B2B Buyer Experience Report:

Four years of research point to one primary implication: the standard B2B revenue operating model is increasingly misaligned with how buying actually happens. That misalignment has widened for nearly two decades as buyers have become less reliant on sellers while revenue teams have continued to organize around the moments when buyers become visible.

The need for ICP visibility

To succeed, revenue teams need a line of sight into every potential opportunity within their ideal customer profile (ICP) segments. Buyers stay current on solution categories between evaluation cycles, so teams must be able to see and influence accounts that are not currently in market. But those accounts should not all receive the same treatment. Investment should reflect each account’s realistic near- and long-term revenue potential. That requires teams to segment buyers by journey status and execute the right treatment for each account. Across an entire ICP and all relevant personas, that level of differentiated orchestration would be impossible without agentic capabilities.

Revenue teams should manage category reputation as a continuous operating discipline, not a campaign activated when accounts enter market. Because buyers remain attentive between cycles and carry evolving vendor perceptions into the next evaluation, brand, content, customer advocacy, analyst relations, communities, events, and seller interactions are all part of the same long-horizon preference-building system. The practical objective is not merely to create awareness, but to enter Day 1 of the next buying cycle already understood, trusted, and preferred.

Buying journeys begin with discovery? Not so much

The research shows the buying journey is more about buying group members deliberating over category and vendor value than about discovering new vendors and objectively evaluating new information. That elevates the importance of identifying key buying-group members — particularly supporting roles — and delivering messaging that helps align the group behind a solution throughout the journey, and even before it begins. Developing and executing marketing programs that use buying-group and buying-journey intelligence needs to be a top priority, not a nice-to-have layered on top of demand generation as it exists today.

Because most buying groups begin with inherited disagreement (71% enter the buying process with two or more conflicting vendor preferences), providers should design for consensus rather than assume a single champion can carry the decision. That means mapping the likely prior beliefs, objections, success criteria, and risk concerns of each major supporting function, then making supporting materials available (findable, ungated, shareable) to support group deliberation. The aim is not to manufacture unanimity; it is to reduce the cost of reaching a defensible collective decision.

Solution type influences buying group composition

Buying group orchestration should be category-specific, not built from a universal committee template. Software providers should anticipate unusually heavy IT involvement; physical-goods providers should design more explicitly for procurement; and most providers should expect finance to be a central supporting function. Persona strategy should therefore begin with the likely functional topology of the purchase, then adapt messaging, proof, and engagement sequences to the scrutiny each function applies.

Buying and LLMs: not talking about a revolution

Industry commentary often treats LLM discoverability as the new center of B2B buying. Our data show otherwise. Buyers have not shifted solution discovery and research almost entirely to LLMs, nor have they abandoned traditional sources. Yet that belief has already led parts of the industry to question the value—and even the continued existence—of intent data. Buyers in our research still consult the sources they have always used. They visit vendor websites in categories that matter to them. They consult third-party sources directly. And they do both within and between evaluation cycles.

Most solution categories—and many of the vendors within them—were discovered long before the current buying journey began. Even when buyers enter an unfamiliar category, they are most likely to encounter it gradually through colleagues, peer networks, conferences, and other professional channels. LLMs do introduce buyers to new vendors, but only 26% report using them for that purpose. That is an important development. It is not a revolution in B2B buying.

Once buyers engage sellers, the seller’s first job must be to identify where they stand on the shortlist, and to surface the assumptions behind the preliminary ordering of that shortlist. For brands in the pole position, the job is to help the buying group validate their decision criteria and preliminary choice. Buying groups often put a vendor in first place conditionally — provided, say, that it comes down in price to match the second-place vendor.

Trailing brands must understand the buying group’s decision criteria, gauge solution fit, and identify where the group’s view of vendor strengths and weaknesses can still change. By first seller contact, buyers have largely or entirely established their decision criteria (85%), so sellers are unlikely to change how the group will decide. Their job is instead to show how their solution best satisfies the requirements buyers have already set. Generic discovery performed after requirements are established risks forcing buyers backward; rigorous validation helps them move forward.

