Before They Call You: How B2B Buyers Make Up Their Minds Without You
After 25 years in marketing, there’s one pattern I see again and again. A sales team does everything right in the meeting and still loses the deal. Or a new client signs quickly and says they’d already decided to work with you before you’d even spoken.
Both stories have the same cause. The decision was mostly made before anyone picked up the phone, in conversations you weren’t part of.
I’ve pulled together the research on how this happens in a short guide called Before They Call You. Here’s a summary of what’s in it.
Most of the decision happens without you
Gartner surveyed 750 B2B buyers about how they spend their time during a purchase. Only 17% of it goes on meeting potential suppliers. The rest goes on researching online and offline, and talking with each other. If a buyer is comparing three or four suppliers, your share of that 17% is even smaller.
6sense’s 2024 research found buyers were nearly 70% of the way through their process before speaking to a supplier, and 81% already had a preferred supplier by first contact. Its 2025 study of nearly 4,000 buyers found the winner was on the day one shortlist 95% of the time.
By the time you’re invited in, the room has already talked about you. What they said is your brand.
Most buyers aren’t buying right now
Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, working with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, estimated that only around 5% of buyers in a typical B2B category are in the market in any given quarter. The other 95% will buy eventually, just not yet.
Pushing harder at the 5% misses most of your market. Your brand’s real job is to be remembered, for the right thing, by the 95% when they’re ready.
Clear beats clever
Research from Princeton’s Daniel Oppenheimer found that when writing used needlessly complicated language, readers rated the author as less intelligent. Jargon doesn’t make you look like the expert. If a buyer can’t explain what you do to a colleague in one sentence, you’re relying on your salesperson, and your salesperson isn’t in the room.
The fear of getting it wrong
A study by CEB (now part of Gartner) and Google of around 3,000 B2B buyers found that personal value, like confidence in the choice and how it reflects on their career, had about twice the impact on decisions as business value. The person championing you is taking a personal risk. Your brand needs to make them look good for choosing you.
They’ve usually met you before
6sense also found that 84% of buyers had previous experience with the supplier they ended up choosing. The shortlist is built from memory. The follow-up after a lost proposal, how a complaint was handled, a LinkedIn post someone scrolled past last year: each one is your brand turning up in a room you’ll never see.
Get the full guide
The guide goes deeper into each of these and finishes with five questions to ask your team this week. Every figure comes from a published source, all listed at the back so you can check them yourself.
It’s also a preview of my upcoming book, The Room You’re Not In.
