By the time a B2B SaaS buyer fills out your form, the buying is mostly over. They have already run their own research, read the reviews, poked at a trial, and quietly decided whether you are in or out. The sales conversation you think opens the deal usually walks in near the end of it.
Mystery Demo books competitors’ real sales demos as a credible buyer and hands back what each rep said, showed and quoted, which is what your team needs to prepare its own reps for those rivals. The sales call is a step most buyers now save for late in the journey, and it is the part of a rival’s sales process no website or review site shows.
We collected the most useful B2B SaaS buyer behavior statistics we could source on how buyers research, where they look, what they trust, and how much they will spend without meeting you, and checked each one against its original publication, listed at the end. If you only keep a handful of these, keep these:
Buyers Do the Homework Before They Raise a Hand
For a sales enablement team, these numbers mean your rep meets a buyer who has already done the research and already holds a shortlist. The modern B2B SaaS evaluation starts the moment a buyer feels a need, and the first move is almost never to call you. It is to open a browser and start digging on their own.
Three studies looked at when a seller enters the picture.
| Study | What it measured | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| TrustRadius, 2,185 technology buyers, 2022 | The first step after spotting a need | 77% did their own research; 23% contacted a sales rep3 |
| G2, 1,900+ B2B software buyers, 2024 | When buyers engage a salesperson | 69% usually only once they have made their decision, up from 67% a year earlier1 |
| 6sense, nearly 4,000 B2B buyers with $25,000+ spend, 2025 | How far into the journey the first seller contact comes | About 61% of the way through, earlier than the 69% of 20249 |
| 6sense, the same survey | Who starts the engagement | Buyers initiated 79% of engagements9 |
The shortlist forms just as early, and the studies count it in different ways.
| What was measured | Finding | Study |
|---|---|---|
| Vendors a buyer evaluates | 5.1 on average9 | 6sense, nearly 4,000 B2B buyers with $25,000+ spend, 2025 |
| Shortlist spots filled on day one of the journey | 3.6 on average9 | 6sense, the same survey |
| How often the winner comes from that day-one shortlist | 95% of the time, up from 85% a year earlier9 | 6sense, the same survey |
| Buyers who shortlisted three or fewer products | 83%5 | TrustRadius, 1,862 technology buyers, January 2026 |
The order of operations has flipped. The rep used to open the evaluation; now they arrive after it is mostly written.
When most buyers only want a salesperson once they have decided, the conversation is a closing ceremony rather than a discovery session: the shortlist was set long before, in private, and the call is where the terms get discussed.
That is the blind spot worth naming. The late call is where the shortlisted vendors finally talk to the buyer, and it is the part of a rival’s process you never hear: the price its rep names, the demo it runs, and what it says about you. Those may be the lines your reps are losing deals to, and nobody on your side hears them.
Where the Buyer Really Looks Now
Every surface below is a place a buyer forms an opinion of your product before a rep can shape it. The research has scattered across more surfaces than any single team can watch, and AI search rewired the habit in a year.
The analyst and prior-experience figures point the same direction: analysts are out, and the buyer’s own memory is in. Buyers trust what they have personally touched over what an institution tells them, and a trial they ran themselves now outweighs a report they paid to read.
The omnichannel finding has a sharper edge than it looks. A clunky handoff between channels is enough to lose the deal, and the evaluation is now a UX test the buyer is running on you, mostly without telling you they started.
Reviews and Free Trials Do the Selling
These are the proof points buyers hold up against every claim your reps make. Strip away the sales deck and you find what buyers lean on: other people’s experiences and their own hands on the product. Quality beats volume, and friction is fatal.
The review finding upends a popular growth tactic. Buyers consult reviews more than almost anything, yet few care how many you have, so the race to farm a thousand three-sentence ratings was a waste.
The trial finding is the bigger story: when the most influential thing in the entire purchase is the product in the buyer’s own hands, the demo becomes a supervised version of something they would rather do alone.
Price is where doing it alone breaks down. When a buyer cannot find the number, booking a call to try to get it is one of the two most common next steps, as TrustRadius found when it asked what buyers do next.
| When pricing is hard to find, buyers | Share |
|---|---|
| Delay and keep researching online | 43%3 |
| Book a call with sales to get the price | 41%3 |
| Drop the vendor entirely | 16%3 |
Buyers Will Spend Big Without Meeting You in Person
Deal size no longer guarantees your reps a meeting in the room. The instinct that buyers only self-serve for small, low-risk tools is years out of date: they will commit serious money remotely or through a self-serve flow.
