Your B2B marketing dashboard used to tell a pretty clean story. Your content ranked, people clicked, a percentage became leads, and sales followed.
Now, buyers are making decisions in places your dashboard can’t see. They ask ChatGPT for recommendations, read analyst reports, post in Slack groups, check out Reddit, and ask peers on LinkedIn. When it’s time to buy, maybe they choose you, and maybe they don’t. Increasingly, that decision happens before they ever wind up in your funnel – if they ever do.
So if your marketing team is mainly focused on reach, traffic, engagement, and leads, they may be chasing metrics that no longer map to revenue. For many, it’s a tough pill to swallow.
“Buyability” and why clicks don’t lead to deals
The key now is to focus on “buyability,” a new term coined by researchers at LinkedIn’s B2B Institute and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Buyability describes the confidence a buying group needs to select and advocate for a specific brand. And it shifts the focus from winning clicks to building the emotional trust required to secure enterprise deals.
The core pillars of buyability include:
- Risk reduction: B2B buyers are primarily motivated by the need to feel safe. Their biggest fear is making a bad decision, so their top priority is finding a solution they can confidently defend to their CFO and board if things go awry.
- Social proof: Partly a function of the need to feel safe, buyers are heavily influenced by their peers. Therefore, they look for evidence that similar, recognizable companies use the product.
- Brand fame: Well-known, highly visible brands are perceived as lower-risk. “Category fame” makes a brand feel familiar, making the buying group more comfortable committing.
Why visibility metrics don’t work anymore
Click-oriented visibility metrics, like impressions, click-through rates, and cost-per-click, no longer map to sales and revenue.
This is because:
- They measure the behavior of a single browser, while B2B buying is dictated by group psychology and risk mitigation.
- The purchasing journey isn’t the linear journey those metrics would suggest. Instead, modern B2B purchasing decisions are complex, highly fragmented, and deeply emotional.
The May edition of the Pinwheel Monthly Weather Report: All of your metrics are wrong, breaks down how the old metrics are being demolished and what brands can do about it. Here’s a small sample:
What “buyability” means for marketers?
Marketers should stop treating visibility metrics as the end goal and start looking at it as one input into “buyability.” That changes the strategic priorities quite a bit.
Consistency now matters more
AI systems learn how to describe your company from what’s written about you across the internet. Yes, they check out your website. They also look at channels you might have less control over, including:
- Analyst reports
- Podcasts
- Reviews
- Reddit discussions
- Customer conversations
- Press coverage
If your messaging is concentrated in one area or is inconsistent, humans won’t be the only ones confused. The systems shaping buyer perception will be confused, too.
Third-party validation matters more, too
Building a trust infrastructure can help shape purchase decisions. Start by influencing conversations outside your owned channels and developing:
- Analyst relations
- Customer evangelism
- Executive thought leadership
- Original research
- Distinctive brand positioning
It’s time to write your buyability playbook
What you need is a clean replacement for an AI-mediated funnel. Start giving your CFO a concrete tracking stack to replace the “funnel metrics” that have stopped predicting revenue.
The stack may include:
- Share of model voice, or how often you appear in LLM answers
- Unaided brand recall
- Branded search and direct traffic
- Share of voice in analyst and earned coverage
- A cleaned-up “how did you hear about us” field in the CRM
Continue prioritizing projects that improve buyability, particularly projects that improve brand consistency. The way AI describes your brand IS your brand to that buyer, and it’s partly a result of how consistently you’ve been describing it.
Want the full Pinwheel Monthly Weather Report?
There are many more nuggets of guidance in the full report. So if you’re seeing lackluster sales despite hitting metric goals, then the May edition of the Pinwheel Monthly Weather Report: All of your metrics are wrong is for you. It lays out the shift, the signals, and the practical plays. Get your copy here. Need help staying memorable? Reach out to chat with our strategy experts.
