B2B Buyers Have Changed. Most Sales Teams Haven’t.

B2B buyers in 2025 are doing the majority of their evaluation before they ever speak to a salesperson. They arrive at conversations already formed in their views, having consulted peers, read independent content, and stress-tested your positioning against competitors. The sales process, as most organisations still run it, was designed for a buyer who no longer exists.

That gap between how buyers actually behave and how vendors are structured to sell is where deals stall, pipelines inflate, and revenue forecasts quietly fall apart. Closing it requires more than a new CRM or a refreshed pitch deck. It requires a clear-eyed look at what modern B2B buyers are actually doing, and an honest reckoning with whether your go-to-market approach is built around them or around the internal convenience of your own sales team.

The Buyer Who No Longer Needs Your Sales Process

There is a version of B2B sales that most organisations still run on, at least operationally. A prospect enters the funnel through some form of marketing activity, a salesperson makes contact, runs a discovery call, delivers a demo, and moves through a qualification and proposal stage. It is a logical sequence. It was also designed for a world where the vendor controlled the information.

That world is gone. Buyers now arrive at your sales process already educated, often already opinionated, and sometimes already half-decided. They have read your G2 or Trustpilot reviews. They have asked in a Slack community whether anyone has used your product. They have found a LinkedIn thread from eighteen months ago where someone described a problem with your onboarding. They have done all of this before you even know they exist.

I have seen this play out across dozens of client engagements. When we were building out the go-to-market approach for a B2B SaaS client a few years ago, the sales team was convinced their biggest challenge was lead volume. When we actually talked to buyers who had evaluated and not converted, the story was different. Those buyers had formed strong views about the product before they ever got on a call, and the sales process had done nothing to address the specific concerns they had already developed independently. The leads were not the problem. The assumption that the sales conversation was where evaluation happened was the problem.

If you are thinking about how this connects to your broader commercial strategy, the go-to-market and growth strategy hub covers the structural decisions that sit behind buyer engagement, including how to align your channels, messaging, and team around the way buyers actually move.

Buying Groups Are Bigger and More Complicated Than They Were

One of the most consistent shifts in B2B purchasing over the past several years is the expansion of the buying group. Decisions that might once have sat with a single budget holder or department head now involve procurement, IT, legal, finance, and multiple end users, often simultaneously. The more significant the contract value, the more stakeholders are involved, and each of those stakeholders brings a different set of priorities, risk tolerances, and evaluation criteria.

This creates a structural problem for most B2B marketing and sales operations. Marketing tends to build content and campaigns around a single persona, usually the person they think makes the decision. Sales tends to build relationships with a single champion and rely on that person to sell internally. Both approaches underestimate the complexity of how the decision is actually made.

The procurement team evaluating your contract terms has different concerns than the IT lead assessing your security posture, and both of them have different concerns than the end users who will live with the product daily. A vendor who builds their go-to-market around only one of these audiences will find that deals stall at stages they did not anticipate, because someone in the buying group who was never properly engaged raises an objection that nobody on the sales team saw coming.

BCG has written about the importance of coalition-building in commercial transformation, and while the context is broader than B2B sales specifically, the principle applies directly. Getting a complex organisation to change what it buys requires engaging multiple functions, not just the one that holds the budget.

Dark Social Is Doing More Work Than Your Attribution Model Suggests

Ask most B2B marketers where their best leads come from and they will give you an answer shaped by their attribution model. Paid search. Organic. Email. Events. What they will rarely say is “a private Slack channel” or “a conversation between two CFOs at a conference” or “a recommendation in a WhatsApp group for finance directors.” Not because those things are not happening, but because they are invisible to most measurement frameworks.

This is what is commonly called dark social, and in B2B it is not a marginal phenomenon. Peer recommendation has always been influential in considered purchases. What has changed is the infrastructure for it. There are now thousands of active professional communities, industry-specific forums, and private networks where buyers share vendor experiences, ask for recommendations, and warn each other about companies that overpromise. Your brand is being discussed in places you cannot see and cannot directly influence.

