I’ve been writing about relevance in B2B marketing for two decades. It seems like such a simple concept: Engage B2B buyers in learning about what they need to know to solve a problem, deliver information in a context that matters because it’s meaningful to them, create meaning that builds confidence and mitigates perceived risks, and build momentum toward validation for buying decisions.
In complex buying processes, relevance depends on clarity and continuous refinement. This is extremely difficult if you don’t truly know and understand your buyers and what matters to them, given the rapid change we’re all living through. Especially given the growth in AI moderation during buyers’ self-education. According to 6sense’s 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, buyers don’t engage with sellers until they’re 61% through their journey. Worse, in 95% of cases, the winning vendor is already decided before the first contact is made.
From a Funnel to a Continuum
I hate to have to say this again, but buying isn’t linear. While we’ve had the Gartner spaghetti graphic for years, since its first release in 2019, we’ve clung stubbornly to the funnel. Partly because our marketing automation and CRM systems cater to it, but mostly because it’s a construct we’re comfortable with.
Yet, we’ve based momentum on counting stuff. Lead scoring had us decide that each interaction was worth #X points and set gates at stages we used to identify a buyer’s place in the funnel. For example, at 75 points, a lead reaches mid-funnel consideration.
Sounds kind of silly now, right?
Marketers need to get over assigning too much importance to visibility and measurability bias. It’s misleading given channel growth and buyer avoidance. We need to stop weighting scoring based on the heft of a content asset and instead consider the relevance ranking. A 20-page white paper isn’t an indication of buying commitment more important than a blog post that simplifies a key point your buyer struggled to grasp to build momentum.
It’s not about the volume of content they consume or the number of interactions you have with your buyers. More important is the resulting progression that those interactions enable. And that’s becoming even harder to measure, given that much of the buying process now happens beyond your website.
Where a funnel is linear and rigid, a continuum is dynamic and holistic. The difference enables the creation of experiences designed to build relationships. A continuum shifts perspective from the inside-out orientation of the funnel to the outside-in orientation based on your buyers’ reality. A continuum anticipates and allows for those loops of circling back that buyers make as they work to gain consensus and traction to move forward with building a short list.
Designing a Continuum as a Decision Environment
Decisions inherently are about answering questions. One of the key aspects of the personas I build is including a series of questions buyers must answer to make decision progress.
Questions help your buyers:
- Uncover pain points they may “feel” but have yet to name
- Assess risks realistically against perceptions
- Build confidence in themselves by gaining knowledge
- Align stakeholders around value by gaining insight into different perspectives
Decision Environments Rely on Meaning
A decision environment is fundamentally different from a content funnel because it’s built around your buyer’s questions, not your marketing calendar. In a funnel, you push content at buyers based on where you think they are. In a decision environment, you create the conditions for buyers to pull themselves forward by answering the questions that matter to them at each stage. The shift sounds subtle, but it changes everything — what you create, how you sequence it, and how you measure whether it’s working.
Let’s redefine the funnel in relation to a continuum built to enable decisions. What becomes clear is that it’s not about you or your product, but about moving from problem to solution with clarity and relevance.
From Awareness to Problem Recognition
Goal: To help buyers define the problem clearly.
Buyer Question: What’s actually at risk?
Contextual Relevance: Help them see what’s broken and why that matters now.
To win from the start means you must understand your buyers’ problems and perspectives about them. Where are they stuck? Why haven’t they fixed it already? What does it impact? If you help them define and understand a meaningful problem, you’ve earned their attention.
From Consideration to Exploration
Goal: To help buyers understand their options, trade-offs, and how to compare.
Buyer Question: What does better look like once we solve the problem? What do we need to make that happen?
Contextual Relevance: Help them understand what’s possible and see the path to achieving it, along with introducing a structure for clarity in evaluating options.
Progression here is two-fold. Buyers must understand what’s possible and the impact a successful solution enables. Once they do, then they need to decide what they need. And not just your champion. All of those involved must consent to moving forward. Interactions here must begin to build buyers’ confidence in themselves, not just your product.
For example, email is still a powerful tool. Opens are still solid, but clicks are down. Review your email copy to ensure it provides a key insight for buyers to latch onto — even if they don’t click. Make sure the sequence of email copy used across touchpoints works to orchestrate decision-making.
Recently, a technology services client started to receive outreach from contacts in nurture programs who had never clicked any links to view the related content. When asked, each of them said a version of “the emails you sent gave me new ideas about how to fix a problem and why they should do so.”
From Purchase to Confidence and Validation
Goal: For buyers to put you on their shortlist and initiate conversations with your sellers.
Buyer Question: Why should I be confident we won’t mess this up? How do I defend this decision?
Contextual Relevance: This is the highest friction point in the decisioning process. Think beyond classic customer stories to decision use cases — what tipping points helped your customers make the decision? What caused lost deals not to decide? What challenges have customers had implementing your product, and how did they succeed? What did it take, and what did that look like?
We tend to push the positive even though we all know perfect execution is the exception. We spew statistics about improvement, but rarely get into the weeds of what that really looks like. If your buyers can’t visualize it, deciding becomes harder. Chances are that the buyers you know about must get more hidden internal stakeholders on board. Arming buyers to defend the decision puts them that much closer to reaching consensus and making the decision.
Marketing Must Enable Better B2B Buying Decisions
The funnel model marketers currently operate is not representative of how B2B buying takes place today. According to a Harvard Business Review study of over 2.5 million sales conversations, 40% to 60% of B2B deals end in no decision. That alone should be evidence enough that the funnel model is broken.
When designing your content strategy around a Continuum built to enable buying decisions, the question is no longer “What should we write about?” It’s “What decision do we need to help our buyers make?”
Viewing the buying journey as a set of decisions makes it easier to map your content to contextual relevance. It also helps you build the authority AI search looks for when your buyers ask them about a problem you solve, as they inevitably will.
Content and experiences that facilitate decisions along the way for a variety of involved stakeholders will shorten buying processes, help your company earn a place on the short list, and align sales reps with contextual relevance for validation conversations.
Marketing is now the orchestrator across the majority of a complex B2B buying process.
Stop thinking about relevance as personalization. Start thinking about relevance as progression. Decisions are what B2B Buyer Experiences must enable for vendors to win in today’s market.