Buying Happens Before Selling
The distance between selling motions and buying behaviour is now at a historic high
Speaking for myself, over the past few weeks I have seen a sharp increase in cold emails, newsletters I did not subscribe to, targeted ads, and even, somehow, cold calls. I have always respected good sales efforts, and I genuinely feel for marketers and salespeople trying to push real signal through an increasingly hostile environment. But this morning took the cake. A record number of personalized intrusions arrived more or less at once.
Instead of impatiently swiping past them, I gave myself a few minutes to be curious, I read each one, I even answered a cold call (gasp!). This was not with intent to engage, but to see if anything could break through to me, or if the entire exercise had become self-contained. I wanted to take stock, to see whether the current state of messaging could move me at all.
They all told me the same thing: I apparently have a problem. They are the solution. And we need to talk now. A few even reminded me that “as CEO at Sparrow Bioacoustics, it falls to me to ensure the problem is solved”
None of it got through. None of it changed anything.
To be clear, like every company, we do have problems to solve. They are addressed in order of worthiness and impact, as resources allow. But this style of outreach does not affect that ordering, the timing, or the decisions. It simply does not intersect with how buying actually happens for us.
More than a decade ago at PathFactory, I wrote “The Attention Economy”, a paper and talk track about getting attention, holding it, and extracting signal from it. That idea still holds, and PathFactory still does a great job executing on it. But something has shifted since then, and I suspect things now feel far stranger for sales and marketing than they did at the time.
AI collapses the cost of content to near zero. When anyone can produce unlimited words, images, and personalized messages, content stops being a differentiator. The constraint is no longer production. It is credible attention, trust, relevance, and timing. Advertising does not die because people stop seeing ads; it dies because people stop attributing meaning to them. Outbound sales follow the same trajectory. Cold email was already decaying; AI simply accelerates the process. When everyone can send ten thousand customized messages, customization becomes meaningless. Inboxes are filtered, phones go unanswered, interruption no longer buys leverage.
At the same time, discovery has shifted inward.
I see this clearly in my own work. I do not assume that buying something will fix my problems. Most products promise solutions before I am convinced the problem is even worth solving right now, and that alone is enough to disengage. If I do believe a purchase might help, the process is deliberate and self directed. We research, weigh tradeoffs (there are always tradeoffs) and actively look for reasons not to buy. No salesperson speeds that up. The desire to act does not come from the outside. It comes from within.
This is where the real gap has opened.
The way many organizations are still trying to sell looks increasingly disconnected from the way businesses actually make buying decisions. Volume prospecting underperforms and discovery calls miss the mark because the buyer has not yet decided the problem is worth their time. Ads and content struggle for the same reason. They assume attention can be generated through effort, rather than recognized when it becomes available.
Sales used to be about changing minds. Now it is mostly about being present at the moment conviction forms, if it forms at all. By the time a company shows up, the decision is often half made or already rejected. This is why the moment feels weird. Not because selling is broken, but because the distance between selling motions and buying behavior is now at a historic high.
And yet, people still buy things every day. They still invest in products and services to improve outcomes, reduce risk, and do their jobs better. The opportunity has not disappeared. What has faded away is the idea that desire can be initiated from the outside simply because a solution exists. The existence of your product does not, on its own, justify action on the buyer’s part. They must first value the problem, decide it is worthy of attention, and believe that solving it matters now. And, they may also have to figure out how they will operationalize whatever the solution may be before they are ready to talk to anyone from the outside.
What will replace today’s ads and outbound won’t be silence however. It will be signal. Signal looks more like clearly articulating a problem before the buyer fully names it, evidence that survives independent verification, language that matches how the buyer already thinks, not how the seller wishes they did. Signal is availability instead of pressure when the buyer is ready.
Selling will feel less like influence and work a lot more like infrastructure. Instead of running a convince and convert process to grab budget, the work is now to build something that integrates seamlessly into how the client already buys. That means being discoverable without demanding attention, understandable without explanation, and evaluable without someone forcing the process along. When a buyer finally reaches out, they are not asking to be convinced; they are asking to confirm.
Sales done well can still be one of the noblest professions, but the answer is not arming teams to push harder or enabling them to manufacture urgency. It is understanding, deeply, how your client makes decisions, and designing a way to be present without interfering, even when that means they are not ready to engage with you or your content. Great sales leaders are going to figure how to make this work.
For our company, business development is a high-precision, high touch activity, where the impetus to engage is driven by forces that have little to do with us and everything to do with timing, context, and readiness. That tells me there is probably no new emerging B2B playbook any of us should be waiting for, and I would be wary of one if it appeared. This will be figured out differently by every business. What I am confident about is that the gap will not close on its own, and things will not revert to familiar inbound outbound dogma, funnels, and sales motions.
It will get figured out. But it will be figured out by teams willing to accept that buying has changed, that desire cannot be initiated from the outside, and that alignment beats pressure every time.