I nearly didn’t write this one, because the number at the heart of it stung a little.
Two thirds of B2B buyers say they’d rather buy without talking to a sales rep at all. That’s 67%, from a Gartner survey of 646 buyers reported by BizTechReports, up from 61% the year before. In the same survey, 45% said they’d used AI during a recent purchase.
The lazy reading is “sales is dead”. I’ve seen that headline most years since I was a marketing intern at Samsung in Sri Lanka. It hasn’t been true yet.
The better reading is that the buyer already asked the AI before they asked you. By the time they reply to your email, they’ve had the brochure, the comparison table and the pros and cons, in about four seconds, for free.
So information isn’t my job any more. Something else is.
From telling to checking
I sell data capture and point-of-sale hardware through the channel. Scanners, printers, mobile computers, the kit that keeps shops and warehouses moving. Every one of those products has a spec sheet the internet knows by heart.
What the internet doesn’t know is the stuff that actually decides a deal. Whether the model a reseller wants is in stock this month or sitting on a boat. Which version their engineers already know how to set up, so the rollout doesn’t stall. What the end customer will really do with it on a cold Monday morning. Which of four “equivalent” options has quietly become the one everyone’s buying.
None of that is in a chatbot. All of it is in a good account manager’s head.
That’s the shift as I see it. The rep used to be the source of information. Now the rep is the second opinion: the person who checks what the AI said, adds what it couldn’t know, and puts their name to the answer.
Give the admin to the machines
The Salesforce State of Sales report says UK sellers spend about 41% of their time actually selling. Nearly half have already used AI agents, mostly to research prospects and draft emails.
Good. That’s exactly where AI belongs. Let it do the research, the first draft, the quote that used to take an afternoon. Then spend the time you get back on the bit buyers still want a person for: is this the right call, and can I trust you if it goes wrong?
If you use AI to send more of the same emails, faster, you’ve automated the very part of you buyers were trying to avoid.
What I’m trying to do about it
Read what they read. Before a call, I ask the same AI tools my buyer probably asked. If I know what they’ve been told, I can spend the call on what they haven’t.
Bring what the internet can’t. Stock, lead times, what’s selling, what’s going wrong out in the field. If I’m not adding something the AI couldn’t, I’m not adding anything.
Be easy to reach. If buyers only call a human when they need one, that call matters more than ever. A same-day reply beats a perfect one on Thursday.
The buyers who skip the rep aren’t against people. They’re against wasted time. Give them a reason to call and they will.
Information got cheap. Trust didn’t.
