The B2B buyer journey starts before the first enquiry. Are you already on their shortlist?
The B2B buyer journey doesn't begin when a name arrives in your inbox. By then, a prospective client may already have spent weeks or months deciding which businesses feel worth speaking to.
Imagine a marketing director looking for help with a difficult project. A colleague has mentioned a consultancy. They've seen one of its partners speaking at an industry event, read a useful LinkedIn post and perhaps asked an AI assistant which firms have relevant experience. They've looked at a few websites, too, but they haven't contacted anyone.
Then an enquiry lands. Your CRM records a new opportunity and your report celebrates a fresh lead. Fair enough. But to the person making the enquiry, this isn't an introduction. They have a head start on you.
If you're responsible for attracting the right clients, it's worth asking how much of your marketing helps people decide they'd want to work with you before they have a brief, a budget or a reason to get in touch.
What the B2B buyer journey looks like before anyone contacts you
Research suggests that formal supplier selection often begins with some preferences already in place. In an August 2026 analysis of its 2025 Buyers' Journey Survey, Forrester reported that 68% of B2B buyers began the purchasing process with a preferred supplier in mind.
That doesn't mean those buyers had made a final decision. Nor should we assume a complex enterprise purchase works exactly like appointing a local planning consultant or specialist law firm. But it does challenge the idea that everyone starts looking with a blank sheet of paper.
In its June 2026 marketing priorities report, Forrester also describes B2B discovery and evaluation as increasingly buyer-led, with AI-mediated research making visibility and relevance harder to manage.
Think about a prospective client who's simply getting on with their job. They notice useful advice from someone in your sector, hear a good account of a project or remember a recommendation from someone they respect. None of this necessarily means they're shopping for a supplier. But an impression is forming.
Months later, a problem needs attention. That previously unfamiliar firm is now a name they recognise. It may be the first one they investigate, or the one they ask a colleague about.
This isn't a tidy route from awareness to enquiry. People revisit questions, compare options and change priorities as new information emerges. We've explored that behaviour in our guide to Google's Messy Middle. The additional challenge for marketers is what happens before a prospect is visibly in the market at all.
Where do prospective clients form an opinion of your business?
Wherever they're learning about their work, talking to peers and trying to make sense of a problem. Sometimes that will be on your website. Often it won't.
Take an expertise-led business such as an architecture practice, engineering consultancy or law firm. A future client might meet one of its people at an event, read an explanation in a trade publication, hear a recommendation or find a helpful answer online. Another member of the same buying team could be researching completely different questions.
Each encounter gives them a slightly different reason to remember, investigate or rule out a business.
What someone encounters | What they may be trying to establish |
An expert's LinkedIn post | Do these people understand the problem we're facing? |
A colleague's recommendation | Have they been good to work with? |
An AI-generated answer | Which firms might be relevant enough to investigate? |
A case study | Have they handled a comparable challenge, and how? |
A conversation at an industry event | Do I trust their judgement? |
AI is now one of those routes, but it's not the whole journey. In a Gartner survey of 645 B2B buyers, 45% said they'd used generative AI during a recent purchase, while 69% said they preferred to validate AI-generated insights with a sales representative. Digital discovery and human reassurance can sit alongside each other.
This is one reason zero-click marketing matters. People can encounter your thinking without visiting your website, then return through another route when they want more detail. It's also why there's little point trying to be everywhere for the sake of it. Find out which people, publications, platforms and conversations actually influence your audience.
Being found is not the same as being considered
Someone recognising your company name is a start. It doesn't tell them whether you're right for the job.
For marketers, B2B brand consideration is the work of giving people a reason to treat your business as a credible option. And that's particularly interesting when the service you're selling is somebody's experience, thinking and judgement.
Look at the language used across many expertise-led websites: experienced, trusted, client-focused, innovative. There may be nothing wrong with those descriptions, but they don't help a prospective client judge what the business actually knows. They're claims almost anyone can make.
An architect explaining the trade-offs behind a difficult design decision gives someone more to work with. So does a planning specialist describing where a proposed approach is likely to run into trouble, or an employment lawyer explaining which facts would change their advice. The detail is what makes the expertise visible.
That's what we mean when we say Unmute your experts. At The Polka, we want prospective clients to encounter the real people, considered opinions and practical experience behind a business, long before they need a supplier.
