Sales needs brand more than ever – here’s why

Here’s an uncomfortable truth for every B2B sales leader reading this: your buyers are doing more homework on you than you’re doing on them. And they aren’t using Google anymore. They’re letting platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot do the heavy mental lifting and getting synthesized answers to their most pressing business challenges.

That’s not a step change; it’s an entire reworking of the way buyers engage (or no longer engage) with your business. The research backs this up: according to 6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report, 94% of B2B buyers now use large language models during their buying journey. Not to browse. Not to discover. But to compare, rationalize, and shortlist. They’re asking AI to evaluate your business against three competitors, summarize your weaknesses, and build a business case. And this is all happening before your SDR has finished writing the first outreach email.

The funnel is dead, long live the funnel

The traditional funnel – awareness, consideration, decision, purchase – assumed a linear journey where Marketing warmed the lead and Sales closed it. It’s how B2B businesses have operated for years. But the fact of the matter is, that model is dead.

What’s replaced it is something far messier: a compressed loop where buyers bounce between exploration and evaluation inside AI interfaces. 70% of B2B purchasing influence now happens in private channels. They aren’t looking at your product pages. They aren’t reading your blogs. No, they’re arriving at a shortlist in minutes rather than the months, and discussing options in WhatsApp chats, email threads, and conversations over coffee.

In other words, the ‘messy middle’ that Google identified in 2020 hasn’t gone away. It’s just been supercharged by machines that can process a buying committee’s entire research agenda in a single prompt.

What does this mean for B2B sales teams?

It means that by the time a buyer speaks to you, they’ve already formed an opinion.

• 6sense found that 83% of buyers have fully defined their requirements before engaging a sales rep
• 80% of deals are won by the vendor that was already the buyer’s favorite before first contact

Your sales team isn’t shaping the decision. They’re confirming – or undermining – one that’s already been made. It’s a far cry from how things have worked in the past, and a reality B2B organizations need to adjust to if they want to keep up.

The ever-growing need for brand – and trust

This is where brand becomes a sales weapon, not a marketing indulgence. When an LLM responds to the prompt “who are the best vendors for X?”, it doesn’t return 20 names. It returns three or four. The brands with the strongest signals across the web ecosystem – the ones with consistent thought leadership, distinctive positioning, and broad market visibility – are the ones that make the cut.

Everyone else is invisible. And if you’re not on that AI-generated shortlist, your sales team never gets the at-bat. But getting on the shortlist is only half the problem. The other half is what happens when the buyer finally picks up the phone.

Every misaligned conversation is a brand withdrawal. Every generic pitch to an already-educated buyer is a signal that you don’t understand their world. In a compressed buying cycle, there’s no second chance to recover.

The knock-on effect on B2B marketing activity

The implication for marketing is equally stark. If buyers can self-serve their research through AI, the traditional demand generation playbook – gated whitepapers, MQL nurture sequences, form-fill funnels – loses its structural advantage.

Gated content is invisible to LLMs. It doesn’t get cited, summarized, or recommended. That’s a huge problem for businesses prioritizing lead generation over business impact. On the flip side, brands that invest in open, authoritative, and findable content are the ones AI will surface. Hiding content behind forms only adds friction to an increasingly frictionless journey.

In summary…

This isn’t a call to abandon demand generation. It’s a call to rebalance. The brands that will win in an AI-mediated buying journey are the ones that invest in mental availability. That’s only possible with one eye on long-term brand building.

Being known and trusted before a buyer ever enters the market – and then arming sales teams with whatever they need to deliver on that promise with speed and precision is what gets you on the shortlist. Sales confirm you belong there. Neither works without the other.

Sales are not your brand. But right now, they’re one of its most important proof points.