75% of Indian B2B marketers say deal cycles are taking longer: Report

Ahead of its annual B2B marketing event, B2Believe, LinkedIn released its 2025 Global B2B Marketing Outlook, revealing key challenges and shifts shaping business-to-business (B2B) marketing. According to the report, 75% of Indian B2B marketers say it now takes longer to make decisions and close sales amid shrinking budgets and tighter spending scrutiny.

The global survey, which gathered insights from 7,000 B2B marketers, highlights how marketers are increasingly relying on full-funnel marketing strategies to build trust and drive conversions. The data shows that maintaining an always-on brand presence among targeted audiences can lead to a 10% lift in conversions, while brand-building content increases lead effectiveness by 1.4 times. Additionally, 88% of marketers say earning audience trust is now as important as reaching larger audiences.

Commenting on the report, Sachin Sharma, Director, Marketing Solutions at LinkedIn India, said, “As buyer groups expand and scrutiny tightens, full-funnel integration has become India’s most dependable path to B2B growth. When trust, relevance and action reinforce each other, outcomes compound. At LinkedIn, we’re enabling marketers to build this momentum by turning trusted engagement into real influence, and influence into measurable business impact, because in B2B, trust still decides the winner.”

Ganesh Kiran, Head of Growth and Digital Marketing at Zoho Workplace, said the platform helped them address common pain points. “Our objective was very clear. We wanted to address common business frustrations with disconnected office apps, complex contracts, and privacy violations and highlight Zoho Workplace as a better, unified alternative. LinkedIn’s targeted B2B audience and video-first innovation, like Connected TV, allowed us to scale our message in a brand-safe environment.”

The report also notes that 95% of B2B marketers view in-person events as one of the most effective tactics for generating direct sales, followed closely by online events (97%). In response, the platform announced enhancements to its Events platform to help marketers manage, promote, and measure events more efficiently.

The updates include ON24 integration for streamlined event creation and promotion on LinkedIn, and Cvent data syncing to improve lead targeting and audience expansion.

It further adds a Lead generation objective for event ads, allowing automatic lead routing to CRMs through integrations with Integrate and ON24.

According to a whitepaper from the platform’s B2B Institute, titled Easy to Find: Being Where B2B Buying Happens, expanding into underused channels like events can help brands boost visibility and incremental reach.

As budgets tighten, 84% of Indian B2B CMOs say proving return on investment (ROI) has become increasingly important over the past two years. Marketers are shifting focus from surface metrics like clicks to deeper outcome-based measurements.

Jae Oh, Head of Ads Measurement at LinkedIn, shared three key strategies for rethinking measurement:

1. Measure what drives growth, focusing on incrementality and company-level attribution.
2. Prioritize outcomes over optics, aligning marketing with sales to track lead quality and revenue impact.
3. Integrate awareness and performance metrics to link brand health with conversion efficiency.