TL;DR
- Gartner and Forrester have spent years documenting a paradox at the heart of modern B2B buying: buyers are more informed than ever, yet purchase outcomes are getting worse, not better.
- Eighty percent of the B2B buying journey now happens without direct vendor contact. Eighty-one percent of buyers express dissatisfaction with the provider they ultimately choose. Eighty-six percent of purchases stall.
- These outcomes are not the result of buyer passivity or disengagement. They are the result of confident misunderstanding: buyers who conducted extensive research, formed firm conclusions, and made decisions based on information that felt authoritative but was fragmented, inaccurate, or misaligned with reality.
- Forrester’s 2025 research found that 20% of buyers felt less confident in their decision after using generative AI because they encountered unreliable or inaccurate information. Among procurement professionals, that figure rises to 28%.
- Gartner’s research shows that 74% of buying teams experience unhealthy conflict, and that 69% of buyers report inconsistencies between what they found online and what sellers told them — a direct signature of confident misunderstanding colliding with governed reality.
- The research does not name this phenomenon. But everything it documents points to the same structural problem: buyers forming confident but inaccurate views during independent research, and those views shaping outcomes in ways neither buyer nor seller can easily predict or correct.
ENaiBLD is a Buyer-Enabled Evaluation System designed to address confident misunderstanding directly, ensuring buyers develop accurate understanding throughout their evaluation rather than discovering misalignment late in the process.
The Paradox at the Heart of Modern B2B Buying
The story modern B2B buying research tells should not be possible. Buyers have more access to information than any previous generation. They can research solutions in depth before agreeing to a first meeting, consult peer communities, read independent analysis, and use AI tools to synthesize vast amounts of content in minutes.
By every measure of information access, buyers should be arriving at purchasing decisions better equipped than ever before.
By every measure of purchasing outcome, the opposite is happening.
According to Forrester’s State of Business Buying 2024, which surveyed more than 16,000 global business buyers, 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process and 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with the provider they ultimately choose. Forrester’s own survey data shows that nearly all purchases — 91% — stall at some point in the process.
These are not the outcomes of uninformed buyers. They are the outcomes of buyers who believed they were informed. Understanding the gap between those two things is the key to understanding why B2B buying has become so dysfunctional despite the explosion of available information.
What the Research Actually Documents
Both Gartner and Forrester have independently documented the same underlying pattern from different angles. Neither uses the term confident misunderstanding. But the phenomenon they describe is unmistakable.
Buyers are conducting more research but reaching worse conclusions
Gartner’s 2024 research shows that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time in direct contact with potential vendors, meaning roughly 80% of the journey is self-directed. That self-directed research is not idle browsing. Buyers are actively forming views, developing opinions, and arriving at conclusions that will shape every downstream interaction with the selling organization.
The problem is the quality of those conclusions. Gartner’s research found that 69% of B2B buyers report inconsistencies between information on the selling organization’s website and what sellers told them. That statistic is striking. It means the majority of buyers entered a sales conversation holding a view of the solution that contradicted what the seller was about to tell them. Not a slight discrepancy. A material inconsistency between what the buyer believed and what the seller knew to be true.
That is confident misunderstanding made measurable. The buyer believed what they found during their independent research. The seller knew it was wrong. The collision of those two realities is one of the primary mechanisms through which B2B deals stall, extend, and fail.
AI is accelerating the problem, not solving it
Forrester’s 2025 survey found that generative AI tools were the single most cited meaningful interaction type for researching purchases. Yet 20% of buyers said they were less confident in a decision because they encountered unreliable or inaccurate information from AI tools. Among procurement professionals, that figure rose to 28%.
This is confident misunderstanding in real time. Buyers using AI to research solutions are receiving answers that may be plausible, fluent, and confidently stated by the AI system, while being factually incorrect, outdated, or misaligned with the specific vendor’s actual positioning. The buyer who asks an AI assistant to compare two enterprise software platforms and receives a detailed, well-structured response has no reliable way to know whether that response accurately reflects either platform’s current capabilities.
A Gartner VP Analyst noted that GenAI acts as both an influencer and amplifier for B2B buyers. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 40% of B2B commercial leaders will form generative search teams to manage the emerging risks and opportunities created by the adoption of GenAI for buyer research. The risk Gartner is naming is the risk of confident misunderstanding at scale. AI-generated research that feels authoritative but is inaccurate is not just a minor inconvenience. It is a systematic mechanism for producing confident misunderstanding across the entire buyer population.
