The single most useful number published about business buying in the last year is not about conversion or cycle time. It is about when the decision stops being open.
What the research found
6sense surveyed close to 4,000 buyers across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific for its 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report. Ninety-five percent of the time, the vendor that eventually won was already on the shortlist the buyer drew on day one. Four in five deals went to what the report calls the pre-contact favourite. Ninety-four percent of buyers said they could rank that shortlist in order of preference before speaking to any seller.
Those three figures describe one situation from three angles. By the time a buyer is willing to have a conversation, they have a ranked list, they have a favourite, and the favourite usually wins.
Why it matters more than it first reads
The comfortable interpretation is that sales still decides the outcome and the shortlist is just the qualifying round. The figures do not support that reading. A four in five conversion from pre-contact favourite to winner means the conversation is confirming a decision far more often than it is changing one.
The uncomfortable interpretation is that most of a commercial budget is spent on the part of the process with the least remaining influence. Discovery, qualification, pitch and negotiation are all staffed, measured and trained. The stage that produced the ranked list is usually owned by nobody in particular.
What we take from it
It moves the question from how well you sell to whether you are present, legible and credible at the point the list is drawn. That point is research: what a buyer finds when they look, what a peer says when asked, what an answer engine returns when queried, and whether what they find is specific enough to be remembered a week later.
It also changes what a first conversation is worth measuring against. If you are converting pre-contact favourites at four in five, your sales process is performing normally. If you are being added to lists late and losing, the fault is upstream of anything a seller does, and improving the pitch will not reach it.
The practical test is cheap. Take your last twenty closed opportunities and ask, for each one, whether the buyer knew who you were before they contacted you. If most did not, you are winning despite the shape of the market rather than because of your position in it, and that is a harder thing to scale.