Experience, nOT THEORY
how to sell in 2026
Everyone’s automating. We’re picking up the phone.
There’s one statistic that deserves attention. According to the 2025 Buyer Experience Report by 6sense, based on responses from nearly 4,000 buyers worldwide, 94% of buying groups already have a preferred vendor shortlist before they ever speak to a salesperson. And in 80% of cases, the vendor that starts as the favourite on day one wins the deal.
That changes everything. By the time a prospect answers your call, much of the decision has already been made. Not entirely, but enough to make traditional persuasion largely irrelevant. Your role is no longer to convince someone from scratch. It’s to validate their thinking, provide clarity, and give them the confidence and language they need to justify the decision internally.
Anyone working in B2B sales sees this every day. The market no longer rewards the company with the best product pitch. It rewards the company that’s already in the buyer’s mind before the buyer even realises they’re ready to buy.
Sales isn’t a channel. It’s a process
built on expertise.
The dominant narrative in B2B sales has been reduced to a war of channels.
Phone vs LinkedIn. Email vs advertising. Outbound vs inbound. It’s a sterile debate, because it starts from the wrong assumption: that there is a “best” channel. There isn’t one best channel.
There is a process, and each stage of that process requires a specific skill.
Today, AI can profile a prospect in minutes: industry, company size, organisational structure, market signals, active ads, recent hires, trade fair participation. Five years ago, this took days. Today, anyone who doesn’t do it starts at a disadvantage that no amount of rhetoric can compensate for.
LinkedIn builds familiarity. It nurtures relationships when done properly. It puts a name and a face in front of a prospect before a call ever happens. In some contexts, it even converts directly. A step-by-step journey isn’t always needed: there are deals where a single channel, used with skill, is enough.
And then there is the phone. The oldest, simplest, and most difficult tool to master. Difficult because you can’t hide behind well-written copy or smart automation. It’s you, your voice, and your ability to read a conversation in real time. That’s why the phone is what sets people apart. And why it’s still the highest-converting tool.
Skill is not about choosing the right channel. It’s about knowing what is needed at each stage, and being able to execute it well.
AI and the paradox nobody talks about
Let’s talk about AI, because it’s unavoidable. But let’s talk about it without the rhetoric.
AI has fundamentally changed the preparation phase. Prospect analysis, segmentation, large-scale personalisation, follow-up management. Those who use these tools well arrive at the conversation with a huge advantage: they already know who they’re speaking to, what they care about, and what problems they might have. This is no longer optional. It’s the new baseline.
The paradox is elsewhere. The more the market adopts the same automations, the more indistinguishable the messages become. LinkedIn InMails all start to look the same. Email sequences follow identical rhythms, identical formulas, identical attempts at “personalisation” that feel anything but personal. The average buyer now receives dozens of “tailored” messages that are not tailored at all, and has learned to ignore them. And something paradoxical is happening as a result.
The more people retreat into automation, the rarer human competence becomes. A phone call from someone who is genuinely prepared, who knows what they’re talking about and isn’t reading from a script, has become an unusual event in a decision-maker’s day. And what is unusual gets attention.
AI doesn’t replace competence. It amplifies it, if it’s there. If it isn’t, it amplifies mediocrity. And amplified mediocrity, in B2B, doesn’t create results. It creates noise.
Anyone working in high-complexity sectors, from precision mechanics to professional cosmetics, from energy to the food industry, knows this well: you can’t sell a technical service through an automated funnel alone. You can use AI to arrive better prepared. But then you still need to sit down, listen, and propose something specific. That requires competence, not software.
Marketing and sales: the disconnect that costs revenue.
There is a structural problem in most Italian B2B companies. Marketing and sales don’t talk to each other. Marketing produces content that sales don’t use. Sales closes contracts that marketing doesn’t talk about. Each side works in its own direction, and neither amplifies the other’s work.
If 94% of buyers already have a preferred vendor before speaking to you, the real question is: how did you get onto that list in the first place? You didn’t get there through a cold call. You got there before that. Through the case study the prospect found while searching for your name. Through the LinkedIn post your salesperson shared three weeks before making the call. Through the newsletter that arrived at just the right moment. The phone may have converted, but everything else created the conditions for that conversation to happen.
And it works the other way around too. The salesperson making calls every day hears recurring objections, questions, and doubts. They know which sectors are heating up, and where the market is moving. If that information stays in the heads of those making the calls and never reaches marketing, then marketing will continue producing generic content that helps no one.
This is not a departmental issue. It is an issue of circularity. When the flow works, every part feeds the others. Sales informs communication, communication prepares the ground for sales, results generate new content, and content generates new prospects. When the flow is broken, everyone is rowing, and no one is moving forward.
Selling abroad: where automation stops
Everything we’ve said so far becomes even more amplified when the market is international.
A German buyer does not respond to the same triggers as an Italian one. A Finnish decision-maker follows a different decision-making process than a Spanish one. Timelines change, hierarchies change, and the way trust is built changes. No automation tool truly accounts for these differences. “Personalised” email sequences that work in Italy get ignored in Germany. An informal tone that opens doors in Milan can close them in Stockholm.