I ran a session a couple of years ago with a client who was spending heavily on paid acquisition and struggling to understand why their cost per acquisition kept rising despite strong brand awareness metrics. When we dug into how their actual customers had first heard of them, a significant proportion cited word of mouth or peer recommendation as the initial trigger, even when they had subsequently clicked on a paid ad before converting. The paid ad was getting the credit. The conversation in a professional network was doing the work.

The implication for go-to-market strategy is not that you should abandon measurable channels. It is that you should invest in being the vendor that gets recommended in conversations you cannot track. That means product quality, customer experience, and a reputation built over time, none of which show up cleanly in a performance dashboard but all of which drive revenue.

Self-Service Is a Buying Preference, Not Just a Product Feature

The preference for self-service in B2B has accelerated significantly. Buyers want to explore pricing, run trials, access technical documentation, and compare options without having to speak to a salesperson. This is not a generational quirk. It is a rational response to the fact that buyer time is scarce and early-stage sales conversations often add friction rather than value.

Vendors who gate everything behind a discovery call are creating unnecessary resistance. If a buyer cannot get meaningful information about your product, pricing, or capabilities without committing to a conversation, many of them will simply move to a competitor who makes that information available. The sales call should be where complex questions get answered and relationships get built, not where basic information gets exchanged for the first time.

This does not mean removing humans from the process. It means repositioning them. The buyers who want to self-serve through the early stages of evaluation are often the most qualified by the time they do engage with sales, because they have already done the work. The sales conversation that follows is more efficient, more specific, and more likely to convert.

Forrester has tracked the evolution of buyer behaviour across industries for years, and their analysis of intelligent growth models points consistently to the importance of aligning vendor behaviour with how buyers want to engage, rather than forcing buyers to adapt to vendor-preferred processes.

Content Is Now a Sales Asset, Not a Marketing Deliverable

One of the more persistent organisational failures in B2B go-to-market is the separation between what marketing produces and what sales actually needs. Marketing creates content to generate awareness and drive traffic. Sales creates decks and one-pagers to support conversations. The two rarely connect in any systematic way, and buyers feel the gap.

In a world where buyers are doing independent research before engaging with sales, every piece of content your organisation publishes is either helping or hindering that evaluation. A blog post that addresses a real objection a buyer is wrestling with is doing sales work. A case study that maps to the specific situation of a target account is doing sales work. A pricing page that gives buyers enough information to self-qualify is doing sales work. Most organisations do not think about content this way, which is why most content underperforms.

I spent a long time running agencies where the brief from a B2B client was “we need more content.” When you pushed on what they actually needed, it almost always came down to a specific commercial problem: pipeline was thin at a particular stage, a certain buyer type was not converting, a competitor was winning deals they should not have been winning. Content was the answer, but only when it was built around those specific commercial problems. Content as an activity, disconnected from those outcomes, was just a budget line.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation in go-to-market strategy makes a similar point about the need to connect marketing activity to commercial outcomes rather than treating them as parallel tracks. The organisations that do this well tend to outperform those that treat marketing and sales as separate functions with separate goals.

Speed and Relevance at First Contact Still Matter Disproportionately

Despite everything that has shifted in B2B buyer behaviour, one thing has not changed: when a buyer does reach out, how quickly and how relevantly you respond has an outsized impact on whether you win the deal. This has been true for years, and it remains true now, arguably more so because buyers who have done extensive independent research before contacting you have a low tolerance for generic, slow, or poorly informed responses.

A buyer who has spent three weeks evaluating options, reading documentation, and consulting peers before submitting an enquiry is not looking for a discovery call where you ask them what their biggest challenges are. They already know what their challenges are. They want to know whether you can specifically address them, and they want to know quickly. A slow response or a generic follow-up sequence signals that the vendor experience is going to mirror the sales experience, and that is a risk buyers will often decline to take.

This is an area where alignment between marketing and sales creates real commercial value. If marketing has done the work of understanding what buyers are researching before they reach out, sales can be equipped to have more relevant first conversations. The handoff between the two functions is where a lot of this value gets lost in practice, not because the data does not exist, but because it is not shared in a way that is usable in a live sales context.

