Who is Koen De Witte?
Koen is the Founder and Managing Director of LeadFabric, one of Europe’s pioneering sales and demand marketing consultancy firms, established in 2008. With over 20 years of experience, Koen has emerged as a trailblazer in aligning B2B sales and marketing strategies, enabling organisations to achieve sustainable revenue growth through innovative technologies and approaches. Before founding LeadFabric, Koen held senior leadership roles, including Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development at Pervasive Software and Chief Marketing Officer at Bulldog Solutions Inc., both based in the United States. These roles refined his expertise in B2B customer acquisition, interactive media, and marketing automation, laying the foundation for his entrepreneurial success.

Over the past few years, B2B organisations have been confronted with a growing realisation: when it comes to growth much of the industry is still operating on outdated acquisition assumptions. The long-dominant idea that marketing’s primary task is to generate leads for sales has been steadily losing relevance. This shift became unmistakable with the large-scale Buyer Experience research conducted in 2023-24 by 6sense. That study, widely cited through 2025, and which I wrote about at the end of last year, revealed that traditional lead-generation models are structurally misaligned with real buying behaviour.

The findings were indisputable:

• Buying groups complete roughly two-thirds of their journey before ever engaging a salesperson, and
• In more than 80% of cases they are the ones initiating contact.
• By the time they finally reach out, four of the five vendors they will evaluate are already on their shortlist – often established on Day One.

HubSpot

SDR outreach, gated content, early-funnel campaigns, and classic inbound tactics barely register in this process. It is not surprising that even HubSpot softened its once-iconic inbound narrative.

These insights challenged long-held beliefs. If the first real interaction takes place only after the buying group has already formed a clear opinion, trying to “capture leads” during the anonymous phase becomes futile. Once buyers are ready to engage, it is typically too late to influence the shortlist that was shaped long before.

This brings renewed attention to what many B2B demand marketers had deprioritised: familiarity, reputation, and steady brand presence. Buying groups consist of multiple stakeholders with different roles and information needs, which means B2B marketing now carries the far more complex responsibility of influencing a partly invisible committee rather than collecting a single lead. The previous research confirmed this; the latest study deepens and expands it.

The role of AI across the buying journey

This year’s report revisits the same markets but adds two critical dimensions: the role of AI across the buying journey, and a closer look at cultural nuances between regions. Let’s look at the first dimension in more detail. Readers interested in the cultural divide can contact me to get the fully study sent to them.

As 6sense’s exclusive European research partner, we explored these European patterns in more depth. One insight stands out. While 94% of buyers now use LLMs, this has not reduced their reliance on vendor expertise. If anything, AI has made their evaluation process more complex. Buyers want to understand how vendors are embedding AI in their solutions, how capabilities differ, what new risks arise, and how pricing or implementation models might shift. Their prior experience – which played an essential role in earlier research cycles – offers less guidance in this new landscape.

Uncertainty is pulling buyers into contact earlier

Counter to expectations, this uncertainty is pulling buyers into contact earlier, not later. The data shows that the point of first contact has moved from around 69% of the journey closer to 61%. The research expresses this only as a percentage of the buying process, not in calendar duration. But given that many enterprise buying cycles are measured in months, such a percentage shift typically represents a move of several weeks earlier. Buyers are not responding to outreach; they are proactively seeking clarity in an increasingly AI-defined market.

Despite this earlier engagement, the structural dynamics remain: buying groups still average around ten members; the shortlist is still largely fixed on Day One; and the vendor contacted first continues to win the majority of deals. The buying journey remains buyer-led, front-loaded, and guided by prior familiarity – only now filtered through the additional complexity that AI brings.

Agentic AI

Entering 2026, the implications for GTM are unavoidable. Marketers and sellers must adapt to buyers who are more autonomous, more experienced, and paradoxically more in need of expert guidance earlier in the journey. Success will depend on influencing buying groups during their anonymous phase, creating relevant early familiarity, and orchestrating meaningful engagement across an entire committee long before a salesperson is involved.

Agentic AI is often presented as the next miracle solution – especially by the major platform vendors who are rapidly renaming entire product lines around “agents” as if this alone will erase all the shortcomings of marketing and sales operations. Their sudden pivot to “Agent-first everything” suggests that agents are the new universal cure. But these alphabet-soup narratives don’t actually clarify anything. At best they confuse teams; at worst they obscure a profound shift happening beneath the surface of the software industry – particularly in marketing and sales technology.

The real story is this: buyer behaviour is evolving so quickly that no monolithic platform built on old school software development processes and no matter how comprehensive it once claimed to be, can realistically keep up. The idea that a single system could cover every business-process need is simply no longer credible in an AI-driven world. Even the largest vendors are wrestling with this tension – on one hand, trying to embrace the future of flexible, autonomous agentic workflows; on the other, still needing to defend the platform-centric architectures that generated their market dominance. If you feel confused when looking at their latest product architecture diagrams, you are not alone. Vendors must continue selling their vision of the future while simultaneously justifying the platforms of the past. It’s a tricky balancing act.

