In B2B marketing, it is essential to become the commercial marketer – someone who thinks about revenue, ROI and business goals over isolated marketing metrics and campaigns. And in order to achieve this, you need to master six essential skills, with one of them being collaboration skills – the ability to build sustainable relationships with both internal and external stakeholders. In this blog, Leeya Hendricks, Managing Director, Hark Consultants shares the importance of this capability.
In a platform-driven economy, growth no longer happens through linear funnels. It happens through collaboration, co-creation, and the interactions between people, partners, processes, and technology. The way customers make decisions – and the way organisations create value – has changed dramatically. This shift is especially visible in B2B marketing, where buying journeys are complex, multi-stakeholder, risk-sensitive, and increasingly shaped by ecosystems rather than individual brands.
In The Platform Playbook : The Marketer’s Guide to Designing, Scaling and Leading Platform Growth, I explore this shift in depth: the move from isolated touchpoints to interconnected systems; from one-way communication to multidirectional engagement; and from transactional exchanges to dynamic value flows across networks. Marketing is evolving from delivering campaigns to orchestrating shared value across an ecosystem.
AI, automation, and digital platforms have accelerated this transformation – but the shift is fundamentally human. It is shaped by how we collaborate, co-create, and design environments where customers, partners, communities, and contributors can interact in ways that benefit everyone involved. This is the shift from funnels to ecosystems, and it is redefining how B2B organisations grow, compete and scale.
Why funnels no longer reflect how growth happens
For decades, marketing relied on the funnel: a linear, sequential path that customers move through from awareness to conversion. It reflected a world where brands controlled the message, channels were limited, and customer journeys were predictable.
That world no longer exists.
Today:
- Customers navigate fluidly across devices, platforms, and conversations
- Influence comes not only from brands but also from partners, peers, and communities
- Value is co-created, not simply delivered to a passive buyer
- Platforms and ecosystems shape expectations and define interactions
- The limitations of the funnel are not just structural – they’re conceptual. Funnels assume progression. But modern growth requires understanding connections.
Customer loops vs Ecosystem engagement
As organisations moved beyond the funnel, many adopted customer loops – models focused on re-engaging the same individual through loyalty, feedback, personalisation, and continuous interaction. Customer loops deepen the relationship with a single user and help brands maintain ongoing engagement.
But ecosystems behave in entirely different ways, extending this idea several steps further.
Ecosystems don’t operate as loops – they operate as networks
Where a customer loop reconnects one person to value, ecosystem engagement reconnects multiple actors and amplifies value across the system.
Ecosystem engagement includes:
- Customers
- Partners
- Complementors
- Contributors
- Creators
- Communities
- Influencers
- External experts
- Shared data and insight flows
- Adjacent products and platforms
Ecosystem engagement is:
- Non-linear
- Multi-directional
- Dynamic and adaptive
- Shaped by parallel interactions
- More like a web or constellation than a cycle
Customer loops re-engage the individual, whereas ecosystem engagement re-engages the entire network. This networked behaviour – and the value that emerges from it – is what makes ecosystems a fundamentally more powerful model for growth.
From campaigns to connected systems
As organisations 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 far richer understanding of how interactions unfold, how incentives influence behaviour, and how different actors – from customers to partners to internal teams – participate in creating and exchanging value.
Seeing the full value chain
The first shift is the ability to see the full value chain. Growth now depends on understanding not just the customer journey, but the wider set of relationships and exchanges that surround it. This includes recognising where friction slows progress, where collaboration accelerates outcomes, and where partnerships can unlock scale. AI and data bring clarity to many of these patterns, but it is human interpretation that gives them meaning and helps organisations decide where to act.
Orchestrating actors, not activities
The second shift is the move from managing activities to orchestrating actors. Ecosystems thrive on coordination. Marketing plays a pivotal role in bringing cross-functional teams together, aligning product, commercial, and technology groups around shared goals, and enabling partners, complementors, and communities to participate in ways that strengthen the whole system. This orchestration fosters trust, shared understanding, and momentum – qualities that cannot be generated through isolated campaigns. This is a defining capability in enterprise B2B, SaaS, fintech, professional services, and regulated industries, where coordination directly impacts customer trust, adoption, and lifetime value.
