2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report

In our earlier Buyer Experience Reports, we have emphasized how the buying journey has been abstracted from the sales cycle. Results from two years of research and just over 5,000 participants across three major global markets have shown us that:

Buyers are deeply experienced in the solution categories that impact their roles.

&

They are able to execute two-thirds of their buying journeys — including choosing winning vendors — before engaging with sellers.

However, buyers of nearly every B2B solution now have to understand whether AI is embedded in those solutions, and, if so, what it is doing. They need to know how AI is changing a vendor’s capabilities, pricing models, implementation timelines, and data security.

Simply put: a buyer’s due diligence now includes answering vital questions about how AI is being implemented in solutions they buy, whether technology or services, and even physical goods.

Buyers’ experience in a given category is of little use in this new terrain, and the information they need is not readily available on vendor websites. Later in this report, we discuss how this is warping buying processes.

Are Buyers Substituting LLM Usage for Vendor Engagement?

No. Not yet, at least.

While we found that 94% of buyers are using LLMs in their buying process, that usage does not appear to be diminishing reliance on vendor interactions, digital or otherwise. In particular, we ask buyers each year to estimate how many interactions they had with the winning vendor across their buying journey. These interactions included both content and human interactions. Buyers this year reported have an average of 16 interactions per person with the winning vendor – one less than in 2024 and statistically identical number to 2023. For a deeper dive on how buyers are using LLM’s to aid their research click here.

Why isn’t LLM usage changing buyer interaction patterns?

There are multiple factors that may be leading to stasis in buyer-seller interactions in the present.

First, the typical purchase being reported in our survey had a median annual value of $200,000 to $300,000. Such purchases, even for the largest companies, represent significant investments, and, as such, significant risks for the individuals making the vendor selections. Even were LLMs fully trustworthy sources of information today, many if not most users would likely still be reluctant to trust without verifying all relevant information for themselves.

For companies experiencing a decline in web traffic attributable to LLMs, it is likely the traffic that has gone missing is not from in-market buyers, but from the professionally curious and from future buyers. This is not to say that marketers should be unconcerned about the decline of web traffic. However, that decline is unlikely to impact current pipeline production. To read how buyer experience may also mitigate the impact of LLM-induced traffic loss click here.

Second, another factor that may be buttressing the volume of direct interactions between buyers and vendors is the need to assess how vendors across all solution categories are implementing AI in their solutions. As we’ll detail below, the need to evaluate how potential vendors are implementing AI in their solutions is causing buyers to engage with vendor sellers earlier.

Not Just AI Uncertainty, Economic Uncertainty

The second hypothesis we tested was that economic uncertainty might also cause cycles and the point of first contact to be compressed.

Nearly half of buyers (49%) also said that economic uncertainty had led to shorter buying cycles. Organizations with approved budgets may have been eager to spend budgeted funds quickly, before potential pullbacks due to tariffs, cost-cutting, or other macroeconomic risks.

Not only were cycles compressed, but 62% of buyers said that they engaged with sellers earlier due to economic uncertainty, again accelerating the buying process.

Read more about how economic uncertainty is affecting the B2B buying journey here.

Our supplemental survey gave us not only an explanation for the changes we observed in the main study, but also a rare glimpse into how large-scale external forces can bend long-standing patterns in B2B buying. This also suggests that rather than a permanent realignment, changes may prove to be situational adjustments — though still adjustments that every revenue team must now recognize and adapt to.

Given the heightened uncertainty buyers reported this year — and its substantial impact on the timing of first contact with sellers — one might reasonably expect buyers to be less certain about their vendor preferences before engaging in those conversations.

As shown in figure 10 below, buyers this year were just as likely to establish their purchase requirements in advance of the POFC as in prior years.

This year, we asked buyers the most direct question we have asked to date, namely: “Was your team able to put your shortlist in order of preference prior to engaging with sellers or SDRs?”

A resounding 94% of buyers answered yes. Nearly all buyers enter their first seller conversations with a shortlist already ordered according buying group preference. This means that before engaging with sellers, the buying group has created an internal ranking of vendors — making second place or below at the time of the first meeting a steep uphill climb.

