RevTalks, Episode 11: Surprising New Findings About B2B Buyers

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Randy Littleson: So you guys just put out some good new research. I love the stuff that you guys put out. Your recent buyer study had some surprising and interesting findings in it. What stood out to you the most?

Latané Conant: The difference in the results we saw in this study isn’t just that a lot of the cycle is done, and they’ve done their research—it’s that they’ve already picked. The research says that 85 percent of the time, they’ve already picked by the time they talk to a salesperson.

So what does that mean for marketing? How do we influence that picking process? How much can you actually influence during that journey, and where I think it’s changed? I believe that earlier stage—when they’re forming an opinion—is becoming more important, but it’s also the hardest for marketers, as you know. That’s the rub or the balance.

Another aspect I’ve been thinking about related to this research is you need to know the timing, but you also have to really focus on the how and the what within that timing. So what are we talking about at each stage? How are we reaching out at that stage? That’s why I love the product name “Rhythm.” You have to be in rhythm with their cycle. You can’t just pounce at the end and expect to win.

Randy: You guys have also talked about the small percentage of your addressable market that’s active and interested at any one point in time. Understanding who’s in-market and being able to engage them earlier really matters, given the data and research you guys have done.

Exactly. Yeah. How about practitioners? Are you hiring practitioners to talk to buyers? And if so, how do you resource that?

Latané: Another thing the study found was, while buyers won’t talk to sales, they’ll talk to pretty much anybody else. I exaggerate a bit, but they want to talk to their peers and industry experts. We’ve always inherently done this at 6sense. That’s why I spend a lot of time, and my team spends a lot of time, educating and being insightful. But you do have to resource for it—and it drives finance and HR crazy because I’m like, “We’re going to hire an evangelist.”

Any meeting where one of our experts is involved gets tracked. It’s like 80 percent of our—well, you can measure the lift and winning patterns of how often we’re closing when these experts are involved.

Randy: Right—if you’re an executive now, you’re effectively a seller. As you bring more experts and practitioners into the process, what does this mean for the future of sales and sellers?

Latané: I think it’s highly dependent on the type of product you sell. For relatively complex products, even if buyers have decided, they still need to be shepherded through the process. It means salespeople need to be more like architects. They need to have that architectural conversation with the CIO and say, “Here’s how my product works with your overall infrastructure.”

Randy: I think the best sellers for the long term have always pulled in the right experts depending on where you are in the process. It’s a continuation of what you just said.

At Salesloft, we’re focusing a lot on this concept of durable revenue growth. In today’s economic environment, with all the buying changes, it’s a struggle. Do you think it’s possible to get to durable revenue growth? And if so, what are the tenets to achieve that?

Latané: First, you need to understand what I call “B2B inflation,” which is that getting an opportunity today takes way more work than before, and it’s probably going to be a smaller opportunity. It’s like milk being $10 while your salary stays the same. We can’t work the same way. We have to change.

Think about content. Marketers love more words on the internet. So how do you scale production? Meet your friend, generative AI. We’ve been able to double our output while keeping headcount flat, and that’s worked really well for us.

Then think about the biggest area of waste I see in revenue creation—the dead zone. You define your revenue strategy, you understand your market, marketing creates demand—wonderful. But then there’s the “capture demand” aspect that nobody wants to own. A ton of work falls on the floor.

We’ve focused on that dead zone and are using generative AI and agents to ensure we’re not leaving demand on the table. Inbound comes in, and within seconds, an AI agent is following up and booking a meeting. They’re in-market right now—not next week, not in three years. We also apply this logic to trade shows. How many of us spend a ton on a trade show only to have no follow-up? So, we have a trade show agent that ensures follow-up happens. Now, 25 percent of our pipeline is generated autonomously through these AI agents.

I think the future is taking each use case and asking, “How do we flow this use case end-to-end and do it as autonomously as possible?” Email is also very ripe for that.

Randy: You’re hitting on something I talk about a lot—quality versus quantity. The industry’s been fixated on “more, more, more,” but the real focus should be “better, better, better.” How do we identify which accounts are truly in-market and then action them appropriately to move them further along the journey?

Now, you mentioned AI. What does responsible AI transformation look like for go-to-market teams? You can go crazy with this stuff, but companies want to do it responsibly. How do you do that?

Latané: Every generative AI product is using the same three large language models. If you’re just using an LLM without tuning it, you’re essentially speeding up spam—and nobody wants that. I wrote a book called No Forms, No Spam, No Cold Calls, so I’m definitely against that approach. It’s all about the tuning.

I think about two knobs when it comes to tuning: one is voice and tone—your brand, your case studies, your CTAs. You have to tune the AI on that. The other side is data tuning. We tune AI on our own data and on your data, so it recognizes you just attended a webinar, visited our website, or installed certain technologies. That data makes communications relevant and personal.

Then there’s trust. Work with a trustworthy partner because AI can hallucinate. A good provider will have anti-hallucination mechanisms built in. That’s a guardrail, and it’s critical.