There used to be a public service announcement that ran on television late at night: “It’s 10 PM – do you know where your children are?” The idea was simple, which was that a lot of parents assumed they knew, and a lot of them were wrong. I think about that ad a lot when I coach sales leaders today, because most of them assume they know where their buyers are and how they buy, and most of them are working from a map that’s twenty years out of date.
In the Navigator’s Chart, I call this the Waters – the market environment you’re sailing through, the conditions that determine whether your journey is smooth or whether you run aground. And here’s the problem: the Waters have changed more in the last five years than in the previous hundred, but most sales approaches haven’t changed at all.
How Buyers Used to Buy
Not that long ago, the salesperson held most of the cards. If a buyer wanted to understand a product, compare options, or figure out what something should cost, the most efficient path to that information was through a salesperson. We controlled the brochures, the specs, the pricing, and the answers, and that information imbalance was the foundation of how selling worked. Gotta be honest, it was a pretty cool time if you were a salesperson (I was).
A buyer would identify a need, call a few vendors, and rely on the salespeople to educate them. The salesperson who got in early could shape the entire process, because the buyer didn’t have an easy way to learn without us. Cold calling worked because picking up the phone was often the buyer’s best option too, and contact ratios reflected that – you could expect a conversation for every three or four dials, and a voicemail had a decent chance of getting returned.
That world is gone, and it isn’t coming back.
How Buyers Buy Now
Today’s buyer completes somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of their Buyer’s Journey before they ever talk to a salesperson, and in many cases they’ve already settled on a preferred vendor before that first conversation. They research online, read reviews, watch videos, ask their peers in online communities, and use AI tools to compare options and synthesize information that used to live only in a salesperson’s head. The information imbalance that built the old sales model hasn’t just shrunk – it’s reversed, and now the buyer often walks in knowing more about your market than your newest rep does.
If you think I’m wrong, ask yourself how you conducted your last major purchase. Did you do research beforehand, or did you bring in a salesperson and rely on the salesperson (or salespeople) to give you their gospel?
Phone work has a similar problem. Contact ratios that used to run one in three or four have dropped to one in ten or worse, and voicemails mostly go to die. That doesn’t mean prospecting is dead, but it means the old approach of dialing for dollars and pitching whoever answers is a slow way to fail. Phone work still can be useful, but it requires a different mindset than in the past – and it’s not a direct way to appointments anymore.
A Generational Shift Drives This
None of this is an accident, and it’s only going to accelerate, because the people doing the buying have changed. Millennials and Gen Z now make up roughly 71 percent of B2B buyers, and they bring a fundamentally different set of expectations to the table.
These buyers grew up in the age of Amazon, where pricing is visible, information is instant, and you don’t have to talk to anyone to figure out what you need. They expect that same experience in their professional buying, which is why they’re the least tolerant generation we’ve ever seen toward the “contact us for pricing” runaround. They also dislike negotiating – Millennials don’t care for it, and Gen Z has almost no interest in it at all – so the old gamesmanship of holding cards close and dancing around price doesn’t impress them. It annoys them.
There’s a wild card, too. If this behavior were only confined within Millennials and Z’s (these two generations make up 71% of those with B2B buying authority), we could at least figure out how old our buyer is, and have a “Boomer and X” approach and a “Millennial and Z” approach. But many of the X’s and even Boomers have looked at the buying habits of younger buyers and said, “You know, that’s not a bad idea!” So now, it’s a mixed bag where some Boomers and X’s are buying like Millennials and Z’s.
That doesn’t mean that salespeople still aren’t valuable. They are – perhaps even more than in the past. Research shows that while many buyers say they want a rep-free experience, the ones who buy that way more often end up regretting the decision. They want the efficiency and the transparency, but they still need genuine guidance, and that’s the opening for salespeople who understand the new Waters. The opportunity isn’t to fight the way buyers want to buy – it’s to meet them where they actually are, with transparency and expertise instead of control and pressure.
There’s a Real Opportunity Here – If You Want It
If your sales approach still assumes that buyers need you to access basic information, that cold calling at volume (without incorporating other methods) will fill your pipeline, or that you can control the process by controlling what the buyer knows, you’re navigating today’s Waters with yesterday’s chart. The salespeople who win now are the ones who show up after the buyer has done their homework and add value the internet couldn’t – real insight, sharp questions, and help defining what success actually looks like. And yes, there’s still a role for building buyer relationships before they haven’t entered their Buyer’s Journey – what Harvey Mackay used to call “Digging Your Well Before You’re Thirsty” – which makes you the go-to for those insights.
You can’t change the Waters, but you absolutely can learn to read them. The buyers are out there, they’re just not where they used to be, and they’re not behaving the way your old playbook says they should.
Navigating the New Waters
I’m going on June 25 with a webinar dedicated entirely to the Waters – how buyers have changed, where they actually are in 2026, and how to adjust your approach to meet them there. If this article struck a nerve, that session will give you the full picture and a practical way to chart your course. Details and registration are here.
For now, start with one honest question about your own sales organization: It’s 2026 – do you really know where your buyers are? Because if you’re being honest, there’s a good chance they’ve moved, and the first step to reaching them is admitting that the map you’ve been using needs to be redrawn.
