The Complex Sale Got More Complex

How fragmented attention, hyper-personalisation and the return of human presence are changing complex sales cycles across B2B and B2C.

There was a time when a complex sales cycle was relatively easy to describe, even when it was difficult to execute. There was an account, there were decision-makers, and there was a sequence of meetings, presentations, negotiations and approvals. In B2B sales, we mapped stakeholders and tried to move them through a funnel. In high-consideration B2C, the journey looked different, but the underlying logic was similar: awareness created interest, interest became consideration and, eventually, someone made a decision.

None of that has completely disappeared. But the environment around it has changed considerably. Today, someone can discover a company through LinkedIn, ignore three emails, hear its name from a colleague, ask an AI assistant about it, encounter one of its executives at an industry event, listen to a podcast, visit the website twice, discuss the decision internally, disappear for three months and eventually return because someone they trust mentioned the company over dinner. Try putting that neatly into a funnel.

Complex sales have not necessarily become longer because buyers need more information. They have become harder because attention, influence and decision-making have fragmented. And at exactly the same time, marketing technology has promised us the opposite: more data, better targeting, greater personalisation and increasingly precise control over the customer journey. We have become extraordinarily good at producing, distributing and measuring interactions while the decision itself has become increasingly difficult to locate.

That contradiction is worth examining.

What is a complex sales cycle today?

A complex sales cycle is a purchasing process involving multiple interactions, stakeholders or stages of evaluation before a final decision is made. Complexity can come from price, risk, technical requirements, emotional involvement, organisational impact or simply from the consequences of making the wrong choice. This is why complex sales are not exclusively a B2B phenomenon.

Enterprise software, industrial technology and professional services clearly belong in this category, but so can choosing a university, buying a premium car, selecting a wealth-management provider, purchasing a home, deciding on healthcare services or planning an expensive trip. The actors and motivations change, but the underlying challenge is remarkably similar: when the perceived cost of a wrong decision increases, people search more, compare more, consult more sources and seek more reassurance before committing.

The traditional distinction between B2B and B2C sales therefore explains only part of what is happening. Another useful distinction is between low-consideration and high-consideration purchases. A low-risk transaction can survive a relatively disconnected customer experience because the consequences are limited. When a purchase carries significant financial, professional or emotional weight, trust becomes part of the product itself. And those high-consideration decisions increasingly happen inside an ecosystem rather than along a predictable path.

The customer journey did not just become digital. It fragmented.

We have spent years talking about the omnichannel customer journey, but omnichannel may actually be too organised a word for what happens today. It suggests a company successfully connecting multiple channels around the same customer. The reality is often much messier.

People move between search engines, websites, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, podcasts, events, stores, communities, review platforms, private messages, sales conversations, AI assistants and recommendations from people they trust. Some of these interactions are visible to the company and measurable through its technology stack. Many are not. A B2B buyer might consume months of content before completing a form. A consumer considering an expensive purchase might research online, visit a physical location, ask friends, watch independent reviews and return to the brand weeks later through a completely different channel.

Generative AI adds another layer to this fragmentation. People can now research companies, products, competitors and categories without necessarily visiting the original sources from which that information was assembled. The first meaningful interaction with a brand may increasingly happen in an environment the brand neither owns nor fully sees.

This changes both the B2B buying journey and the high-consideration B2C journey in an important way: companies are no longer managing all the places where their reputation is being built. The journey did not simply become digital. It became fragmented, and fragmentation changes the questions companies need to ask. Instead of looking only at Where did this lead come from?, perhaps the more interesting question is What combination of signals made this company credible enough to be considered?

Hyper-personalisation created another paradox

For years, personalisation was presented as one of the answers to digital fragmentation. Collect more data, segment audiences more precisely, automate journeys and deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment. Much of that logic still makes sense, and advances in AI are making it possible to personalise communication at a scale that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.

But there is a problem: when everybody can personalise, personalisation itself stops being distinctive.

Adding someone’s first name to an email is not intimacy. Mentioning their company in an automated LinkedIn message does not necessarily create relevance. Showing someone an advertisement because they visited a webpage yesterday might demonstrate excellent targeting without demonstrating any real understanding of what they need. We can now create thousands of apparently individual interactions without any of them feeling particularly individual.

