TL;DR
- Gartner’s research on B2B buyer behavior documents a fundamental shift that most GTM strategies have not fully absorbed.
- A significant majority of B2B buyers now prefer to conduct their own research before engaging a sales representative, reshaping the entry point for every sales motion.
- Buying teams are larger, more complex, and more prone to internal conflict than they were a decade ago, driven largely by misalignment across stakeholders.
- The implication is not that sales matters less. It is that the infrastructure supporting buyers between sales interactions matters more than it ever has.
- Organizations that respond to this research by adding more sales touchpoints are solving the wrong problem. The gap is not in outreach frequency. It is in explanation quality between interactions.
- Buyer-Enabled Evaluation Systems are a direct response to what Gartner’s research describes: a buying environment where self-direction, stakeholder complexity, and information fragmentation are the norm.
ENaiBLD is a Buyer-Enabled Evaluation System built to address the buyer behavior patterns that Gartner’s research consistently identifies as the defining challenges of modern B2B sales.
Why Analyst Research Matters for GTM Strategy
Market research from firms like Gartner earns its authority by documenting behavior at scale. Individual sales leaders can observe patterns in their own pipeline. Analyst research confirms whether those patterns are isolated or structural, anecdotal or systemic.
When the same themes appear across multiple years of Gartner research on B2B buyer behavior, they are not trends to watch. They are conditions to plan around.
The findings discussed in this article have direct implications for how GTM teams structure their go-to-market motion, where they invest in infrastructure, and what they expect sales to accomplish relative to digital channels. Understanding them is not an academic exercise. It is a prerequisite for building a digital-first GTM strategy that matches how buyers actually work.
Finding One: Buyers Prefer to Research Without Sales
Gartner’s 2025 Sales Survey found that 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience, choosing to conduct digital research independently before engaging a seller.
This figure deserves more attention than it typically receives, because it is often interpreted narrowly as a preference for digital channels. The more significant implication is about timing and control.
Buyers are not simply choosing a different medium. They are choosing to form their own view of the solution space before allowing a sales team to influence that view. By the time they engage with a seller, they want to arrive with a framework already in place, questions already formed, and a level of independence that lets them evaluate the seller’s claims against their own prior research.
For GTM strategy, this has two consequences. First, the quality of information available to buyers during their independent research phase directly shapes the mental models they bring into sales conversations. If the most authoritative, accurate information available comes from third-party sources that may not reflect a vendor’s actual positioning, buyers will arrive misinformed. Second, organizations that only invest in the sales-led portion of the buying journey are effectively absent from the phase where more than half of buyers are forming their foundational views.
The strategic response is not to try to push buyers into sales conversations earlier. It is to ensure that accurate, governed expertise is present during the self-directed research phase, so that the understanding buyers develop independently is aligned with reality rather than fragmented from it. This is precisely the missing layer in most modern GTM stacks.
Finding Two: Hybrid Engagement Drives the Best Outcomes
Gartner’s 2023 to 2024 buyer enablement research establishes that hybrid digital and human engagement models produce stronger outcomes than either purely digital or purely sales-led approaches.
Digital channels accelerate the research and education phases of evaluation. Human expertise remains critical during the decision-intensive stages of a purchase: navigating complex trade-offs, managing stakeholder dynamics, and providing the kind of contextual judgment that automated systems cannot replicate.
The practical implication is that digital and human engagement are not in competition. They are complementary, and the organizations that treat them as such outperform those that try to optimize for one at the expense of the other.
What this means for GTM infrastructure is that the handoff between digital and human engagement needs to be designed deliberately. Buyers should be able to self-educate through high-quality digital channels and then transition into sales conversations with a strong baseline of accurate understanding. Sales should be able to see what buyers have explored digitally before engaging, so that live conversations can build on that foundation rather than starting over.
Most GTM stacks were not designed with this handoff in mind. Digital marketing and sales operate as separate motions with limited coordination between what buyers learn in the digital phase and what sales knows when the conversation begins. Closing that gap is one of the highest-leverage investments a GTM team can make. Understanding what a digital-first GTM strategy requires is the starting point for closing it.
Finding Three: Information Overload Creates Confident Misunderstanding
Gartner’s research on buyer behavior consistently documents a paradox at the heart of modern buying: buyers have access to more information than ever before, but that abundance has not produced proportionally better decisions.
The reason is that information quality has not kept pace with information volume. Buyers are synthesizing content from AI-generated summaries, peer forums, competitor websites, analyst abstracts, and third-party review platforms. Each of these sources contributes a fragment of a picture. None of them are accountable to the vendor’s actual positioning. None of them know the specific context of the buyer’s situation.
The result is what the research describes as information overload, but the downstream consequence is more specific than that term implies. Buyers do not just feel overwhelmed. They form conclusions. Those conclusions feel grounded because they are built from multiple sources, but they are often misaligned with reality in ways the buyer does not recognize.
This is confident misunderstanding at scale, and it is a direct product of a buying environment where information is abundant but governed expertise is scarce. The strategic implication is that the problem is not how much content a selling organization produces. It is whether that content, and the explanation it provides, is present in the moments when buyers are actively forming their views.
Finding Four: Stakeholder Conflict Is the Norm, Not the Exception
Gartner’s 2025 research reports that 74% of B2B buying teams demonstrate unhealthy conflict during decision processes. This figure is striking both in its magnitude and in what it reveals about where deal friction actually originates.
Stakeholder conflict in buying committees is rarely about fundamental disagreement over whether a solution is needed. It is most commonly driven by misalignment: different stakeholders have developed different understandings of what a solution does, what it costs in practice, how it integrates with existing systems, and what the implementation will require.
