Last Updated on September 18, 2026 by Team TBH
B2B sales teams have long operated on a simple assumption: more effort in the pitch means more trust from the buyer. A longer deck, more discovery questions, a custom-built business case. Research from Adience, a B2B market research consultancy, suggests that assumption is now working against vendors more often than it works for them.
The report has a name for the pattern behind this: discovery theatre, sales motions that look thorough on the surface but don’t actually demonstrate that the vendor understands the buyer’s business.
The frustration buyers rarely say out loud
Adience surveyed 350 B2B buyers across the US, Europe, APAC, and Africa/the Middle East for its report, The B2B Buyer Backlash. The findings read less like a sales training manual and more like a list of everyday annoyances buyers have simply stopped mentioning to the vendors causing them.
Among the top frustrations buyers reported: 30% said they had been asked repetitive or generic discovery questions in the past year. Almost as many, 29%, said they had received irrelevant decks, PDFs, or demo links. Another 29% said vendors clearly didn’t understand their industry or use case at all.
None of these are dramatic complaints. They are small, cumulative signs that a sales team hasn’t done its homework, and buyers notice every one of them. The report finds that 73% of buyers actively avoid vendors whose outreach feels irrelevant. Not “eventually stop responding to.” Actively avoid.
Where vendors are getting the buyer wrong, specifically
The report also asked a more pointed question: what do vendors most often misunderstand about your company or your needs? The top answer, cited by 35% of buyers, was a failure to grasp their actual priorities, whether that meant speed over price, or service over speed. Another 30% said vendors misunderstood their industry-specific pain points entirely, and 28% said vendors didn’t understand their technical requirements or constraints.
That’s a useful list for any brand team to sit with. It describes vendors pitching into a vacuum, not through a lack of effort necessarily, but a lack of fit between the effort and what the buyer is actually trying to solve. Decision-makers in insurance, manufacturing, and automotive were the most likely to say vendors missed their industry-specific pain points altogether.
The vendors buyers actually trust
Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone building a brand’s go-to-market strategy. The report also asked buyers what would make them evaluate a vendor differently, and the answers didn’t point toward flashier pitches or bigger discounts.
Buyers said they want vendors who stay current on market trends (34%), who can interpret data to make decisions (33%), who genuinely understand their category (33%), and who know how to use AI tools appropriately rather than just owning them (33%). That last one connects to something else the report found: 26% of buyers named the misuse of AI, a robotic tone, obvious autofill, or plain factual errors, as one of their biggest frustrations with vendors over the past year. Owning an AI tool and using it well are clearly not the same thing to buyers.
Buyers also want a simpler process, not just a smarter pitch
It’s worth pausing on one more finding, because it reframes the conversation away from the pitch and toward the process surrounding it. Asked which parts of the buying process they’d most like to improve, 43% of buyers pointed to being evaluated more on fit and less on price, the single most requested change in the survey. Streamlining internal approvals came next at 41%, followed by clearer decision criteria at 39%, earlier vendor engagement at 36%, reduced legal and procurement complexity at 35%, and simply making decisions faster at 33%.
That ordering matters as much for brand teams as for sales teams. Buyers aren’t asking vendors to work harder at persuasion. They’re asking vendors to make the whole experience of buying from them less painful, from the first conversation through to the signature.
What this means if you’re building a B2B brand
If there’s one takeaway for marketing and brand teams here, it’s that “more content” and “more personalisation” are not the same thing, and buyers can tell the difference instantly. The report itself recommends vendors swap 30-slide decks for one-page briefs built around the buyer’s own outcomes, not the vendor’s feature list.
Adience’s Managing Director, Chris Wells, frames the fix simply: “The best discovery builds confidence, not fatigue.” Vendors who simplify their processes, listen more than they present, and tailor their approaches to the specific buyer in front of them are the ones earning trust fastest.
For brands trying to stand out in a crowded B2B market, that’s a genuinely useful reframe. The competitive edge isn’t the size of the pitch. It’s whether the buyer feels understood by the end of it, and whether everything that follows is easy rather than exhausting.
To read more content like this, explore The Brand Hopper
Subscribe to our newsletter
