De-Risking the B2B Buyer Journey in the Age of AI

According to Forrester, a staggering 92% of B2B buyers have formulated a shortlist before they ever engage with a sales rep—and that was two years ago. Today, AI has exacerbated this trend as buyers increasingly rely on LLM-generated insights in an attempt to de-risk the B2B buying journey by amassing as much information as possible. Plus, a recent Gartner survey of 645 B2B buyers found that 75% of buyers want nothing to do with a sales rep. However, that same survey revealed something counterintuitive: After buyers finish their research—the same research they used to avoid us in the first place—69% turned right back to a sales rep to make sure they got it right.

Sit with that for a second. Buyers have more information than ever before, and less confidence in it than ever before.

Make no mistake: This is a unique moment in the history of our profession. Buyers are more risk-averse than ever, because they know a major purchase is a career risk. As a result, they’re so desperate for trusted and credible advice that they’re going beyond the ever-expanding buying groups, the external influencers and the peer-to-peer networks that they’ve relied on in the past—all the way back to the sales professionals they’ve tried to avoid.

For the teams that work to facilitate the buying process and build buyer confidence, this is an incredible opportunity. For those still running in “education mode” and those whose sales motions are still anchored on features and functionality, it’s a wake-up call.

The Rep-free B2B Buyer Journey Is Now the Default

Most of the early journey happens before a seller ever shows up. It begins when buyers define the problem, build a shortlist, read peer reviews and hand the first pass to an AI assistant. Buyers have effectively designed sellers out of the top of the funnel, and they did it on purpose.

However, buyers now face more information than they can reconcile, often from sources that are equally credible and flatly contradictory. They research exhaustively, settle on firm conclusions and end up confidently wrong. The easy, frictionless buying everyone wanted turned out to be the thing most likely to leave them regretting the decision. So, in the end, they come back to the source.

Buyers Still Turn to Reps to Validate AI-generated Insights

In the same Gartner survey, 51% of buyers said they are more likely to get misleading information from generative AI, and 49% said the same about a sales rep.

There’s a real tension playing out here. And you have to wonder: What kind of salesperson did those 49% encounter? Did they encounter someone pitching features and functionality through rose-colored glasses, or someone who acted as a trusted advisor?

I know which one my money is on, and it’s why reps still matter most at the riskiest moments of the buying journey: expanding a prospect’s understanding of the problems worth solving, diagnosing the underlying business issue, creating a roadmap to value realization, building internal consensus and buyer confidence.

Ultimately, my read on this is in line with Blaisdell’s (VP Analyst, Chief of Research, Gartner): Buyer preference for self-service does not mean sellers matter less. It means sellers have to show up differently, "engaging where they can help buyers validate information, reduce risk and move forward with greater confidence."

The B2B Decision-making Process Is Risk Management

Look closely at the B2B decision-making process and you will see it all revolves around risk management. Back in 2023, when I wrote The Power of Value Selling, I described buyers as risk-averse individuals  "tasked with making the perfect business decision with imperfect information." It’s easy to see why: Get an enterprise purchase wrong, and it is not a small mistake. It can derail the career of the person who championed it.

Now spread that fear across a buying committee. I have seen how quickly the dynamic gets complicated as a committee grows. Each one carries a different agenda, a different appetite for risk and now a different pile of AI research that may not line up with anyone else's. Someone has to make sense of the conflicting inputs and help the group reach a decision it can stand behind.

And it’s buyer confidence that turns money spent into value realized. Gartner found that confident buyers are twice as likely to report a high-quality deal. In turn, a seller who helps a committee lower its risk is doing the work that accelerates decisions and paves the way for easier renewal sales.