And no, that doesn't mean telling every partner to become a LinkedIn influencer. It means making sure that their knowledge isn't only available to people who are already paying for it.
As AI makes it easier to produce polished, plausible content, the reasoning and evidence behind an opinion matter. A name and a headshot aren't enough on their own. Show what someone has worked on, what they learnt, and why they reached a particular conclusion. That gives a potential client something useful to judge long before a sales conversation.
How can marketers earn a place on the shortlist?
You don't need a new channel for every stage of the B2B buying journey. Start with buyer questions and the proof your business can offer.
Start with the questions that come before the brief
Ask your business development colleagues and fee-earners about the last few enquiries. What was the client wrestling with before they knew who to call? What alternatives had they considered?
The earliest question might be 'Is this a planning problem?' rather than 'Who is the best planning consultancy?' Or 'What would changing our employment policies involve?' rather than 'Which solicitor should we appoint?'
Those early questions could become an article, talk or LinkedIn discussion that helps someone understand the problem before they're ready to buy a solution.
Give experts a way to contribute that respects their time
The familiar problem for an in-house marketer: your experts are delivering the work, and you're chasing them for quotes, approvals and ideas.
Make contributing easier. A ten-minute conversation after a project might uncover what surprised the team, a common misconception or a decision worth explaining. Marketing can shape that into a useful piece of content; the expert checks that the facts, reasoning and voice are right.
Agree approvals and confidentiality upfront. Build a repeatable process instead of relying on last-minute favours.
Show the proof behind your claims
A case study should do more than tell readers that a project was successful. Explain the situation, what made it difficult, the choices available and why your team took a particular approach. Include outcomes when you can substantiate them, and be clear about any limitations.
Sometimes an expert explaining when their service isn't the right first step is more valuable than another page of reasons to choose them. It helps a reader make a better decision, and tells them something about the judgement they're buying.
Connect the encounters rather than creating more noise
A useful conversation at an event can become the basis of an article. That article can support an expert's LinkedIn post. The post can lead a prospective client to a case study that shows the idea in practice.
These shouldn't be identical pieces of content copied across channels. They should help people recognise the same expertise wherever they come across the business. Give each contribution a clear job and a sensible next step.
A 20-minute shortlist check for your marketing team
Choose one problem you want your firm to be known for solving.
Look at what someone would find about that problem through search and a couple of AI tools. Treat results as a sample, not a definitive ranking.
Ask a recent client or referrer where they would look for advice and whose name they would mention.
Check whether a stranger could find your relevant people, their perspective and credible examples of their work.
Identify one gap you can improve, rather than adding five more activities to the content plan.
How do you measure influence when you can't see the whole journey?
This is where the marketer's job becomes awkward. You can count clicks, enquiries and completed forms. It's harder to measure a colleague forwarding an article, someone remembering a speaker or a future buyer quietly following a partner for six months.
That doesn't make reporting pointless. It means knowing what each measure can and cannot tell you.
Track suitable enquiries, bid invitations and commercial outcomes alongside branded search, relevant expert-content engagement and what comes up in new-business conversations. These are useful signals of recognition and interest, not proof that one activity caused a particular sale.
Ask new prospects: 'Where did you first come across us?' and 'What made you decide to get in touch now?' Don't force the answer into a single dropdown if their story involves a recommendation, a LinkedIn post and a Google search.
Separate what people tell you from what analytics suggest. Review those patterns alongside the quality, not just the number, of opportunities.
If you want to check AI visibility, test a consistent set of genuine buyer questions and see whether your business is named, cited or recommended. That is useful diagnostic information, not a complete record of what every prospect sees or proof that AI created a sale.
This gives you a more rounded conversation with leadership: where marketing is creating demand you can measure, and where it's helping the right people become familiar with the business before a measurable opportunity exists.
Make sure you're part of the conversation
You can't control every recommendation, search result or conversation about your business. But you can give people better reasons to remember your expertise, and make the evidence easy to find when they decide to investigate.
Think about a business you'd love to work with. What might its people be trying to understand today? Who could offer them a useful perspective, and where might they come across it?
It's a more valuable place to start than filling next month's content calendar for the sake of it.
For more on making your team's knowledge visible and useful throughout the changing buying journey, download Unmute your experts, The Polka's thoughtpiece Marketing in the age of the zero click: Why unmuting your experts will become your point of difference.
