B2B Buyers Do Their Research Online. Here Is What That Means for Sales

B2B buyers complete a significant portion of their research online before they ever speak to a salesperson. The exact percentage varies by source, industry, and deal complexity, but the directional truth has been consistent for years: by the time a prospect contacts your sales team, they have already formed views about your category, your competitors, and probably your brand. What that means for how you structure sales and marketing is less obvious than most vendors would have you believe.

The statistics matter less than the behaviour they point to. B2B buying is no longer a linear process that begins when a salesperson picks up the phone. It is a distributed, self-directed research process that sales teams often cannot see, cannot influence in real time, and frequently misread when they do get involved.

What the Research Actually Says, and What It Does Not

You have probably seen the claim that B2B buyers complete 57%, 67%, or sometimes 70% of their purchase decision before engaging a sales rep. These figures have circulated for years, often attributed to CEB (now Gartner) research from the early 2010s. They get repeated in decks, cited in vendor content, and used to justify content marketing budgets. I have used them myself in pitches.

When I was judging the Effie Awards, one of the things that became clear across submissions was how often marketers reached for a compelling statistic without interrogating whether it actually supported their argument. The 57% figure is a good example. Even if it was accurate at the time of the original research, it was drawn from a specific sample, at a specific moment, in a specific category of B2B purchase. Applying it universally to every B2B sale in 2024 is a stretch.

What is not a stretch is the underlying behaviour. Buyers do research online. They read category content, compare vendors, look at review sites, check LinkedIn, watch product demos, and form opinions long before they want to talk to anyone. The precise percentage is less important than the structural implication: your digital presence is participating in sales conversations you do not know are happening.

Forrester has tracked B2B buyer behaviour extensively, and their work on how trust operates between sales and marketing points to a connected problem. When marketing produces content that does not match what sales is saying in meetings, buyers notice the inconsistency. The research-heavy buyer who arrives at a sales conversation having already read your white papers and case studies is not going to be impressed if the salesperson starts from scratch.

Why the Buying Committee Complicates Everything

One of the more useful insights from recent B2B buying behaviour research is not about online research percentages at all. It is about the number of people involved in a typical B2B purchase decision. Depending on deal size and organisational complexity, that number is often six to ten people, sometimes more.

Each of those people is doing their own research. They are not all reading the same content, asking the same questions, or weighing the same criteria. A CFO evaluating a software purchase is looking at total cost of ownership and implementation risk. A department head is looking at workflow disruption and whether the tool actually does what the vendor claims. An IT lead is looking at security, integration, and support. They may all be researching the same vendor simultaneously, through entirely different channels, and arriving at different conclusions.

I ran an agency for several years where we managed technology client accounts with exactly this buying structure. The campaigns that worked were the ones we built around the full committee, not a single decision-maker persona. When we built content only for the economic buyer, we won the budget conversation and lost the internal champion conversation. When we built for the champion and ignored the economic buyer, we got enthusiasm without approval. Getting this right required understanding that the research experience was plural, not singular.

This is where segmentation thinking becomes genuinely useful rather than just a planning exercise. If you treat the buying committee as one audience with one set of needs, your content will be relevant to some of them and irrelevant to others. The ones you miss will fill that gap with competitor content.

The Dark Funnel Problem Is Real, but Overdiagnosed

There is a category of vendor conversation that goes roughly like this: buyers are doing research you cannot track, in channels you cannot see, so you need our platform to surface the intent signals you are missing. This is not entirely wrong. There is genuine research activity happening in private Slack groups, industry forums, peer conversations, and content that does not fire a tracking pixel. Calling this the “dark funnel” is a reasonable description of a real phenomenon.

What gets oversold is the implication that this is a new problem requiring expensive new technology. Buyers have always talked to peers, attended conferences, and formed opinions through channels that marketing could not measure. The proportion of research happening in untrackable channels may have grown, but the underlying dynamic is not new.

The more useful response to the dark funnel is not more technology. It is better content in the channels that do exist, stronger relationships with the communities where your buyers congregate, and a sales process that assumes the buyer already knows something rather than treating every conversation as a blank slate. Platforms like Optimizely offer tools for personalising digital experiences based on what you do know about a visitor, which is a more tractable problem than trying to illuminate everything you do not know.

When I was growing an agency team from around 20 people to over 100, one of the consistent lessons was that chasing measurement sophistication before getting the fundamentals right was a distraction. The organisations that benefited most from better analytics were the ones that already had a clear view of what question they were trying to answer. Analytics is a perspective on reality, not a replacement for thinking clearly about what you are trying to do.

What Online Research Behaviour Actually Means for Your Content

If buyers are doing significant research before they contact sales, the logical implication is that your content needs to be present, credible, and useful during that research phase. This is not a controversial idea. What is less well executed is the specifics of what “present, credible, and useful” looks like in practice.

Present means being findable through organic search, appearing in the right industry publications, showing up in the conversations happening on LinkedIn and in professional communities, and having a review presence on the platforms your buyers check. It does not mean being everywhere. It means being where your specific buyers actually look.

Credible means that your content reflects genuine expertise rather than marketing copy dressed up as thought leadership. Buyers doing serious research can tell the difference. A white paper that answers a real question with specific, defensible reasoning will do more work than a thought leadership piece that restates obvious truths in confident language. I have reviewed hundreds of pieces of B2B content over the years and the gap between what organisations think is credible and what a sceptical buyer actually finds credible is often significant.

Useful means that the content helps the buyer make progress on their actual problem, not just on the vendor’s preferred framing of the problem. Buyers are not looking for content that tells them they need your product. They are looking for content that helps them understand their situation, evaluate their options, and build the internal case for a decision. Content that does that earns attention. Content that does not gets ignored.

