I ran a webinar last month on the Waters — the layer of the Navigator’s Chart that deals with how buyers have changed and what that means for the way you sell. Attendance was low. Genuinely lower than I expected, and low enough that I’ve been chewing on it ever since.
I don’t think the problem was the promotion or the timing. I think the problem is that buyer behavior isn’t sexy. Nobody’s pulse quickens at “come learn about generational shifts in purchasing habits.” What people want is the thing they can use tomorrow — the objection-handling technique, the prospecting hack, the close that finally works. I understand that impulse, because I’ve had it myself. But every one of those tactics is built on an assumption about how buyers behave, and if the assumption is wrong, the tactic fails no matter how well you execute it.
So let me make the case for the unsexy layer, because low attendance at a webinar about buyer behavior is itself pretty good evidence of the problem.
Everything Else Sits on Top of This
When I walk a company through the four layers of the Chart, the Waters comes first, and the sequence isn’t arbitrary. The Waters is the selling environment — who your buyers are, how they research, what they expect, and when they’re willing to talk to you. It’s the ocean you’re sailing, and you don’t get a vote on it.
The other three layers all rest on it. Your Vessel — the compensation plan, the activity metrics, the sales process, the tech stack — is designed around an assumption about how deals actually get done. Your Crew is hired and trained against a picture of what a good salesperson does. Your Route, the way your people actually sell, is built entirely on a theory of how buyers decide. If that underlying picture is twenty years out of date, then you have a compensation plan rewarding the wrong behaviors, a hiring profile screening for the wrong traits, and a sales methodology optimized for a buyer who no longer exists.
That’s the most common pattern I see, and it’s the most expensive one. A company that has invested seriously in structure, people, and technique — but never genuinely reckoned with how its buyers changed — has built three good layers on a bad foundation. Everything looks reasonable in isolation. Nothing produces the results it should.
What Actually Changed
The single biggest shift is that the information imbalance reversed. For most of the history of selling, the salesperson held the advantage — we controlled the specs, the pricing, the comparisons, and the answers, and the buyer had to come through us to make an intelligent decision. I sold in that world, and I’ll be honest with you, it was a pretty good time to be a salesperson.
It’s gone. Today’s buyer completes somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of their journey before they ever talk to a salesperson, and studies put the number at 81 percent for buyers who’ve already identified a preferred vendor before the first sales conversation. The buyer frequently walks in knowing more about your market than your newest rep does. The phone tells the same story, with contact ratios that used to run one in three or four having collapsed to one in ten or worse, and voicemails that mostly go to die.
If you doubt any of this, don’t take my word for it. Just ask yourself how you handled your last significant purchase. Did you do your own research first, or did you call in a salesperson and wait for their gospel?
The Generational Engine Powering This
None of this is an accident, and it isn’t going to reverse, because the people doing the buying have changed. Millennials and Gen Z now hold roughly 71 percent of B2B buying authority, and they arrived with a completely different set of expectations than the generations before them.
They grew up with Amazon, where pricing is visible, information is instant, and you never have to talk to anyone to figure out what you need. They expect their professional buying to work the same way, which is why they have almost no patience for “contact us for pricing” — they don’t read it as standard practice, they read it as a red flag. They also don’t enjoy negotiating. Millennials tolerate it at best, and Gen Z has essentially no interest in it, which means the old gamesmanship of holding your cards close and dancing around price doesn’t impress them at all. It annoys them.
What makes this genuinely hard to navigate is that the behavior didn’t stay put. If it had stayed neatly inside those two generations, you could at least figure out roughly how old your buyer is and run two playbooks — one for Boomers and Xers, another for Millennials and Gen Z. But a lot of Boomers and Xers watched how the younger buyers shop and decided they liked it better, so now you’ve got sixty-year-olds researching and buying like thirty-year-olds, and no reliable way to sort them by age.
You don’t get to pick. There’s one set of Waters now, and everybody’s sailing it.
This Doesn’t Make Salespeople Obsolete
It would be easy to read all of that as a eulogy for the profession, and it isn’t. There’s a wrinkle in the research worth knowing, which is that buyers who say they want a rep-free experience and then actually buy that way report regretting it more often. They want the transparency and the efficiency, but they still need genuine guidance, and that gap is exactly where a good salesperson lives now.
Your value just shifted – it didn’t disappear. When information was scarce, you could make a living moving it around. Now that information is everywhere, the salespeople who are worth something are the ones who know things the internet can’t tell you — how this actually works in a plant like theirs, what goes wrong that nobody warns you about, what success is really going to look like eighteen months from now. That’s a harder job than being the gatekeeper of a brochure. It’s also a better one, and it pays more.
Navigating the Waters
So let me make the same pitch for the unsexy layer that I’d make to anyone who skipped the webinar.
Before you buy another sales training program, rework your comp plan, or hire another rep, spend an honest hour on one question. Do you actually know how your buyers buy right now — not how they bought when you built this thing, but right now? Ask your own customers how they’d want to be approached if they didn’t know you. Ask your salespeople what percentage of their first conversations involve a buyer who’s already done the homework. Compare what you find to the assumptions baked into your process.
If there’s a gap, you’ve just found the reason your tactics aren’t working, and no amount of technique is going to close it, because the problem isn’t technique. The chart you’re navigating by is out of date.
That’s not the most exciting sentence I’ll write this year. But it’s the one that determines whether everything else works.