The data show just how steep. First, consistent with prior years, 79% of buyers reported that they, not vendor representatives, initiated the first buyer-seller interactions (prior years = 82%). Buyers are clearly still taking charge of when that first interaction occurs.

Given how closely buyers control that first interaction, it stands to reason that they would also choose carefully the order of their first meetings with vendors. Our earlier studies have shown that buyers speak with the ultimate winner first more than 80% of the time. This year’s study reiterated that finding. In the initial survey, 77.0% (n=3,744) of buyers saying that their first vendor conversation was with the ultimate winner. In our supplemental survey (n=766), 81% of buyers said they spoke with the winning vendor first.

While unlikely, this finding might indicate that persuasive initial conversations influence buyers more than their prior preferences, with first vendors winning 80% of the time due to compelling interactions.

To test this, we examined the rare cases where buyers said they had not ordered their shortlist before speaking with sellers. If buyers had not ordered their shortlists in advance, the first vendor to speak with the buyer should come out on top even more often than 80% of the time. However, when buyers have not identified a leader prior to the first conversations, the first vendor they spoke with won just 57% of the time.

Buying groups spend months ordering their shortlists as a group, and they do that before their first seller conversations nearly every time. And even where there are important considerations that need to be validated after that first interaction, that leader at the point of first contact is the ultimate winner nearly 80% of the time. There is still meaningful room for change in buyer preferences after the POFC, but being second or worse at that juncture is to be avoided.

It is clear: being the first vendor contacted is an indication that you are the preferred vendor, not the cause of becoming the preferred. And while buyers in this year’s research expressed greater uncertainty about vendor selection and engaged sellers earlier, this finding suggests that the real opportunity to shape outcomes still occurs before the POFC.

The implication for revenue teams is stark: earlier engagement alone will not win deals if the buying group’s ranking is already set. The competitive advantage lies in becoming the preferred choice before the POFC — through brand presence, reputation, and influence earlier in the buying journey — so that when uncertainty does drive buyers to engage, they are engaging with you first and from the top position.

AI-related questions and economic uncertainty may prompt earlier outreach, but that enlarged window is still primarily used to confirm existing preferences — not to reset them.

When Buyers Are Using LLMs in the Buying Journey

As Figure 13 illustrates, buyers are clearly using LLMs earlier rather than later in their journeys. It may surprise many readers to see that buyers are using LLMs more toward the middle than the beginning of their journeys. To understand this, it is worth reflecting on an earlier section of this report, where we described how buyers are overwhelmingly likely to have prior experience with the brands they are about to evaluate. As such, in established product categories it is unlikely that buyers are going to LLMs or to standard search engines at the outset of their journey to discover vendors in their category of interest.

In short, the answer is largely no. In our study, age ranged from 21 to 70 (median = 39.6). Age was correlated with most buying journey measures, but the correlations were almost all trivially small. As expected, older buyers reported more prior experience evaluating and purchasing solutions. There was also a very slight tendency for older buyers to engage with sellers later in the journey, and to have slightly more total interactions during their journeys.

Finally, as shown in Figure 15, age played a small role in the use of large language models (LLMs): those who did not use an LLM were on average 4.5 years older than those who did. However, those who did not use an LLM represented only about 6% of the entire sample.

There are no meaningful age-related differences in how important buyers felt LLMs were. Buyers in the 51 to 60 age range rated LLMs slightly – but reliably – less useful than their younger counterparts, but that decline was reversed for buyers aged 61 to 70.

One explanation for the minimal role that age plays in buying journey dynamics is that buying journey dynamics are likely driven by the company’s rules and norms, and by those imposed by the buying group.

Another factor concerning individuals who are part of buying groups is the degree to which they have prior experience in the category and with the vendors they were evaluating. Last year, we asked buyers whether they had prior experience with one or more of the vendors they were evaluating: 97% of buyers said they did.

This year, we went further, asking buyers what type of prior experience they had, how many times they had evaluated vendors in the category of solution they were describing in the survey, and how many of those journeys had ended in a purchase.