If the Buyer Can Research Everything Without You, What Are They Paying the Salesperson For?

There was a time when talking to a salesperson was one of the primary ways a buyer learned about a product or service. The salesperson knew the specifications, explained the differences between options, answered questions, and provided information that was difficult for the customer to find anywhere else. Access to information was part of the value the salesperson brought to the relationship.

That advantage has largely disappeared. Today’s B2B buyers can research products, compare competitors, read reviews, watch demonstrations, explore pricing, consult their networks, and increasingly use AI to gather and analyze information before ever speaking with someone in sales. McKinsey’s research reflects just how fragmented the modern buying journey has become, with B2B customers now using an average of ten interaction channels as they move through the purchasing process.

Yet that doesn’t mean buyers no longer want salespeople involved. McKinsey’s findings point toward something more interesting: buyers continue to move between digital self-service, remote interactions, and traditional human engagement depending on what they need at a particular point in the journey. The salesperson hasn’t disappeared from the process. The value that salesperson needs to provide has changed.

Information Is Everywhere. Understanding Is Harder.

Having more information does not necessarily make a complex buying decision easier.

A buyer researching a significant B2B purchase may encounter competing claims, dozens of possible solutions, different pricing structures, technical considerations, implementation questions, and vendors that all appear capable of solving the problem. AI can make that research faster, and emerging agentic commerce may eventually allow technology to perform even more of the discovery, comparison, and transactional work buyers currently handle themselves.

What technology cannot automatically provide is a deep understanding of the individual organization making the decision. Two companies shopping for the same solution may have completely different operational challenges, priorities, cultures, budgets, timelines, or definitions of success. That is where a knowledgeable salesperson has an opportunity to create value that goes beyond simply explaining what the company sells.

The conversation becomes less about delivering information and more about helping the customer interpret it. A strong salesperson can ask questions the buyer hasn’t considered, recognize an underlying problem the customer is describing imperfectly, identify tradeoffs between possible approaches, and connect a proposed solution to the business outcome the customer is actually trying to produce.

Buyers Expect the Salesperson to Know More Than the Product

Research from Sales Growth reinforces this shift in expectations. In its examination of what B2B buyers want from salespeople, buyers placed significant value on credibility and on sellers who understand their business problems. The research found that 82 percent of respondents considered credibility more important than likability.

That distinction matters because sales organizations have traditionally placed enormous emphasis on relationship skills. Relationships still matter, particularly in complex sales where trust develops over time. But being personable is not the same thing as being valuable.

A salesperson who understands the product but not the customer’s business may struggle to add much beyond what the customer can already discover independently. A salesperson who understands both can help the buyer think differently about the decision. That requires preparation, curiosity, industry knowledge, thoughtful questions, and enough business acumen to understand how the customer’s problem connects to larger organizational priorities.

In that environment, expertise becomes part of the sales experience.

The Value Exchange Has Changed

Walter Bond teaches that strong business relationships are built on a Value Exchange. For a relationship to remain valuable, both sides have to understand what they are receiving from the interaction.

That creates an important question for modern sales organizations: What does the customer receive from interacting with our salesperson that they could not easily get somewhere else?

If the answer is product information, that value has become easier to replace. If the answer is a generic presentation or a walkthrough of information already available on the website, the customer may reasonably prefer to continue researching independently.

But if the salesperson helps the customer understand the problem more clearly, avoid an expensive mistake, identify an opportunity, evaluate competing priorities, or build confidence around a complicated decision, the exchange becomes much more meaningful. The seller is no longer functioning primarily as a source of information. They are contributing judgment.

That is a harder form of value to automate because it depends on context.

AI Raises the Standard for Human Selling

The emergence of AI and agentic commerce makes this shift more urgent, not less. Deloitte has explored how AI agents could increasingly participate in B2B commerce by performing tasks across the buying journey, potentially including discovery, evaluation, negotiation, and purchasing activities.

