How to Sell to Buyers Who Have Already Done Their Research

The current crop of B2B buyers is something we’ve never seen before: an AI-empowered, outreach-averse group of highly-informed consumers. Gartner found they’re using a dozen or more AI and research tools to evaluate vendors before they ever submit a form. That’s part of how they proceed, at least on average, nearly three-quarters of the way through the buying experience without talking to sales, according to Forrester.

Is there a place for sellers in this new landscape? Only if they deliver something their competitors, and AI companions, can’t: a tailored, differentiated insight and the kind of partner who can navigate a sales process that’s longer and more complicated than it’s ever been before.

Selling to Informed Buyers

Challengers are uniquely positioned to win in an information-saturated market because their approach is grounded in unique insight. By definition, it’s not something prospects can uncover through search, address through other products, or build on their own. It’s not even something they realize until it’s delivered during the Commercial Insight Choreography.

Here’s how it looks:

The Warmer — Opens by showing you understand the buyer’s world, often referencing similar companies in similar situations. This builds credibility before you introduce anything challenging.

The Reframe — Introduces a new problem or concern the buyer hasn’t considered, one that challenges a core assumption about how they’re currently handling things.

Rational Drowning — Backs up the reframe with data and business-case evidence, making the case that the problem is real and costly.

Emotional Impact — Makes the problem feel personal and urgent through storytelling, so the buyer isn’t just intellectually convinced but starts to feel the stakes

A New Way — Describes the capabilities needed to solve the problem, without mentioning your product yet — this is where the buyer starts to feel relief that a solution exists.

Your Solution — Positions your specific offering as the best way to deliver on that new approach.

This approach doesn’t just reveal a new problem or position a solution. It positions the seller as a partner, instead of a vendor. It pulls them out of the comparison chart and helps them rise above the noise to a level of partnership buyers need in order to avoid purchase regret.

How Challengers Win With Highly-Informed Buyers

Buyers relying on a self-service purchase model are 1.65 times more likely to experience purchase regret, Gartner found. If they do come to the table, it’s two-thirds of the way through the sales process, and they arrive expecting to negotiate on price or get into the weeds on features and functionality. Buyers think they’re saving time and perhaps avoiding the “sales pitch,” but they’re often operating on incomplete information.

“Just because they assume they know everything, that doesn’t mean what they’ve learned is accurate,” Richardson’s Michael Schaumberger, Head of Global Challenger Insights & Messaging, explains.

That’s an especially important distinction when buyers turn to AI overviews for guidance in their purchase search. A recent analysis of Google’s AI overview found it gave a correct answer 90% of the time –but the inaccurate 10% represents tens of millions of erroneous answers per hour.

Average Sellers welcome the chance to jump straight into pricing negotiations, but Challenger Sellers take a different approach. Rather than assuming they can skip the choreography and meet well-informed buyers two-thirds of the way along their buying journey, “the goal is to try to push that back to zero and start from scratch,” Schaumberger says. Anything else risks miscommunicating with buyers who don’t fully grasp larger issues such as the scope of their problem or smaller ones such as product capabilities.

Still, it pays to tread lightly with buyers who are already deep in the research. Acknowledge the time and effort they’ve put in, share that you’re glad they’re engaged, and move on to uncovering what they (think they) already know.

“I always tell clients to ask at least two questions: why do you believe that’s what you need, and what did you do to arrive at that conclusion?” says Michael Schaumberger, Head of Global Challenger Insights & Messaging

Those two answers say a lot about how much you’ll need to push back or correct.

“If they don’t have a good rationale for why they need it, you can go into a reframe easily: acknowledge what they heard, then say, ‘here’s what people in that situation don’t realize,’ and that stops them and gets them thinking,” Schaumberger says.

Navigating the Purchase Process with Highly Informed Buyers

Buyers who cut sellers out of the process experience purchase regret. They might not understand that sticking with their status quo or skipping due diligence now will simply put them back in the position of buying again in the next year—after spending money, time, and good will on a sub-par solution.

Sellers can stand out by helping buyers navigate their own buying process. In a Gartner survey, 77% of B2B buyers rated their last purchase as very complex or difficult; Gartner also found enterprise deals typically involve 15-17 stakeholders. Buying groups now include 6-10 stakeholders, with more like 15-17 involved in enterprise deals, according to Gartner. Purchase regret is the very final outcome when a complicated process goes wrong. Even highly-informed buyers need help overcoming internal resistance and navigating increasingly difficult procurement processes – and they can’t do it with a self-serve sales model.

Challenger sellers don’t shy away from working with intelligent buyers. By revealing something they hadn’t considered and leading them through a sales process they might well have underestimated, these sellers succeed in creating a loyalty-building sales process that wins customers for years to come.