Your buyer has mostly decided before they speak to you. Here's how to still be the one they choose.

The way B2B buyers make decisions has changed more in the last three years than in the previous twenty. Most marketing and sales teams are still operating on the old model. This piece explains what has changed, why it matters, and what to do about it.

Why are B2B deals decided before the first sales call?

Two things changed at once. The buyers changed: millennials and Gen Z are now the majority of B2B buyers and nearly half of all final decision-makers, and they would rather research on their own and ask their peers than take a vendor’s word for anything. And the research moved off Google. 94% of B2B buyers now use AI tools during the buying process, many of them as their main way in. They're forming a view of the market, and a shortlist, in places your team has no sight of.

Where does the enterprise buying decision actually happen?

Not in your meeting. A typical enterprise purchase now runs through 13 internal stakeholders and nine external participants, going by Forrester’s 2026 research, each judging the same solution through a different lens. Finance weighs cost, security weighs risk, operations worries about rollout, procurement wants the right terms. The deal is won or lost in how those people line up behind one option, and most of that lining up happens with no vendor in the room.

How much of the deal rides on your champion?

More than you would like. One person usually carries your case into the rooms you never see, and they have to answer questions you never hear. When the CFO asks about integration risk and your champion cannot answer it cleanly, nobody tells you. The deal just slows down and goes quiet. The content that helps you here is the kind your champion can forward and use to make the argument for you, in language the next person already speaks. Anything that needs translating gets left in the inbox.

What is Buyer Group Marketing?

This is what Buyer Group Marketing is built to fix. Rather than working one lead or pushing generic content at the account, it treats the whole buying group as the unit you engage, gives each stakeholder content built for their role, and tracks how that content travels between them. Gartner found that content built for buying-group relevance lifts consensus by 20%, and groups that reach consensus are 2.5 times more likely to land on a decision they are happy with.

How does Curaley help sales reach the buying group?

Curaley is a buyer engagement platform built for exactly this. It maps the buying group on a deal and shows you what's going on inside it: which functions are involved, what each person has actually looked at, and whether the group is drifting toward a decision or stalling out. The consensus-building that normally happens out of your sight becomes something you can watch and act on. You can see which stakeholder has gone quiet, and get your champion the one piece of content that moves the next conversation forward.

In a market where the buyer has mostly decided before they call you, the deals you win are the ones where you were useful in the rooms you were never invited to.

Sources: 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report; Forrester 2026; Gartner 2025.

See how Curaley maps your buying groups and tracks engagement across every stakeholder.

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