The Confidence Gap: More Research, Less Accuracy
There is a specific dynamic that Forrester’s research captures particularly well, and it explains why more information has not produced better outcomes.
The buyers who conduct the most extensive independent research are also, paradoxically, the most likely to arrive at sales conversations with entrenched views that are difficult to correct. They have not just read one article or consulted one source. They have synthesized multiple sources into a coherent mental model. That model feels well-supported. It is the product of effort and attention. Correcting it requires not just providing accurate information but challenging something the buyer invested in developing.
Gartner’s research shows that B2B buyers are 1.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal when they engage with supplier-provided digital tools in partnership with a sales rep, rather than relying on independent research alone.
The implication is significant. The gap between self-directed research and supplier-provided explanation is not just a gap in information quantity. It is a gap in information quality and accuracy. Buyers who engage with governed, accurate explanation from the supplier produce better outcomes than buyers who rely on the same volume of independent research. This is not because supplier-provided content is inherently more persuasive. It is because it is more accurate. The buyer who develops their understanding through governed explanation is less likely to have formed confident misunderstandings. When they reach a decision, it is based on an accurate picture of what they are buying. This is the core argument behind what Gartner’s research means for GTM strategy — the response to buyer self-education is not more outreach, but governed expertise present in the spaces where self-education happens.
The Buying Committee Amplifies the Problem
Gartner’s research adds a layer to this picture that explains why confident misunderstanding has become so consequential at the organizational level.
Gartner’s 2024 survey of 632 B2B buyers found that 74% of buying teams experience unhealthy conflict during the decision process, and that buying groups that reach consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal outcome.
The connection between confident misunderstanding and buying team conflict is direct. When each member of a buying committee has conducted their own independent research, they have each potentially formed their own confident misunderstanding. The CFO’s pricing assumptions, developed from publicly available information, may conflict with the technical lead’s understanding of the deployment model, developed from a whitepaper that described an earlier version of the product.
Forrester’s 2025 research found that buying groups are larger than in prior years, with an average of 13 internal stakeholders and nine external participants influencing a B2B purchase decision.
Thirteen stakeholders conducting independent research, each potentially forming their own confident misunderstanding. The buying committee conflict that Gartner documents at 74% is not primarily driven by disagreements about preferences or priorities. It is driven by stakeholders who each believe they have an accurate picture of the solution and cannot reconcile why their pictures are incompatible with each other. This is the mechanism explored in depth in the multi-stakeholder buying problem — and the Gartner and Forrester data confirms it is not an edge case. It is the norm.
The Dissatisfaction Loop
Forrester’s research documents a consequence of confident misunderstanding that is rarely framed this way but becomes obvious once the mechanism is understood.
Eighty-one percent of buyers express dissatisfaction with the provider they choose at the end of a successful purchasing process. The disconnect is worse with Gen Z and Millennial buyers, who express dissatisfaction 91% of the time.
Dissatisfaction after a completed purchase is the downstream outcome of confident misunderstanding that was never corrected. The buyer who formed an inaccurate view of what the solution would do, how it would be implemented, or what it would cost in practice — and who was never given access to governed explanation that could have corrected those views — made a decision based on that inaccurate picture. When reality does not match their expectations, dissatisfaction follows.
This is not a customer success problem in the conventional sense. It is a purchase quality problem. The dissatisfaction was seeded during the evaluation process, when confident misunderstanding went uncorrected. By the time implementation reveals the gap between expectation and reality, it is too late to address the root cause. The organizations that take Forrester’s dissatisfaction data seriously and trace it back to its origin will find that it points to the evaluation process — specifically to the quality of understanding buyers developed during independent research before and between sales interactions. This is also why behavioral intent data alone is insufficient — it tracks what buyers are doing, not what they are understanding, and it cannot detect confident misunderstanding forming in real time.
What the Research Points Toward
Neither Gartner nor Forrester prescribes a specific solution to the problem their research describes. But the pattern their data establishes is clear.
Buyers are spending 80% of their journey forming views without direct vendor contact. Those views are increasingly shaped by AI-generated content that 20% of buyers acknowledge produced inaccurate or unreliable information. The majority of buying teams experience conflict that traces back to incompatible mental models. And the overwhelming majority of completed purchases end in dissatisfaction that traces back to expectations that were never aligned with reality.
Gartner’s research shows that hybrid digital and human engagement — where buyers engage with supplier-provided digital tools alongside human sales involvement — produces significantly better outcomes than either purely digital or purely human-led approaches.
The implication is not that sales reps need to be more involved in the 80% of the journey they currently do not reach. It is that the supplier needs to be present in that 80% in a different form — one that provides accurate, governed explanation that buyers can access on their own terms and timeline. That is exactly what the confident misunderstanding problem requires. Not more outreach. Not more content. Governed expertise that follows buyers through the self-directed research phase that makes up the vast majority of the modern buying journey, and that ensures the conclusions they form during that phase are based on accurate information rather than the fragments and approximations that currently fill the void. This is the missing layer in the sales stack — named precisely because it is the layer that current go-to-market architecture, however sophisticated, has consistently left out.
The Bottom Line
Gartner and Forrester have documented, from multiple angles and across tens of thousands of buyers, the systematic failure of the modern B2B buying process to produce accurate understanding and confident decisions. The statistics are striking not just in their magnitude but in what they collectively reveal.
Buyers are not failing because they lack information. They are failing because the information they rely on during independent research is fragmented, AI-generated, peer-sourced, and ungoverned. It produces views that feel well-supported but are often misaligned with reality. When those views encounter the governed reality that sellers know, the collision produces conflict, stalled deals, extended cycles, and post-purchase dissatisfaction.
Confident misunderstanding is the mechanism connecting all of these outcomes. It is not a new phenomenon. But as self-directed research becomes the dominant mode of B2B evaluation, as AI tools accelerate the formation of plausible but inaccurate views, and as buying committees grow larger and more fragmented, it has become the central problem that B2B go-to-market strategy needs to solve.
The research has documented it comprehensively. The question now is what selling organizations do about it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Gartner’s research say about how much of the B2B buying journey happens without vendor contact?
Gartner’s 2024 research shows that buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time in direct contact with potential vendors, meaning roughly 80% of the journey is self-directed. This figure has increased steadily from 57% in 2015 and reflects the growing preference for independent digital research over direct seller engagement.
What does Forrester’s research show about buyer satisfaction with purchasing decisions?
Forrester’s State of Business Buying 2024, which surveyed over 16,000 global business buyers, found that 81% of buyers express dissatisfaction with the provider they ultimately choose. Dissatisfaction rates are even higher among younger buyers, reaching 91% for Gen Z and Millennial buyers. The same research found that 86% of purchases stall during the buying process.
How does AI research contribute to confident misunderstanding?
Forrester’s 2025 research found that generative AI tools were the most cited research method used by B2B buyers, but 20% of all buyers and 28% of procurement professionals reported feeling less confident in their decision because they encountered unreliable or inaccurate information from AI tools. AI-generated research can be fluent and confidently stated while being factually incorrect or misaligned with a specific vendor’s actual current positioning.
What does the Gartner 69% inconsistency statistic reveal?
Gartner found that 69% of B2B buyers report inconsistencies between information on the seller’s website and what sellers told them. This means the majority of buyers enter sales conversations carrying views formed during independent research that contradict what the seller knows to be accurate. That gap is a direct measure of the scale at which confident misunderstanding operates in modern B2B buying.
How does buying team conflict relate to confident misunderstanding?
Gartner’s 2024 survey found that 74% of buying teams experience unhealthy conflict during the decision process. When each member of a buying committee has conducted independent research and potentially formed their own inaccurate conclusions, the conflict that follows is not primarily about preferences. It is about incompatible mental models that each stakeholder believes to be accurate. Gartner found that buying groups that reach genuine consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal outcome.
What does Forrester’s research suggest about solving the information quality problem?
Forrester’s research identifies hybrid digital and human engagement as producing better outcomes than either purely self-directed or purely sales-led approaches. Gartner’s research confirms this with a 1.8x higher rate of high-quality deals when buyers engage with supplier-provided digital tools alongside sales interactions. Together the research points toward governed, supplier-provided explanation being present in the 80% of the journey that currently unfolds without direct vendor contact.
Why does more buyer research produce worse outcomes rather than better ones?
The paradox Gartner and Forrester document reflects the difference between information quantity and information quality. Buyers who conduct extensive independent research form views based on fragmented, ungoverned sources. Those views feel well-supported precisely because they were developed through effort and synthesis. Correcting a confident misunderstanding is harder than filling an information gap, because the buyer believes they already have the answer. More research from poor-quality sources does not produce better outcomes. It produces more deeply held misunderstandings.