Selling to Decision Makers Who Already Did the Research

A rep who walks into a late-stage meeting planning to deliver facts the buyer does not have will lose. The buyer already has the facts, sometimes more of them than the rep. What the buyer lacks is judgment, context and the confidence to move forward. Here is how reps, and the leaders who coach them, can deliver it:

For reps, it starts with curiosity and discipline:

• Diagnose before you prescribe: When a buyer shows up with a point of view, resist the urge to confirm it. Stay in “problem expert” mode for longer than feels comfortable to help them deepen their understanding of the problem they are trying to solve.
• Get to the why behind the buy: Separate the objective from the real business issue underneath it, then go one level deeper, to the personal value. AI can lay out the business case. What it cannot uncover is what this decision means for each person whom it affects. Ultimately, personal value is where buyer confidence and real differentiation get built.
• Pressure-test AI's version of the truth: Generic AI models are confident even when they are wrong, and buyers know it. Walk them through what their research may have missed, objectively, so they come to trust your judgment over the LLM’s.
• Let them predict the experience: Confidence comes from a buyer being able to picture exactly what working with your company will look like. A model can summarize a category, but it cannot detail the experience of going from signed contract to value realization.
  

For leaders, take a hard look at how your coaching and enablement programs engage with the human side of selling. When we surveyed 464 sales leaders, they told us that establishing credibility and trustworthiness were the most impactful behaviors during a buying cycle’s early stages. We also found that while 98% of organizations measure performance, only 25% of organizations actually measure behaviors like this. That gap is your opportunity. To get started:

• Coach credibility in the first few minutes: No executive shares a real business problem with a seller they don't trust, and that judgment gets made almost immediately. Use conversational intelligence to track if your reps open with a short, value-based credibility story that proves they understand the buyer's world.
• Ensure discovery goes beyond AI insights: A buyer who arrives with AI-formed conclusions only has the surface version of their problem and solutions. Your reps earn their seat by going deeper: asking the questions that separate the buyer's stated objective from the real business issue underneath it, surfacing all challenges along the way. Then, ensure sellers are equipped with the conversational skills to position the problems your company is uniquely qualified to solve at the top of that list.
• Build their business and financial fluency: While AI can run a company’s financials, predict business issues and give your reps a script, can your sellers actually hang in the conversation with a senior executive? Invest in the business acumen and financial literacy skills that let a seller use AI insights as a springboard to executive-level conversations instead of a life vest.
• Measure the behaviors directly: As I mentioned earlier, our research found a real disconnect: 98% of organizations measure performance, but only 25% measure the selling behaviors that drive it. Use your tech stack to track trust, credibility and rapport-building as leading indicators, so you can coach them long before you see their impact at quarter’s end.

Buyer Enablement in the Age of AI

Buyer enablement means helping buyers move through their own decision with confidence, instead of pushing them into your sales process. It is the practical form of a principle I come back to throughout my latest book: people do not want to be sold to. They want to buy, and the seller's job is to facilitate that buying process.

The traditional approach to selling centers around the act of persuasion: Convince the buyer that this is a good idea and confidence—and the signed deal—naturally follow.

Today, nothing could be further from the truth. Buyer confidence is built when they can clearly see the path to value realization on both the business and personal level, when they can accurately predict the experience and the outcome of working with your company. It’s that small view into the future that closes high-quality deals, and it is something that relies heavily on a foundation of human-to-human connection and credibility, trust and rapport.

So, in the end, buyer enablement in an AI-driven journey comes down to giving the committee what it needs to decide with confidence: a clear line from their business issue to your solution and value realization, a mutual plan they helped write, references and proof that let them predict the outcome, and a seller who lowers uncertainty every time they show up. Do that consistently and you become a necessity in the decision rather than a nicety.

The Judgment Gap Is Where Trusted Reps Win

To be relevant today, sellers must shift efforts toward closing the gap between information and trust. Ultimately, this doesn’t require you to reinvent how you sell. All it means is refocusing on the fundamentals—disciplined discovery, real credibility, business and financial fluency—at the moment buyers crave these sales skills.

Get that right, and you become something AI can't replicate: a steady source of confidence in a time when decisions feel riskier than ever. That's the opportunity in front of us, and the teams that seize it will pull ahead.