Why Are B2B Buyers Increasingly Bypassing Salespeople?

Hello. My name is Peter Button.

For four decades, I've trained other people's B2B sales teams. Over time, I've become increasingly aware of why buyers prefer to bypass salespeople.

The root cause? Salespeople are accountable for revenue, not customer outcomes.

This priority has led to the pervasive culture of adversarial selling that prioritises “Objection Handling Techniques” and similar approaches that today’s buyers simply don’t have time to endure.

The solution seems obvious. Salespeople should have dual accountability, for both achieving quota AND enabling customers to achieve the outcomes they need. But this fundamental realignment of accountability is missing in most B2B sales teams.

Even when organisation and salespeople seek to embrace this dual accountability, they face practical barriers. Creating bespoke, outcome-focused proposals requires business writing skills many salespeople simply don't possess.

Suddenly, AI has enabled every salesperson to take outstanding notes and create genuinely bespoke proposals.

Now any salesperson can repurpose the AI transcripts of customer conversations into professional, outcome-focused proposals. The technology handles the writing.

Salespeople can focus on what matters: enabling customers to define their needs more accurately and co-creating solutions.

This is an opportunity to transform the role of salespeople, transform how they sell, and transform their customers’ buying experience.

All my work with clients is now focused on implementing this new vision of dual accountability, facilitated by the effective use of AI.

I equip and inspire sales team leaders and the members of their teams to lead fundamentally different and better conversations.

The shift from revenue-focused to outcome-accountable selling isn't just inevitable, it's already begun.

Forward-thinking business and sales team leaders are embracing AI not as a threat, but as the enabler of the transformation they've long sought.

Making these changes is significantly more challenging than most people realise. Incremental change, hoping to gradually transition from conventional selling to outcome-accountable selling is unlikely to be successful.

Teams seeking to make these changes need a fundamental Sales Reset.

Click here to learn more about Peter’s Sales Reset Programme, or click the yellow button.