Connecting marketing to enterprise value
The third shift is connecting marketing more directly to enterprise value. In an ecosystem context, the emphasis moves from producing outputs to enabling outcomes. Marketing contributes by shaping the conditions that lead to value creation, deeper engagement, and long-term participation. Decisions are framed not around immediate conversion, but around their impact on scalability, efficiency, risk, and the organisation’s strategic positioning.
This is where marketing makes its commercial contribution clear – not through the volume of activity, but through the quality of the environment it helps to build.
Thinking in three movements:
Design → Orchestrate → Scale
Drawing on themes from The Platform Playbook, a practical way to move beyond the funnel is to approach ecosystem growth as three interconnected movements.
1. Design the system
The first step in moving beyond the funnel is intentional system design. This is where marketers work closely with product, commercial, and technology teams to clarify how value will move across the ecosystem. It involves shaping the value proposition for different actors, understanding the motivations and incentives that bring them together, and identifying the moments where co-creation can genuinely occur. Design also requires determining how the platform or offering fits within the wider landscape – not as a standalone product, but as part of a connected, evolving environment. This stage lays the groundwork for shared value and sets the direction for everything that follows.
2. Orchestrate the interactions
Once the ecosystem has been designed, the work shifts to orchestration. This is where ideas become interactions. Marketing plays a pivotal role in coordinating internal teams, aligning product and technology groups, and enabling partners and contributors to participate in meaningful ways. It involves nurturing insight flows, supporting early collaboration efforts, and ensuring that the environment encourages interaction rather than fragmentation. In networked systems, signals shift quickly – which is why orchestration requires agility, adaptability, and an ability to steer momentum while staying responsive to what unfolds across the ecosystem.
3. Scale what works
As the ecosystem begins to gain traction, the focus turns to scaling what creates the most value. This often means deepening relationships with partners, evolving platform capabilities, and strengthening the recurring exchanges that build trust and interdependence. It also involves nurturing communities and advocates who play a central role in sustaining engagement and expanding reach. Scaling in an ecosystem context is not about doing more – it is about amplifying what works, extending into adjacent opportunities, and allowing value to compound through participation.
Why this matters for growth
Organisations that embrace ecosystem-led thinking unlock forms of growth that traditional funnel models simply cannot achieve. Customers and partners engage more deeply because they feel part of something collaborative rather than transactional. Advocacy becomes richer and more authentic, emerging from communities and relationships rather than campaigns alone.
Acquisition becomes more efficient as value is carried through networks instead of being pushed through linear stages.
Lifetime value increases because engagement is continuous, multidirectional, and reinforced by multiple actors – not just by the brand. Internally, teams align faster because they are working within a shared system rather than separate silos. Innovation accelerates as contributors, partners, and customers co-create, bringing diverse perspectives into the environment. And ultimately, growth becomes more scalable and sustainable because it is powered by networks, not pipelines.
Ecosystem-led organisations don’t simply convert customers – they cultivate participation, connection, and shared value.
Growth becomes less about pushing people through stages and more about enabling participation, contribution, and connection.
The future is collaborative – and marketers will shape it
As explored throughout The Platform Playbook, strategy is no longer a static plan. It is a discipline of orchestration, alignment, and co-creation. The shift from funnels to ecosystems reflects a fundamental reality: growth now emerges from collaboration, not control.
We have moved:
- From ownership to access
- From one-way messaging to multidirectional dialogue
- From products as endpoints to platforms as enablers
- From transactions to relationships
- From isolated value to shared value
Platforms are not just technologies – they are social systems. Constellations of people, processes, and technologies working together to create, exchange, and expand value.
Their power comes from:
- Diverse contributions
- Co-creation
- Network effects
- Trust
- Participation
- Shared purpose
And this is where marketing plays a defining role
Marketers who think in systems – who connect insight to action and actors to outcomes – will help shape the collaborative structures organisations need to thrive. Their ability to design for interaction, support alignment, and enable co-creation transforms ecosystems from conceptual models into engines of growth.
Entering 2026, it’s evident that the B2B organisations that succeed in the next decade will be those that operate seamlessly across networks – where collaboration is embedded, not forced. And marketing will guide that shift: enabling participation, nurturing communities, and unlocking new, scalable forms of value.
If you’re looking to upskill yourself in collaboration and communication skills, as well as the other five, check out our report here.