Sales organizations could interpret that development as a threat to the human salesperson. A more useful response is to examine which parts of the sales process technology can handle well and where human involvement becomes most valuable.

If AI can perform preliminary research in seconds, a salesperson should not spend the customer meeting reciting basic information. If the buyer can compare product features independently, the salesperson can spend more time understanding why particular features matter in that organization’s environment. If technology can automate routine follow-up, the seller has more capacity to prepare for meaningful conversations and develop stronger relationships.

The bar for human interaction rises as routine work becomes easier to automate. Customers have less reason to tolerate a sales conversation that doesn’t add anything to what they already know.

Better Questions Become a Competitive Advantage

Salespeople are often trained extensively on how to present answers. Modern B2B selling may place even greater value on knowing what to ask.

A customer might arrive saying they need a particular product, service, or capability. A capable salesperson can explore what prompted the search, what the organization has already tried, where the current approach is breaking down, who is affected by the problem, what happens if nothing changes, and what a successful outcome would actually look like.

Those questions accomplish more than qualifying the opportunity. They help both sides determine whether there is a meaningful problem worth solving and whether the seller is equipped to help solve it.

This also protects the sales organization from pursuing business that isn’t a strong fit. If the objective is simply to convince every prospect to buy, discovery becomes a step on the way to the pitch. If the objective is to create genuine value, discovery becomes a way to understand whether there is a valuable exchange available for both sides.

That can produce a different kind of sales conversation—one built around diagnosis before prescription.

The Sales Playbook Has to Develop the Person, Not Just the Process

Organizations can respond to the changing buyer journey by adding technology, redesigning sales stages, creating better content, and giving representatives access to more customer data. Those improvements can strengthen the Playbook, but they do not automatically create salespeople capable of delivering greater value.

That requires development.

Representatives need to understand the industries they serve, the business problems their customers face, and the outcomes their solutions can influence. They need enough confidence to move beyond a memorized presentation and enough curiosity to explore what is actually happening inside the customer’s organization. Managers can coach those capabilities just as deliberately as they coach pipeline management, prospecting, and closing.

This is where the Roster becomes critical. If the market expects more from salespeople, the organization has to develop people who are capable of providing more.

The strongest sales organizations may increasingly distinguish themselves not by having access to better information than everyone else, but by having people who know what to do with that information.

Human Interaction Has to Earn Its Place in the Journey

McKinsey’s research is important because it prevents an overly simple conclusion about the future of B2B sales. Buyers have not universally chosen digital channels over people. Instead, they move among channels and expect organizations to meet them effectively across the entire journey.

That means the goal should not be forcing human interaction into every stage of the process. There are moments when self-service is faster and more convenient, and customers should be allowed to use it. There are other moments—particularly when decisions become complicated, consequential, or uncertain—when an informed human conversation can create significant value.

Sales leaders should therefore think carefully about where their representatives belong in that journey and what customers should gain when they arrive there. A salesperson who interrupts a self-directed buying process simply to deliver information creates friction. A salesperson who enters at the right moment with insight, context, judgment, and understanding can make the decision easier.

The difference is the value created by the interaction.

Give the Buyer a Reason to Need the Conversation

The modern buyer has more options for avoiding salespeople than ever before. That reality doesn’t have to diminish the role of sales. It can force sales organizations to become clearer about what exceptional selling actually looks like.

The salesperson’s advantage is no longer knowing something the customer cannot possibly find. Increasingly, it comes from understanding the customer well enough to help make that information useful. It comes from connecting facts to context, products to problems, and capabilities to outcomes.

Technology will continue changing how buyers research, evaluate, and purchase. Sales organizations should embrace those changes where they make the experience better. At the same time, they should invest just as deliberately in developing salespeople whose expertise, curiosity, judgment, and understanding make human interaction worth choosing.

When customers can find almost everything without talking to you, the question is no longer whether your salesperson can provide information.

It’s whether the conversation makes the customer better equipped to make the right decision.