The new/old job for B2B websites

B2B websites should always have done more than declare the superiority of the company’s solutions. And now that buyers can read summarized information in LLMs, websites cannot be mere information repositories either. Buyer attention while on vendor websites is almost certainly more fragile than ever, and tolerance for unhelpful hyperbole and marketing speak will likely keep declining. B2B companies need to provide experiences that are genuinely interesting and valuable to potential buyers. That information needs to serve not just the primary buyer persona but also key supporting personas: the purchasing, IT, and finance representatives.

Two category-level scenarios shape buying journeys

Buyers either already have the category of solution on offer, or they do not. That simple distinction has a profound impact on how the buying group decides. New-capability journeys often require stronger support for why the organization should invest, broader stakeholder alignment, and longer planning horizons. Importantly, even when a solution is a new capability for a company, it is a mistake to assume that the buying group members are blank slates with respect to that category. They often bring substantial category and vendor experience from prior roles and organizations, even when their current company does not own the capability. What changes is the burden of justification.

The second dimension is the maturity of the solution category itself. Buying-group members are typically highly experienced with Established and Maturing solutions, having bought and used them repeatedly across multiple roles. But familiarity does not guarantee that the group will approve another investment in the category; buyers must still justify its value in the current company. Emerging and First-of-its-Kind categories carry a different burden. Providers must give buyers comparison frames that show how the new category addresses a meaningful business need and how its benefits and costs compare with current or adjacent solutions.

Accentuate the positive reasons for acquiring your solution

Journeys motivated by growth, scaling, and capability expansion succeed more often than journeys triggered by contract pressure, leadership change, dissatisfaction with a current vendor, or market shocks. The triggers are not psychologically equivalent: buyers pursuing an opportunity may be more willing to work through journey friction than buyers reacting to a threat. Our survey of B2B home pages suggests that most providers already emphasize the benefits of acquiring and using their solutions. Even so, providers whose solutions can credibly support both positive and defensive motivations may benefit from biasing their positioning toward growth and adaptation.

Optimism and anxiety do not buy the same way. Revenue teams therefore need two distinct persuasion systems: one that helps the buying group justify the category, and another that helps it choose the provider. Category justification requires quantified business outcomes, change rationale, implementation confidence, and materials that finance and executive stakeholders can use internally. Vendor preference requires differentiated fit, proof, and confidence that the provider can deliver. Treating those as one message leaves the harder decision — whether to invest at all — under-supported.

Double-jeopardy for services providers

Services providers need a distinct GTM design because they face a double burden: buyers are less likely to have prior purchase experience with the roster of contenders, and they find the categories harder to justify. Services marketing therefore must make an intangible offer concrete through diagnostic frameworks, outcome evidence, delivery-method transparency, practitioner credibility, and references that reduce perceived execution risk. Competing only on firm differentiation leaves the category-value problem unsolved.

The extended buying group

The buying group extends beyond the formal W2 group, so influence strategy must extend beyond direct buyer engagement. Analysts, consultants, investors, resellers, distributors, and systems integrators can alter confidence and momentum even when the transaction remains direct. Analyst relations teams tend to focus on point-in-time events like the publication of Waves and Quadrants, while devoting little effort to understanding how analysts talk with their clients about solutions and categories day to day.

Revenue teams should identify which outside actors commonly enter their category's evaluations, read their blogs, LinkedIn posts, and other pronouncements, to understand what they value and how they advise their audiences.

Buying journey attrition is easily the biggest opportunity

The largest revenue opportunity in this study is also one of the most obvious: most buying journeys that begin in earnest—even those that run for months or quarters—still end without a purchase. At any given time, roughly a third of an ICP is in the Selection Phase, but only 6% continue into Validation (see, Nuancing the 95/5 Rule). Attrition, not competitive loss late in the journey, is therefore the largest revenue blocker in B2B. Some buyers default to continuation or renewal, which still produces a sale for the incumbent. But retaining the existing solution often means the incumbent failed to win an upgrade or expansion. Buyers say agreeing on the value of the category is as hard as, or harder than, choosing a vendor within it. Yet most marketing organizations concentrate on winning share among buyers who have already justified the category. Revenue teams can identify what buying groups struggle to justify and use that intelligence to prevent attrition. Our analysis of stalled and abandoned evaluations sharpens the point: failed journeys are not meaningfully larger, more expensive, or more complex versions of successful ones. They begin from different motivations and are more often propelled by reactive pressure and external disruption than by business opportunities.

