Your buyer has done this eight or nine times before

The 2025 6sense buyer report includes a figure that gets less attention than the shortlist numbers and explains a good deal of them. Buyers average eight to nine prior purchase journeys per category. Ninety-seven percent said they had prior personal experience with at least one vendor on their shortlist.

What experience does to a sales process

A buyer on their ninth purchase in a category recognises the shape of what is being done to them. They know that the discovery call is partly qualification. They know the case study was selected. They know the third tier exists to make the second look reasonable, and they know what happens to the price at the end of the quarter.

None of that makes them cynical in a way that blocks a sale. It makes ordinary sales technique transparent, and transparent technique is read as a signal about the firm rather than as persuasion.

The asymmetry underneath

The buyer has done this eight or nine times. The individual seller across from them may have run hundreds of these conversations, but almost always from one side and inside one firm. The buyer has seen how a dozen different firms behave at the same moment, and they are comparing you against that set rather than against your competitors' pitches.

This is why small procedural choices carry more weight than they appear to. Sending a written scope before a call, naming a limitation unprompted, or saying that something is outside what you do are all unusual enough in a category to be noticed by someone with nine comparisons.

What we take from it

Experienced buyers reward legibility and punish technique, which inverts the usual training. The advantage available is not a better version of the standard approach. It is visibly not running the standard approach, in a market where the buyer can tell.

It also sets a floor under how much a first conversation can be improved. If the buyer has seen this nine times, the upside in the call is mostly in not making the errors they are watching for, and the real differentiation happened earlier, where their prior experience of you was formed.