Author: Shira Abel Category: Enterprise Marketing URL: https://hunterandbard.com/resources/blog/your-buyer-researched-you-before-the-call
By the time a prospect agrees to a meeting with you, they've already formed an opinion. According to Forrester, 92% of B2B buyers start with a vendor already in mind. The meeting isn't where they decide. It's where they confirm.
Enterprise buyers research you across seven touchpoints before ever taking a call: <a href="/resources/blog/why-your-dated-website-is-killing-your-deals" class="text-[#316263] font-bold underline">your website</a>, earned media, thought leadership, social presence, newsletter consistency, reviews, and <a href="/resources/blog/seo-is-no-longer-enough-b2b-guide-to-aeo" class="text-[#316263] font-bold underline">AEO</a>. Forrester data shows 92% already have a preferred vendor before formal evaluation. The halo effect means strength in one area lifts everything; weakness in one contaminates the rest. Win the deal before the call starts.
By the time a prospect agrees to a meeting with you, they've already formed an opinion.
According to Forrester's 2024 Buyers' Journey Survey, 92% of B2B buyers start the purchasing process with at least one vendor already in mind, and 41% have already selected a single preferred vendor before formal evaluation even begins. Forrester's framing of this is blunt: "B2B buying today is a process of confirmation, not selection."
Read that again. The meeting isn't where they decide. It's where they confirm what they already believe.
Gartner data showed before the pandemic that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time in direct contact with potential vendors. That's gotten even smaller today and the use of LLMs for decision-making has risen. Your buyers are reading, comparing, and forming impressions long before anyone picks up a phone.
So what are they reading? And what are they concluding about you?
Enterprise buyers are not casual. When a company is evaluating a new vendor for a meaningful contract, they're not just deciding whether your product fits their needs. They're deciding whether your company is going to survive long enough to be worth betting on.
Switching costs inside an enterprise are real. Data migration, retraining staff, re-negotiating agreements, rebuilding integrations. The cost of a bad vendor choice isn't just financial. It's organizational disruption and, often, a career problem for whoever sponsored the decision. According to Forrester's State of Business Buying, 2024, on average 13 people within an organization are involved in the buying decision, with 89% of purchases involving two or more departments. Every one of those stakeholders is trying to reduce the risk that they personally endorsed the wrong choice. Choosing the wrong vendor can become a career problem.
That pressure shapes how they research you. Before they ever agree to a call, they've done a background check. They've looked at your website. They've searched your name. They've checked LinkedIn. They've looked for any signal that tells them whether you're the real thing or a risk they can't afford to take.
What they find, or don't find, either builds confidence before you open your mouth, or starts eroding it.
This is the first and most scrutinized stop. Nearly 60% of B2B buyers find and consume content directly from a vendor's website. This is the first and most scrutinized stop. Vendor websites rank high among the dozen digital channels B2B buyers use in research, far outpacing direct sales contact.
The question they're asking isn't just "do I understand what this company does?" It's "does this company look like they know what they're doing?" Those are different questions. The first is about clarity. The second is about credibility. A website can answer the first question while completely failing the second.
What good looks like: Clear positioning on who you serve and what you do. Specific language, not category language. A visual identity that holds together across every page. Copy that sounds like a human wrote it for another human.
What empty looks like: A site where the homepage hero reads like a mission statement. Generic stock photography. Case studies that say "we helped a Fortune 500 company" without telling you anything. A blog with three posts from 2022.
The empty site doesn't just fail to help you. It actively signals that you don't have customers, don't have the resources to maintain your own presence, or don't take this seriously enough to do it right.
Buyers look for evidence that the world has noticed you exist.
