"Since COVID, zero to one. It's been that bad."
That's the owner of an executive search firm, with 30 years in the business, telling me how many big new clients they've signed per year since 2020.
"I'm doing about 250 a year, which is the worst I've ever done."
I told them they were about the third person in two weeks to tell me some version of that.
A business loan broker: "ever since COVID... it's been sort of slow of building businesses back up... we're not getting the leads like we used to get."
A strategy consultant with 30 years of CEO clients: "COVID hit, everything was done by video... So I think the market shifted."
Most people blame the economy, or interest rates, or "people just aren't buying."
I think something else happened. Your buyers got a lot better informed, all at once.
How B2B used to work
Before 2020, most B2B firms won business the same way. Somebody knew somebody. You met at a conference. You took them to lunch. Your outreach got through because there wasn't much of it.
That strategy consultant had a system that brought in millions of dollars over about seven years. Their team emailed CEOs, then followed up by phone with mature, credible callers, and the consultant flew out to sit across the table from the ones who said yes.
Why did it work? In their words: "not a lot of people were doing it."
That's the part that matters. When a buyer only knew two or three firms like yours, getting in front of them was most of the battle. If they met you and liked you, you were in.
McKinsey surveys thousands of B2B buyers every year. Before 2020, roughly half of them said they preferred meeting suppliers in person. The relationship WAS the sales process.
Then everybody moved online at the same time
In 2020, buyers got stuck at home and started researching everything online. Sellers followed them there.
McKinsey's 2020 survey found nearly every B2B company had moved its selling partly or fully online. Across all the countries it surveyed, the figure was 96%. Today McKinsey finds buyers split their contact with suppliers roughly evenly between in-person, video calls and doing their own research online. And that split has held steady since.
That strategy consultant watched it happen: "everybody else in the industry figured out how to get access to people's emails and do email drips."
And it wasn't just existing firms moving online. A flood of new ones showed up.
The Economic Innovation Group found Americans filed about 2.7 million applications to start a business in the first half of 2023. That's 52% more than the same months in 2019. By the end of that year, the total hit a record 5.5 million.
Not all of them compete with you. But some of them do. And because everything moved online, every one of them can reach your buyers.
The search firm owner feels it: "We are consistently losing business to either lower priced competitors or newer competitors or the shiny new penny."
What that did to your buyer
Your buyer used to know two or three firms like yours.
Now they've seen twenty.
They've read the websites. They've gotten the emails. They've heard "trusted partner" and "proven results" from every one of you.
Eugene Schwartz, who wrote the copywriting textbook Breakthrough Advertising in 1966, had a name for this. He called it market sophistication. When a market has only heard from one or two sellers, a plain claim works. "We help companies like yours grow." Once it's heard from dozens, that same claim slides right off. They've heard it. They don't believe it anymore.
My view: COVID pushed a lot of B2B markets up that ladder in about a year and a half.
6sense surveyed nearly 4,000 business buyers for its 2025 Buyer Experience Study. The average buyer compared five vendors. They'd already filled four of those five spots on day one of their search. And they were 61% of the way through deciding before they ever contacted anyone.
So here's what changed.
The old way of connecting assumed you could get to the buyer before they'd compared you to anyone.
That's gone. By the time you meet them, they already have.
Why the old fixes make it worse
When business slows down, most firms do more of what used to work.
More outreach. But now your email lands next to fifty others that sound the same. A leadership firm president told me prospects "won't even read the emails because they think it's a bot." That search firm owner thinks buyers are simply "burned on outreach."
More referrals. But you can't turn referrals up, and the search firm owner put their finger on another problem: "my network is aging."
More content. The strategy consultant pointed out that so much of what's posted on LinkedIn now is written by AI that "the value of it... is declining."
Every one of those adds to the noise your buyer is already tuning out. 🤷
What works now
Two things.
Be in front of them before they start comparing. Remember, most of the shortlist is set on day one. If they haven't heard of you before they start looking, you're probably not on it.
That's what paid traffic is for. It means paying Facebook, Instagram or Google to show an ad to people who look like your best clients, week after week, whether or not they're shopping yet. When something changes and they start looking, your name is already one they know.
Say something the other twenty aren't saying.
This is where most firms get it wrong. They run ads that sound like everyone else's website.
We run ads for a retirement planning firm. When we tested what their prospects actually responded to, the topics advisors usually lead with came in near the bottom. Inflation, long-term care, leaving a legacy.
The winner was permission. People who saved for 35 years and can't make themselves spend it without "feeling like I'm making a mistake every time I pull from my portfolio."
That isn't what advisors usually talk about. I think that's a big part of why it worked.
One more thing worth knowing. A coach I spoke with this summer told me COVID was "probably my best time in business in 20 plus years." Why? "You got to be able to pivot. COVID taught me that." In their words, "I was ready for it when it happened." They were already where the buyers were heading.
What this looks like from your side of the desk
I run an agency that runs ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google for B2B firms and books calls with buyers on their calendars. Here's how it works if you've never done it.
We find what your buyers haven't heard yet. Before real money goes in, we write a handful of short ads, each describing your buyer's problem a different way, mostly in the words your best clients used. We run them for a few days on a small budget. The ones your buyers respond to tell us what stands out in YOUR market.
We keep you in front of the right people. Those ads run to people who look like your best clients, so you're a familiar name before they start comparing.
The ready ones book a call. They tap the ad, land on one short page about you, answer a few quick questions so you only talk to people who fit, and pick a time on your calendar. Reminders go out so they actually show up.
You own all of it, and you pay per qualified call. Everything runs from an ad account in your company's name. You and I agree on what a qualified call is before we start, and that's what you pay us for. Not clicks, and not no-shows.
If your business hasn't felt the same since 2020 and you can't quite put your finger on why, book a strategy call with me. Tell me how you were getting clients before COVID and how you're getting them now. I'll tell you honestly whether ads can close that gap for you.