How much of a B2B deal closes before a seller ever gets a call

The trend, not just the snapshot

Gartner's sales practice has run this buyer survey in consecutive years: 632 respondents in the August-September 2024 wave, 645 in the same window in 2025. The rep-free preference rose from 61% to 67% between the two, a jump large enough to represent a real shift in behavior rather than survey noise.

Robert Blaisdell, a VP analyst on Gartner's sales practice, has tied part of that shift to how sellers behave once they do reach a buyer. In comments on the 2024 findings, he said bad prospecting actively damages relationships with potential customers, describing many buyers as overwhelmed and frustrated by the outreach they receive. That same 2024 survey found 73% of buyers actively avoid suppliers who send them irrelevant outreach.

The two years of data together describe a feedback loop. Buyers who get poorly targeted outreach retreat further into self-service; the more capable self-service tools become, the easier that retreat is to make.

What buyers do instead of calling sales

The 2025 Gartner survey found 70% of buyers prefer a completely digital, self-service buying experience, and 45% said they had used AI tools during a recent purchase. Buyers reported drawing on an average of seven separate information sources before making a decision.

TrustRadius's January 2026 survey, covering 1,862 technology buyers and 444 technology vendors, puts a finer point on how AI fits into that research. 63% of buyers incorporated AI into their purchase journey, and 59% of completed purchases involved AI tools or AI-enabled features somewhere along the way. Despite that, most buyers kept their shortlist tight: 83% narrowed their options to three products or fewer.

That volume and speed of independent research is the mechanical reason the rep-free number keeps rising. Every additional source a buyer can check without human help, whether a vendor's site, a review platform, or an AI assistant, is one more reason a sales conversation isn't the first or only place they get an answer.

Where a rep still gets pulled back in

Buyer independence has a ceiling, and Gartner's data shows exactly where it sits. In the 2025 survey, 69% of buyers said they turn to a sales rep specifically to validate insights they generated using AI. Blaisdell described the pattern directly: buyers still turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights, and support decision-making at critical moments in the journey.

Gartner's reporting on that same survey names the points in a deal where reps remain most valuable to buyers: researching a business problem, identifying a preferred supplier, securing internal support, and finalizing a purchase. Outside those points, Blaisdell's broader recommendation is that sellers need to show up differently, engaging where they add the greatest unique value, rather than trying to insert themselves into every stage.

Trust in the underlying information is part of why that validation step persists. 51% of buyers in the 2025 survey said they were more likely to encounter misleading information from GenAI tools, while 49% said the same about sales reps, a near-even split that suggests neither channel is fully trusted on its own. TrustRadius found a related pattern among AI users specifically: 94% said they fact-check AI-generated answers at least some of the time, and Rajat Bhatnagar, SVP of Growth at HG Insights, summarized the behavior as buyers using AI to move faster, not to think less.

The 2024 Gartner survey adds texture to how that validation plays out across a single deal. Buyers reported completing an average of 3.0 activities that mixed online research with rep contact, versus 2.3 activities handled with reps only and 1.8 handled entirely through digital self-service. Most deals still blend channels. Very few run start to finish without a person involved at some point.

The cost of getting outreach wrong

Two figures from the 2024 Gartner survey explain why sellers keep getting pushed to the margins of the process. Alongside the 73% of buyers who avoid suppliers sending irrelevant outreach, 69% reported finding inconsistencies between what a supplier's website says and what a seller tells them directly.

Those two numbers describe the same failure from different angles. If a buyer has already read a company's site, and a rep then contradicts or repeats it, the call has cost the buyer time rather than saved it. Gartner's own framing treats accurate, consistent digital content as a prerequisite for any rep conversation that follows, not a substitute for one.

Buyer independence isn't a fixed trait of B2B purchasing, it's a direction things are moving, and it's moving away from sales contact, not toward it.

What buyers trust instead of a pitch

TrustRadius's report asked buyers directly what influenced their decisions most, separate from AI tools. Product demonstrations, free trials, and prior experience with a vendor ranked among the most impactful resources, and 74% of buyers said they used peer reviews as part of their decision.

One complaint has shown up in the TrustRadius data for four straight years running: transparent pricing has been buyers' top requested improvement from vendors since 2023. That persistence suggests it is not a passing frustration but a structural gap between what buyers want published and what suppliers are willing to put in writing before a conversation starts.

What this changes about the sales process

Gartner's research also points to a specific payoff for getting the self-service side right. Buyers who reach a clear understanding of how a solution improves their outcomes in their own context are twice as likely to report a high-quality purchase, according to the firm's analysis reported alongside the 2025 survey.

The practical implication sellers are drawing from this is a division of labor rather than a retreat from selling. Digital channels, reviews, demos, and trials carry the early comparison work; a rep's time gets reserved for the moments buyers say they still need a person for, confirming that AI-assisted research holds up, and translating a generic solution into a specific fit for a buyer's own situation, at the business-problem, supplier-shortlist, internal-support, and final-purchase stages Gartner identifies.