items: legal approval, board approval, and onboarding.
The key disruption points
So the question I wanted to consider was: at what point in this process is AI most likely to have an impact?
As part of our research, our client and I identified where content plays a role along the journey, and we reached the following conclusion:
- Awareness and education - thought leadership content
- Discovery and qualification - product/service content, sector-specific content
- Solution design/scoping - guides, case studies, demos, and whitepapers
- Pricing - calculators and datasheets
There’s a trap waiting for sales and marketing teams here: teams are still building content strategies based on the assumption that users will find and consume their content in its original format, on their channels. But that’s no longer guaranteed in the AI era.
Over the past ten years, if you’ve been good at what you do, you can publish expertise online, and Google (et al) will discover the content and serve it to its search audience.
There’s been a trend towards showing information directly in search results, but users were incentivised to visit the source site.
If users turn to AI tools (ChatGPT, for instance), they may still read your ‘thought leadership’, but it won’t necessarily be in the format you published it. It may be a regurgitated version of it, something that has been formed during the process of an LLM reading your content.
The core idea here, and the trend I think we’ll see, is that information will eclipse format.
This is nothing new; we’ve seen this trend play out for decades:
- Before the web, information was delivered in print, the format was rigid
- On the early web, information was delivered on static websites, it was less rigid, but still rigid
- As mobile devices became ubiquitous, information was delivered on dynamic websites and platforms (web 2.0), and it became less rigid (responsive, you could say)
With generative AI tools on the scene, I believe we’re about to see a dramatic acceleration in the phenomenon I like to think of as ‘responsive information’.
If you imagine a person writing something, it’s hard to decouple what they are writing from the intended destination of the information (a book, web page, magazine, etc). I think LLMs will make it so that information will now exist despite its format, not because of it.
The role of content, marketing, and sales in a formatless world
We need to begin thinking about information, not format. That has always been good advice, but it is rarely followed.
So, how do sales and marketing teams respond?
We need to begin thinking about information, not format. That has always been good advice, but it is rarely followed.
Companies hire social media executives and website managers; these are format-based roles, and that approach is baked deeply into the core of how most companies think.
The way that AI tools consume and repurpose information (or ‘content’ if you prefer) is going to dramatically change this model.
Don’t get me wrong, format remains key, but content strategy will simply need to consider information as separate from format.
Marketers will need to write content strategies comfortable in the knowledge that the information they document may well be consumed, but it could be consumed in almost any format.
A few possible examples:
- An AI platform may use your information as part of a large written response
- A platform might turn your information into a personalised podcast for someone
- An AI tool might refer to your information in an automated video
This feels scary, is it scary?
This shift feels instinctively negative; who wants less control over how their information is presented?
I don’t think it’s necessarily as alien as it would appear, though. In many ways, I think the move towards ‘responsive information’ takes us back in time.
Back to a time when the storyteller would travel from town to town, telling tales to all who listened.
It also takes us back to a time when it wasn’t possible to track everything our prospects did. If we commissioned an out-of-home advertisement, we didn’t know every time a prospect viewed it. We didn’t know how clearly they saw the ad, which bits they read, and whether the bus window they viewed it through was misted.
If anything, the early days of web-based marketing sold us an unsustainable vision; for a short period of time, we genuinely could track everything, but the days of attribution are gone (I’ve already written about that).
To cling to the idea that you can know every time a prospect sees your message and that you can track every action from there is folly.
If AI and the age of responsive information mean we accept the lack of control we have, I think that’s a good thing.
It means we refocus on what’s important: originality and quality. In the age of AI, the best information won’t just be read, it will be reinterpreted. This makes integrity, not format, your greatest competitive advantage.