Paused evaluations should enter a structured recycle motion rather than a generic nurture stream. Because returning groups expect budgets, stakeholders, requirements, external resources, and vendor sets to change, teams should preserve the original buying-group context, monitor for those specific changes, and re-enter with materials tailored to what blocked the first attempt. The second cycle is not a repeat of the first; it is a revised decision system with new boundary conditions. Buying group members are usually experienced with the category and the brand; paused buyers certainly are, and should be treated accordingly. Successful providers will find and, where necessary, create new content and experiences to help the buying group seal the deal next time around.

New customers are won only after many tries

Successful purchasers are typically not on their first attempt to buy that solution for their organization (8.9 prior category evaluations); failed purchases tend to have fewer prior attempts (6.8% prior category evaluations). This suggests that B2B organizations selling into net-new accounts should build that reality into their revenue plans. As we know at 6sense, sales to new customers rarely happen on the first try — this may be one of the most important, underappreciated facts in B2B. By way of corollary, most failed buying journeys aren't really dead; they're paused, and they're likely to return with different budgets, stakeholders, requirements, and sometimes vendors.

The conventional wisdom holds that B2B buyers crawl "under a rock" between purchases, surfacing only when a new need forces their hand. When they do surface, the thinking goes, they spend weeks or months discovering vendors and educating themselves on available solutions. The latest version of that common wisdom holds that when buyers do begin searching, they do it mostly by asking a chatbot, to the exclusion of more traditional sources.

The conventional wisdom is deeply flawed.

The evidence points to a different starting point: buyers enter most journeys as experienced category participants, carrying accumulated beliefs, vendor memories, and inherited preferences with them. They will deliberate with colleagues about whether the category is justified for their business; if it clears finance, IT, and purchasing scrutiny, the group must still agree on which of the highly familiar vendors will win.

The average buyer is a seasoned mid-career professional

Buyers in all buying roles are deeply experienced. Buying-group members average roughly 40 years of age in every buying role — mid-career professionals who are not encountering business categories, vendor claims, buying processes, or internal decision dynamics for the first time. They enter buying journeys with prior knowledge, established beliefs, and previous experience already shaping how they evaluate options.

Figure 1. Buying-group members average roughly 40 years of age in every buying role.

Buyers are navigating familiar terrain

One of our most important findings over the past two years is that B2B buyers are highly experienced in most categories: 85%+ of purchases occur in Established or Maturing categories, and every buying-group role brings meaningful experience to the categories it evaluates. Most vendors these buyers evaluate have also been around for a decade or more — even in software, the most volatile segment, roughly 90% of companies are at least 10 years old, and 64% are more than 15.

For most buyers, the category is familiar terrain they have navigated for years. They re-enter it with prior beliefs, vendor impressions, and evaluation habits already formed. Familiarity does not mean that every vendor is equally well known, that the decision is easy, or that buyers can automatically justify the category for their current organization. It does mean that most journeys begin with memory and existing perception—not with Google or ChatGPT. The data bear that out.

Figure 2. About 70% of buyers across all roles have been through six or more buying cycles in the category.

Category familiarity creates continuous attention

Since first asking the question two years ago, we’ve understood that buyers enter the buying process with a pre-determined shortlist — which implies they stay current on the category between cycles. This year we validated that directly: 96% of buyers said they keep up with their category between evaluations, and the channels they rely on most are traditional and largely vendor-controlled.

That ranking cuts against much current thinking about AI and buyer behavior. Buyers are not disengaging from relevant categories between cycles; they are paying attention continuously through many of the same channels they have relied on for years. LLMs are the least-cited source of new information, not the default one.

Continuous attention changes the starting conditions of the next evaluation. Between cycles, 71.5% of participants said their view of vendors changed somewhat or significantly, and 94% entered the current cycle with pre-existing vendor perceptions. The context makes those numbers unsurprising: most solution categories have existed for a decade or more, most buying-group members have been working for nearly two decades, and likely participants in future buying journeys already monitor the category. Their evolving perceptions become Day 1 opinions in the next cycle.

Figure 3. 94% of buyers had prior perceptions of vendors before the evaluation began, and 71% said those perceptions changed between cycles.