This is why the distinction between personalisation and relevance is becoming increasingly important. Personalisation says, we know something about you. Relevance says, we understand why this might matter to you now. Those are very different capabilities. AI will make the first increasingly cheap; the second still requires context, judgement and a much deeper understanding of the decision being made.

It is also why increasingly sophisticated technology does not automatically create a better customer experience. A company can have an impressive CRM, marketing automation platform, intent data, predictive analytics and personalised content engine while still creating a journey that feels completely disconnected to the person experiencing it. Technology can connect data points. That does not necessarily mean the customer feels connected.

The return of 100% presence

At the same time, another movement is taking place. After years of digitising interactions, automating conversations and optimising everything for scale, physical presence is becoming strategically interesting again. Not because digital channels are disappearing, but precisely because they have become so dominant.

When almost everything can happen through a screen, interactions that require someone to be completely present become scarcer. A meeting, a workshop, a product demonstration, a store experience, an executive roundtable, a conference conversation or even a dinner can create something increasingly difficult to reproduce digitally: concentrated attention. For an hour, perhaps the customer is not simultaneously moving between another tab, another message, another video and another company.

This becomes particularly relevant in complex B2B sales and high-consideration B2C decisions because these purchases rarely depend on information alone. Information is abundant. What people often need later in a complex decision is confidence: confidence that the solution works, that the organisation understands the problem, that the people behind it are credible and that choosing it will not become a mistake they later have to justify.

Here lies one of the most interesting paradoxes of the current sales environment. We spent years digitising the buying journey, automating touchpoints and trying to personalise everything. Now, particularly in complex decisions, physical presence, human credibility and continuity are becoming valuable again. But they return inside a much more fragmented ecosystem than before.

The opportunity, therefore, is not to replace digital with physical or automation with human interaction. It is to understand where human presence has disproportionate value. Perhaps the best use of automation is not removing people from the customer journey, but automating what does not require human presence so that people can be more present where it actually matters.

ABM is still relevant. But the account is no longer the whole picture.

This fragmentation also raises an interesting question about Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM remains an extremely useful approach, particularly in complex B2B sales. Identifying strategic accounts, understanding the stakeholders inside them and coordinating marketing and sales activity around those accounts is considerably more intelligent than treating every prospect identically.

But the environment around the account has expanded.

Traditional ABM asks which accounts matter, who the decision-makers are, what those stakeholders need and which messages or interactions can move the account forward. Those questions remain valid, but today’s complex sales environment requires a few more. Who influences those decision-makers? Where do they learn? Which communities do they participate in? Which experts do they trust? Which colleagues shape their opinion without appearing on the organisational chart? What content do they encounter before they ever identify themselves as prospects? Which conversations happen outside the company’s visibility? And which people can create credibility before sales even enters the room?

This does not make ABM obsolete. It makes the ecosystem around the account more important. The account is no longer enough as the unit of strategy when decisions happen across people, channels, moments and communities.

Perhaps the evolution of ABM is therefore not simply better account targeting, but learning to understand and activate influence ecosystems around strategic decisions. That requires marketing, sales, communication, events, customer experience and sometimes leadership itself to work much more closely together, because influence rarely respects the organisational divisions companies have created internally.

What companies still get wrong about complex sales

One of the most common mistakes is still trying to force a fragmented decision process into a linear measurement model. Imagine someone attended an event six months ago, read an article two months later, followed an executive on LinkedIn, received a recommendation from a peer and eventually arrived on the website through Google. Which channel created the sale? Google might receive the attribution because it was the last visible interaction, but very few people would seriously argue that Google alone created the decision.

Attribution models need answers even when reality does not provide such clean ones, and this creates a dangerous temptation: investing disproportionately in what is easiest to measure rather than what is most influential. Events, thought leadership, executive visibility, communities, recommendations and relationships can all play important roles in complex sales while remaining considerably harder to connect to a final transaction than a click on an advertisement.

Another bad practice is confusing automation with personalisation. At scale, companies can now produce hundreds or thousands of variations of the same message. But producing 500 personalised messages does not automatically create 500 meaningful interactions. If the context is wrong, more sophisticated automation simply allows a company to be irrelevant more efficiently.

The same problem appears when companies map job titles instead of mapping influence. The person signing the contract may not be the person who created confidence in the decision. An official decision-maker might rely heavily on a technical expert, colleague, advisor, family member, online community or external specialist. An organisational chart can tell you who has authority, but it cannot always tell you who has influence.

