Notes from a panel on the modern B2B buyer at Reddit HQ in San Francisco, featuring Octane11's TJ Perrin alongside leaders from Korn Ferry, MongoDB, 6sense, Reddit, and Transmission. They kicked off some hard-hitting pieces of research: real world numbers describing a phenomenon most B2B marketers have quietly suspected for years.
Where these notes come from. These takeaways come from Brand to Demand: The Stories That Don't Make the Keynote, a breakfast briefing hosted by Transmission at Reddit HQ in San Francisco. Octane11's TJ Perrin (Head of Product & Founding Member) joined Amy Chilla (VP, Marketing at Korn Ferry), Nathan Joynt (Director of Marketing Acquisition at MongoDB), Kerry Cunningham (Head of Research & Thought Leadership at 6sense), Timothy Paans (Senior Manager at Reddit), and Transmission's Max Massengill (VP, Activation) and Heather Barrett (VP, Strategy) to talk through how the modern B2B buyer actually decides, with Octane11 in the measurement seat: the team responsible for making sense of all of this for the CMOs and CFOs who sign the checks. Here's what stuck with us. See the event details →
6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report surveyed nearly 4,000 buyers and found that 80% of the time, the winning vendor was already the buyer's top choice before the first sales conversation ever happened.
Four out of five shortlist vendors are locked in before a formal buying process even kicks off. Reddit and SurveyMonkey's Hidden B2B Journey report, covering 1,200 decision-makers, found that 83% of buyers wrap up their research before they'll talk to sales. They trust peer recommendations (73%) more than vendor websites (55%), and only 17% think white papers are actually worth reading.
Read those stats together and you get an uncomfortable picture: most of what B2B marketing and sales teams actually do, the MQLs, the gated content, the BDR sequences, the last-click dashboards, is aimed at a stage of the buying process that most buyers have already moved past.
Put simply: the hidden B2B buyer journey is the research, peer validation, and self-directed discovery that happens before a buyer ever contacts sales — and for most deals, it's where the decision actually gets made.
| Finding | Stat | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Winning vendor already buyer's top choice before first sales call | 80% | 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report |
| Shortlist finalized before buying journey officially starts | 4 of 5 | 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report |
| Buyers finish research before talking to sales | 83% | Reddit / SurveyMonkey Hidden B2B Journey |
| Buyers who trust peer recommendations | 73% | Reddit / SurveyMonkey Hidden B2B Journey |
| Buyers who trust vendor websites | 55% | Reddit / SurveyMonkey Hidden B2B Journey |
| Buyers who find white papers highly valuable | 17% | Reddit / SurveyMonkey Hidden B2B Journey |
| LLMs' share of organic B2B traffic | ~2% | Octane11 (25M impressions) |
| Google organic share of organic B2B referrals | 82% | Octane11 (25M impressions) |
| ChatGPT referral trend, Q2 | Declining QoQ | Octane11 (25M impressions) |
| Claude and Gemini referral trend, Q2 | Rising QoQ | Octane11 (25M impressions) |
B2B has spent fifteen years measuring the wrong end of the funnel, because the form fill was easy to count and easy to count became the standard for what mattered.
A downloaded white paper has never been a reliable signal that someone's going to buy. It was trackable, and that's why it became the thing teams managed to. The problem is that the real buying journey wraps up long before that actually happens. If the winning vendor is chosen before the first sales call, a pipeline full of "last mile" actions is about as helpful as a weather forecast for yesterday.
We ask clients the same question all the time: look at your target account list, look at your open pipeline, and tell us how many of those accounts have had zero marketing exposure. In 2026, with the tools available, that number should be close to zero. It almost never is. That gap is the clearest sign that spend is pointed at the wrong end of the funnel.
Demand gen still matters. The real fix is to stop treating brand and demand as separate budgets competing for the same account. They're the same journey. The question worth asking at the top of the funnel isn't how many leads you generated. It's what percentage of your target accounts have actually seen you this quarter, and engaged with you across any channel — and how often.
By the time a buyer lands in a Reddit thread or reads a G2 review, they've usually already got a shortlist. They're not looking for introductions. They're looking for confirmation.
It's easy to write off "peer recommendations" as anonymous strangers on the internet. That's not what's happening. These are real practitioners with actual experience, in communities that surface useful opinions and bury bad ones. The buying committee now extends well outside the buyer's own org.
In our data, communities like Reddit show up late in an account's journey, during active consideration, close to when a deal enters pipeline. For most established categories, community is the validation layer. Buyers already know who the vendors are. What they're looking for is the one thing a vendor can't give them: an honest opinion from someone who has nothing to sell.
The relationship gets you on the shortlist. The community confirms you belong there. Being present in those spaces is reputation infrastructure, not top-of-funnel spend.