This doesn't mean you need a Wall Street Journal feature. But it does mean there should be something: a trade publication mention, a podcast appearance, a byline in an industry outlet, a quote in a relevant story. For companies selling into deeply technical markets, analyst coverage matters too. A mention in a Gartner or Forrester report isn't just a vanity metric. It's a signal to enterprise buyers that an independent expert found you credible enough to include. You don't need to pay for a full analyst engagement to get there. An initial pitch call with a relevant analyst costs nothing. If what you're doing is genuinely interesting, that relationship can lead to earned mention before you ever write a check.
Enterprise influencers, practitioners with meaningful LinkedIn followings who talk about your space, are increasingly part of this picture too. A credible third party who has organically mentioned your company carries weight that your own content simply can't replicate.
What good looks like: Multiple external sources mentioning you, across multiple years, that you didn't pay for.
What empty looks like: Nothing appears when someone searches your company name plus "review" or your company name plus the publication names in your space. The absence is itself a data point.
This is where companies reveal whether they actually understand the problem they claim to solve.
Content that's just promotional, "here's how our product works" or "five reasons to choose us," don't count. Enterprise buyers are looking for evidence that your team has a point of view. That you've thought about your space carefully enough to say something that isn't obvious.
The Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, which surveys thousands of global B2B decision-makers annually, has tracked this for years. 73% of B2B buyers consider thought leadership to be a better way of judging a company's expertise than marketing materials, and 54% say that companies which consistently produce thought leadership pieces have prompted them to research things they weren't previously considering.
One great quote from the report:
75% of global B2B buyers and C-suite leaders say that a particular piece of thought leadership content has led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering. Among this group, 60% said that the content made them realize their organization was missing out on a significant business opportunity.
There's a harder edge to this data worth noting. Approximately 70% of executives admitted that a piece of thought leadership content has made them wonder whether they should continue working with their current supplier, and 25% of those who questioned their supplier relationships ultimately ended or significantly reduced them.
Thought leadership isn't just acquisition. It's defense. Your competitors are either doing it or they're not. If they are, their content is reaching your existing customers too.
They are reviewing your writing. The question is whether your posts are worth reading.
What good looks like: Original perspectives on your industry. Content that names real tensions and doesn't pretend everything is simple. Bylines and presentations that show your team's expertise holds up outside your own website.
What empty looks like: A blog that rephrases things anyone could have Googled. Posts that announce features or awards with no analysis. Topics that are adjacent to your actual expertise but don't demonstrate it. "10 tips for better [generic thing]."
Specifically LinkedIn. For B2B, it's the platform that matters. Forrester research finds that younger buyers, now comprising nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers, are more likely than older buyers to turn to information sources not controlled by vendors. Meaning they are reaching out to their colleagues on private forums, looking for comments on LinkedIn, and reviewing reputation sites like G2.
The company page matters, but buyer scrutiny increasingly extends to the people behind the company. They're looking at the founders and senior team. How often do they post? What do they say? Do they seem like people who actually operate in this space, or does their profile look like it was set up to exist?
Consistency matters here more than volume. A company that posts something substantive every week looks more stable than one that posted fifteen times in January and then went quiet for four months.
What good looks like: Active company page, founder and leadership presence that reflects genuine expertise. Commentary on industry topics that sounds like it came from someone who's actually doing the work.
What empty looks like: A company page that hasn't been updated since the founding announcement. Founders with bare-minimum profiles. No employee activity visible. Or the opposite problem: a burst of content that abruptly stopped, which raises its own question about what happened.
A newsletter is a proof-of-consistency signal. Whether someone subscribes or not, the existence of an active newsletter tells a buyer: this company shows up on a regular schedule. They have something to say and they say it consistently.
That consistency, over time, is a form of credibility that's hard to fake. Anyone can write one good blog post. Sustaining a newsletter for two years without stopping says something different about organizational stability and genuine engagement with a topic.
What good looks like: A newsletter that's easy to find, has a real point of view, and has been running long enough to show a track record.
What empty looks like: A sign-up form that links to a list with no recent issues. Or no newsletter at all, which on its own isn't disqualifying, but removes one credibility data point from a picture that may already be thin.