Our view is more pragmatic. In real organisations (with real histories, real integrations, and real constraints) both worlds will coexist for years to come. The platforms will not disappear overnight; they are far too embedded in the operational fabric of companies. But we should stop expecting them to cover everything. Instead, they must be complemented with specialised point solutions, AI agents, and agentic workflows that fill critical gaps and enable far greater agility.

Fabric

This is the turning point. The modern enterprise stack is no longer a single system at all, but a constantly evolving Fabric, a living mesh of durable platforms, adaptive point tools, and intelligent agents working together. Some workflows will be long-lasting, forming the backbone of digital operations. Others will be transient, powering campaigns or routines that eventually fatigue audiences or become obsolete as buying patterns shift. This dynamism is not a flaw; it is precisely what allows organisations to stay relevant in an environment where buyers themselves move faster, learn faster, and expect more.

Crucially, this Fabric is not something an organisation can simply “set and forget.” It needs ongoing care: continuous maintenance, calibration, pruning, and expansion. It also demands human creativity and judgement. AI can perhaps orchestrate, analyse, and automate – but it cannot replace all of the strategic decisions required to determine where to focus, how to position, or which interactions will resonate with each stakeholder in a buying group. The day when AI has access to all the real-time signals, context, contradictions, and shifting priorities of a living, breathing organisation operating in an ever-changing economic environment is still far away.

The role of marketing evolves

The role of marketing does not shrink; it evolves. Marketers shift from execution to orchestration, from volume to precision, from chasing leads to cultivating influence across an entire committee.

And here lies the connection back to the challenge described earlier. If buyers remain anonymous for long stretches, assemble shortlists before any vendor interaction, and now reach out earlier primarily to clarify AI-driven ambiguities, then companies must be present – intelligently, consistently, and at scale – during every phase of that unseen journey. The combination of platform stability, targeted point tools, and agentic workflows make that possible. The Fabric gives organisations the control and flexibility they need to influence buying groups earlier, support more personalised journeys, and guide buyers through increasing complexity.

Put simply, Agentic AI does not replace marketers. But when it is woven into a flexible GTM Fabric, it strengthens their ability to operate with the speed, depth, and nuance that 2026 will require. It does, however, raise an important question: in this new landscape, should your organisation rely on large one size fits all technology vendors and their delivery partners – whose operating models depend on symbiosis with the underlying platforms – or on independent partners who are aligned with your interests and better positioned to guide you forward?

TIP 1: Shift from lead capture to anonymous influence

If the modern buying journey is largely anonymous and front-loaded – with buying groups shaping their shortlist long before any vendor interaction – then focusing on individual lead capture is counterproductive. Marketers should instead design programmes that influence the entire buying group during the unseen parts of the journey. That means investing in brand familiarity, thought leadership, and recurring signals rather than forms and gated assets.

Do not attempt to collect names as active buyers will refuse to provide them anyhow. And because buying groups consist of 10 or more stakeholders, each with different concerns and needs, your objective isn’t to “collect” a name but to shape perception across a committee.

This requires orchestrating a sequence of lightweight but consistent touchpoints: category education, early-stage problem reframing, and credibility-building content. AI can help scale this by identifying common informational gaps, generating relevant assets, and adapting timing based on behavioural patterns, but it cannot replace the strategic understanding of what truly influences preference. Start with influence, not identification.

TIP 2: Build your own GTM Fabric rather than relying on a single platform

Modern GTM success relies on agility, not monolithic platforms. With buyers moving faster, information needs becoming more complex, and AI reshaping expectations, no single system can cover the full spectrum of buyer engagement anymore. The solution is to build your own GTM Fabric: a combination of your core platforms (CRM, MAP, CMS), specialised point solutions, and targeted agentic workflows that fill gaps and create adaptability.

This does not mean chasing shiny tools; it means assessing where your current stack falls short and complementing it thoughtfully. For example, you may keep your CRM as the backbone but rely on point solutions for account intelligence, buying-group detection, or AI-powered content personalisation. Agentic AI can then orchestrate tasks across these systems, automatically triggering follow-ups, preparing contextual insights, or pushing content to the right stakeholder at the right moment.

The Fabric approach gives you resilience, speed, and the ability to evolve as buyer behaviour changes. And if you’re still looking for a head start through SaaS solutions, then bypass the heavy, complex B2B marketing automation clouds. Instead, prioritise platforms that give you access to rich second- and third-party buyer signals. Ideally, these tools also allow you to weave a fabric of intelligent, agent-driven workflows that are automatically triggered by those signals and seamlessly complemented by your own first-party data.

Would you like to discover the other 26 marketers’ and content creators’ visions for 2026? Download the whitepaper here.