Buying groups begin with inherited disagreement

Buying groups rarely begin an evaluation from a neutral state. They average 10 members, and in 71% of journeys the group enters with preferences for two or more vendors already represented among its members. Another 24.5% begin aligned around a single vendor. Only 4.2% begin with no vendor preference represented across the group. The implication: the buying journey is rarely a process of discovery and is instead a process of deliberation among informed, opinionated professionals. The question isn't whether the group can discover vendors — it's whether the group can resolve the experiences, beliefs, loyalties, doubts, and assumptions its members already brought with them.

Figure 4. In 71% of journeys, the buying group enters with two or more conflicting vendor preferences on Day 1.

The category familiarity paradox: familiar does not mean easy to justify

Buyers know the terrain, but the group still has to agree it is worth crossing

Familiarity with solution categories and vendors may not breed contempt, but it certainly doesn’t breed alignment. Category familiarity doesn’t mean all buying-group members agree the category is worthy of investment — a department head may have had numerous positive experiences with a category while a finance colleague believes the category itself is flawed. In many buying journeys, the hard question isn’t which vendor should win, but whether the category deserves investment at all: 56.4% of buyers say agreeing on the category, not the vendor, was harder, and that difficulty is more pronounced in failed journeys and in services deals.

Figure 5. Buyers who did not buy were more likely to say agreeing on the category was harder than choosing a vendor. The line marks the 56.4% overall average.

Figure 6. Services buyers reported category justification as harder than software buyers or physical-goods buyers. The line marks the 56.4% overall average.

New capabilities to the company are not necessarily new to the buying group

This paradox extends to how "new" a purchase really is. We asked buyers two related questions: whether the purchase was meant to provide a new capability to the organization, and how they'd categorize the solution category itself — Established, Maturing, Emerging, or First of its Kind.

A purchase can be new to the organization without being new to the people evaluating it. When buyers said a purchase would add a new capability, nearly half still classified the category as Established and another third as Maturing; only a small minority called it Emerging or First of its Kind. Buyers considering new capabilities also reported the same number of prior category evaluations (8.5) as buyers replacing an existing capability. They may therefore be solving a new problem for the current company inside a category they already know and hold opinions about. Prior experience elsewhere informs the evaluation, but it does not eliminate the need to justify the category formally in the present organization.

The decision not to buy is more likely in less mature categories

Failed purchases in our research were more likely to involve less mature categories (50.8%) than completed purchases (43.1%). Providers in less mature categories cannot succeed merely by showing that they are the best vendor in the category. They must also give buying groups the evidence and language needed to justify the category itself.

Figure 7. Failed purchases were more likely to involve less mature categories (51%) than completed purchases (43%).

Evaluation triggers

Evaluation triggers capture the circumstances that set a buying journey in motion. New this year, we asked buyers what triggered their journey, allowing them to select their top two triggers from a fixed list.

Technology advances and growth needs drive most buying journeys

Taking advantage of advances in what's possible, together with accounting for business growth, are far and away the most common reasons buyers enter a journey; other triggers are roughly half as common. Event-based triggers such as new leadership or M&A activity are themselves rare. When they occur they may strongly spur a buying cycle, but as a share of all journeys started they remain modest.

Figure 8. Advances in available technology and internal growth or scaling needs were the most common evaluation triggers. Buyers could select their top two.

Positive motivations appear more often in successful purchases

This year, 62% of buyers said they were primarily motivated to pursue a benefit, 20% balanced benefit and risk avoidance, and 18% were primarily avoiding a negative outcome. Successful journeys are more often driven by the pursuit of benefits, while stalled or abandoned evaluations skew more reactive (see table below).

Because benefit-seeking motivations appear more often in successful purchases, B2B providers may benefit from positioning solutions as tools for growth and adaptation rather than primarily as protection against risk.

The impact of embedded AI and economic uncertainty on buyer mentality

Economic uncertainty is shifting from urgency to constraint

Economic uncertainty is shaping buying cycles differently than it did last year. In 2025, it mostly created urgency: 61% of buyers said uncertainty moved seller engagement earlier, and shortened cycles outnumbered lengthened cycles by nearly two to one. In 2026, that effect weakened. Only 51% reported earlier engagement, and fewer buyers reported that it shortened their cycles. Uncertainty now appears to be changing how buyers decide more than when they engage: 73% became more price-conscious, and 61% became more conservative in their vendor choice.