BCG’s work on B2B commercial strategy, available through bcg.com, consistently points to the same conclusion from the other direction: organisations that invest in helping buyers understand their problem, not just their solution, win a disproportionate share of deals at better margins. That is a commercial argument for useful content, not just a marketing one.

The Sales Handoff Is Where Buyer Research Behaviour Gets Ignored

Understanding that buyers research online extensively is only useful if it changes something about how your sales team operates. In many organisations, it does not. Marketing produces content, tracks downloads, and passes leads to sales. Sales calls those leads and starts from the beginning, asking discovery questions the buyer has already answered through their own research. The buyer, who has spent time getting informed, finds the conversation frustrating and disengaging.

This is not a technology problem. It is an alignment problem. Sales needs to know what content a prospect has engaged with, what questions that content was designed to answer, and what stage of the research process the buyer is likely to be in. Marketing needs to produce content that maps to real buyer questions rather than internal product narratives. Both teams need a shared understanding of what a qualified, research-informed buyer looks like versus a buyer who has only just started thinking about the problem.

The sales enablement discipline exists precisely to address this gap. If you want to go deeper on how the pieces fit together, the Sales Enablement and Alignment hub on The Marketing Juice covers the full picture, from content strategy through to pipeline measurement.

One of the most consistent patterns I saw across agency clients was that the organisations with the best sales and marketing alignment were not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated technology stacks. They were the ones where sales and marketing leadership met regularly, spoke honestly about what was and was not working, and treated the buyer’s experience as a shared responsibility rather than a handoff problem.

Search Behaviour and the Long Research Window

B2B purchase cycles are long. Depending on the category, a buyer might spend weeks or months in active research before they are ready to engage a vendor. During that window, they are using search engines, reading industry publications, watching video content, and talking to peers. The search component of that behaviour is particularly important because it is measurable, and because it tells you something specific about what buyers are trying to understand.

Keyword research for B2B content is not just an SEO exercise. It is a way of understanding the questions your buyers are asking when no one is watching. The searches that happen at the beginning of a research cycle look different from the searches that happen when a buyer is close to a decision. Early searches tend to be about problems and categories. Later searches tend to be about specific vendors, comparisons, and implementation questions. Building content that addresses both ends of that spectrum, and the middle, is how you stay relevant across the full research window.

Social platforms are also part of this picture, though their role in B2B research is often overstated in the wrong direction. LinkedIn is genuinely important for B2B awareness and credibility. Other platforms are more situational. The Moz analysis of platform algorithm dynamics is a useful reminder that how content surfaces on any given platform is a function of that platform’s specific mechanics, not a universal truth about content quality. Distributing B2B content on a platform because it is popular is not the same as distributing it where your buyers actually are.

How to Use Buying Behaviour Data Without Overfitting Your Strategy

The risk with any research on B2B buying behaviour is that it gets used to justify decisions that were already made rather than to genuinely inform strategy. If you already believe that content marketing is the answer, you will find statistics about online research that support that view. If you already believe that sales needs to be more consultative, you will find data about buyer frustration with traditional sales approaches that confirms it.

The more disciplined approach is to use buying behaviour research as a prompt for questions rather than as a source of answers. If buyers are doing significant research before engaging sales, the question is not “should we produce more content?” The question is “what specific questions are our buyers trying to answer during that research phase, and are we the best available source of answers to those questions?” Those are different questions with different implications.

Similarly, if research suggests that buying committees are growing in size, the question is not “should we expand our persona library?” The question is “do we understand the specific concerns of each person in our typical buying committee, and do we have a credible response to each of those concerns?” Expanding a persona library without that underlying understanding produces more content, not better outcomes.

I have managed budgets across thirty-odd industries over two decades, and the pattern that produces wasted spend is remarkably consistent. Organisations use aggregate research findings to justify broad activity, then struggle to connect that activity to commercial outcomes. The organisations that do this well use research findings to identify specific gaps in their buyer’s experience, then build targeted responses to those gaps. The difference in return on investment is not marginal.

Tools for testing and personalising digital experiences, such as those available through Optimizely’s platform options, are most valuable when deployed against a specific hypothesis about what a buyer needs at a particular point in their research. Deploying them without that hypothesis produces data, not insight.

What Good Looks Like in Practice

Organisations that handle B2B buyer research behaviour well tend to share a few characteristics. They have a clear, specific view of what their buyers are trying to accomplish, not just who their buyers are. They produce content that is genuinely useful to buyers at different stages of the research process, not just content that is optimised for search or formatted for sharing. Their sales teams are briefed on what content exists and why, so they can reference it naturally in conversations rather than treating every prospect as if they arrived with no prior knowledge.

They also treat the research phase as an opportunity to differentiate, not just to be present. If your content is indistinguishable from your competitors’ content, being present during the research phase does not give you an advantage. It just means you are one of several similar options the buyer is considering. Differentiation in the research phase comes from having a genuinely distinct point of view on the buyer’s problem, not from better design or more frequent publishing.

The social and content distribution piece matters too, though it is downstream of the content quality question. Buffer’s thinking on social media strategy is a useful grounding point for how distribution decisions connect to commercial outcomes. The question is always whether the distribution channel reaches the buyers who matter, not whether it reaches the largest possible audience.

If you are working through how this connects to your broader sales and marketing approach, the Sales Enablement and Alignment section of The Marketing Juice is the right place to continue that thinking. The articles there cover the operational side of making buyer research behaviour work in your favour rather than against you.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions