Understanding what B2B buyers do before their first sales call is one of the most underleveraged advantages in modern B2B selling.
- By the time a B2B buyer makes first contact with a vendor, they have already completed approximately 61% of their buying journey, down from 69% in 2024 as buyers engage earlier, but still well past the point where initial conclusions have formed (6sense, 2025 Buyer Experience Report).
- 83% of B2B buyers mostly or fully define their purchase requirements before speaking with sales for the first time (6sense, 2025 Buyer Experience Report).
- 94% of B2B buyers now use large language models during their buying process, making AI-generated answers a primary input into vendor evaluation before any sales interaction occurs (6sense, 2025 Buyer Experience Report).
- The sources buyers rely on during pre-contact research — AI tools, peer review platforms, analyst summaries, and competitor content — are unmanaged by the selling team and uncorrected for accuracy.
- This is where confident misunderstanding forms at scale: buyers arrive at the first call not as blank slates but as people who have already drawn conclusions, many of which the selling team does not know exist.
The first sales call is not the beginning of the buyer’s evaluation. It is a checkpoint in the middle of one. By the time a buyer reaches out or accepts an outbound meeting, they have typically spent weeks or months researching independently, forming views about the problem they are trying to solve, which vendors address it, and what distinguishes those vendors from each other. The selling team was not part of that process.
Understanding what happens in that pre-contact phase is not a marketing question. It is a sales and revenue question, because the views formed there are what the selling team inherits when the first call begins.
The Research Phase the Selling Team Cannot See
Before reaching out to a vendor, most B2B buyers have already assembled a shortlist, defined their requirements, and formed a view of the competitive landscape. 6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report, based on a global study of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, found that the average buyer initiates first contact at roughly 61% of the way through their buying journey. That is the earliest point of contact the selling team typically gets. Everything before it happened without them.
What were those buyers doing in that pre-contact period? The same report found that 83% of buyers mostly or fully define their purchase requirements before speaking with sales. They are not arriving to be educated. They are arriving to validate, challenge, or confirm conclusions they have already drawn.
The sources feeding those conclusions are largely outside vendor control. Buyers consult peer review platforms, category analyst summaries, content produced by competitors, AI-generated overviews, and informal peer conversations. Each source offers a version of the market, the problem, and the available solutions. None of those versions was reviewed or corrected by the selling team. The buyer synthesizes across them and arrives at conclusions that feel earned, because they are the product of genuine research effort, even when the inputs were incomplete or misleading.
AI Has Accelerated the Problem, Not Solved It
The introduction of large language models into the B2B research process has made pre-contact opinion formation faster and more confident. 6sense’s 2025 research found that 94% of B2B buyers now use LLMs during the buying process. That near-universal adoption means that AI-generated answers about vendors, categories, and competitive differentiators are now a standard input into how buyers form their views before engaging anyone.
This creates a specific problem for selling teams. LLMs synthesize the information available to them at training time, draw on whatever content the vendor and their competitors have published, and produce confident-sounding summaries that buyers consume as informed context. When that summary accurately reflects a vendor’s positioning and capabilities, it helps. When it reflects a competitor’s framing, an outdated description, or a generic category definition that does not capture meaningful differentiation, the buyer absorbs an inaccurate baseline and arrives at the first call holding it.
The buyer does not know their AI-assisted research produced a flawed picture. The research felt thorough. The LLM was confident. The conclusions feel well-grounded. This is confident misunderstanding at scale, compressed into a research phase that now precedes nearly every first sales interaction.
What the Selling Team Inherits
The practical consequence for sales teams is that the first call does not begin on neutral ground. It begins with a buyer who has a working theory of the market, a shortlist they trust, and a set of criteria that were defined before any governed conversation took place. Some of that working theory will be accurate. Some will reflect the sources that were most prominent, most persuasive, or most accessible during independent research, regardless of whether they were correct.
The selling team’s job in the first call is frequently to discover which parts of the buyer’s pre-formed view are accurate and which need to be addressed. That is a different task from building understanding from scratch, and it is less efficient. Time spent correcting a misconception that formed three weeks ago during an AI research session is time not spent advancing the conversation to genuine evaluation.
The longer-term answer is not to wait for the first call and then repair the damage. It is to be present in the research phase in a way that governs what buyers learn before they ever make contact. For more on how AI is reshaping the pre-contact research phase specifically, see How B2B Buyers Are Using AI to Research Before Talking to Sales. For more on the phenomenon of buyers forming confident but inaccurate views during self-directed research, see What Is Confident Misunderstanding.
Frequently Asked Questions
Have buyers always done this much research before contacting vendors?
The trend has been building for over a decade, but the pace accelerated sharply with the adoption of AI tools. What changed most recently is not the proportion of the journey completed before first contact, which has been above 60% for several years, but the quality of confidence buyers develop during that independent phase. AI tools produce fluent, authoritative-sounding summaries that accelerate opinion formation and make buyers less likely to hold conclusions loosely when they arrive at the first call.
Does better inbound content fix this?
Partially. Vendors who publish authoritative, specific content have a better chance of being accurately represented in AI-generated answers and peer research. But content that exists on a website is still filtered through whatever sources a buyer consults and however an LLM synthesizes across them. Governing what buyers learn requires being present not just in the indexed content ecosystem but in the actual evaluation experience.
Why does it matter what buyers believe before the first call?
Because pre-formed beliefs are the frame through which everything in the first call is interpreted. A buyer who arrived with a misconception about pricing will hear the pricing conversation through that lens. A buyer who formed an inaccurate view of a competitor’s advantage will evaluate the differentiation argument against a benchmark that does not reflect reality. The first call does not reset the buyer’s frame. It intersects with it.
What is confident misunderstanding in this context?
Confident misunderstanding refers to the state in which a buyer holds firm conclusions drawn from fragmented or inaccurate self-directed research, without recognizing that their understanding is incomplete. It is particularly common in the pre-contact research phase because buyers invest significant effort in that research and arrive at conclusions that feel earned. The confidence is real. The accuracy is not guaranteed.
Bottom Line
B2B buyers spend the majority of their evaluation time before they speak with any vendor. During that time, they form views from AI tools, peer reviews, analyst summaries, and competitor content, all without a governed, expert source available to correct or complete the picture. The opinions they form shape every conversation that follows. Selling teams that understand this dynamic are better positioned to address it, and to build the infrastructure that ensures accurate understanding is available in the spaces where buyers are already looking.