Cycles and Secular Changes^™

58.5 percent of United States searches end without a click. Industrial sales and marketing did not hit a rough patch. It crossed a structural break.

Ed's long form paper on why the SEO to form fill model that drove industrial marketing for a decade stopped working, what actually changed underneath it, and what replaces it.

Download the paper

Ungated. No form, no gate, no follow up sequence. Download it, or send it to whoever needs to see it.

58.5%

Of United States searches end in zero clicks

SparkToro, 2024. The number that ended the traffic to form fill model industrial marketers built their decade on.

This is not a cycle. Cycles come back.

Buyers are roughly 70 percent through their journey before they contact a rep. AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity answer the question without sending the click. HubSpot's own blog lost roughly 27 percent of its organic traffic.

The uncomfortable part is the base rate: heavy industry is about 0.3 percent of Google volume and only 0.4 percent of searches go to paid ads, so industrial marketers were never playing a volume game. What changed is that the small volume there was stopped arriving at all.

The paper was written arguing 2025 was the watershed year. Reading it now, the argument holds and the date moved. It closes on what works instead: be the source the answer engines cite, and make the material worth citing.

Primary CTA · 15 Minutes · No Pitch · No Sequence

Want Ed to walk through it with you?

Fifteen minutes. Bring the marketing plan you are about to approve. Ed will tell you which parts of it are still built for a market that no longer exists. No pitch, no proposal cycle, no follow up automation, and a referral if he is not the right fit.

An honest read on your sales team. In 15 minutes.

No pitch deck. No proposal cycle. No follow-up automation. Ed asks sharp diagnostic questions about your organic growth challenge and gives you an honest read on what's actually happening.

A clear next step, a better referral, or a few things you can do this week
Ed's read on whether your sales problem is people, process, or strategy
If Ed isn't the right fit, he'll tell you who is

Ed Marsh

Consultant · Speaker · Director · Author · Veteran

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Cycles and Secular Changes™

This is not a cycle. Cycles come back.

Want Ed to walk through it with you?

An honest read on your sales team. In 15 minutes.

Cycles and Secular Changes^™