McKinsey asked about remote and self-serve purchases in 2020 and again in 2024, when it split buyers into three types.
| Purchase | Who | Share willing | Survey |
|---|---|---|---|
| Over $50,000, self-serve or remote | All B2B decision-makers | 70%8 | McKinsey, 2020 |
| Over $500,000, self-serve or remote | All B2B decision-makers | 27%8 | McKinsey, 2020 |
| $500,000 or more, remote | Seekers, who demand a smooth experience across every channel | 69%7 | McKinsey, 2024, about 4,000 decision-makers |
| $500,000 or more, remote | Innovators, who are on every digital channel | 37%7 | McKinsey, 2024 |
| $500,000 or more, remote | Adapters, who stick to the relationships and channels they know | 19%7 | McKinsey, 2024 |
The two surveys are four years apart and cut the data differently, so read the rows as two snapshots rather than a trend line. Every group in 2024 had at least some buyers willing.
Big-ticket selling still happens, but the buyer now decides whether a purchase needs a meeting at all, and increasingly decides it does not. The dollar figure stopped being the thing that forces a face-to-face sales conversation. That choice moved to the buyer, and they are exercising it.
Younger Buyers Check the Reviews First
Your reps are now selling to a generation that checks the reviews before it takes the call. Behind much of this, the buyer changed: the committee filled up with people who have never known a software purchase that required a phone call.
This shift sits under several of the numbers here. A buyer who grew up reading reviews before buying headphones does not behave differently at work: they check the reviews first, distrust the pitch, and want to try before they talk. As that cohort took over the buying seat, review sites and trials moved ahead of the sales call.
Buyers Save the Sales Call for Late in the Journey
Most buyers now do on their own whatever they can. The step they bring a person into comes late, with a short list of vendors left, and none of the figures above can tell you what a rival says there.
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Mystery Demo books that call with your competitors as a credible buyer, for one rival or for every serious player in your market, and hands back the recordings on one board. Below is the sales scorecard from our public example board, where the company and every competitor are invented. On a real project, each rival’s sales call is graded the same way: responsiveness, demo quality, transparency about price, and follow-up.
Right now a buyer is weighing your product against a rival’s pitch on a call you will never hear. Tell us which rival keeps winning those calls, and we will take one as the buyer and bring back what was said.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do B2B SaaS buyers research software?
77% of buyers do their own research as the first step after spotting a need3, and only 23% contact a sales rep first.
When do B2B buyers contact sales?
About 61% of the way through the journey, on average, in 6sense’s 2025 survey9, and 69% of buyers in G2’s 2024 survey usually engage a salesperson only once they have decided1.
How many vendors do B2B buyers evaluate?
5.1 vendors on average in 6sense’s 2025 survey9, while 83% of buyers in TrustRadius’s 2026 survey shortlisted three or fewer products5.
How much of B2B buying is self-service?
Nearly half of business purchases are self-service transactions6, and at any stage buyers split about evenly between in-person, remote and digital self-serve contact7.
Will B2B buyers make large purchases self-serve or remotely?
70% of decision-makers were open to self-serve or remote purchases over $50,000 in 20208, and by 2024, 69% of the buyers McKinsey calls seekers would buy $500,000 or more remotely7.
How important are free trials to B2B buyers?
77% of buyers named free trials as one of their most influential resources in 2023, the top of the list, up from 67% in 20224.
Do online reviews influence B2B software buyers?
54% of buyers consult user reviews, but only 9% care how many reviews a vendor has4.
How much does pricing transparency matter to B2B buyers?
72% of buyers say transparent pricing makes them more likely to buy4, and 81% want to find pricing on their own3.
How fast do B2B buyers expect ROI?
78% of buyers expect a return within six months of implementing software1.
Has AI search changed B2B buyer behavior?
79% of buyers say AI search has changed how they conduct research2.
Are analyst reports still influential with B2B buyers?
Only 13% of buyers used analyst reports to make a purchase decision in TrustRadius’s 2026 survey5.
Who are B2B software buyers today?
71% of B2B buyers were millennials or Gen Z in Forrester’s 2023 survey6.
References
- G2: 2024 Buyer Behavior Report (2024)
- G2: 2025 Buyer Behavior Report (2025)
- TrustRadius: 2022 B2B Buying Disconnect, The Age of the Self-Serve Buyer (2022)
- TrustRadius: 2023 B2B Buying Disconnect (2023)
- TrustRadius: 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report (2026)
- Forrester: Younger Generations Are Shaking Up B2B Buying (2024)
- McKinsey: Five Fundamental Truths, How B2B Winners Keep Growing (2024)
- McKinsey: These Eight Charts Show How COVID-19 Has Changed B2B Sales Forever (2020)
- 6sense: The B2B Buyer Experience Report (2025)
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