AI Can Find Your Buyers. Only You Can Earn Their Trust

By Dan Sanchez · Episode published

B2B buyers form shortlists early, long before sales knows they are shopping. Build useful content and relationships before intent appears, then use AI to act on the signals.

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Most B2B teams start paying close attention when a buyer fills out a form, answers a sales email, or enters a visible evaluation process. By then, the important decision may already be mostly made.

The 6sense Buyer Experience Study offers a better way to understand the buying cycle. Instead of treating a purchase as a short funnel that begins when a lead appears, the research looks at how accounts move through target, awareness, consideration, decision, and purchase stages. The findings point to a long period when buyers are learning, forming preferences, and deciding which vendors deserve a place on the shortlist.

The buying cycle starts before the lead

In the study’s snapshot, 60 percent of accounts were in the target stage, 17 percent were in awareness, 17 percent were in consideration, 4 percent were in decision, and 2 percent were in purchase. Those percentages describe a point in time across monitored accounts, not a fixed calendar for every business. A company with a seasonal buying cycle will see its distribution change.

The practical lesson is that most accounts are not ready for a sales conversation. Even among the accounts that are moving, only a smaller portion is close to a purchase. Treating every contact as a lead creates pressure on sales teams and confuses learning behavior with buying intent.

The study also found that the shortlist forms early. Buyers put four of the five eventual vendors on the list at the beginning of the buying journey, then add the fifth later. The average buying journey described in the research lasted about 10 months. By the time a sales team learns that an account is evaluating solutions, the buyer may already have a strong preference.

The first position has a real advantage

After the buying group has spent time evaluating its options, the vendor at the top of the shortlist wins most of the time. A sales conversation can change a preference, but it is much harder to create a preference from nothing at the end of the process.

That changes how marketing should think about early content. The goal is not to pressure an account into a purchase before it is ready. The goal is to become useful while the buying group is learning, defining its problem, and deciding what good solutions look like.

This is where brand, thought leadership, podcasts, webinars, and practical resources matter. They can help a company become familiar before the formal process starts. A buyer may not be ready to talk to sales, but the buyer can still remember who helped make the problem clearer.

Stop confusing audience with demand

Useful content creates an important measurement problem. People may read a blog, listen to a podcast, attend a webinar, or join a newsletter because they find the material valuable. That does not mean they are ready to buy.

The answer is not to stop building an audience. Audience building creates the familiarity that can help a company make the shortlist later. The answer is to distinguish an interested contact from an account showing purchase intent. A person can be a valuable member of an audience long before becoming an active buyer.

That distinction also changes how you interpret traffic from AI and search. People are not necessarily avoiding a company because they use ChatGPT. They may simply have no reason to visit a website that offers generic explanations. If a company shares an experience, an insight, or a useful perspective that cannot be replaced by a generic answer, it gives people a reason to return.

Create content for the whole buying group

The person who first discovers a solution is rarely the only person who needs to agree to the purchase. Finance, IT, operations, and other stakeholders may have their own questions and risks. A buyer who likes your product still needs help explaining the decision to those people.

AI can make this work more practical. Once a company understands the different roles in a buying group, it can create content that helps each person evaluate the decision in the language of their responsibilities. The primary buyer may need a workflow explanation. Finance may need a value and risk case. IT may need information about security, integration, and implementation.

The content should be available before the formal sales process, then become easier to find when an account shows meaningful intent. Signals can help a team decide which accounts deserve more focused attention, but the content still needs to be useful in context.

Build relationships for the next cycle

A sales representative may not be able to turn every late-stage evaluation into a win. Relationships still matter because they influence who gets remembered, trusted, and invited into the next buying process. That effect may not appear in the current quarter, but it can determine whether a company makes the shortlist months or years later.

The durable strategy is to build helpful experiences before the buyer is ready, recognize intent when it appears, and support every stakeholder who has to make the decision. AI can help identify accounts, interpret signals, and scale relevant content. Trust still comes from being useful over time.