What Vendors Who Are Winning Are Actually Doing Differently

The vendors performing well in B2B markets in 2025 share some consistent characteristics. None of them are particularly exotic. They have just built their commercial operations around how buyers actually behave rather than how they would prefer buyers to behave.

They have made pricing and product information accessible without forcing a sales conversation. They have built content that addresses real buyer questions at each stage of evaluation, not just awareness-stage material. They have invested in their reputation in the communities where their buyers talk to each other. They have aligned their sales and marketing teams around a shared understanding of the buyer, including the full buying group, not just the primary contact. And they have built the operational capacity to respond quickly and relevantly when buyers do engage.

None of this requires a significant technology investment. Most of it requires organisational honesty about the gap between how you are currently structured and how your buyers actually move. That honesty is harder than it sounds, because it often means acknowledging that the sales process you have optimised over years is optimised for the wrong thing.

Growth hacking frameworks and acquisition tactics get a lot of attention in B2B circles. Semrush’s breakdown of growth hacking examples is useful for understanding the tactical options available. But tactics only compound when the underlying commercial model is aligned with buyer behaviour. Without that alignment, you are accelerating a process that is already leaking.

Forrester’s research on go-to-market struggles across complex industries highlights how even well-resourced vendors fail when their commercial approach does not account for the realities of how buyers evaluate and decide. The pattern holds across sectors: the problem is rarely the product. It is the gap between the product and the buyer’s decision-making process.

The Measurement Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Most B2B organisations are measuring the wrong things, or measuring the right things badly. Pipeline volume, MQL counts, and conversion rates by stage are useful data points, but they describe activity rather than buyer behaviour. They tell you what happened inside your funnel. They tell you very little about what buyers were doing before they entered it, or why the ones who did not convert chose not to.

The measurement challenge in B2B is compounded by the dark social problem. A significant portion of the influence on a buying decision is happening in places you cannot track. Attribution models that credit the last touchpoint before conversion are systematically misrepresenting how buyers actually decided. This leads to investment decisions that optimise for measurable channels at the expense of the unmeasurable ones that are often doing more work.

I have sat in enough board meetings and quarterly reviews to know that this is an uncomfortable conversation to have. The finance director wants a clean number. The CEO wants to know which channel is working. Telling them that a meaningful share of your pipeline is being driven by peer recommendation in communities you cannot track is not a satisfying answer. But it is often the honest one, and building commercial strategy on false precision is more expensive than building it on honest approximation.

Tools like Hotjar can help you understand how users are actually engaging with your digital assets, which gives you a more grounded picture of buyer behaviour than conversion metrics alone. But no single tool will give you the full picture, and the organisations that perform best tend to be those that triangulate across multiple signals rather than optimising for one clean metric.

If you want to think through how measurement connects to broader commercial decision-making, the go-to-market and growth strategy hub covers the strategic layer behind these operational questions, including how to build a commercial model that is honest about what you can and cannot know.

What to Do With This

The practical implication of all of this is not a long list of tactical changes. It is a more fundamental question about whether your commercial model is built around the buyer you have or the buyer you wish you had.

Start with the buying process itself. Map how your buyers actually evaluate, not how your sales funnel represents that evaluation. Talk to customers who converted and those who did not. Find out where they went for information, who they consulted, what concerns they had that your process never addressed. The gap between that picture and your current go-to-market approach is your problem statement.

Then look at your content. Is it built around real buyer questions at each stage of evaluation, or is it built around what your marketing team finds interesting to produce? Is your pricing and product information accessible enough for a buyer who wants to self-serve, or are you forcing conversations that buyers do not want to have yet? Are your sales and marketing teams working from a shared picture of the buyer, including the full buying group, or are they operating on separate assumptions?

None of these are new questions. They are just questions that most organisations have not answered honestly. The B2B buyers of 2025 have not fundamentally changed what they want: relevant information, credible vendors, and a purchase process that respects their time. What has changed is how much of that they can now satisfy without you. The vendors who understand that will build commercial models that earn their place in the process. The ones who do not will keep wondering why their pipeline looks healthy and their revenue does not.

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.

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