Here's a confession from someone who's spent two decades staring at dashboards: we've gotten really, really good at knowing what buyers did. We know who clicked, who downloaded, who visited the pricing page at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. We've built entire martech stacks around capturing these breadcrumbs. And yet, most of us still can't answer the question that actually matters: what does this buyer need to do next?
The signal obsession has become marketing's version of counting steps on a fitness tracker. Sure, you hit 10,000 today. But did you actually get healthier? The data tells you the what. It doesn't tell you the why. And it definitely doesn't tell you the what's next.
The Funnel Lied to Us (Sort Of)
Let me be clear: I'm not here to bury the funnel. The funnel is a perfectly fine operating model. It gives us a common language for pipeline, forecasting, and those delightful handoff conversations between marketing and sales. The problem starts when we treat a funnel stage as shorthand for buyer intent.
A buyer can sit in "consideration" in your CRM while simultaneously building a business case, checking three competitors, and trying to get their CFO comfortable with the decision. Your system says they're in Stage 2. Their reality is a 10-dimensional chess game you can't see.
McKinsey's 2026 Global B2B Pulse Survey makes this distinction impossible to ignore. Nearly 4,000 B2B decision-makers across 13 countries reported using an average of ten channels across the purchasing journey. Ten. Not the three or four your attribution model is tracking. And here's the kicker: inconsistent information across teams is now the leading reason buyers switch suppliers.
Think about what that means. The buyer doesn't care whether the website belongs to marketing, the conversation belongs to sales, or the post-purchase problem belongs to customer success. They experience all of it as one relationship. When those interactions contradict each other, your org chart becomes irrelevant.
The Invisible Majority
There's another problem with treating signals as the buyer journey: increasingly, we can't see large parts of that journey.
Gartner's 2026 research, based on a survey of 646 B2B buyers, found that 67% prefer a rep-free experience. Nearly half (45%) used generative AI during a recent purchase, primarily to gather information on vendors and products. Your buyer is out there asking ChatGPT to compare you to your competitors, and you have zero visibility into that conversation.
This isn't a trend to watch. It's the new baseline. Buyers are doing their homework in channels you don't own, with tools that don't report back to your CRM. By the time they show up as a "signal" in your system, they've already formed opinions, built shortlists, and possibly made decisions.
The irony is thick: we've invested billions in signal capture while the most important signals moved somewhere we can't capture them.
Signals Tell You Where They Were, Not Where They're Going
Here's where I think we've gotten fundamentally confused. We've conflated behavioral data with buyer understanding. They're not the same thing.
A click tells you someone was interested enough to click. It doesn't tell you whether they're trying to solve a problem, validate a decision they've already made, or just killing time before a meeting. A whitepaper download tells you they wanted the whitepaper. It doesn't tell you whether they're the decision-maker, an influencer, or an intern doing research for someone else.
Salesforce's 2026 State of Sales report found that reps spend only 40% of their time actually selling. The other 60% goes to administrative work, internal meetings, and chasing data. We've built systems that generate more signals than our teams can meaningfully act on, then wonder why conversion rates aren't improving.
More data isn't the answer when the data doesn't tell you what you need to know.
What Buyers Actually Need (Hint: It's Not More Touchpoints)
Here's what the research keeps pointing to, and what most signal-obsessed marketers keep missing: buyers don't need more information. They need help making sense of the information they already have.
Gartner found that 69% of B2B buyers still prefer to validate AI-generated insights with sales reps. They're using AI to research, but they want a human to help them feel confident before they buy. The same research showed that 51% of buyers say they're more likely to encounter misleading information from GenAI, while 49% say the same about sales reps.
Buyers are swimming in information and drowning in uncertainty. They don't need another nurture sequence. They need someone who understands their specific situation and can help them navigate the decision.
This is the gap that signals can't fill. A signal can tell you someone visited your pricing page. It can't tell you that they're stuck because they can't figure out how to justify the cost to their CFO, or that they're comparing you to a competitor who offers a feature you don't have, or that they're actually ready to buy but can't get three other stakeholders aligned.
From Signal Capture to Situation Understanding
So what do we do with this? I'm not suggesting we throw out our martech stacks and go back to gut instinct. Signals have value. But they're inputs, not answers.
The shift we need is from "what did they do?" to "what are they trying to accomplish?" That requires a different kind of listening. It means designing interactions that surface context, not just capture clicks. It means training teams to ask better questions instead of just responding to triggers. It means accepting that some of the most important buyer activity will never show up in your dashboard.
The companies winning right now aren't the ones with the most sophisticated signal capture. They're the ones who've figured out how to translate signals into situational understanding, and then into genuinely helpful responses.
Marketing is like dating, as I've said before. You don't propose on the first ad impression. But you also don't keep sending flowers to someone who's already told you what they need. At some point, you have to actually listen.
The signals will keep coming. The question is whether we'll keep mistaking the map for the territory, or finally start understanding what buyers are actually trying to do.