Perhaps the most persistent bad practice, however, is organisational. Marketing generates leads. Sales closes opportunities. Communication manages reputation. Events organise experiences. Customer experience manages customers. Leadership builds visibility. Each function has its own objectives, platforms, agencies, dashboards and KPIs. The buyer sees none of those divisions. They see one company.

When those parts are disconnected, the customer experiences the gaps.

What better complex sales strategies look like

A more effective complex sales strategy begins by accepting that not every interaction needs to convert. Some interactions create discovery, others create understanding. Some build credibility, while others provide proof, reduce perceived risk or simply make the organisation easier to remember. A relatively small number may finally trigger action, but the decision can depend on everything that happened before them.

This changes the role of content, events and sales interactions. Instead of forcing every touchpoint towards an immediate conversion, companies can design different interactions for different jobs within the decision process. A thought-leadership article does not necessarily need to generate a meeting tomorrow to have strategic value. A small executive event may influence an opportunity months later. A customer story can become valuable precisely when a buyer reaches the point at which reassurance matters more than awareness.

It also means moving from stakeholder mapping towards influence mapping. Who makes the decision matters, but who shapes the decision matters too. Instead of mapping only roles inside an account, companies can begin to understand the network surrounding those roles: peers, communities, advisors, industry voices, customers, partners and internal advocates.

The same evolution can happen with data. Instead of asking only which channel generated a conversion, organisations can investigate which combinations of content, relationships, experiences and conversations repeatedly appear around successful decisions. This does not mean abandoning measurement. It means measuring with enough humility to recognise that not everything influential will be perfectly attributable.

Hyper-personalisation can also become more useful when it moves away from superficial individualisation and towards genuine contextual relevance. The questions then change from Who is this person? to What are they trying to solve, where are they in the decision, what uncertainty needs to disappear before they can move forward, and who or what are they likely to trust at that moment? This is where technology, data and human judgement become complementary rather than competitive.

B2B and B2C may be closer than we think

There are obvious differences between selling an industrial solution and selling a premium car, between choosing enterprise software and choosing a university. The number of stakeholders, procurement structures, budgets and decision criteria can be completely different. But complex B2B and B2C customer journeys increasingly share several important characteristics.

Both can involve extensive research and multiple sources of influence. Both can move repeatedly between digital and physical environments. Both can include long periods in which the potential customer is completely invisible to the company. Both are increasingly shaped by people and platforms outside the company’s controlled channels. And both depend heavily on trust when the financial, emotional or professional consequences of making the wrong decision are high.

This does not mean B2B and B2C sales strategies should become identical. It means that the old categories may sometimes be less useful than understanding how much trust a particular decision requires. A €20 purchase can survive a fragmented or disconnected experience. A €200,000 investment probably cannot. The more consequential the decision, the more important continuity, credibility and reassurance become.

That also explains why physical and human experiences are returning without replacing digital ones. The customer may discover digitally, validate socially, experience physically, research through AI, discuss privately and finally purchase through another channel altogether. The strategic challenge is not deciding which single channel owns the customer. It is making sure the organisation remains recognisable and credible while the customer moves between all of them.

From managing funnels to designing ecosystems

The funnel remains useful. CRM stages remain useful. ABM remains useful. Attribution remains useful. Customer journey mapping remains useful. The mistake is expecting any one of them to describe the whole decision.

Complex sales increasingly happen through accumulated signals: a useful article, a conversation, a recommendation, a salesperson who actually listened, a physical experience, a search result, an AI-generated answer, a customer story, an executive who seems credible or simply a brand that someone has encountered consistently enough to recognise and trust. Individually, many of these interactions may look insignificant. Together, they create confidence.

Perhaps this is what companies should increasingly be trying to orchestrate: not a perfectly controlled funnel, but an ecosystem of trust.

In a fragmented world, the companies that earn attention may not necessarily be the ones that appear most often. They may be the ones whose different signals, from content and technology to people, experiences and recommendations, somehow add up to the same thing. The strategic question is therefore no longer simply how many touchpoints it takes to close a complex sale. It is which touchpoints actually build trust, who creates them and whether they feel connected when experienced from the outside.

And perhaps that is the real evolution of account-based thinking: moving from targeting accounts to understanding ecosystems.

Is your organisation still managing a funnel, or has it started designing the ecosystem around the decision?