The conversation starts late
Most sellers picture the sale beginning when a buyer fills in the contact form. The 6sense 2025 buyer study of nearly 4,000 people suggests otherwise. Buyers first contacted a seller about 61% of the way through their buying process. By then, 94% had already ranked their shortlist by preference, and four of the five shortlist places were filled on day one.
Only then did they write. They contacted their top-ranked vendor first about 80% of the time, and they bought from that vendor 77% of the time.
What the numbers do not say
Read this with care. The 80% figure does not show that being contacted first wins the sale. Buyers may simply have written to the supplier they already preferred. The sample is mostly technology and services firms, and only 26% of respondents bought physical goods. The company behind the study sells marketing software. Nothing here measures a wholesale buyer ordering stock for a gift shop.
What the study does show is the order of events. The ranking comes first. The conversation confirms it, or it breaks it.
Where a wholesale buyer builds her ranking
She does it alone, on pages you do not see her open. Our post on reading your wholesale page the way a buyer's AI does covers one side of this. A person does the same job more slowly. She looks for:
- Minimums and prices she can find without asking. A page that says "contact us" for both drops down her list. - Terms, lead times and shipping rules stated plainly enough to copy into her notes. - Signs that the company answers. A named contact, a visible way to ask a question, a recent date on the page.
A supplier who misses all three may never get a message. The buyer has already ranked the stores that answered her questions.
Stay on the list, then answer the call
Suppose you are on the list. The message that arrives is a confirmation, and the buyer is checking your answer against her ranking. A slow reply or a reply that contradicts your page can move you down.
That is where live help earns its place. A buyer with one open question about terms can ask it on the page, get an answer from someone who knows the account and keep her ranking intact. This is an editorial reading of the study, not a measured result.
Check this week
Open your wholesale page with no login and answer your buyer's three questions from the page alone: the minimum, the terms and who to ask. If you have to hunt, so does she. Fix the missing line first. The ranking is built before the conversation, and it is cheapest to win there.
Source
CustomerThink: 6sense study provides critical insights on B2B buyer behavior, a round-up of the 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience study of nearly 4,000 buyers, with a separate 766-person survey on AI. 6sense sells B2B marketing software, and the study's respondents skew toward technology and services firms (80%), with 26% buying physical goods. These figures were read in secondary coverage, not in the original report. They describe a correlation and say nothing about wholesale retail in particular.