Buyers expect AI inside the solutions they evaluate

Embedded AI remains a major evaluation factor, though it eased slightly: 80% of purchases involved AI capabilities (down from 89% last year), and embedded AI was strongly encouraged (37%) or mandated (21%) in most evaluations — increasingly a form of productivity insurance under uncertainty.

AI expectations moderate the role of economic uncertainty

The desire for embedded AI also interacts with economic pressure: 43% of buyers expecting significant AI in the solution said the economy shortened their cycle, more than 50% higher than the rate among buyers expecting limited AI functionality (28.1%) — a sign that AI-driven productivity or cost relief is itself an urgency lever.

Buyers are less confident that they know how AI is being deployed in solutions

Buyers have also grown less confident, not more, that they understand how providers are actually deploying AI inside their solutions — a gap providers can close with clearer content.

Figure 9. The share of buyers confident or very confident that they understood how providers deploy AI fell from 82.5% in 2025 to 72.7% in 2026.

Automation and prediction lead the list of desired AI use cases

The shape of buyer desire is shifting, too: buyers are notably less likely to be looking for process automation and content-creation capabilities than they were last year, though automation and predictive analytics remain the two most-wanted AI use cases by a clear margin, and these priorities are remarkably consistent across departments.

Buyer Psychology explained what buying groups bring into an evaluation: experience, category memory, and pre-existing vendor preferences. Journey Mechanics shows what follows. Those prior beliefs compress discovery, move the central disagreement inside the buying group, and turn seller contact into validation of a decision already taking shape.

The buying journey is structurally stable but more front-loaded than previously understood. Buying groups still move through recognizable Selection and Validation phases. Buyers arrive with prior opinions, organize the shortlist, set requirements, and identify a likely winner before first contact with sellers. Year over year, these mechanics changed only subtly: groups stayed large, vendor sets stayed narrow, winners were usually known early, and first live seller contact still landed well past the midpoint of the journey.

The two-phase evaluation cycle

Formal buying journeys have two phases: Selection, before live buyer-seller contact, and Validation, after it. Sellers do not merely enter late; buyers keep them out until the group has completed most of the consequential work. Before first contact, buyers form the shortlist, clarify requirements, rank vendors, and—in 91.4% of journeys—identify a preliminary winner. Vendor contact occurs, on average, 59.2% of the way through a 10.3-month cycle. That point has moved earlier over several years, but most of the journey remains seller-free. Even with earlier engagement this year, the preliminary favorite became more—not less—likely to win. Validation is therefore less a fresh competition than a stress test of a choice already taking shape.

Buyers – in all buying roles – remain current in relevant categories at all times

That consistency holds across buying roles, too. As mentioned earlier, 96% of buyers stay current even between evaluation cycles — and that holds whether a buyer is considering a purchase for their own department or participating in a supporting role for someone else's. Viewed across every member of the buying group, between 90% and 98% stay current on relevant categories between cycles, and none of the modest differences we observe between roles are statistically reliable. In other words: whether a buying-group member is involved in a purchase for their own department or another's, they bring deep prior experience and stay informed between purchases either way.

Figure 10. Between 90% and 98% of buyers stay current on the category between cycles, whether buying for their own department or another’s. Differences between roles are not statistically reliable.

Journey parameters

Buying roles produce nuanced but consistent perspectives

There is modest variation in how different buying roles experience the journey — influencers and financial ratifiers describe somewhat larger groups, longer cycles, and more difficulty justifying the category, while decision makers and procurement report slightly shorter, more contained journeys. But the core mechanics barely move: across roles, the winner is usually on the Day 1 shortlist, requirements are set before seller contact, first contact lands well past the midpoint, and the eventual winner is usually the first vendor contacted.

New-capability journeys are meaningfully harder than replacement journeys

Buyers launch evaluations either to replace or upgrade existing capabilities, or to acquire new ones — and that starting point produces meaningfully different mechanics. New-capability journeys involve larger buying groups (10.9 vs. 8.4 members) and run longer (11.3 vs. 8.2 months). The largest gap is category justification: 61.5% of new-capability buyers say justifying the category was harder than choosing a vendor, compared with 44.6% of buyers replacing an existing capability. The eventual winner was also contacted first more often in new-capability journeys (79.2% vs. 70.2%).

Figure 11. 61.5% of buyers acquiring a new capability said category justification was harder than choosing a vendor, compared with 44.6% of buyers replacing an existing capability.

