What B2B Selling Is Now

The buyer you are actually selling to

The most useful single picture of the current buyer comes from Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026, built on its Buyers' Journey Survey of nearly 18,000 business buyers and published in January 2026. Three findings matter for everything that follows in this course. First, the typical buying decision now involves 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers. Second, 94% of buyers report using AI somewhere in their buying process, and generative AI search is usually where research starts. Third, Forrester describes these buyers as risk-averse and 'far less forgiving of claims without proof'.

The research firm 6sense, which sells buyer-intent software and so has a commercial interest in this question, reports a consistent picture in its 2025 Buyer Experience Report of nearly 4,000 buyers: buyers made first contact with a seller about 61% of the way through their journey, they initiated 79% of those first contacts themselves, and the vendor that eventually won was already on the buyer's day-one shortlist 95% of the time.

Read together, these numbers say something uncomfortable. By the time most sellers get a conversation, the buyer has framed the problem, set criteria, and ranked the options. A seller who opens with a product tour is answering questions the buyer already answered with a search engine.

What buyers still want a person for

This is not the end of the salesperson. Gartner's June 2025 survey of 632 B2B buyers found that 61% prefer a rep-free buying experience overall, but the same release notes that buyers still seek seller input for tasks such as judging whether a product fits their company's specific needs. Gartner also found that 69% of buyers reported inconsistencies between what a supplier's website said and what its sellers told them, and that 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach.

The pattern is clear enough to plan around. Buyers do not want a person to recite information they can look up. They want a person for the parts of a purchase that are specific to them: whether this will work in their environment, what the real risks are, how to get twelve colleagues to agree, and what happens if it goes wrong. Those are judgment tasks, and they are where the rest of this course spends its time.

An older argument points the same way. In 2012, Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon and Nick Toman argued in Harvard Business Review that the classic 'solution sale' was breaking down because sophisticated buyers and procurement teams could now define solutions for themselves. Fourteen years later the tools buyers use to do that have become far more capable, which is why the argument has aged well.

Outreach is nearly free, so attention is expensive

The second shift is on the seller's side. Writing and sending a sales email used to cost a person's time; now an AI tool can draft and send thousands. Salesforce's seventh State of Sales report, a vendor survey of 4,050 sales professionals conducted in August and September 2025 and published in February 2026, found that 54% of sellers had already used AI agents and nearly nine in ten planned to by 2027. Sellers expected agents to cut prospect research time by 34% and email drafting time by 36%.

When everyone can send more, sending more stops being an advantage. The inbox fills, the buyer's tolerance for irrelevance drops, and the mailbox providers respond: since 2024 Gmail and Yahoo, and since May 2025 Outlook, have enforced authentication, unsubscribe and complaint-rate rules on bulk senders (Lesson 3.4 covers them in detail). The economic logic is simple. The scarce resource is no longer the seller's time to write; it is the buyer's willingness to read. Relevance, restraint and proof become the competitive edge.

The same Salesforce report gives a second reason for restraint: the average seller spends only 40% of their time actually selling. Automation that produces more activity without more judgment does not change that number in any useful direction. Automation that removes the clerical work around a few well-chosen conversations does.

What this means for how you work

Three working principles follow, and the rest of the course develops each.

First, be on the shortlist before the buyer calls. If the winner is usually on the day-one list, the work that matters most happens before any conversation: being findable, being specific about who you are for, and being known by the people who influence the buyer. That is why Module 1 spends a lesson on the ideal customer profile before it spends one on outreach.

Second, sell to the group, not the contact. With a dozen or more stakeholders, the person you talk to is rarely the person who decides, and the decision is usually blocked by disagreement rather than by price. Module 2 is about that group.

Third, keep one honest record. Every practice in this course depends on knowing what is actually in play: which deals exist, what stage each is really in, who you have spoken to, and what was promised. In Kavanah that record is the Deal Room at /deals. It holds deals on a stage board (with List and Forecast views), each deal's contacts and their status on that deal, and a timeline of activity that synced email, calendar meetings and your own logged notes write to. The agent reads and writes the same record, which means a question like 'what is stuck?' is answered from data rather than from memory.