B2B buying process is not what it used to be a decade ago.

Imagine a salesperson preparing for a discovery call. They have reviewed the CRM notes, prepared their opening questions, rehearsed the value proposition. They believe – because this is what the sales process was designed to produce – that the next 45 minutes will influence the outcome.

The data says otherwise.

In most B2B purchases the call that the sales rep is preparing for is not the moment the deal is won or lost. It is a confirmation exercise. The buyer has already researched the category, identified their requirements, shortlisted vendors, ranked their preferences, and in many cases picked a favourite. The discovery call is an opportunity to validate that choice or, more often, to confirm it.

This is not a pessimistic view of sales. It is a description of how B2B purchasing actually works in 2026, documented across multiple years of research from 6sense, Forrester, Gartner, and others. And understanding it changes how you think about where a pipeline is built, where it is lost, and what tools actually influence the outcome.

Five numbers that describe the modern B2B buying journey used as a reference in this article:

• 83% of the total buying journey happens without vendors in the room (Gartner)
• 95% of the time, the winning vendor is already on the Day One shortlist (6sense, 2025)
• 81% of buyers have already picked a preferred vendor at the time of first contact (6sense, 2024)
• 94% of B2B buyers now use LLMs during their buying process (6sense, 2025)
• 67% of buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience (Gartner, August–September 2025)

How Far the B2B Buying Process Has Moved

The statistic most sales leaders have encountered is the one from a CEB and Google study published in 2015: the average B2B buyer completes 57% of their purchase decision before engaging a sales representative. It was a striking finding when it was first published, and it became one of the most widely cited figures in sales and marketing. What has received less attention is that this number has only moved in one direction since then.

By 2019, Forrester had updated the figure to 70%: buyers were completing approximately 70% of their buying journey independently before engaging with vendors. By the mid-2020s, Gartner’s research had refined the framing further – and in a way that makes the shift feel even more significant. Rather than expressing it as a percentage of the journey, Gartner found that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time with potential vendors. The remaining 83% is self-directed, conducted through independent research, peer conversations, review platforms, and now, AI tools.

That progression is not a series of measurements of the same thing. It is a trend line pointing in a consistent direction: towards buyers who depend on vendors less, who do more of their own thinking earlier, and who arrive at first contact having already formed a substantive view.

Each new information tool that has become widely available – Google, G2 and Capterra, LinkedIn peer networks, and most recently LLMs – reduces the information asymmetry that once made buyers dependent on vendor conversations. The dynamic that produced the 57% figure in 2015 was already changing. By 2026, the asymmetry has effectively reversed: buyers often know more about the competitive landscape, peer experiences, and implementation realities than the sales representative they are speaking to.

The Shortlist Is Built Before You Know the Buyer Exists

The trend from the past decade tells you buyers are independent. But research tells you something more specific and more consequential for how you think about pipelines.

It is not just that buyers complete most of their journey before contacting vendors. It is that they complete the selection phase (the work of identifying options, building a shortlist, ranking preferences, and choosing a favourite) before that contact happens. The vendor discovery and evaluation work is done in the dark, without you knowing it is occurring.

The 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report, based on nearly 4,000 B2B buyers across North America and the UK, documents this in precise terms. 94% of buying groups rank their shortlist in order of preference before initiating contact with any seller. They contact the vendor they have ranked first, and purchase from them in nearly 80% of cases. 

Making the shortlist is not enough. You need to be ranked first on it.

The permanence of the shortlist is equally striking. In 95% of purchases, the winning vendor is already on the Day One shortlist – up from 85% the year before. 

Forrester’s 2024 Buyers’ Journey Survey found a parallel result from a different angle: 92% of buyers start the purchasing process with at least one vendor already in mind, and 41% have already selected a single preferred vendor before formal evaluation begins. Among C-suite buyers, 47% begin with a preferred vendor. Among solo decision-makers, 63% do.

The implication is uncomfortable but direct. If your sales team’s primary activity is discovery calls with inbound leads, most of those calls are occurring after the most important part of the decision has already been made. The call is a validation exercise. The deal was won or lost in a research phase no one in your CRM ever saw.

What the 6sense shortlist data means for late-stage sales effort:

• If you are the first-ranked vendor at first contact:  the call confirms a preference that already exists. Your job is not to sell – it is to validate and not lose.
• If you are the second or third-ranked vendor:  you are in a genuine competition, but you are swimming against a strong current. 80% of deals go to the preferred vendor.
• If you are not on the shortlist at all:  no amount of outreach, follow-up, or sales skill changes the outcome. You are not in the evaluation.

Buyers Are Actively Avoiding You

The self-directed buying journey is sometimes framed as an inconvenient reality that sales teams need to work around. Research suggests it is something more deliberate: buyers are not just doing more research independently, they are consciously choosing to do so, and protecting their research time from vendor influence.

The Gartner survey of 646 B2B buyers conducted in August and September 2025 found that 67% prefer a sales-free buying experience. An earlier, broader Gartner study placed that figure at 75%. A 2023 RAIN Group study found that 71% of decision-makers actively want to control the buying process themselves.