Buyers in stalled or abandoned evaluations stumble on requirements-setting and category justification

Buyers who did not end up purchasing cited category justification as a hurdle 11.3 points (roughly 21%) more often than those who did, and were 10 points less likely to have requirements set before engaging sellers — evidence these buying groups struggled to establish the value of the category itself, not just to pick a winner.

Category maturity has only a weak effect on mechanics

Emerging and First-of-its-Kind categories follow the same broad journey mechanics as mature categories, but novelty adds friction in specific places: buyers evaluate more vendors, take longer, contact sellers late, and involve larger groups. One plausible explanation is that buyers have less established category memory to draw on and must search across adjacent categories for comparable offerings. Even so, the journey’s overall shape remains remarkably consistent across maturity levels. Corporate purchasing processes may impose a common structure that bends less for novelty than conventional wisdom suggests.

The Selection Phase is for ironing out buying-group differences

In the traditional view of a buying journey, buyers spend the early part of the journey identifying potential vendors, and only later develop requirements and form preferences. What we understand now is different: buying groups enter over 71% of journeys already holding two or more opinions about the best vendor. The Selection Phase ends — in 91.4% of journeys — when the group ranks its shortlist and moves to engage sellers; reaching that ranked consensus is effectively what ends Selection and begins Validation.

Vendor-aligned buying groups have harder, not easier, journeys

Counterintuitively, a shared Day 1 vendor preference does not make the journey easier. Groups that begin aligned on one vendor report greater difficulty justifying the category (60% versus 52% among groups with multiple Day 1 preferences), longer cycles (12 versus 10 months), and larger groups (12.2 versus 10.4 members). That pattern resists the usual explanations. Larger groups might be expected to contain more competing vendor preferences, and our prior research shows that group size and cycle length are most strongly associated with the number of vendors evaluated. Yet this sample showed no statistically reliable difference in vendors evaluated, deal size, or company size between the two groups.

The evidence cannot establish why aligned groups have harder journeys, but it is consistent with a plausible explanation: early agreement on a vendor does not resolve the separate—and often harder—question of whether the category deserves investment.

Buyers pick vendors they already know, and services deals face a double burden

Buyers usually choose vendors they already know: in 73% of cases, prior experience with the eventual winner came from having bought it or from having used it at an organization that had purchased it, and 14% have evaluated it multiple times. Services providers face a double burden. Their buyers find category justification harder (62.1%) than software buyers (52.7%) or physical-goods buyers (50.6%), and they are less likely to have previously purchased from the eventual winner (53%, versus 60%–68% for software and physical goods). These hurdles may help explain why services represented 51.9% of stalled or abandoned evaluations but only 44.9% of completed purchases—a statistically reliable difference. Services providers face a heavier burden to establish both that the category deserves funding and that their firm is a credible choice within it.

Figure 12. In 73% of journeys, buyers were previous customers of the eventual winner.

Buyers evade sellers until they’re ready

New this year, we asked buyers whether they took steps to disguise their identity from vendors as they progressed through the journey. Just 35.2% used their own contact information on a form, and the buyer's team, not the vendor, initiated 82% of first vendor contacts. Perhaps no other data points in this study more clearly illustrate why lead-based go-to-market practices fail to capture where buyers actually are in the journey.

Figure 13. The share of buyers using their own contact information ranged from just 33% to 39.2% across buying roles. The line marks the overall average.

Buyers have many influences, but keep their own counsel

Buyers draw on many sources, but their accumulated knowledge and internal deliberations dominate. During Selection, buyers rate existing knowledge as the strongest influence on vendor perception, followed by discussions inside the buying group; AI tools sit in the middle of the pack. Nearly every measured influence—except direct human contact with the provider—declines once Validation begins. The most plausible interpretation is not that those sources cease to matter, but that the group becomes less open to persuasion as its preference solidifies.

Buying group composition & external influences

Buying journeys are group decisions, but the group extends beyond the formal buying committee. Internal functions bring different forms of scrutiny, risk tolerance, and category familiarity to the evaluation. External actors—including analysts, consultants, channel partners, and investors—can also shape confidence, timing, and commitment. The buying group is therefore better understood as a network of influence than as a fixed committee contained inside the organization.