International business development is where human competence becomes least replaceable. It requires people who understand the target market, who can adapt tone and positioning, and who know when to push and when to wait. AI can identify the right prospects and provide market intelligence. But the real conversation requires cultural sensitivity that no algorithm has.
For Italian companies looking to grow abroad, this is a critical point. Italian products often have a real competitive advantage: quality, specialisation, production flexibility. But that advantage does not sell itself. It needs to be translated, not only linguistically, but culturally, into a value proposition that a foreign buyer can understand and justify internally. And that translation work is not done by platforms. It is done by people.
After-sales in B2B is business development.
Acquiring a new B2B customer is becoming increasingly expensive. In some sectors, the cost per qualified lead has exceeded €300, and the average sales cycle has settled at around ten months. This makes any model that treats each sale as an isolated event unsustainable.
Companies that grow consistently are not those that close the most deals. They are the ones that turn every contract into a long-term value-generating relationship. But this doesn’t happen by default. It happens because, after the signature, someone is still there, tracking results, proposing improvements, and responding when problems arise.
After-sales in B2B is not customer care. It is business development under another name. Yet very few organisations treat it as such.
Today’s buyers enter negotiations carrying the weight of past broken promises. They have seen perfect presentations turn into poor execution. What they are looking for is not the supplier with the best pitch. It is the partner who will remain present after the signature with the same intensity as before it. Once again, this is a question of competence. It is not enough to want to be there. You have to know how to be there.
What we see from the field
We don’t write these things as observers. We write them as operators who, every day, work inside the B2B market on behalf of our clients.
We manage tens of thousands of commercial interactions every year, across more than twenty industries. From the food industry to pharmaceuticals, from precision mechanics to insurance, from energy to cosmetics. Each project has its own specifics, its own market, its own stakeholders. In some cases, we use the full spectrum: AI-driven profiling, LinkedIn social selling, direct phone outreach. In others, a single channel is enough. Both approaches work, because it is not the number of channels that determines the outcome. It is the competence with which each stage is managed.
What the data shows us, project after project, is that the stage where conversion is actually generated, the moment a prospect agrees to a meeting, in the vast majority of cases comes through direct contact. Not because the phone is magical.
But because it is the tool that requires the most preparation, the most competence, and the greatest ability to adapt in real time. And it is also the one most people have stopped using properly.
We see the market from a privileged position because we are inside it every day. And what we see is clear: B2B is splitting in two. On one side, those who invest only in automation and hope the numbers will do the work. On the other, those who use technology to arrive prepared, but then put a competent person in front of the prospect. We are on the second side. Not out of romanticism, but because it works.
Where we stand
We believe that the more the market becomes automated, the more human competence will become the real competitive advantage. Not generic competence. Specific competence: knowing how to profile a prospect in an industry that isn’t your own, knowing how to build familiarity on LinkedIn without sounding like a salesperson, knowing how to run a phone call with a procurement director who has already said no to three of your competitors.
For this reason, there are things we do and things we will not do.
We use artificial intelligence every day, for research, for profiling, for market analysis. We do not use it to replace conversations. Conversations are handled by prepared people, with a name and a face, who take responsibility for the relationships they build.
We don’t promise leads.
We promise qualified appointments with real decision-makers. The difference is not semantic. It is the difference between a name in a database and a person sitting in front of your salesperson.
We don’t sell automation disguised as strategy.
Every stage of the process requires a specific skill, and we treat it as such. If a project only needs one channel, we use one. If it needs three, we use three. Complexity is not a value. Results are.
We don’t abandon the client after the signature.
The moment a contract is closed is the moment the real work begins. Results are measured, shared, and used to grow. Those who disappear after the sale are not partners. They are suppliers.
FAQ –
The New Standard in B2B Sales
According to the Buyer Experience Report, 94% of buying groups already have a preferred vendor shortlist before contacting a salesperson, and in 80% of cases, the vendor that is ranked first on day one wins the contract. Sales today is no longer about persuading from scratch. It is about the ability to position yourself in the prospect’s mind before the explicit need even emerges.
AI has revolutionised the preparation phase, research and prospect profiling, but when it is used to automate mass messaging, it makes communication increasingly uniform and indistinguishable. The paradox is that the more the market automates, the rarer and more valuable human competence becomes. A phone call made by a well-prepared person today captures attention precisely because it has become an unusual event.
The phone is the most difficult tool because it doesn’t allow you to hide behind copy or automation: it requires empathy, voice, and the ability to read the conversation in real time. It is not a magical tool, but it is the one that demands the highest level of specific competence. If AI-supported preparation opens the door, it is direct human contact that generates real conversion.
Attraverso un flusso circolare di informazioni:
Automation tools lack cultural sensitivity. An approach or tone that works in Milan may be ignored in Frankfurt or Stockholm. International business development requires a cultural translation of the value proposition, along with precise work on foreign hierarchies and decision-making processes, something only people can do.
The strategic difference is this: Selling leads simply means delivering a list of cold contacts, or contacts with generic interest. Delivering qualified appointments, on the other hand, means bringing a real decision-maker to the table (physical or virtual) with a verified need and a clear intention to listen to your proposal.
