Ninety-five percent. That's the percentage of winning vendors who were already on the buyer's shortlist before anyone picked up the phone. If that number doesn't make you rethink your entire go-to-market motion, you might want to read it again.
For the past few years, Kerry Cunningham and the research team at 6sense have been quietly dismantling some of B2B marketing's most cherished assumptions. Their Science of B2B initiative isn't just another vendor content hub dressed up in thought leadership clothing. It's a longitudinal study of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers that keeps delivering findings uncomfortable enough to make most CMOs squirm.
Here's the thing about data: it doesn't care about your marketing playbook.
The 60/40 Shift Nobody Saw Coming
For years, 6sense tracked what they called the Point of First Contact Constant (POFC), a metric so stable across industries, geographies, and deal sizes that it earned its own nickname. Buyers consistently completed about 70% of their journey before reaching out to vendors. The remaining 30% was validation theater.
Then 2025 happened.
According to 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report, that ratio shifted to 60/40. Buyers are now contacting sellers roughly six to seven weeks earlier than before. Average buying cycles compressed from 11.3 months to 10.1 months. On paper, this looks like good news for sales teams.
It isn't.
The earlier contact isn't happening because buyers suddenly want to be educated by your SDRs. Nearly 90% of buyers report that AI features are now part of the solutions they're acquiring. They're reaching out earlier because they need to validate whether your AI capabilities are real or, as one practitioner put it, "marketing glitter." Economic uncertainty is the other driver: 62% of buyers said pressure to commit budgets before they evaporated pushed them into earlier conversations.
But here's the kicker: despite earlier contact, the pre-contact favorite still wins 80% of the time. Buyers are talking to you sooner, but they've already made up their minds.
The MQL Industrial Complex
Cunningham has a term for the machinery most B2B organizations have built around lead generation: the MQL Industrial Complex. It's a system so optimized for producing marketing qualified leads that nobody stopped to ask whether MQLs still correlate with revenue.
Spoiler: they don't.
6sense's research on buying groups shows that by the time someone fills out your form, their buying group has already completed 70% of the journey, established solution parameters, created a shortlist, and picked a favorite. You're not capturing demand. You're documenting decisions that were made without you.
The numbers are brutal. Buying groups now average 10.6 people in North America, 9.8 in EMEA, and 12.8 in APAC. These aren't casual observers. They're active participants in evaluation and decision-making. When your marketing team celebrates an MQL, they're celebrating one signal from a group of eleven people who have been researching solutions for months.
As Stefano Iacono from 6sense's EMEA team puts it, MQLs have a 95-99% failure rate. The system was designed for a world where sellers controlled information. The internet changed that balance of power, and nobody updated the playbook.
The Dark Funnel Isn't Dark Anymore
6sense coined the term Dark Funnel to describe the anonymous research activity that occurs throughout most of the buyer journey. According to their research, 97% of website visitors remain anonymous. They're researching, comparing, forming opinions, and building shortlists without ever raising their hand.
The traditional response to this problem was to gate more content, add more forms, and pray for conversions. The Science of B2B research suggests this approach is exactly backwards.
6sense's analysis of LLM usage found that 94% of buyers now use large language models during their buying journey. They're asking ChatGPT to compare vendors, synthesize reviews, and draft evaluation criteria. Yet they maintain the same number of interactions with vendors as before: 16 interactions per person with the winning vendor in 2025, compared to 17 in 2024 and 16 in 2023.
LLMs aren't replacing vendor engagement. They're complementing it. Buyers are using AI to do the homework they used to do on your website, then showing up to conversations better prepared and more opinionated than ever.
Buyers Aren't Blank Slates
Perhaps the most uncomfortable finding from the Science of B2B research is how experienced modern buyers actually are. The 2025 report found that buyers average eight to nine prior purchase journeys per category. They've seen your competitors. They've worked with at least one vendor in your space. They have opinions.
The "educate the buyer" mindset that dominates most content marketing strategies assumes buyers enter the journey as blank slates ready to be shaped by your thought leadership. The research shows the opposite: buyers consume content to arm themselves for internal debates, not to form opinions from scratch.
6sense's two-phase buying journey model breaks this down clearly. The Selection Phase is where the real choice gets made: buyers put four of the five vendors they'll evaluate on their day-one shortlist. They buy from one of those four 85% or more of the time. The Validation Phase that follows is largely theater, a formal process to confirm a decision that's already been made.
If you're not on the shortlist when the journey begins, you're extraordinarily unlikely to win.
What This Actually Means for Revenue Teams
The Science of B2B research points to a fundamental reorientation of how B2B organizations should think about demand generation. The goal isn't to capture leads. It's to earn a place on the shortlist before buyers know they're buying.
6sense's analysis of the 95/5 rule (the idea that only 5% of your market is in-market at any given time) adds nuance: about 40% of target accounts show some buying signals, but only 2-4% are ready to buy now. The other 36% are in earlier stages where brand building and buyer enablement matter more than sales outreach.
This isn't a call to abandon measurement. It's a call to measure different things. Instead of MQL volume, track account engagement across the buying group. Instead of form fills, monitor signals that indicate movement through buying stages. Instead of celebrating first contact, focus on being the vendor buyers already know and trust when the buying process kicks off.
The companies winning consistently aren't those with bigger budgets or more aggressive SDR teams. They're the ones who've adapted to buyer-controlled purchasing by showing up earlier, being useful without being pushy, and earning preference before the formal evaluation begins.
Marketing is still a team sport. But the game changed while most of us were still running the old plays.