Buying group composition

Buying groups span many organizational functions, and supporting functions often bring distinct perspectives to the evaluation. Group size has nevertheless remained steady year over year at roughly 10 people, contrary to the common claim that buying committees are continually expanding. Composition varies more than size: finance is the most frequently involved supporting function for nearly every user department, while other functions become more or less prominent depending on the solution and the department that will own it.

Figure 14. Supporting-Function Involvement by User Department

The type of solution influences which functions join the buying group

Solution type shapes which functions show up, too: physical-goods purchases lean more on procurement and less on the C-suite, while software purchases lean heavily on IT. IT shows up in roughly seven of ten software purchases, versus about four in ten purchases of physical goods or services — while physical-goods purchases lean hardest of the three on procurement.

Nearly three-quarters of buyers involve an external party

Nearly three-quarters of buyers (74%) engaged at least one external resource during their 2026 evaluation, down slightly from 76% in 2025. The largest declines involved investors, whose participation fell from 31% to 26%, and distributors, resellers, or integrators, whose participation fell from 24% to 16.4%. Analysts and consultants remained the most-used external resource. Their involvement also varied with outcome: 35% of buyers who purchased involved an analyst, compared with 28% of those who did not buy; investor involvement showed the reverse pattern, at 24% among purchasers and 31% among non-purchasers. These associations do not establish that outside actors caused the outcome, but they suggest that different external parties enter evaluations under different conditions.

Figure 15. Among buyers who completed a purchase, consultants (38.4%) and analysts (35.0%) were the most-used outside resources.

Channel partners shape evaluations more than they own transactions

Channel partners shape evaluations more often than they own the final transaction. Among buyers who engaged distributors, resellers, or systems integrators, more than four in ten (41.5%) interacted with them as much as they interacted with vendors directly, and another 22% interacted with them more. Yet 80% still purchased directly from the vendor. Influence and transaction ownership are therefore separate roles: channel partners can materially shape the decision even when the vendor ultimately books the sale.

Journey Mechanics of evaluations that were stalled or abandoned

Stalled evaluations are not casual explorations that never became serious. They ran for 8.6 months on average—only slightly less than completed purchases—and buyers engaged directly with an average of 3.3 vendors, about 78% of those they considered. By the time these evaluations stopped, most of the field had received real engagement.

Completed and stalled journeys differ more in experience and motivation than in scale

The strongest differentiator is prior category experience: buyers with more category evaluations under their belts are more likely to complete the purchase. The next clearest signals are motivational — journeys triggered by an identified capability gap, internal growth need, or a regulatory/compliance requirement are more likely to reach a decision, while journeys triggered by contract expiration, dissatisfaction, new leadership, or market shifts are more likely to stall.

Buying-group size, purchase complexity, and Day 1 shortlist size differ reliably between completed and stalled evaluations, but the differences are modest. They may reflect some of the same underlying forces associated with experience and motivation rather than acting as independent explanations. Buyers who consider more vendors, for example, naturally tend to form somewhat larger groups and Day 1 shortlists.

The following are not meaningfully different in completed versus abandoned purchases: purchase cost; share of considered vendors that reach the Day 1 shortlist; triggers tied to M&A; internal stakeholder demand; and vendor consolidation.

No-decision journeys, then, are not simply larger or more expensive versions of successful ones. They begin with less category experience and more reactive motivations, while the differences in group size and shortlist formation may be downstream echoes of those conditions.

"No decision" usually means "not yet"

Most stalled evaluations are postponed rather than abandoned. Within 12 months, 77.9% of buyers expect to revisit the purchase; only 4.3% have firmly decided to walk away. When the evaluation restarts, most expect at least one boundary condition to change: budget (43%), use of external resources (41%), vendors considered (39%), stakeholders (31%), or requirements (29%). Only 5% expect to approach the decision the same way. Nor do these pauses usually indicate broad financial distress: 56% of organizations with a stalled evaluation report performing above expectations.

Why the purchase paused

The most-cited reasons were changing business priorities (29%) and implementation concerns (26%), followed by a cluster of similarly sized factors: M&A activity (22%), difficulty reaching vendor consensus (23%), unclear ROI (24%), difficulty reaching solution consensus (21%), and budget approval (21%). Alternative paths were uncommon — just 13% built in-house and 8% chose an AI tool instead (of whom 56.4% said it fully met their needs). Stalled evaluations, in short, are driven more by internal organizational friction than by buyers finding another way to solve the problem.

