Your buyers decide before they call you

Most business buyers now prefer to research on their own, and they judge suppliers by what they find. The website has become the first salesperson, and often the only one.

The traditional picture of selling has a salesperson guiding a prospect from first contact to signature. The research says that picture is now mostly wrong. By the time a buyer speaks to you, much of the decision has already been made, using whatever they could find on their own.

Most buyers would rather not talk to a rep

In June 2025, Gartner published a survey of 632 business-to-business buyers, carried out in August and September 2024. It found that 61 percent prefer an overall buying experience without a sales representative, and that most prefer to do their own research through digital channels.

Buyers have not given up on people entirely. Gartner found that they favour self-service for general information and learning, and want a seller's input for judgement calls, such as whether a product really fits their company. The website does the explaining; the person does the advising.

Inconsistency costs trust

The same survey found that 69 percent of buyers had noticed inconsistencies between what a supplier's website said and what its sales staff told them. Gartner warns that this kind of mismatch creates mistrust and can put a deal at risk. A website that has not kept pace with the business is not a neutral failure; it actively contradicts the people selling for you.

Gartner also found that 73 percent of buyers actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach, which makes the quality of what buyers find for themselves matter even more.

Ten seconds to say why

When a buyer does land on your site, the window is short. Nielsen Norman Group's analysis of Microsoft Research data covering more than 205,000 web pages found that visitors often leave within 10 to 20 seconds, but pages that make their value clear can hold attention for far longer. Visitors read only around a quarter of the text on the pages they do visit.

What your website now has to do

• Answer the questions a buyer would ask a salesperson: what you do, who it is for, how pricing works and what happens next.
• Say it in the first screen. If the value is not clear in about ten seconds, many visitors will not stay to find it.
• Keep it in step with the business. Prices, services, team and case studies should match what your people say on calls.
• Make the hand-off easy. When a buyer is ready for a judgement call, the route to a real person should be one click away.

For a growing number of buyers, your website is the sales conversation. It is worth building as carefully as you would brief the person you send to the most important meeting of the year.