Your buyer built their shortlist before you knew they were in the market. They read a community thread, asked a peer, ran a query through an AI assistant and settled on a list you never appeared on. By the time a form gets filled, the evaluation is over. This is not a funnel with a leak. It is a funnel that moved somewhere you cannot see.
Geoffrey Sidari, Chief Innovation Officer and Head of AI at Marketbridge, takes you inside the research on how B2B buying actually works now. 83% of decision-makers self-research before they contact sales. 55% cannot tell which sources to trust. Peer recommendations are the most trusted source at 73%, ahead of vendor websites and AI chatbots. Buyers spend roughly 17% of the journey with suppliers, and any one rep gets about 5% of that time. The journey did not get longer. It went dark.
He will show why the standard response- more content and more lead capture- impacts the problem, and what’s working: earning trust in the communities where buyers gather, becoming visible in the AI answers that now shape shortlists, and orchestrating proprietary intelligence across the platforms you already own. He will also challenge the most comfortable assumption in the room, that the channels you can measure are the channels that matter. Your dashboard reports the 17% you can see. It says nothing about the peer conversation or the AI answer that made the decision. Marketers optimizing the visible last click are tuning a system the buyer already left.
If your pipeline still assumes the buyer will raise their hand, this session shows you what it takes to win the decision that happens before they do.
What will you learn?
- How B2B buyers research, decide and build shortlists before they contact sales
- Why trust, not reach, now determines which vendors make the shortlist How to become visible in the AI answers and peer communities that shape buying decisions
- Why the channels you can measure are not the channels that decide How to orchestrate proprietary intelligence above the platform layer