Figure 16. Changing business priorities (29.5%) and implementation concerns (25.9%) were the most-cited reasons for pausing or ending an evaluation without purchase.

When budget, vendor consensus, and incumbent status become barriers to purchase

Two of those barriers deserve closer attention because they originate primarily inside the buying organization. Among buyers who cited budget-approval challenges, 68.4% said the obstacle was a company-wide budget freeze rather than a decision specific to the purchase. Among buyers who struggled to reach vendor consensus, conflicting requirements within the buying group ranked first (41%), followed by concerns about vendor stability (34%) and the absence of a clear standout (34%); a poor sales process ranked last (13%).

Three of the four leading causes of vendor disagreement therefore reflect internal alignment problems rather than vendor execution. Even among the small share of groups that stayed with the existing solution (9.2%), the decision was usually practical: incumbent advantages (51%), switching costs (42%), integration concerns (42%), and compliance requirements (37%).

The role of LLMs in B2B buying

LLM adoption is high, but influence remains secondary

Most B2B buyers use LLMs somewhere in the journey, but use is not the same as influence. Adoption fell from 94% last year to 81% this year. The decline was more pronounced among individual contributors and lower-hierarchy roles and was larger in EMEA than in North America. One possibility is that organizations are restricting personal AI access before fully deploying approved corporate alternatives, although we cannot determine from these data whether that is the cause.

Among those who do use LLMs or AI Agents, usage is concentrated more in the middle of the journey than at the beginning. Only 26% of buyers use LLMs to find new vendors. Most use them to sort, summarize, and validate information they already have rather than to discover what they do not know. LLM discoverability therefore matters, but the evidence does not support the claim that buyers have offloaded solution search to chatbots or that LLMs have displaced established sources of influence.

LLM use is a tweak, not a revolution

A quarter of buyers (25.2%) said LLMs significantly influenced their perception of vendors, and nearly half said LLMs had some influence. That is enough to make LLM visibility worth managing. It is not enough to make LLMs the dominant influence on the journey, because buyers still rate traditional channels, accumulated knowledge, and internal discussion more highly. The practical conclusion is bounded: providers should manage how their solutions appear in LLMs without mistaking a meaningful new influence for the center of B2B buying.

Our buyers reported substantial trust in LLMs: 51.8% reported a high level of trust, and another 36.5% reported a moderate level. Trust also shapes timing. Buyers with greater trust are more likely to use LLMs earlier in the journey, while buyers with less trust tend to use them in the middle. Two outside studies provide useful context but are not directly comparable: a University of Melbourne and KPMG study of 48,000 people across 47 countries found that 46% were willing to trust LLMs at all, including 41% in the United States, while a July 2025 YouGov study of 1,500 American AI users found that 5% completely trusted AI and 43% trusted it somewhat.

Figure 17. LLM use among buyers who use them is concentrated in the middle of the journey (59%) more than at the beginning (43%). Respondents could select more than one stage.

Figure 18. Trust in LLM output is higher among buyers who rated their prompting effort as high. Across buyers, prompting effort correlates with trust.

Prompting effort is strongly associated with trust and influence

Trust, in turn, is associated with effort. Nearly half of buyers (46.6%) rated their prompting effort as high, and prompting effort correlates strongly with trust in the output (r=.58) and with the influence buyers attribute to it (r=.47). The pattern raises an important question: are buyers using LLMs to research, or to confirm?

Economic uncertainty and AI expectations

AI and economic conditions both affect when buyers engage sellers

Separately, economic pressure and AI expectations appear to push in the same direction rather than against each other: buyers expecting significant AI capability were far more likely to say economic conditions accelerated their seller engagement (65%) than buyers expecting no AI at all (29%) — consistent with some buyers treating AI-enabled solutions as a response to uncertainty rather than waiting it out.

Regional snapshot

The regional differences are real but bounded. North American buyers contact sellers later than buyers elsewhere, APAC buying groups are somewhat larger, and Continental European buyers consider slightly fewer vendors. Yet the decisive mechanics remain stable in every region: the winner is usually present on Day 1, buyers usually control first contact, and the pre-contact favorite usually wins. Regional adaptation should therefore refine the journey model, not replace it.