Gartner surveyed 632 B2B buyers and found that 61% would prefer a buying experience with no sales rep involved at all.¹ Read quickly, that sounds like bad news for anyone who sells. Read properly, it is something more useful for an SME: a description of how your buyers want to be helped, and a clear explanation of why the contact form on your website is the wrong answer.
The preference has been building for years. In an earlier Gartner survey of 725 buyers, 83% said they preferred to order or pay through digital commerce rather than through a person.² The 2025 finding goes further. It is no longer only the transaction that buyers want to handle themselves. It is the whole journey.
What does "rep-free" actually mean?
It does not mean buyers want no help. The Gartner research is precise about where they draw the line. For general information and learning, buyers prefer self-service. For anything that needs context, such as working out whether a product or service actually fits their business, they still want input from the supplier.¹
So the buyer is not saying "leave me alone". They are saying: let me move at my own pace, and give me a real answer when I ask a real question. Most of that research happens before any supplier knows the buyer exists, a pattern we looked at in the zero moment of truth.
That is a reasonable request. It is also one most SME websites cannot meet.
Why the contact form fails the rep-free buyer
Look at a typical B2B SME website from the buyer's side. There is plenty of information, arranged the way the company thinks about itself. There is a contact form. And there is nothing in between.
A visitor who wants to know whether you work with businesses their size, or how pricing would work for their situation, has two options. Read until they find it, or fill in a form and wait for a salesperson to call. The first often fails, because the specific answer is not written down anywhere. The second is exactly what 61% of buyers said they would rather avoid.
So they do neither. They leave, and carry on researching somewhere else.
They are not short of somewhere else to go, either. The same study found that 73% of buyers actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach.¹ Buyers have very little patience for a sales process that feels as if it is being done to them.
This is the trap for an SME. Larger competitors can fund self-service portals, configurators and deep content libraries. A smaller business usually has a brochure site and a form. When buyer preference shifts towards self-direction, the business with only a form is the one that drops off the shortlist first. Quietly, and without ever knowing the buyer was there.
Is the real divide digital versus human?
A 2024 study in the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing followed how one B2B firm digitalised its customer journey, and drew a distinction that matters here.³ Digital marketing worked well for building awareness early on. Personal selling worked better at addressing a customer's specific needs once they were seriously evaluating. The authors argue that the meaningful divide is not between digital and personal channels at all. It is between automated, one-size-fits-all marketing and individualised selling, whatever the medium.
It is a single case study, so it is not the last word. But it fits the Gartner finding closely. Buyers want the self-direction of a digital channel and the individual attention of a good salesperson. They do not want to be forced to choose.
What does a website built for the rep-free buyer look like?
The answer is not to remove people from the sales process. It is to let the buyer get individual, contextual answers without having to book a call to get them.
A conversation on the website does that. The visitor asks the question they actually have, in their own words, at whatever hour they happen to be researching. The answer responds to their situation rather than pointing them at a generic page. If it becomes clear they are a good fit and ready to talk, that is the moment to hand them to a person, with the context already captured so nobody asks the same questions twice. If they are not ready, they leave better informed, and with a reason to come back.
That is the job an AI sales agent can do on an SME website: a genuine extra member of the sales team, there for the buyer who would rather not talk to sales yet, and handing your people the conversations that are ready for them.
A test for your own site
Picture a buyer who would rather not speak to a salesperson yet, landing on your site with one specific question about fit. Can they get an answer without filling in a form?
If not, that buyer is probably already on someone else's shortlist. If you would like to see what that conversation looks like on a site like yours, book a short demo.
Sources
- Gartner (2025). "Gartner Sales Survey Finds 61% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Buying Experience." Gartner press release, 25 June 2025. Survey of 632 B2B buyers, August–September 2024.
- Gartner (2022). "Gartner Sales Survey Finds 83% of B2B Buyers Prefer Ordering or Paying Through Digital Commerce." Gartner press release, 22 June 2022. Survey of 725 B2B buyers, November–December 2021.
- Andersson, S., Aagerup, U., Svensson, L. & Eriksson, S. (2024). "Challenges and opportunities in the digitalization of the B2B customer journey." Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 39(13), 160–174.