B2B Marketing Statistics for 2026: Buying Groups, AI Research, Finance Vetoes and Where the Budget Goes

B2B buying and budget figures, side by side with their sources

Each figure below was traced to its publisher in October 2026. Two of the biggest sources, Forrester and Gartner, sell their full reports to subscribers, so the numbers here come from their public releases. Several others come from companies that sell to B2B marketers, and the last column says so. For the strategy behind the numbers, our B2B marketing guide covers committees, account lists and channels; this page sits in the marketing statistics library.

Thirteen people inside the building, nine outside it

Forrester's 2026 State of Business Buying, announced in a January 21, 2026 release, says a typical purchase now involves 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, more for complex or strategic purchases. Its summary post draws on the firm's Buyers' Journey Survey of nearly 18,000 business buyers worldwide, fielded the previous year. Purchases that include generative AI features double the group, 14 members against seven.

The extra seats are not decorative. Procurement professionals are decision-makers in 53% of buying cycles, per Forrester. More than 60% of buyers use a trial, and 78% of those making purchases of $10 million or more run one first. Forrester also reports that 94% of buyers in groups of six or more see clear benefits, so do not expect committees to shrink because a vendor finds them tiresome.

• The procurement officer wants terms, pricing structure and references, and arrives late with veto power.
• The outside influencer (a consultant, a peer at another firm, an analyst) forms an opinion from what is public about you, often before you know they exist.
• The trial user judges the product on a Tuesday afternoon with no salesperson in the room.
• The finance reviewer reads the proposal for risk and payback, not features.
• The original champion needs material to forward to all of the above, in their words rather than yours.

Two-thirds would rather skip the sales call

Gartner's March 9, 2026 release reports that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, from a survey of 646 buyers conducted August to September 2025. In the same survey, 45% said they used AI tools during a recent purchase. Gartner also found that buyers who reach high confidence in their decision are twice as likely to report a high-quality purchase.

Prefer is the important word. A preference for skipping the rep is not proof that buyers complete purchases without one, and the same release ties good purchases to buyer confidence, which a seller can still help build. What the figure does say is that most of the persuading now happens on pages the buyer reads alone: pricing ranges, specifications, comparisons, case studies, implementation timelines. Our pages on B2B website design and B2B SEO cover building and ranking those pages.

The website is now the first salesperson most business buyers will agree to meet.

Ninety-four, forty-five or eighty-two: buyers and AI

Three respected sources measured AI use by business buyers in the same twelve months and got three very different answers. None of them is wrong. They asked different people different questions.

Any use across a whole process will always beat use during one specific purchase, and software buyers are the most likely of all buyers to reach for a chatbot. The direction is the same in all three. G2 adds the detail that matters for marketers: review sites (38%) narrowly edged out AI chatbots (37%) as the top source shaping which vendors make a shortlist, and half of the buyers who took AI recommendations said AI had its greatest impact when narrowing and comparing options.

Forrester's post notes that buyers check AI output against trusted sources and are more likely to engage a provider on the strength of industry-expert information than of AI tools. So the chatbot builds the list and people check it. Whether you are on the list depends on what the public record says about you. Our comparison of GEO and SEO explains how that record is read, and the free AI visibility check shows which vendors an AI engine names for a buyer's question. Software companies should also read SaaS and AI search.

Agents are next, slowly. In G2's survey, 61% of buyers use or plan to use AI agents in the buying process, 47% would let an agent research and recommend, and only 9% are comfortable letting an agent execute a purchase within approved guardrails. The robot may shop. It may not yet sign.

The finance chief, the security review and the late veto

G2's July 2026 survey of software buyers found finance involvement in software decisions jumped from 31% to 46% in a single year. IT security review was the biggest single source of delay, named by 39% of buyers and 50% at enterprises, ahead of budget approval at 32% and implementation planning at 25%. Nearly half said their finance chief had vetoed an approved deal in the last year; G2 gives no exact figure. Three in four buyers who had lived through a late-stage veto now expect a positive return within six months of signing.

G2 sells software review listings and buyer data to software vendors, and its sample is software buyers, so read these as the view from that market. A manufacturer's equivalent of the security review may be a quality audit or a supplier qualification form; the manufacturing SEO guide covers those buyers. The lesson carries: the people who can stop a deal late rarely visited the website early.

Those two lists are our practice, not survey findings, but they follow directly from where G2's buyers say deals stall.

LinkedIn's growing share of the ad budget, and a 211-day wait

Dreamdata, which sells B2B attribution software, analyzed thousands of deals from hundreds of its customers for its 2025 LinkedIn Ads Benchmarks Report, using 2024 data. The average customer journey lasted 211 days, and larger companies took 49% longer to buy. From a buyer's first LinkedIn ad impression to revenue averaged 320 days.

In the same data, LinkedIn's share of total B2B ad budgets grew from 31% in the first half of 2024 to 39% by year end, with non-branded Google Search second at 37% of the average budget. LinkedIn influenced 29% of marketing-qualified leads, 36% of sales-qualified leads and 35% of new business deals, more than Google or Meta, and Dreamdata reports LinkedIn returned the highest ROAS of the major networks at 113%, against 78% for Google Search and 29% for Meta.

Content and video follow the same channel. The Content Marketing Institute's B2B research, covered on our content marketing statistics page, found most B2B marketers name LinkedIn among the most effective channels for thought leadership, and a video host's survey on our video marketing statistics page found more of its business teams share video on LinkedIn than on YouTube.

Budgets set the ceiling. The CMO Survey, sponsored by Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, found marketing expenses averaged 7.02% of revenue at B2B product companies and 10.07% at B2B services companies in its Spring 2026 edition, against 11.99% for B2C product firms. Only 61 and 41 marketing leaders answered for the two B2B groups, and the spread was wider than the averages, so treat them as a rough range. Our digital marketing statistics page has the survey's overall figures.

Five tests for a B2B statistic before it reaches the board deck

1. 1

   Name the buyer

   G2 asked software buyers. Forrester asked business buyers worldwide. Gartner asked B2B buyers. A survey of SaaS purchasers says little about how a hospital buys linen service or a contractor buys steel.

2. 2

   Find out who sells to whom

   G2 sells review listings and buyer data to software vendors. Dreamdata sells attribution software. Forrester and Gartner sell research and advice by subscription. Each has a reason for buying to look complicated, and each is still the best public source on its slice.

3. 3

   Admit you read the press release

   The headline numbers on this page come from public releases and summaries. The methods, margins and question wording sit in reports behind a paywall. Quote the release as a release.

4. 4

   Read the verb

   Prefer a rep-free experience is not bought without a rep. Influenced a deal is not caused it. Used AI during the process is not trusted what AI said.

5. 5

   Count the sample before the decimal

   The CMO Survey's 7.02% for B2B product companies rests on 61 answers with a spread larger than the average. Two decimal places do not make a small sample precise.

Turning buyer research into your own pipeline numbers

The surveys describe other companies' buyers. Your CRM already describes yours, if it records four things: where each lead says it heard of you (a required field on the form, in plain words), the date of the first visit and the date of the signed deal, every person from the buying company you met, and why lost deals went elsewhere. Search Console's branded query numbers show whether the outside influencers are sending people to look you up. Our SEO KPIs guide shows which numbers to report, and conversion tracking setup makes sure calls and forms are counted at all.

If the research is right that buyers decide before they call, the work is making sure your site, your search results and the public record answer the committee first. That is what DataCram's SEO programs do, month to month with a defined scope, starting at $575 a month per the SEO pricing page. Our PPC management program catches the buyers already searching on Google Ads, and the free website audit is a quick first look at what a skeptical reviewer will find.