Here’s the most important shift happening in B2B marketing right now: your buyers don’t want to talk to your sales team.
They don’t want demos. They don’t want discovery calls. They don’t want to sit through presentations about features they already researched online.
75% of B2B buyers now complete most of their purchase research before ever talking to a salesperson, and 80% of buyers choose their preferred vendor before they reach out to sales.
Which means if you’re not the obvious choice before that first sales conversation, you’ve already lost.
The B2B Buyer Revolution Nobody Wants to Admit
Your sales team doesn’t want to hear this. Your CEO doesn’t want to believe it. But the data is crystal clear: the traditional B2B sales process is dying.
Millennials are now 59% of B2B buyers, with 30% serving as lead buyers. These aren’t people who grew up talking to salespeople. They grew up researching everything online, reading reviews, and making decisions without human intervention.
And they’re bringing that behavior to their business purchases.
Why Your Sales Process is Broken (And It’s Not Your Sales Team’s Fault)
Problem #1: You’re Still Optimizing for 2015 Buyers
Your sales process assumes buyers need you to educate them about their problems and available solutions. Modern buyers have already educated themselves.
They’ve read your competitor’s case studies. They’ve watched product demos on YouTube. They’ve asked for recommendations in Slack communities and LinkedIn groups.
By the time they talk to your sales team, they’re not looking for education—they’re looking for validation that you understand their specific situation.
Problem #2: Your Marketing Isn’t Set Up for Self-Service Buying
Most B2B marketing is designed to generate leads for sales teams to nurture. But buyers don’t want to be nurtured anymore—they want to be enabled.
Notice what’s missing from this list? “Schedule a call with sales.”
Problem #3: You’re Measuring Success by Sales Metrics Instead of Buyer Experience
Most B2B companies measure their sales process by how efficiently it converts leads to opportunities. But they don’t measure how much buyers actually enjoy the experience.
Guess what? Buyers are overloaded with content, cautious with spending, and harder than ever to engage directly.
Your “efficient” sales process feels like harassment to modern buyers.
The Self-Service B2B Future (Whether You Like It or Not)
Reality #1: Buying Groups Are Getting Bigger and More Complex
Your sales team can’t have individual relationships with 22 people. But your marketing can create content that serves all 22 roles simultaneously.
Reality #2: Digital Channels Are Becoming Primary Purchase Channels
This isn’t about small purchases anymore. Enterprise deals are happening without traditional sales involvement.
Reality #3: Marketing is Becoming the New Sales Team
2025 is the year B2B marketers realize that all marketing is performance marketing today. Marketing takes the next step from supporting revenue to driving revenue.
Your marketing team needs to stop generating leads and start generating customers.
What Actually Works in the Self-Service B2B World
Strategy #1: Become the Obvious Choice Before They Shop
Instead of trying to capture attention when buyers are ready to purchase, focus on shaping how they think about their problems when they’re not ready to purchase yet.
Build content that defines the problem, establishes the criteria for evaluation, and positions your approach as the logical solution.
Strategy #2: Enable Internal Champions, Don’t Bypass Them
With 22 people involved in enterprise purchases, someone inside the organization needs to sell your solution to their colleagues.
Create content that helps your champions build internal consensus. Give them the tools, templates, and talking points they need to sell your solution when you’re not in the room.
Strategy #3: Make Buying Easy, Not Selling Easy
Stop optimizing your process for your sales team’s convenience and start optimizing for your buyers’ convenience.
- Put pricing on your website
- Offer self-service trials
- Create ROI calculators
- Build comprehensive FAQ sections
- Provide reference customers who will take calls
The Metrics That Actually Matter in Self-Service B2B
Old Metrics (That Don’t Matter Anymore):
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
- Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
- Time to first response
- Number of sales touches
New Metrics (That Drive Revenue):
- Pipeline velocity from first touch to close
- Self-service conversion rates
- Content engagement by buying group role
- Customer acquisition cost by channel
Performance-driven metrics are replacing vanity metrics as the primary measurement of marketing success.
Your Self-Service B2B Transformation Plan
Phase 1: The Buyer Journey Audit (30 Days)
- Map your current buyer journey from the buyer’s perspective
- Identify where buyers get stuck waiting for sales involvement
- Survey recent customers about their buying experience
Phase 2: The Content Gap Analysis (30 Days)
- Audit your current content against each role in the buying group
- Identify which stakeholders have no relevant content
- Create role-specific content journeys
Phase 3: The Self-Service Infrastructure (60 Days)
- Add transparent pricing to your website
- Create self-service trial or demo experiences
- Build tools that help buyers evaluate your solution independently
Phase 4: The Sales Role Evolution (90 Days)
- Retrain sales team to focus on qualified opportunities
- Create handoff processes between marketing and sales
- Establish new success metrics focused on buyer experience
The Hard Questions You Need to Ask
About Your Current Process:
“If a buyer wanted to purchase from us without talking to sales, could they?”
About Your Content:
“Does our content help buyers make decisions or just generate leads for our sales team?”
About Your Sales Team:
“Are our salespeople adding value to the buying process or just gatekeeping access to information?”
The Uncomfortable Truth About B2B Sales
The traditional B2B sales process was designed for a world where information was scarce and salespeople were necessary to provide education and access.
That world no longer exists.
Information is abundant. Buyers are educated. Access is expected.
Your salespeople aren’t becoming less important—they’re becoming more important for different reasons. Instead of providing information, they need to provide insight. Instead of managing the buying process, they need to enable the buying decision.
The Bottom Line
The companies winning in this new environment aren’t fighting the self-service trend—they’re leading it.
They’re making it easier to buy from them than to buy from their competitors. They’re creating buying experiences that buyers actually prefer. They’re measuring success by customer outcomes, not sales activities.
Most importantly, they’re treating marketing as a revenue function, not a lead generation function.
The question isn’t whether your buyers will skip traditional sales. It’s whether your marketing will be ready when they do.
Marissa Homere 