The reasons are not irrational. They are grounded in the experience of dealing with a sales process that was designed for a different era:

• Risk minimisation: 68% of B2B buyers research intensively to reduce the perceived risk of making the wrong decision (Gartner). Independent research, peer networks, and third-party review platforms feel more trustworthy than vendor-supplied information.
• Competence demonstration: For 62% of decision-makers, independent research is a way to demonstrate expertise internally (Gartner). Arriving at a vendor conversation already informed signals competence to colleagues and executives.
• Trust deficit: Only 40% of B2B buyers trust that salespeople fully understand their needs (Edelman Trust Barometer). If buyers do not expect the conversation to be useful to them, they postpone it.

AI Is Making the Anonymous Research Phase Faster and Deeper

If the trend from 57% to 83% self-directed research already represented a fundamental shift in the b2b buying process, the widespread adoption of AI tools in the buying process is accelerating it further and making it more challenging to sellers.

The 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report, drawing on nearly 4,000 real buyers making purchases with a median annual value of $250,000–$400,000, found that 94% of B2B buyers now use large language models during their buying process. Forrester confirmed this independently, finding that LLM adoption in B2B purchasing went from near zero in January 2024 to 89% by mid-2024. This makes it one of the fastest adoption curves for any enterprise technology on record.

Understanding how buyers use AI matters as much as knowing that they use it. The 6sense research is careful to distinguish what AI is and is not replacing in the buying process:

• Where buyers use AI:  primarily in the middle of their journey for synthesis and comparison (comparing vendors side by side), for analysing customer reviews at scale, for drafting RFP requirements, and for pressure-testing their own reasoning. AI is an efficiency tool for existing research, not a discovery tool for finding vendors.
• Where buyers do not use AI:  for final validation. Despite 94% LLM adoption, buyers still report an average of 16 direct interactions with the winning vendor during their journey – statistically unchanged from 2023 and 2024. For purchases of $250,000–$400,000, buyers still require direct vendor engagement to validate. AI accelerates the pre-contact phase but it does not replace the validation phase.

What this means practically: the anonymous research phase is not only longer than sellers realise but it is now also faster. Buyers using AI can synthesise competitive information, build comparison frameworks, and shortlist vendors in hours rather than weeks. They arrive at first contact more informed, with sharper questions, and with preferences that are harder to shift.

There is a darker dimension of this new b2b buying process too. A significant portion of this research now happens in channels that are invisible to your analytics. When a buyer asks an LLM to compare your product with three competitors, that interaction leaves no trace in Google Analytics. The dark funnel (the anonymous research phase that precedes any CRM entry) is getting darker. 

A quarter of B2B buyers now say generative AI has overtaken traditional search as their primary vendor research tool (Demand Gen Report, 2026). Research is moving into channels where you cannot see it, cannot influence it directly, and cannot even know it is happening.

Remember: The Decision Window Is NOT the Sales Call

If you put the data together, a picture emerges that is different from the one most B2B sales processes are built around.

The conventional b2b buying process model assumes that pipeline is built through outreach, that leads are generated at the top of a funnel, and that sales skill applied during discovery and negotiation determines who wins. The data suggests that by the time any of this happens, the most important decisions have already been made in a research phase that your CRM never captured.

The implication is not that sales skill does not matter. It matters significantly – for confirming a preference that already exists, for handling the 20% of cases where the preferred vendor stumbles, and for managing the validation phase with buyers who arrived ready to say “yes”. But it matters less than the question of whether you were on the shortlist at all. And the shortlist was built without you in the room.

This shifts the strategic question from “how do we improve our sales process?” to “how do we build preference before the sales process begins?”

There are two parallel answers:

• Long-term: build awareness, credibility, and preference in the channels where the anonymous research phase happens – through thought leadership that gets cited, content that ranks and gets referenced by LLMs, reviews and case studies that appear on third-party platforms, and peer network presence. This is slow work but it compounds. It determines whether you are on the Day One shortlist.
• Immediate: when buyers do arrive on your website – mid-journey, already with a shortlist forming, validating rather than exploring – engage them in that moment. Not with a form that most will not fill in. With a conversation that meets them where they are: at 70% of their journey, ready to evaluate, looking for something or someone to confirm their thinking.

This is the window Iliana AI was built for. When a buyer arrives on your website at 70% of their journey, they are not browsing, but validating. They are looking at your pricing page, your integration documentation, your comparison content. They have questions specific to their situation. 

Iliana AI is an AI sales agent that engages that visitor in real time, understands what they are evaluating and why, qualifies their specific context, and routes the right next step – before they leave, before they return to their LLM to compare you with a competitor, and before your sales team is even aware the visit happened.

The previous article in this series showed that 70–80% of inbound leads never reach a sales conversation. 

This article explains why that matters more than it might seem: the leads that disappear are not random website visitors. They are buyers in the middle of active evaluation – and the moment they arrive is, in many cases, the last moment you have to influence their decision.

If you want to address this trend and challenge the right way and get the most out of it for your business, contact our team today and get a free demo of Iliana. Our solution is designed and trained on the most complex sales frameworks that would help in engaging, nurturing and turning a website visitor into a qualified lead for your business.