Each of those gaps traces back to the same root cause. Stakeholders evaluated independently, using different sources, with no shared reference point. The CFO got their understanding from a summary the champion provided. The IT lead formed their view from a technical whitepaper and a forum thread. The security team came in late and built their mental model from a compliance document that may or may not have been current.
By the time the buying committee convenes to make a decision, they are not operating from a shared understanding. They are operating from several different understandings, each of which feels accurate to the person who holds it.
Sales teams typically encounter this conflict late, often after it has already created momentum problems. The deal slows not because of external competition but because of internal misalignment that was allowed to develop in the absence of a shared, governed explanation.
The strategic implication is clear: in multi-stakeholder deals, ensuring alignment across the buying committee is as important as managing the relationship with the primary champion. And that alignment cannot be created entirely through sales-led interaction, because most of the stakeholders involved will never attend every meeting.
Finding Five: Enabling Evaluation Outperforms Adding Touchpoints
Gartner’s recent research makes a distinction that challenges a common GTM assumption: that more sales engagement produces better outcomes. The research suggests that helping buyers evaluate effectively is more impactful than simply increasing the frequency or volume of sales interactions.
This finding reframes the optimization problem for GTM teams. The instinct when deals slow down or conversion rates drop is often to add more touches: more outreach, more follow-up, more demos. But if the underlying issue is that buyers cannot evaluate confidently because they lack access to accurate, contextual explanation, more interactions do not solve the problem. They add activity without addressing the root cause.
Enabling evaluation means ensuring buyers have what they need to move forward on their own terms. It means making expert explanation available between interactions, not just during them. It means giving every stakeholder, not just the champion, access to governed information that answers their specific questions.
The organizations that act on this finding restructure their GTM investment away from outreach volume and toward evaluation infrastructure. They measure success not just by meetings booked or touches completed, but by the quality of understanding buyers develop throughout the process.
What This Research Means for Your GTM Motion
Taken together, these findings describe a buying environment that most GTM strategies were not built to serve.
Buyers want to self-direct their research. They are forming views before and between sales interactions using sources that may not reflect your actual positioning. Buying committees are large and prone to misalignment because stakeholders evaluate independently without a shared reference point. And adding more sales activity does not fix any of these problems.
The GTM response this research points toward is not a radical departure from what sales does well. It is a structural addition: infrastructure that ensures accurate, governed expertise is present in the spaces where buyers are already evaluating, accessible to every stakeholder involved in the decision, and visible to sales teams so that live conversations can build on what buyers have already explored.
That infrastructure is not a content library. It is not a chatbot. It is not a sales room with documents attached. It is a system designed specifically to support buyer evaluation, aligned with how the buying process actually works, and governed by the selling organization so that the understanding buyers develop is accurate rather than fragmented.
This is what Buyer-Enabled Evaluation Systems are built to do. And it is precisely what Gartner’s research identifies as the gap that most GTM strategies have yet to close.
The Bottom Line
Gartner’s research on B2B buyer behavior is consistent across multiple years and multiple dimensions: buyers are more self-directed, buying committees are more complex, information quality is declining relative to information volume, and the highest-leverage GTM investment is in enabling evaluation rather than increasing outreach.
Organizations that read this research and respond by optimizing their sales-led motion are solving for the portion of the journey they already address. Organizations that respond by building infrastructure for the portion they do not are closing the gap that Gartner’s findings consistently point to.
That gap is where modern deals are won and lost. It is also where Buyer-Enabled Evaluation Systems are designed to operate.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Gartner’s research say about how B2B buyers prefer to engage?
Gartner’s 2025 Sales Survey found that 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience, choosing to research independently before engaging a seller. This reflects a structural preference for self-direction rather than a rejection of sales engagement entirely. Buyers want to form their own baseline understanding before allowing a seller to influence their view.
What does Gartner’s research say about buying team conflict?
Gartner’s 2025 research reports that 74% of B2B buying teams demonstrate unhealthy conflict during decision processes. This conflict is most commonly driven by stakeholder misalignment: different members of the buying committee have developed different understandings of the solution, often because they evaluated independently using different sources.
What is the practical implication of buyers preferring self-directed research?
It means that the quality of information available during the self-directed research phase directly shapes the mental models buyers bring into sales conversations. Organizations that are not present in that phase, through governed digital explanation, are absent from the portion of the buying journey where foundational views are being formed.
What does Gartner mean by hybrid digital and human engagement?
Gartner’s buyer enablement research identifies hybrid models, where digital channels support education and research while human expertise handles decision-intensive stages, as producing the strongest outcomes. Neither purely digital nor purely sales-led approaches perform as well as a coordinated combination of both.
How does information overload connect to buyer decision-making quality?
Gartner’s research documents that despite having access to more information than ever, buyers are not making proportionally better decisions. The issue is that information quantity has outpaced information quality. Buyers synthesize fragments from multiple ungoverned sources and arrive at conclusions that feel well-supported but are often misaligned with reality.
Why does adding more sales touchpoints not solve the problems Gartner identifies?
Gartner’s research suggests that enabling evaluation is more impactful than increasing sales interaction frequency. If buyers lack access to accurate, contextual explanation between meetings, more meetings do not address that gap. They add activity to a process where the underlying infrastructure problem remains unresolved.
What kind of infrastructure does Gartner’s research point toward?
The research points toward infrastructure that supports buyer evaluation itself: governed expertise that is available between interactions, accessible to all stakeholders, and aligned with how the selling organization actually explains its solution. This is distinct from content libraries, chatbots, or sales rooms, each of which addresses a different and narrower problem.