Gartner Digital Markets' 2024 Software Buying Behavior Survey found that reading reviews before making a purchase decision is important for 98% of buyers, and 92% of buyers trust reviews written within the past year. This pattern shows up on platforms like G2, Capterra, Clutch, and Trustpilot depending on your category.
Reviews serve a different function than your own case studies. Your case studies say what you want them to say. Reviews say what your customers actually said. Buyers know the difference. IT decision-makers are particularly likely to be swayed by expert testimonials, and social proof tells B2B decision-makers: "This is a good product from a trustworthy business."
What good looks like: Reviews that are specific, recent, and varied. Customers who describe what you actually helped them with, not just that they were "satisfied." Responses from your team that show you're paying attention.
What empty looks like: No reviews at all. Three reviews from four years ago that all sound suspiciously similar. Or reviews that are overwhelmingly positive in a way that reads as coached.
The absence of reviews isn't a neutral signal for a company that's been operating for several years. It prompts a question: why hasn't anyone said anything publicly?
Your buyer is asking an LLM to do the vetting for them.
Forrester\'s data suggests that nearly half of the "selection" phase now happens inside a chat interface. When a buyer asks AI, "Which of these three vendors is capable of a global rollout, handles XYZ, and speaks these languages?" they aren\'t just looking at your homepage. They want to know if you have all of the things, and they want that answer quickly.
AEO is the process of making sure that verdict is in your favor. If an AI cannot parse your technical specs or security standards because they are buried in a PDF or a gated form, you effectively don\'t exist in the AI-generated shortlist. This is the new "invisible filter."
What good looks like: Factual, declarative content and structured data that an LLM can cite with confidence. You want the AI to say, "Vendor X is the best fit because their documentation explicitly confirms SOC2 compliance and 24/7 support in EMEA."
What empty looks like: A website that is all adjectives and no attributes. If your site is just a collection of "industry-leading" and "innovative" buzzwords, the answer engine will hallucinate a better-documented competitor into your spot.
The AI is looking for proof. If you don\'t provide the data, you\'re forcing the bot to guess. In enterprise sales, "guessing" is just another word for "disqualified."
This is where psychology becomes important.
In 1920, psychologist Edward Thorndike identified what he called the halo effect: the tendency for a positive impression in one area to color our perception of everything else about a person or entity. A sharp logo? It must be a sharp company. A confident speaker? They must be an expert. The brain fills in the blanks based on very little information.
McKinsey's analysis of B2B companies found that those with strong brands outperform weak ones by 20%, noting that many B2B companies still mistakenly think of branding as consumer-facing communication.
The reverse is equally true. A weak website casts doubt on the quality of your work. An empty social presence raises questions about whether the company is still active. One bad data point doesn't just affect that data point. It contaminates the read on everything else. Then the horn effect takes over, and suddenly everything you do is working against you.
McKinsey has also written directly about this phenomenon in business, noting that a company's overall impression, its halo, shapes how we perceive its strategy, leaders, culture, and other elements, and that this halo effect can be created or destroyed by performance signals that may have nothing to do with underlying reality. If your performance doesn't back up your brand signals, the horn effect will go into place.
The seven touchpoints above don't operate in isolation. A buyer who lands on your website with a positive impression from a third-party mention will interpret an average website more generously than a buyer who arrives cold. Conversely, a buyer who finds your site thin will approach your pitch call with a skepticism that's harder to overcome than you think. When buyers have already chosen a favorite before the call, that favorite wins the deal most of the time. What you want is to already be the favorite.
AI has made it easier and cheaper to produce content, build websites, generate visuals, and maintain a presence. That's genuinely useful. But there's a conversation worth having about the difference between AI in skilled hands and AI in unskilled ones, because the output is not the same, and your buyers can tell.
Here's an honest internal example. I'll build something in an AI design tool and think it looks great. Then Daina, my design partner at Hunter & Bard, looks at it and says "Oh dear no." She fixes it. It looks a million times better. I can see that hers looks better. I cannot do what she does.
