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6sense · November 2025 · Registration required
2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report
6sense’s global buyer study finds that most B2B buying groups rank preferred suppliers before they speak to anyone, and that the early favourite still usually wins.
Also listed under Winning organisational work.
This is not a coaching report. It is still one of the more useful recent pictures of how organisational buying actually happens.
6sense surveyed nearly 4,000 B2B buyers. 94% said they ordered their shortlist before engaging sellers. In this year’s study, the vendor ranked first at the end of that selection phase went on to win 77% of the time; 6sense still describes the broader pattern as the first-contact favourite winning roughly eight times out of ten.
That is why it sits here and in Winning organisational work. If coaching buyers behave even roughly like this, the commercial work happens before anyone asks you to submit a proposal.
A coach who only appears when a buyer is ready to brief three suppliers may already be second or third in the room.
Getting known earlier — through useful writing, introductions, former clients, or a clear point of view — is less about ‘always be selling’ and more about being available as a named option when a buying group starts comparing.
It also suggests that proposal-writing skill, however important, cannot rescue a process that began without you. The practical question is how a buyer would already have heard of you.
This is an external source. Four Corners Coaching did not produce the original report.
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Edelman and LinkedIn · June 2025
The seventh annual Edelman–LinkedIn study looks at how thought leadership reaches both visible buyers and the quieter internal voices that can help or halt a deal.
Why we picked it. It shows why useful thinking can help a lesser-known coach become easier to take seriously inside a buying group.
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LinkedIn and Ipsos · June 2025
LinkedIn’s Ipsos survey of 1,500 B2B marketers finds that trust is treated as the foundation of brand success, built more through social proof than through being widely famous.
Why we picked it. It is a useful check on whether coaches are chasing visibility when buyers may be looking for proof they can trust.
Winning organisational work · Free to read
UK Government Commercial Function · November 2024, updated August 2025
Official guidance on the Procurement Act 2023 regime, Find a Tender, and how smaller suppliers are expected to register and bid for public-sector work.
Why we picked it. It is the government’s own starting point for suppliers, including small businesses, under the current procurement rules.