Research Road

One of the biggest threats to pipeline is the buying journey that begins in earnest but ends without a purchase because the buying group can't decide, the budget gets pulled, or business priorities change. This year, we've added a whole new arm to our Buyer Experience research focused on journeys that end in no-decision,…

Yayy! It’s our favorite time of year here on the Research team! Time to start counting down to Breakthrough and the release of this year’s Buyer Experience research. We surveyed more buyers than ever and asked them more questions than ever (including buying journeys that ended with no purchase!). We have sooo many new…

Hi all, A couple weeks ago I put up a post with a sassy little headline: "How B2B Buyers Use LLMs to Discover Your Business: They Don't." We have a ton to talk about regarding LLM use in our upcoming Buyer Experience data, but along the same vein as that sassy title, I wanted to share a small sneak peek. This year, we…

Happy Friday to all who celebrate!😉 It's been a little quiet over here on Research Road lately because we're deep in the analysis of new buyer research that's turning out to be quite the story🤩. We're practically bursting at the seams to share it with you all in a few months. In the meantime, I wanted to call attention to…

Hi all, I wanted to share this great post from our head of research, @Kerry . Despite what may be enticing to think, very few buyers use LLMs to discover vendors. Most buyers already know the vendor landscape well before they ever open an LLM. Even the exception (buyers evaluating in a genuinely new category) rarely turn…

Hi all! I have a new article to share today — by yours truly! I doubt anyone reading this is unaware of confirmation bias, but I do think it has more of a role in the buyer evaluation and purchase process than we've given it credit for. There's often a perception that buying is an objective, fact-driven process, but the…

A form-fill used to mean "I need to talk to a human because there's no other way to learn about this." But that's not true anymore, and hasn't been for a long time! If you follow our Research Road, you've probably heard us repeat this many a time before: buyers spend 60% of the buying journey deciding who they want to buy…

Hi all, It's quite literally my favorite time of year at the Science of B2B! Over the next several weeks, we're asking B2B buyers about their recent purchases to inform our annual industry report on all things B2B buying. This year, we're also capturing the other side of the story — evaluations that don't result in a…

Hi all, We've been chatting a lot about this year's BDR research — dare I say the most interesting year yet. It's wildly important that we take a step back and look at where we're going with AI: so much potential, but also plenty of potential to just pump out more of the same, faster. Our head of research @Kerry sat down…

In a typical 10-to-12-month B2B buying journey, 6 to 8 months are spent in what we call the Selection Phase: a period of silent, anonymous deliberation in which buying teams shortlist and rank vendors before ever speaking to sellers. Almost all of that activity is invisible to teams that aren't tracking anonymous signals…

I've been posting a bit about our video series called Statistically Speaking — a labor of love from the research team at 6sense. Ever since day one of this job, we've been committed to producing objective, thorough research. It's kind of in our blood — or at least how we were taught. That means crossing t's and dotting i's…

Our AI-Driven GTM research is out. While some of the findings aren't entirely surprising (when we ran this study in 2023, teams were already over-indexed on identified, individual signals of buying intent), what's changed is the urgency. Every organization we surveyed (literally 100%) is now using AI for GTM, and it's…

Happy Day 2 of BDR Appreciation Week! Continuing to share findings from year 5 of our BDR research — this one connects to what I shared yesterday about account prioritization tools and performance targets. "Wrong timing" is the #1 reason prospects tell BDRs no. But how often reps hear it depends a lot on how their…

Happy Day 3 of BDR Appreciation Week! Back with more from this year's BDR research: 91% of BDRs say they multi-thread into accounts — and that number has been statistically similar for the past few years. So multithreading itself might not be what separates teams anymore, but what happens within it does. Reaching two…

Hi all, Yesterday we teased the release of our new framework Folklore Debt. We're really excited to be sharing it with you today. Like technical debt, folklore debt accumulates when the stories that once drove success outlive the conditions that made them true — quietly shaping decisions long after they should have been…

We have a new report out today — AI-Driven GTM: How B2B Teams Find, Prioritize, & Engage Buyers. We surveyed 427 B2B practitioners on how they identify and engage buyers, and specifically on how AI has entered that process. What we found is that AI has moved in everywhere but changed very little about the underlying…

@Kerry and I started our annual BDR study in 2021. That year, and every year since, how supported BDRs feel has been the strongest predictor of their performance. This year, BDRs who agree or strongly agree that they feel supported achieve an average of 100% quota attainment, compared to 77% among those who somewhat agree…

Last week, we shared the release of our new research — AI-Driven Go-to-Market: How B2B Go-to-Market Teams Find, Prioritize, and Engage Buyers. Every organization we surveyed uses AI for GTM, but only 1 in 3 rely on predictive models to do it. The rest are running rules-based logic (or a combination of rules and models)…

A lot of benchmarks and "boom" stats that we come across report descriptive statistics — averages, usage rates, etc. They describe what was found in a sample, and they're genuinely useful for communicating what a data set shows (we use them all the time!). But descriptive stats summarize the data you collected, not whether…

Eeeeek! So happy to be sharing that @Kerry and I have a new video series, Statistically Speaking 🎉 How many benchmarks that you've cited this year were actually statistically validated? Probably fewer than you think! We're constantly surrounded by research, benchmarks, surveys, reports, and claims, both at work and in our…