Your best salespeople are frustrated. They keep telling you the same thing: when we get in front of qualified prospects, we close business. The problem is they're getting fewer at-bats than ever before.
Here's what's actually happening: buyers are eliminating 70-80% of potential vendors before they ever contact a sales team. That's not a typo. According to 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report, 81% of buyers have already selected a preferred vendor before they reach out to anyone. Your competition isn't just other manufacturers offering similar products. Your competition is invisibility.
Think about your own behavior when you're buying something significant for your business. Do you call a salesperson first? Of course not. You research online. You ask peers. You read reviews. And increasingly, you ask AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity to help you understand your options.
A 2025 study from Digital Commerce 360 found that one in four B2B buyers now use generative AI more often than traditional search when researching suppliers. Two-thirds said they rely on AI chatbots as much or more than Google when evaluating vendors. For tech buyers specifically, 56% said chatbots are a top source for vendor discovery.
This shift has happened faster than anyone predicted. Forrester reports that B2B buyers are adopting AI-powered search at three times the rate of consumers, largely because employers are driving the adoption. AI-generated traffic to B2B websites grew more than 40% per month through 2025, and Forrester expects AI-driven traffic to reach 20% or more of total organic traffic by the end of this year.
The old model assumed buyers would enter your funnel at the top, gradually moving through awareness and consideration stages before reaching out to your sales team. Your salespeople would guide them, educate them, and build the relationship that leads to a purchase.
That model is broken. Today's buyers don't move through funnels. They're homing in on targets. They've already done their research. They've already formed opinions. By the time they contact you, they're looking to validate a decision they've mostly already made.
The 6sense research shows that 95% of the time, the winning vendor is already on the buyer's Day One shortlist. If you're not on that shortlist before the buyer starts their formal evaluation process, you've already lost.
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for many manufacturing companies: buyers build their shortlists from what they can find. They use AI tools that summarize and recommend vendors based on available information. They search online for answers to their technical questions. They look for companies that have clearly demonstrated expertise in solving problems like theirs.
If your technical expertise is locked in your salespeople's heads or buried in PDFs that AI can't access, you're invisible to these buyers. All that accumulated knowledge, all those decades of application engineering experience, all the problems you've solved for customers—none of it matters if it's not findable.
I recently asked ChatGPT to recommend suppliers for a specific industrial application. It generated a list of companies with helpful summaries of their capabilities. Some of those companies I'd never heard of. And some companies I know are leaders in that space didn't appear at all.
Let's do some math that should concern you. If you typically close 30% of the qualified opportunities you pursue, and buyers are now eliminating 80% of potential vendors before those opportunities ever reach you, your actual conversion rate from potential interest to closed business is around 6%. For every 100 potential customers who have a problem you could solve, 80 eliminate you before you know they exist, and you close maybe 6.
That's the hidden cost of being invisible during the research phase. It's not showing up in your pipeline reports because these buyers never become leads. They never fill out a form. They never call. They never send an RFQ. They just... chose someone else.
Here's a simple exercise that might change how you think about your digital presence: Open ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. Ask it to recommend solutions for the problem your best customers come to you to solve. Ask it to compare vendors in your space. Ask it the questions your buyers ask when they're trying to understand their options.
What shows up? Is it you? Is it accurate? Is it helpful?
If you're not showing up, or if the information that appears is incomplete or inaccurate, you're losing deals you never knew existed. And the longer you wait to address this, the more established your competitors become in the AI-driven research ecosystem that's shaping B2B buying behavior.
The companies that figure this out first will have an enormous advantage. Because once you're on the Day One shortlist, you win 8 out of 10 deals where you're the first vendor contacted. The battle isn't won in the sales meeting anymore. It's won in the research phase—before anyone from your company even knows there's an opportunity.