Buyers are using AI to do their homework faster and show up to the first sales conversation with much sharper questions than they used to.
The assumption was that LLMs would push human conversations later in the process. The opposite is happening. Buyers are using AI to cut down their consideration set and then they want a real person to confirm what the model told them. It's a faster path to a more informed conversation.
There's a second-order effect worth sizing. Across 25 million B2B impressions analyzed by Octane11, LLMs account for roughly 2% of organic traffic. Google organic is still 82% of organic referrals. But that 2% is growing ultra-fast — and the mix inside it is shifting just as quickly: ChatGPT referrals are down quarter over quarter in Q2, while Claude and Gemini are climbing. What matters is that with Octane11 you can finally see it when it happens, a named account arriving from an AI engine, and know it occurred. That's a new signal. (We broke down all of it in our State of B2B AI Search report.)
And here's why that 2% matters more than the number suggests. The community content buyers trust is the same content these models train on and cite. If you're not putting out branded content with real proof points, and if you're not showing up in discussions on Reddit and G2, you're missing the peer validation that sways buyers and the source material that AI engines use to decide whether to recommend you. In 2026, both of those gaps hurt.
Every brand now has two reputations: the one on their website, and the one an AI reads back to their buyers. Most companies have no idea what the second one says.
Gating content made sense when a form fill was your only way to know a target account was paying attention. That's no longer true, which makes gating a much harder call to justify.
Only 17% of buyers find white papers valuable, and in established categories, your best-fit prospects likely read that content years before they were ever in market with you. Gating it now mostly just caps your reach.
The original argument for gating was measurement: you needed the form fill to prove engagement. With account-level identification, you can see when a target account hits your pricing page, reads a case study, or checks out your product pages, without asking them to trade their email for it. The gate was a workaround for a measurement problem. That problem got solved.
The case for gating in 2026 is real but narrow: when you genuinely need a specific contact record and don't have another way to get it. That use case exists. It's just much smaller than the industry has been treating it.
If most of the buying journey is invisible to traditional attribution tools, the board report has to be rebuilt around account-level signals and pipeline influence.
What share of your ICP did you reach this quarter? How many of those are showing engagement signals? How many have active pipeline? That's a funnel built on accounts, not leads.
Which channels consistently show up in the journeys of accounts that close, particularly in the 90 days before a deal enters pipeline? Influence is a different question from attribution, and it's the honest one.
You can now see when a buyer comes in from ChatGPT, Reddit, or Google organic and tie that visit to a named company, even with no UTM. Your CFO has never seen that number. It's the first real visibility into the invisible journey.
Which channels are generating reach and engagement you'd actually lose without them? You don't have to go dark to find out. Test at the margin with regional holdouts or account-level control groups, and let the gap tell the story.
The throughline from the whole panel: B2B marketing isn't short on data. The industry just hasn't caught up to using what it already has. The modern buying journey can be measured. It's been invisible to the wrong tools, not to the right ones.
That's the work. Make the invisible visible, account by account, so the next time someone asks what marketing is actually worth, the answer is already on the screen.
The questions B2B marketers ask most about the hidden buying journey and how to measure it.
6sense found that 80% of the time, the winning vendor was already the buyer's preferred choice before any formal sales engagement, and Reddit found 83% finish their research before talking to sales. Preference forms through peer research and self-directed discovery, well before a form fill.
Only 17% of B2B buyers call gated white papers highly valuable. In established categories, most buyers read that type of content long before an active purchase cycle began. Gating it limits how many people see it without providing any measurement benefit that account-level identification can't give you on ungated content.
Track target account reach and engagement across all channels, channel influence in the 90 days before pipeline entry, and incrementality. This moves the conversation away from lead volume and last-click credit toward account-level signals that reflect how buying decisions actually get made.
Attribution assigns credit to specific touchpoints using rules like last-click or first-touch. Influence asks which channels consistently appear in the journeys of accounts that actually close. For long, committee-driven B2B sales cycles, influence is the more useful and honest measurement.
LLMs are compressing early research, helping buyers get to a shorter consideration set faster and show up to conversations more prepared. Across 25 million impressions analyzed by Octane11, LLMs drive roughly 2% of organic B2B traffic today. But that 2% is growing quickly — and with tools like Octane11 you can now see when specific named accounts are arriving from an AI engine.
Community surfaces late in the buying journey, during active consideration and close to pipeline entry. Buyers use it as a validation layer, not a starting point. Showing up credibly in those communities influences conversion far more than it influences initial awareness.
Octane11 connects all of your Sales & Marketing data into one account-level view, so you can see which accounts you're reaching, how marketing is driving pipeline, and where to invest next.
Account-level measurement across LinkedIn, Reddit, Meta, DSPs, email, and your website, including referrals from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, tied to named accounts, with no UTM in sight.