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One of the Most Important Things We've Published This Year
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…
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How B2B Buyers Use LLMs to Discover Your Business: They Don't
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…
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Confirmation Bias The Silent and Most Persuasive Competitor in Every Sales Cycle
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…
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New Publication! The Lead-Based Approach Has Failed Us: It's Time to Move On
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…
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Ever Evaluated a $25K+ Purchase — Whether It Went Through or Not? We Want to Hear From You!
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…
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2026 BDR Research Webinar Replay
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…
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Another finding from our latest AI-Driven GTM research...
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…
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Statistically Speaking Ep 4: Level of Significance & P-values (Sounds Boring But Stay With Us)
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…
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The Phase That Decides the Deals Is Invisible to 6 in 10 Teams
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…
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What cut "wrong timing" rejections from 78% to 44% in our BDR data?
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…
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9 in 10 BDRs Multithread -- Here's What the Top Teams Do Differently
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…
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Folklore Debt: The Stories That Build B2B Companies — and the Ones That Hold Them Back
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…
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New Research! AI-Driven GTM: How B2B Teams Find, Prioritize, & Engage Buyers
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…
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8 Research-Backed Ways to Increase Job Support in BDRs
@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…
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June 30th BDR Research Webinar with Kerry Cunningham and Mike Turcotte
Hi everyone! In one week, our head of research @Kerry and MarketOne International's VP, CRO Mike Turcotte are leading a webinar on this year's BDR research. It was a productive year of research into the BDR function. As the headline suggests, BDRs are well-equipped — 90% have access to signal tools — but those tools aren't…
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Most B2B Teams Are Optimizing for the Moment Influence Ends
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)…
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Statistically Speaking Ep 3: Descriptive vs. Inferential Statistics
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…
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Why One Quarter Looks Different Than the Next:Variability Explained in Ep2 of Statistically Speaking
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…
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What Kodak's Digital Camera Can Teach B2B Teams About Their Own #FolkloreDebt
In 1975, a Kodak engineer built the first working digital camera. And yet what followed wasn't a transformation, rather, it was careful management. Digital was licensed, developed slowly, kept at a safe distance from what had made Kodak one of the most valuable companies in the world — film. Digital photography never quite…
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Name It to Tame It: Folklore Debt
There's a common arc in B2B. Early-days, an MQL-based demand system gets built. Growth explodes. A narrative about how MQLs drove company growth becomes cannon. New initiates into the company are steeped in the MQL narrative. Then, conditions change — the market matures, the brand grows, buyers get more sophisticated — but…