Have you asked your Sales team lately how their buyer conversations are shifting? You might hear something like this: discovery calls aren’t really discovery calls anymore. The buyers are coming prepared; they have a list with three vendors already evaluated, a specific question about an integration, and concerns about implementation timelines.

Sales used to come to the call with questions. Now, buyers are coming prepared to decide.

The tried-and-true go-to-market strategy assumes Marketing warms people up and then hands them off to Sales, but those aren’t the rules B2B buyers are playing by anymore.

B2B buyer behavior has changed, and along with it, Marketing’s job description. Below are the key changes we’re seeing at Yes& and what that means for Marketing’s new role.

Why are B2B buyers staying anonymous longer?

Gartner found that 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience and nearly three-quarters will actively avoid vendors who send irrelevant outreach. That’s a signal that buyers have figured out how to research, compare, and narrow their options on their own.

This requires Marketing to do a job it wasn’t always built to do: carry the full weight of evaluation. Pricing context. Proof. Implementation detail. Competitor comparisons. Use cases. ROI rationale. “Why us” messaging that doesn’t require a 45-minute call to access.

Buyers can now ask AI to research very specific solutions to very specific problems that fit within budgets and then compare all of their options in one place. In most cases, AI does a decent job of getting buyers farther down the funnel faster than the time it takes to schedule and attend three different sales calls and compare data sheets on their own.

Sales conversations still matter, they’re just happening later, and with a more informed buyer.

How is AI changing the B2B buying process?

G2’s 2025 research found that 79% of B2B buyers say AI search has changed how they do research, and that AI chatbots now rank among the top sources influencing vendor shortlists. 6sense puts it even higher: 94% of B2B buyers report using LLMs at some point in the buying process.

This doesn’t mean traditional research is dead. Buyers still rely on review sites, peer networks, prior experience, and your website content. But AI has become the front door for how they access that information. If you’re not structuring your content in a way that AI can parse and summarize clearly, you’re losing early-stage visibility to companies who are.

More than ever, you need structured service pages, FAQs with real answers, comparison content, customer evidence, and consistent messaging across your website, social channels, review platforms, sales materials, and PR. All of these components shape whether an AI system (or a human) decides you’re worth putting on a shortlist.

We recently diagnosed this problem for an enterprise data and AI governance software client. Their site had dozens of content pages, but many of them targeted the same keywords and repeated similar feature-based messaging. That overlap was splitting their search authority and giving AI tools exactly the kind of broad, standardized information they can summarize without attribution. Buyers were getting the answers they needed from AI, but they were not being made aware of the brand behind those answers. The solution required consolidating duplicative content, restructuring pages around the specific problems buyers were searching to solve, and making the messaging distinct enough that AI and search engines would treat the brand as the authoritative source rather than one of many inputs.

Why does brand familiarity matter more in B2B buying?

TrustRadius’ 2024 research found that buyers are leaning heavily on brands they already know, especially when budgets are tight and every purchase needs to prove its ROI.

If buyers are building shortlists before they’re talking to Sales, then brand preference is the catalyst. The companies that make those lists aren’t always the most innovative or the most feature-rich. They’re the ones that have been consistently visible and credible in the right places long before the buying window opens.

Thought leadership, customer proof, analyst presence, executive visibility, review standing — these aren’t awareness drivers. They’re shortlist drivers.

Yes& built the VIBE Score™ because most brands don’t have a clear picture of how visible and credible they are in the AI tools and recommendation engines shaping buyer shortlists today. It’s a proprietary metric that blends visibility, influence, and brand engagement into a single score across search, social, and content, so you can see where you stand before a buyer decides whether you’re worth considering.

What information do B2B buyers expect before talking to Sales?

Forrester projected that in 2025, more than half of B2B transactions of $1M or more would be processed through digital self-serve channels. That’s not a trend limited to SMB or low-consideration buying. It reflects the preferences of Millennial and Gen Z buyers who now hold real purchasing authority and expect digital-first experiences even at the enterprise level.

We’re seeing this play out in our own work with clients. We’re currently running a Voice of Customer and usability research engagement for a tier one manufacturer. Their buyers are highly technical engineers. When they get to a website, they know exactly what load requirements they’re working with and need to validate whether a system fits their application. Our early research is surfacing a gap between what those engineers need to do digitally before they’re ready to have a Sales conversation and the experience our client’s site provides. The result is an abandonment of digital experiences that can’t meet them where they are.

The goal isn’t to remove Sales from the equation. It’s to make the digital experience strong enough that Sales becomes more valuable when it does show up.

A website that requires a demo request to access meaningful information isn’t built for this buyer. Modern B2B buyers expect to find pricing guidance, integration documentation, technical specifications, and product comparison information before a conversation begins. They want implementation expectations spelled out, ROI frameworks they can take to an internal stakeholder, and customer proof organized by industry or use case rather than a generic testimonials page. The bar for what constitutes a useful digital experience has moved, and most B2B websites haven’t caught up.

The new B2B marketing mandate

B2B buying has shifted from a Sales-led funnel to a buyer-controlled research process shaped by AI, peer validation, and brand trust. Marketing’s priority is no longer just generating leads. It’s becoming findable, credible, and genuinely useful before anyone is ready to talk.

That means building brand presence before demand exists, creating content that AI systems can parse and buyers can act on, publishing proof earlier in the process, treating review sites, communities, search, social, analysts, and sales content as a connected ecosystem, and building a website capable of holding up under serious evaluation without a rep in the room.

What is a buyer-controlled research process?

A buyer-controlled research process is a purchasing journey where buyers independently research, compare, and evaluate vendors before engaging with Sales. AI search tools, review platforms, communities, and self-service content make it possible for buyers to answer many of their questions without direct vendor interaction.

Many of the Marketing teams we work with are already feeling this shift, but their structure, metrics, and content haven’t caught up yet. Marketing gets measured on leads, so it optimizes for lead capture. Content gets built to convert rather than inform. And investment in credibility and proof often stops at the handoff to Sales, right when buyers are doing their most intensive independent research.

We’re helping them adapt by rethinking all three. Presence and credibility need to be treated as performance metrics alongside pipeline. And the work of building trust needs to start well before anyone is ready to talk.

Let’s talk about your B2B marketing strategy

We’re already working with clients to close the gap between how their buyers research and how their marketing and digital experience holds up under that scrutiny, from structuring content for AI visibility to auditing websites against the expectations of today’s self-serve buyer. If you’d like to do a little more research before a conversation, explore our B2B marketing expertise. When you’re ready to pressure-test your current approach against how B2B buyers actually buy today, we’d welcome the conversation.

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