Someone said something near the end of our recent customer event that landed harder than anything else across two and a half days of conversation.
We were wrapping up, doing a final pass through the themes that had surfaced, and one of the attendees said it plainly: “Marketing owns the customer journey now. Sales only comes in for the last thirty percent of the deal. And that thirty percent is split between three vendors. So sales actually owns about ten percent of the buyer’s journey.”
Nobody pushed back. The room just sat with it for a second.
I’ve been sitting with it since.
The math isn’t new. Forrester and others have been publishing versions of this for years. Buyers are self-educating earlier, going further into the decision process before they ever want to talk to a sales rep, and when they do finally engage with sales, they’re already comparing you against two or three alternatives. The sales conversation used to be where the deal was made. Increasingly, it’s where the deal is ratified.
If that’s true, and the evidence suggests it is, then marketing doesn’t just influence the pipeline. Marketing owns the conditions under which every deal either has a chance or doesn’t. The shortlist gets set before sales picks up the phone. The perception of your brand, your credibility, your relevance to the buyer’s specific problem, all of that is formed in the seventy percent that happens before the sales conversation starts.
Which makes the next question uncomfortable: if marketing owns seventy percent of the journey, why do most marketing teams behave like they own the top of the funnel and nothing else?
Part of the answer goes back to what I wrote about in the last post. Teams are measured on what they can count, and what they can count tends to be top-of-funnel activity. Leads generated. Cost per response. Click-through rates. If your compensation and your quarterly review are tied to those numbers, that’s where your attention goes. The rest of the journey, the part where the buyer is actually deciding, is someone else’s problem.
Except it isn’t. It’s just unowned.
One attendee described how her team had built an account engagement score that tracked how many decision-makers and influencers within a target account were actively engaging with their content at any given time. When the score crossed a threshold, it was a signal to sales: a buying committee is forming, and you need to get in front of these people now.
The result was a thirty to forty percent improvement in pipeline acceleration. Not more leads. Not a bigger budget. Just better visibility into what was already happening and a system that told sales when to move.
The insight wasn’t sophisticated. It was just honest about where deals actually start.
There’s a related problem that doesn’t get talked about enough, which is that most content is built for the person you’re already talking to, not for the people you’re not.
Enterprise deals don’t stall because the champion loses interest. They stall because the champion can’t get internal consensus. There’s a procurement lead who has concerns. A finance director who hasn’t heard of you. A senior executive who needs to sign off and currently has no reason to care. The champion is doing their best, but they’re trying to sell internally without the right tools to do it.
What if content was designed explicitly for that problem? Not to generate a new lead, but to be forwarded. Something specific enough to matter to the finance director’s concerns, credible enough that the champion looks smart for sharing it, and useful enough that the recipient actually reads it.
That’s not a new idea. Most marketers would nod along to it. But the percentage of teams that are actually producing content with that intent, rather than producing content and hoping it gets forwarded, is pretty small.
The companies that will outperform over the next few years aren’t necessarily the ones generating the most pipeline. They’re the ones who have figured out how to influence the seventy percent, the research phase, the internal debate, the shortlist formation, and then show up in the last thirty percent already trusted.
That’s a fundamentally different job than filling the top of the funnel and handing off to sales. It requires different content, different measurement, and a different conversation with leadership about what marketing is actually accountable for.
It also requires a willingness to claim the ownership that the data suggests you already have.
Marketing owns the customer journey. Most teams just haven’t started acting like it yet.