More than half of consumer brands lose sight of a lead once it reaches the people who close it. In Invoca’s 2026 Broken Funnel Report, released Nov. 10, 56% of B2C marketers said they lose track of leads once they reach a dealer, franchise or local branch, and 74% of those running AI agents said they cannot fully track an agent-handled lead from first click to conversion.
Invoca commissioned the research firm Gather to survey 451 US B2C marketing leaders at companies with 100 or more employees in automotive, healthcare, home services, financial services and telecom, between Sept. 14 and Oct. 5. Only 27% of marketers running AI agents use revenue, bookings or conversion rate as the agents’ primary KPI. Response times are also overrated: 84% of marketers say they answer web leads within an hour, while 36% of consumers in Invoca’s 2026 B2C Buyer Experience Report say they hear back that fast. One in four marketers lose 20% or more of inbound leads to slow or missed responses.
What it means for the sales side
“When prospective buyers start conversations with a brand, the AI agent is effectively a new sales channel,” said Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca. Sales channels are measured at the close, and the close happens after the handoff the survey says most teams cannot see.
In our reading, the fix belongs to sales operations as much as to marketing. An agent conversation should enter the CRM as a lead source with an owner, and the dealer or branch that takes it should write the outcome back to that record. Without that loop, a team cannot do the lead-level revenue attribution boards now ask for, and the response-time gap stays a routing problem nobody owns.
Source: Invoca via PR Newswire
