McKinsey's 2026 Global B2B Pulse surveyed nearly 4,000 B2B decision-makers in 13 countries. Nearly all of them move between in-person, remote and digital channels when they buy, and the average buyer uses ten touchpoints along the way.
The report also names two leading reasons buyers switch suppliers: inconsistent information, and a lack of knowledgeable support. Neither is a price problem. Both are about what happens between the touchpoints.
One order, ten stops
Picture a buyer restocking for the winter season. She reads your product page on Monday. On Tuesday she opens a catalog PDF a rep sent last spring. Wednesday she emails the rep, and on Thursday she checks the page again on her phone, between meetings.
That is four touchpoints, and she has not ordered anything yet. Each one can hold a different number, and she has no way to know which one is current.
Where the answers drift
Drift happens in the same few places. The price on the page is the list price, and the PDF shows last year's. The stock label says "in stock" while the rep knows the shipment is late. The page says the minimum is one case, and the email says three.
Nobody lied. Each channel was right on the day somebody last updated it. The buyer only sees that two of them disagree, and McKinsey's data suggests that is enough to make her start looking at another supplier.
What a disagreement costs her
She now has to find out which answer is true. That means a call, a wait, or a guess. A buyer who guesses wrong places a short order. A buyer who waits may have a competitor's page open in the next tab.
Lack of knowledgeable support follows the same path. If the person who answers cannot see the page she was reading or the account she is ordering on, she starts from the beginning, and she tells the story a second time. Our post on what wholesale buyers expect the store to know lists what a rep knows that the page does not.
Fix one source, then add a person
Start by choosing one place where the truth lives for price, stock and minimums. Usually that is the product page, fed from your inventory system. Then make the other channels point to it. Replace the PDF with a link, and have reps quote from the same page the buyer sees.
Next, make sure a person can step in without asking the buyer to start over. A short live conversation from the product page works when the person answering sees the product and the account in question.
Finally, run a small test this week. Pick your five best-selling wholesale items. Look up each one on the page, in the latest catalog and in the last rep email. Every mismatch you find is one a buyer could have found first.
Source
McKinsey: The surprising economics of B2B growth, McKinsey's 2026 Global B2B Pulse, nearly 4,000 B2B decision-makers in 13 countries. Figures as summarized in McKinsey's published excerpt; the full report was not available for review.
