Moving Beyond the Funnel in 2026: How Collaboration and Co-Creation Are Driving the Next Evolution of B2B Marketing
In B2B marketing, becoming a commercial marketer who prioritizes revenue, ROI, and business goals over isolated marketing metrics and campaigns is crucial. To achieve this, mastering six essential skills, including collaboration skills, is necessary. Collaboration skills involve building sustainable relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
In a platform-driven economy, growth occurs through collaboration, co-creation, and interactions between people, partners, processes, and technology. The way customers make decisions and organizations create value has changed dramatically, especially in B2B marketing, where buying journeys are complex and shaped by ecosystems rather than individual brands.
The traditional funnel model is no longer effective, as customers navigate fluidly across devices, platforms, and conversations, and influence comes from partners, peers, and communities. Value is co-created, not simply delivered to a passive buyer, and platforms and ecosystems shape expectations and define interactions.
Customer loops, which focus on re-engaging individual customers, are being replaced by ecosystem engagement, which reconnects multiple actors and amplifies value across the system. Ecosystem engagement includes customers, partners, complementors, contributors, creators, communities, influencers, external experts, and shared data and insight flows.
Ecosystem engagement is non-linear, multi-directional, dynamic, and adaptive, and is shaped by parallel interactions. It is more like a web or constellation than a cycle. Customer loops re-engage the individual, whereas ecosystem engagement re-engages the entire network.
As organizations transition into ecosystem environments, marketing evolves from delivering isolated campaigns to shaping the conditions in which value can move freely between actors. This requires a richer understanding of how interactions unfold, how incentives influence behavior, and how different actors participate in creating and exchanging value.
Three key shifts are necessary for marketing to thrive in an ecosystem context:
1. **Seeing the full value chain**: Understanding the wider set of relationships and exchanges that surround the customer journey.
2. **Orchestrating actors, not activities**: Moving from managing activities to orchestrating actors, and bringing cross-functional teams together to align around shared goals.
3. **Connecting marketing to enterprise value**: Emphasizing the contribution of marketing to enterprise value, and framing decisions around their impact on scalability, efficiency, risk, and strategic positioning.
A practical approach to moving beyond the funnel is to approach ecosystem growth as three interconnected movements:
1. **Design the system**: Intentional system design, where marketers work closely with product, commercial, and technology teams to clarify how value will move across the ecosystem.
2. **Orchestrate the interactions**: Coordinating internal teams, aligning product and technology groups, and enabling partners and contributors to participate in meaningful ways.
3. **Scale what works**: Scaling what creates the most value, deepening relationships with partners, evolving platform capabilities, and strengthening recurring exchanges that build trust and interdependence.
Organizations that embrace ecosystem-led thinking unlock forms of growth that traditional funnel models cannot achieve. Customers and partners engage more deeply, advocacy becomes richer and more authentic, acquisition becomes more efficient, and lifetime value increases.
The future of marketing is collaborative, and marketers will shape it by designing for interaction, supporting alignment, and enabling co-creation. By mastering collaboration and communication skills, marketers can guide the shift towards ecosystem-led growth and unlock new, scalable forms of value.