Gartner ran a survey in 2025 and found that 61 percent of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience. A majority of the people you are trying to sell to would rather do the whole thing without talking to a salesperson at all. Sit with that. It is not that buyers dislike your product. It is that the experience of being sold to has become so uniformly unpleasant that most people would rather opt out of it entirely. That number is not a fluke. It is the natural end state of a whole industry running the same play at the same targets until the targets stopped answering.
I want to walk through how a field arrives there, because it is a lesson about what happens to any tactic once everyone owns the identical tools.
When a play is rare, it works. In 2015 the teams running account-based marketing had a real edge for a simple reason: most competitors were not doing it. When a target account got a genuinely well-aimed campaign, it stood out, because the buyer's inbox was not yet full of imitations. Early adopters reported big jumps in close rates and larger deals, and those numbers were real. LiveRamp, to take a documented case, picked 15 Fortune 500 accounts that fit its profile, concentrated its effort, and reported a 33 percent conversion rate in four weeks. But look closely at what that number was really measuring. It was measuring the scarcity of the approach as much as the approach itself. The edge was in being one of the few, not in the mechanics.
Then the mechanics got packaged, and everyone bought the package.
Walk the exhibit hall at any B2B conference now and count the ABM platforms. They sell to everyone. Your competitor has the same intent data feed you do, which means you are both being told the same accounts are in-market on the same day. You are both firing at the same targets, at the same time, with tools that produce nearly identical output, because they were built by studying the same best practices. A buyer who shows a flicker of interest in a topic does not get one clever, well-timed reach-out. He gets eleven of them in a week, and they all sound alike, because they were all generated by systems trained on the same playbook.
Put yourself in that buyer's chair. You looked into a problem on Tuesday. By Friday your inbox holds a dozen emails that somehow all noticed, your LinkedIn has six connection requests from account executives you have never met, and ads for four competing products trail you from site to site. What do you conclude? Not that any one of these vendors understands you. You conclude that you tripped a wire and are now being processed. So you do the rational thing. You stop clicking. You mute the notifications. You let the emails stack up unread. The whole channel goes dead for everyone at once, because everyone abused it at once. That is the machinery behind Gartner's 61 percent.
This is the part the dashboards hide. Every team watches its own response rates fall and concludes it needs to send more, personalize harder, buy a better tool. Almost nobody steps back far enough to see that the entire field is doing the same thing, and that the collapse in results is not a flaw in any one campaign. It is the predictable outcome of a shared tactic reaching saturation. More effort inside a saturated channel does not reverse the decline. It accelerates it, the way a price war does not rescue anyone's margin, it just burns everyone's faster.
Meanwhile the buyers did something the software never accounted for. They left.
Not the market. The channels. A great deal of real buying research has quietly moved to places the ABM tools cannot see or touch. Private Slack and Discord communities where practitioners actually trust each other. Peer groups where one executive asks four others what they really use. Podcasts. Dinners. Text threads. The industry started calling this dark social, which is a telling name, because it is only dark if you are the one trying to surveil it. To the buyer it is not dark at all. It is the well-lit room he moved into to get away from the tracking. Gartner's finding that buyers spend only about 17 percent of the purchase meeting with suppliers is the same story from another angle. The other 83 percent happens somewhere you are not, increasingly on purpose, and he makes his shortlist there, among people he believes, before a single one of your orchestrated touches arrives.
So the honest scoreboard reads like this. The channels the tools can measure are exhausted, because everyone is crowded into them running the same plays. And the conversations that actually decide deals have moved to channels the tools cannot measure at all. The modern ABM stack is optimizing harder and harder for a stretch of road where nobody makes money anymore.
I am not telling you the tools are worthless. I will make the opposite case soon. I am telling you that treating them as the strategy, rather than as one small input to it, puts you in a fight that cannot be won by fighting harder. When the play is common, effort inside the play just speeds the erosion. You cannot out-automate a field of automators.
And here is the quiet opportunity buried in all of this. The moment a tactic saturates is the exact moment its opposite becomes valuable again. When every buyer's inbox is full of counterfeit attention, real attention becomes almost shocking. When most buyers have retreated behind spam filters and muted notifications to escape the machine, the seller willing to do one genuinely human, genuinely researched, unscalable thing walks through a door that everyone else left wide open on their way out.
That door is the original idea, the one from before the software. In the next two posts I want to show you what is actually behind it, and how to walk through it on purpose.
Sources: - [Gartner: 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-sales-survey-finds-61-percent-of-b2b-buyers-prefer-a-rep-free-buying-experience) - [LiveRamp's 15-account Fortune 500 ABM results](https://www.cognism.com/blog/account-based-marketing-examples) - [Gartner on the share of buyer time spent with suppliers](https://documill.com/blog/buying-is-difficult-in-b2b-not-selling/)