This isn't an AI problem. The tool is the same. The difference is that Daina has spent years developing a trained eye, understanding hierarchy, whitespace, visual tension, color relationships, typography, in ways that don't transfer just because you have access to a sophisticated tool. I can write and she knows it. She can design and I know it. We each use AI to accelerate our own expertise. Neither of us can use AI to really replace the expertise we don't have.
When designers on Reddit discuss why AI-generated UX "feels off," spacing comes up constantly. The interfaces look professional but feel cramped or floaty in ways that are hard to articulate.
Good UX requires slowness in specific places. The pause where you reconsider whether users actually need this screen. The revision where you strip out half the elements because testing revealed people were overwhelmed. That judgment can't be automated (yet).
Research on professional versus non-professional evaluation of AI-generated design found that professional participants were adept at identifying deficiencies in AI-generated design schemes, with significant differences in focal points and observation patterns between professional and non-professional evaluators.
What's harder to explain is that you don't need to be a designer to feel it. Most people can't articulate what's wrong. They just feel a low-level unease, something that registers as "off" without being able to name what. That feeling is processed fast and it shapes perception before any rational evaluation begins. Reber's processing fluency theory suggests that ease of visual processing itself generates aesthetic pleasure, meaning design that requires effort to parse, even subtly, generates a negative response the viewer may not consciously attribute to anything.
The implication is not that you should avoid AI tools. It's that AI is a multiplier, not a substitute. In the hands of a skilled designer, it accelerates good work. In the hands of someone without design training, it mostly accelerates mediocrity with a professional finish, which is arguably more dangerous than obviously bad design, because it's harder to recognize.
This matters for your seven touchpoints because buyers are looking at your website, your social content, your collateral, and your visual identity and making rapid, mostly unconscious assessments. Consistency, coherence, and visual quality create the halo that makes everything else land better. The absence of those things creates a low-level skepticism that follows the buyer into the call.
Go look at your own seven touchpoints right now. Not through your own eyes, but through the eyes of a skeptical enterprise buyer who found you during research, hasn't talked to you yet, and is trying to figure out whether you're a real company that's going to be around in two years.
What do they find? And does it earn the meeting, or just survive it?
The companies that win enterprise business before the call starts aren't necessarily the ones with the best product. They're the ones who made it easy for a careful buyer to feel confident. That confidence is built across these six places, consistently, over time.
That's the work.
Ready to Fix Your Seven Touchpoints?
Hunter & Bard helps B2B companies in deep tech, telecom, energy, and hardware sharpen their positioning and build the brand presence that earns trust before the first conversation. If the seven touchpoints above gave you a list of things to fix, that's where we start.
Hunter & Bard is a San Francisco-based B2B strategy consultancy founded in 2011 by Shira Abel. We help deep-tech and enterprise SaaS companies fix their positioning, sharpen their messaging, and close $100K+ deals.
We work with B2B leaders who are tired of being overlooked, underestimated, or mistaken for their competitors. Our specialty is turning complex, technical products into clear, compelling stories that win enterprise deals.
We believe that perception drives revenue. If your buyers can't tell you apart from the next vendor in 30 seconds, you have a positioning problem — not a marketing problem. We fix that.
Perception = (Story × Visibility) ÷ Noise
This framework drives everything we do. Your story has to be sharp. Your visibility has to be strategic. And you have to cut through the noise — not add to it.
Shira Abel — Founder & CEO. Kellogg MBA. 20+ years in B2B marketing. Former CMO. Keynote speaker. Published in Forbes, HuffPost, and Wired. Specialist in enterprise positioning and perception strategy.
Daina Reed — Founding Designer & Partner. 15+ years in product and brand design. Former Senior Product Designer at Dun & Bradstreet. Specialist in enterprise UX, visual identity, and design systems.