A theory on why B2B marketing requires so many darn customer touches today

When you step back and look, the trend line is clear: when companies cut B2B marketing brand and awareness programs, sales cycles grow longer and require more touches

It takes 62-plus touches to close a deal in 2026.

The B2B tech buyer requires 62.4 touches on average, across 3.5 different marketing channels – from first touch to deal closed. It’s a process that exceeds six months and now lasts 192 days.

It sure seems like an incredibly high number of touches. Yet the source of this data isn’t an opinion survey; it’s behavior – it’s based on data running through a technology marketing platform called Dreamdata.

I wrote about the Dreamdata report in May 2026, it made my semi-annual half-year highlight reel, and came up again in an interview with Michelle Garrett – for her PR Explored podcast.

She couldn’t believe the number, and it’s been on my mind ever since.

Sixty touches does sound excessive. I’ve worked in B2B for 90%-plus of my career, which spans 25 years. We never needed this many historically. What changed?

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A brief history of marketing touches

It’s not the first time we’ve seen a study conclude more touches are required today than historically, or that sales cycles are trending longer. In fact, I’ve written about many of these over the years.

Some of the most recent findings include the following:

A 2022 study by Forrester found B2B sales requires 27 touches;

A 2024 study by McKinsey found B2B marketing manages an average of 10.2 channels in 2024 – that’s double what it managed eight years ago, which at the time this study was published was 2016; and

A post I wrote in 2025 rounds up five different studies on this topic with a range of answers from just a dozen to 28.87, to as many as 266.

Two hundred and sixty-six touches! What’s the cost-per-touch on that Machiavellian marketing campaign?

At the same time, there are a number of complementary findings from studies that also show prospects consume more content; as many as 11 pieces of content from a vendor.

And avoid talking to sales until the very last minute. But there’s more.

Sales cycles have gone from long to longer. There are more decision-makers involved in these deals – legal and finance teams are increasingly influential.

These aren’t isolated examples. What I’ve just provided is an 80,000-foot view of B2B marketing for the last decade, but the conclusion is solid:

It takes, on average, more time and more effort directed at more people to attract, convert and close a deal today than it did 10 or 20 years ago.

Theory: Why does B2B marketing need so many touches?

With respect to marketing, there’s one significant and multi-year marketing observation, dare I say trend, that coincides with the accumulation of required customer touches to close a deal:

the deliberate cutting of brand marketing and awareness-building budgets.

These programs get cut because they are hard to measure. And the budget goes toward tactics like performance marketing because it’s easy to count clicks.

If you work in marketing, you know this is a fact. If you don’t, or if you are like 97% of the company board members who haven’t cracked open a marketing book since undergrad, there’s a boatload of studies that demonstrate it:

2025 CMO Spend Survey by Gartner: “54% of CMOs prioritized performance marketing versus 22% who prioritized brand marketing”;

2025 Voice of the Marketer survey by WARC: “42% share expect increased investment in performance, against 29% share who envision increased investment in brand”; and

CMO Outlook 2026 by Lippincott: More CMOs come from performance marketing (35%), strategy and ops (15%), and product marketing (13%) than from brand (12%), media (11%) or comms (2%).

That’s just scratching the surface. Any marketing or comms person or activity that has to do with brand or awareness has been under intense pressure for the last 10 years.

My theory is that we are seeing the results of those cuts manifest in long sales cycles and innumerable touches. The more these functions and programs get cut, the longer the sales cycles become and the more touches are required.

Awareness and brand marketing are hard to measure in the short term, but cutting them has a dramatic and adverse impact on an organization’s ability to close deals in the long term.

‘Correlation is not causation’

Theories, including Einstein’s, Darwin’s, and Quantum Mechanics, are based on observation.

Theories aren’t fact. They aren’t laws. They aren’t immutable. They are an educated guess based on observation. They earn consensus in due course.

The prize-winning theories hold up over time, and unification or at least reconciliation notwithstanding, new observations support old conclusions. Einstein needed Edwin Hubble’s observation to believe the constant he put in his own equations.

Now there are those who are going to say, correlation is not causation. Certainly, my Excel spreadsheet calculations, based on an eclectic mix of surveys devoid of random sampling, aren’t even remotely on the same level as scientific observation or mathematical rigor.

On the other hand, budget cuts don’t require scientific instrumentation; for B2B marketers, it’s just another Tuesday.

Markets are conversations

Even so, I have three responses:

First, I’m not the first person to suggest this theory. A 2023 analysis by the Boston Consulting Group put it far more elegantly:

“Across all the industries and periods of uncertainty we examined, key performance metrics suffer when companies decrease their investments in brand marketing.”

Second, the preponderance of evidence is apparent. I’ve written about literally hundreds of studies and surveys for the last 17 years. When you step back and look, the trend line is clear: when companies cut awareness and brand marketing, sales cycles grow longer and require more touches.

Third, it just makes sense. If you aren’t familiar with a company when they call on you, you are going to have a higher level requirement for information. That is if you even meet the 95:5 rule, which is probably better described as a business parable than it is a statistic.

For the sake of this argument, let’s assume you do, and you now have to satisfy all of the needs that awareness and familiarity, if they had been budgeted, would have already resolved. Marketing is spending money on performance and buyers are consuming that spend for awareness. The sales cycle takes six months and a gazillion touches becuase no one has heard of your tech company before; they haven’t heard of your company because you haven’t “talked” to anyone.

The Cluetrain Manifesto was right: Markets are conversations but many of today’s companies have decidedly opted out of participating.

The buyer, you, is cramming a couple years’ worth of awareness into six months of study. This approach to marketing is not scalable unless you have an unlimited budget, which nobody does.

Worse, from a PR perspective, you lose your ability to frame the context. Instead, you are reliant on how the medium – search, social or today, generative AI – is going to present your case for you.

In the long run, this is a more expensive approach to marketing. If you dump most of your marketing budget into performance, you are far more likely to have a higher CAC. That’s a metric that any marketing leader can measure, based on historical or comparative data relative to brand spend, to start a conversation that gets your marketing efforts right-sized again.

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