Two-Thirds of Your Buyers Would Rather Skip Your Sales Team. What They Find Without Them Decides the Deal.

Article Summary

Most B2B buyers would rather not talk to a salesperson, at least not early. Gartner surveyed 646 B2B buyers in August and September 2025 and found 67% prefer a rep-free buying experience. A companion Gartner release drawn from the same research window found 70% prefer a completely digital, self-service experience, and 45% used generative AI during a recent purchase, mostly to gather information on vendors and products.

That doesn’t mean the sales team stopped mattering. The same research found 69% of buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep, and that buyers used an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase. Buyers are doing most of the work on their own, then bringing a short list of specific questions to a rep near the end of the process to confirm or correct what they already believe.

Forrester’s 2024 Buyers’ Journey Survey shows what that means for the outcome: 92% of B2B buyers already have a shortlist when they start a formal purchase process, and 41% have a single vendor in mind. By the time a manufacturer’s sales team gets the call, most of the decision has already been shaped by the website, the search results, the AI answers, and whatever content the buyer found on their own.

For a manufacturer in the $25M to $100M range, the implication is practical rather than philosophical. The work that decides the deal now happens before the first conversation. If what buyers find on their own is thin, outdated, or disconnected from what the sales team would say in the room, the company is losing deals it never knew it was in.

Why Would Buyers Rather Skip the Sales Rep?

Because they can. Buyers now have more ways to get answers without scheduling a call, and most of them prefer it that way. Gartner’s research puts that preference at 67% for a rep-free experience and 70% for a fully digital, self-service path. For the engineer specifying a component, the plant manager comparing suppliers, or the procurement lead building a vendor list, moving at their own pace is simply more efficient than being pulled into a sales process before they’re ready.

This isn’t a knock on anyone’s sales team. It’s a change in how people buy. Gartner senior principal analyst Alyssa Cruz described buyers as “progressing through critical buying tasks in more autonomous ways,” and noted that “sellers can’t rely on static collateral to carry influence in those moments.” In other words, the materials a manufacturer leaves behind for buyers to find are doing more of the selling than they used to.

Does That Mean the Sales Team Matters Less?

No. It means the sales team shows up at a different moment. Gartner’s May 2026 release found 69% of buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep, and buyers report they’re about as likely to run into misleading information from generative AI (51%) as from sales reps (49%). They aren’t replacing the rep. They’re checking the rep against everything else they’ve read.

Gartner VP Analyst Robert Blaisdell summed it up directly: “Sales leaders should not interpret buyer preference for digital self-service as a signal that sellers matter less. It is a signal that sellers need to show up differently.” In practice, the rep’s job shifts from introducing the company to confirming, correcting, or sharpening what the buyer already believes, and that rep is walking into a conversation that started weeks earlier without them.

Where Is the Deal Actually Being Decided?

In the space between marketing and sales, where nobody is clearly in charge. Forrester found 92% of B2B buyers have a shortlist before a formal purchase process begins, and 41% already have one preferred vendor. Buyers build that shortlist from an average of seven information sources, according to Gartner, including supplier websites, search, AI tools, peers, and industry content.

That’s where most manufacturers have a gap. Marketing owns the website and the content. Sales owns the conversation. Nobody owns whether what a buyer finds on their own matches what the sales team would say in the room. We call the connections between those teams the Growth Chain: the handoffs between marketing, sales, finance, and operations where growth actually gets won or lost. The handoff between self-directed research and the first sales conversation is one of the weakest links in most manufacturing companies, and one of the least measured.

What Do Buyers Need to Find Before They’ll Call?

Answers to the questions they would otherwise ask a rep. For most manufacturers, that means clear specifications and capabilities, the industries and applications the company serves, realistic lead times, certifications and quality standards, and proof that the company has solved a problem like theirs before. With 45% of buyers using generative AI during a purchase, those answers also need to be written clearly enough for AI tools to find and cite them, not just for a human skimming a brochure. We covered that shift in more detail in Google Used to Rank You. Now AI Decides Whether You Exist.

The test is simple. If a qualified buyer spent an hour researching the company without talking to anyone, would they have enough to put it on their shortlist? If the honest answer is “they’d need to call us,” a meaningful share of them won’t, and the company will never see those buyers in its pipeline to know they were lost.

How Does a Manufacturer Close the Gap?

Start by finding where the handoff breaks, not by adding more content or more reps. A few direct questions usually surface the constraint quickly. What questions does the sales team answer on almost every first call? Those are the questions buyers couldn’t answer on their own. When a deal is lost, how often was the buyer already leaning toward a competitor before the first conversation? And does the website say the same thing the best salesperson says, in the same order, with the same proof?

The last question is usually the hardest one: who owns the buyer’s experience before the first call, and how is it measured? Most manufacturers can’t answer that cleanly, and that’s the constraint. As we wrote in More Reps Didn’t Fix It. An Agency Didn’t Fix It., the problem is usually in the connection between teams, not inside any one of them. That’s also where a diagnostic conversation usually starts: not with a content plan, but with a clear picture of where buyers are forming their shortlist and what they find when they look.

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