Buyers have more information than ever. That does not necessarily mean they have more clarity.

By the time a B2B buyer enters a first meeting today, they may already have visited your website, compared competitors, read reviews, asked an AI assistant to summarise the market, consulted colleagues and formed an initial opinion about your offer.

The traditional sales advantage, namely access to information, is disappearing. What remains increasingly valuable is harder to automate: context, judgement, credibility and the ability to help someone make sense of a complex decision.

This shift came up recently during Business is Human, a networking and consultative sales conversation hosted at Supertree with Crina Diculescu and Andrei Dicher. One idea stood out: before the company, the offer or the contract, there is still a person.

Good commercial relationships still begin with the fundamentals: listening, understanding context, building trust and recognising what the person in front of you actually needs. From an advisory perspective, however, that human layer is becoming more important precisely because B2B buying itself is becoming more complex.

Buyers increasingly want to sell themselves first

The first major change is autonomy.

According to Gartner’s 2026 research, 67% of B2B buyers say they prefer a rep-free experience, while 45% reported using AI during a recent purchase. Buyers are increasingly comfortable researching, comparing and progressing through substantial parts of the buying journey independently.

That does not necessarily make the salesperson less relevant. It changes when and why the salesperson becomes relevant.

If a buyer can find your service description, case studies, credentials and pricing model online, repeating that information in a 45-minute presentation adds little value. The meeting has to earn its place.

The commercial conversation therefore shifts from “Let me tell you what we do” toward “Let’s understand what you are actually trying to solve.”

That is a meaningful difference. The first is presentation. The second requires diagnosis.

AI has made research easier. It has not necessarily made buying easier.

Generative AI adds another layer.

Gartner found that B2B buyers used an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase, with 45% using GenAI primarily to research vendors and products. Yet 69% still prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales representative.

That apparent contradiction says a lot about the future role of sales. Buyers want autonomy, but they also want reassurance at critical moments.

And there is good reason for it. In the same research, 51% of buyers said they were more likely to encounter misleading information from GenAI, while 49% said the same about information coming from sales representatives.

The opportunity is therefore not for humans to compete with AI on the quantity of information they can provide. It is to provide something different.

A strong salesperson or advisor can ask whether the information is relevant to the buyer’s particular situation, what assumptions sit behind it, what the trade-offs are, what could prevent implementation and what happens if the organisation does nothing.

In other words, information becomes abundant; judgement becomes scarce.

The buyer in front of you may only be one part of the decision

Complexity also sits inside the organisation.

B2B purchases are rarely made by one person. Edelman and LinkedIn report that an average of 13 stakeholders can now be involved in a single B2B purchasing decision, and more than 40% of deals stall because buying groups fail to align internally.

Many of those stakeholders may never join a sales call. Procurement may evaluate commercial risk. Legal may question contractual exposure. Finance may challenge the business case. Operations may worry about implementation. Management may view the decision through an entirely different strategic lens.

These are the so-called hidden buyers. And they matter: 71% of hidden buyers surveyed by Edelman and LinkedIn said they have relatively little interaction with sales teams, despite having meaningful influence over purchasing decisions.

This creates a different challenge for sales. It is not enough to persuade your contact. You need to understand the decision architecture around your contact: who needs to agree, who can block the decision, who carries the risk, and what argument your contact will eventually have to make internally when you are no longer in the room.

This is where the line between sales, business development and advisory starts to become less clear.

Ten channels. One company.

At the same time, buyers are interacting with companies through more touchpoints than ever.

McKinsey’s 2026 Global B2B Pulse found that buyers now use an average of 10 channels across the purchasing journey. More importantly, inconsistent information across teams has become the leading reason buyers switch suppliers.

Consider what that journey can look like. Someone discovers your company through LinkedIn. They visit your website. They ask an AI tool to compare you with competitors. They download a presentation. They exchange emails with business development. Procurement requests commercial details. Eventually they meet a senior consultant.

Internally, those interactions may belong to five different functions. To the buyer, they belong to one company.

Which means consistency itself becomes part of the sale.

Positioning, marketing, business development, sales and advisory can no longer operate as separate narratives. The promise made at the top of the funnel must still make sense when the conversation reaches the commercial table.

Credibility is cumulative. So is inconsistency.

Sometimes the right answer is “not now”

There is another element of judgment that rarely appears in conventional sales training: knowing when not to push.

A company can have a genuine problem, understand the value of your solution and still not be ready to make a decision. The budget may not exist yet. Another internal project may take priority. Leadership may be changing. The buying group may not be aligned. The need may simply not be urgent enough.

That does not automatically make the conversation unsuccessful.

Not every “no” is a no forever.

In longer B2B buying cycles, forcing the transaction can destroy more value than waiting. Sometimes the better business development decision is to remain relevant, continue the relationship and recognise when circumstances have changed enough to reopen the conversation.

That requires a different definition of commercial success. Not simply: Can we close this opportunity? But rather: Is there genuine alignment between the problem, our capabilities, the stakeholders involved and the timing?

That question sounds much closer to advisory than traditional selling.

From selling an offer to helping make a decision

At Supertree, we increasingly see sales, business development and advisory converging.

That does not mean commercial objectives disappear. Businesses still need to sell. It means the route toward the sale is becoming more sophisticated.

A traditional product-led conversation asks: How do we convince this company to buy what we offer?

An advisory-led conversation asks: What is the actual business problem? Who is affected by it? What is preventing progress? What alternatives exist? Are we the right partner — and is now the right time?

Sometimes your existing offer is exactly the answer. Sometimes it needs to be adapted. Sometimes the opportunity is a partnership rather than a client relationship. And sometimes the responsible answer is that the fit simply is not there.

That level of judgment builds something considerably more durable than a successful pitch: trust.

And trust remains especially important in complex, high-value B2B decisions. McKinsey’s latest research similarly finds that while buyers favour digital self-service for high-frequency transactions, human interaction remains particularly important for larger, less frequent purchases.

What this means for sales teams in 2026

The salesperson does not need to compete with the internet or AI by becoming an even faster source of product information. The opportunity is elsewhere.

Sales teams need to know more about the buyer’s context, not just the product. They need to understand the market, the organisation, the decision process and the constraints. They need to help buyers navigate the organisation behind the decision, because selling to one enthusiastic contact is not the same as creating internal alignment.

They also need to bring interpretation rather than information overload. Buyers can increasingly access facts themselves; the more valuable question is what those facts mean for their specific situation.

Consistency matters too. The website, marketing content, sales conversation and eventual delivery experience should reinforce one another. And timing matters. A premature close is not necessarily better than a stronger opportunity six months later.

Perhaps most importantly, sales teams need to stop confusing persuasion with value.

The strongest commercial relationships increasingly feel less like someone being convinced and more like two parties working out whether, and how, they should create value together.

Less persuasion. More judgement.

AI will continue to change how companies research suppliers. Digital self-service will continue to reduce the need for salespeople in parts of the buying journey. Buyers will become better informed before the first conversation begins.

None of that eliminates the human role. It raises the standard for it.

If information is abundant, repeating information has less value. If buying decisions involve more stakeholders, navigating complexity has more value. If AI can generate an answer in seconds, knowing whether that answer is right for this company, in this context, at this moment becomes more valuable still.

The salesperson of 2026 therefore looks increasingly different from the traditional presenter of an offer: less persuasion, more judgement; less pitching, more problem-solving; less presenter, more advisor.

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