Why B2B Buyers Really Buy: The Hidden Buyer Journey with Scott Gillum - The B2B Roundtable | Lyssna här

Most GTM teams have gotten very good at tracking what buyers do. They can see form fills, intent signals, CRM activity, demo requests, and pipeline movement.

But those systems often miss the people, pressure, risk, trust, and hidden stakeholders shaping the actual decision.

In this conversation, Scott shares what he learned from studying more than 10,000 buyers across 15 industries, including why so many people who influence a deal never appear in the CRM, why B2B buying is more emotional than we admit, and how personality, culture, and hidden stakeholders shape complex deals.

The big question behind this episode is simple:

Even if our lead systems worked perfectly, would they really explain what drives a buying decision?

About this episode

In complex B2B sales, the visible buyer journey is often only part of the story.

The CRM may show one set of contacts. The real buying group may include several others.

The business case may look rational. The actual decision may be shaped by fear, trust, confidence, internal pressure, and personal risk.

Scott Gillum calls this The Hidden Buyer Journey. His research shows that many of the people who influence deals are never entered into the database, and many of the signals that matter most are not captured by traditional lead and pipeline systems.

Scott and Brian discuss:

Why human-to-human selling still matters as AI and rep-free buying grow
How one sales team nearly missed the real executive concern in a deal
Why 85% of buyers in a buying group may not be visible in the database
Why complex B2B buying is emotional, even when the process looks rational
How personality and culture influence buying decisions
Why empathy is not a soft skill in complex sales
How sellers can use AI to become better with people, not just louder at scale

About Scott Gillum

Scott Gillum is the founder and CEO of Carbon Design, a marketing services firm focused on understanding buyer behavior and improving B2B growth.

He is the author of The Hidden Buyer Journey: How Personality, Culture, and Hidden Stakeholders Decide Your Deals.

Scott’s work focuses on the hidden forces that shape B2B buying decisions, including personality, buying-group dynamics, organizational culture, and the stakeholders who influence deals but often never appear in CRM or marketing automation systems.

Scott Gillum on LinkedIn

Chapters

00:00 Introduction: Scott Gillum and The Hidden Buyer Journey
01:06 The human-to-human selling relationship
02:15 When the CRM tells the wrong story
04:10 The 85% of buyers missing from the database
06:14 The emotional gap in complex sales
08:03 Buyer confidence versus vendor confidence
11:28 The two-thirds rule and personality-based selling
15:16 Why empathy is not a soft skill
18:18 How sellers should adapt under pressure
20:44 Using AI to move closer to the customer
23:42 Closing thoughts

A few things worth taking away 1. The CRM may not show the real buying group

Scott shared an example of a deal where the sales team thought the need was real-time project profitability. But late in the deal, the CEO’s behavior showed a very different concern: cash flow.

The visible activity told one story. The person with the most influence over the decision was telling another.

2. Hidden stakeholders are not a small problem

Scott said his team found that 85% of buyers in a buying group were not in the database. In one example, a company gave its team 100 contacts for an opportunity. After reading the email threads, they found nine people in the actual buying group, and only two of those nine were in the system.

That changes how we think about attribution, lead management, sales process, and account strategy.

3. Complex B2B buying is emotional because the risk is real

Scott put it plainly: buying the wrong iPhone may be frustrating, but nobody gets fired for it. Making the wrong million-dollar SaaS decision is different.

That risk creates pressure. And that pressure shapes how people make decisions.

4. Buyers need confidence in themselves, not just confidence in the vendor

One of the most important ideas in the conversation is that sellers often believe their job is to make the buyer confident in the vendor.

But in a complex sale, the buyer also needs confidence in their own decision.

They need to believe they can defend the choice internally, manage the risk, and survive the consequences if things do not go perfectly.

5. Personality and culture shape how people buy

Scott explains what he calls the two-thirds rule: certain personality patterns tend to concentrate in industries, roles, accounts, and buying groups.

That does not mean every person is the same. But it does mean sellers and marketers can get smarter about how different buyers process information, evaluate risk, and build trust.

6. Empathy is not soft. It changes outcomes.

Scott shared an example from email analysis where a seller who showed empathy and understood the buyer’s situation had a much better path through the deal than sellers who tried to drive the process harder.

In complex sales, empathy is not about being nice. It is about understanding the pressure the buyer is under and adapting accordingly.

7. AI should make sellers better with people, not just louder at scale

Scott’s warning is direct: we chose scale because we were not good at conversion.

AI can make that problem worse if it simply produces more outreach. But it can also help sellers understand buyers, buying groups, and corporate culture more deeply.

A few lines that stuck with me

“We have a tendency to make purchase decisions emotionally, and we rationalize them later.”

“You buy the wrong iPhone version, you’re not going to fire yourself. You make a bad decision on a million-dollar SaaS implementation.”

“Turns out they’re not putting the people in.”

“Titles and roles don’t make decisions. People do.”

“We chose scale because we weren’t good at conversion.”

“We train on tools. We don’t train on buyers.”

Resources mentioned

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Transcript

Brian Carroll: Welcome to The B2B Roundtable: What Dashboards Miss. I’m Brian Carroll, and here’s the question behind today’s conversation.

Even if our lead systems worked perfectly, would they really explain what drives a buying decision?

My guest today is Scott Gillum. He’s the founder and CEO of Carbon Design and the author of The Hidden Buyer Journey.

Scott spent seven years studying more than 10,000 buyers across 15 industries. And here’s what he found: we’ve gotten very good at tracking what buyers do, but we still don’t understand enough about the person making the decision.

Because the real buyer journey often happens somewhere our dashboards can’t see.

Scott, welcome to The B2B Roundtable.

Scott Gillum: Thank you, Brian. It’s good to be on. It’s good to talk to you again. It’s been a few years, so I’m excited for our conversation.

Brian Carroll: You’ve described four selling relationships in the book, and you said the human-to-human one is disappearing. What are we losing right now?

Scott Gillum: I think it’s a value equation.

In the book, we talked about the number-one driver of purchase decisions being trust and reliability. So if the tools advance to be more trusted than the human, and you already see some of that in the research where buyers want a rep-free experience. They’re well through the buying process before they talk to a rep, if machines can do a better job of giving information and conveying that to be credible, and the audiences trust those sources, they’re going to do it.

This is an opportunity. The book is really about how we elevate this human-to-human selling experience so we can preserve the most important thing, which is the human connection, when it comes to making a purchase decision in B2B.

We have to take a hard look at how we’re training our reps, the information we’re enabling them with, and whether we really understand the buyers at the other end of the deal.

Brian Carroll: I wanted to talk about a deal where the CRM told one story, but the people inside the decision were telling another.

Scott Gillum: It’s in the enterprise space. It’s a SaaS company. The sales team was hearing one thing from the buyers they were having conversations with, and they thought the need was around real-time project profitability.

Their system is an ERP system. It was focused on project work. Fortunately, they had put all the buyers they were dealing with into their database, which isn’t common.

Two weeks before the final presentation against the incumbent competitor, the CEO began showing signs of activity. His intent signals were throwing off cash flow. He searched for cash flow 35 times over the last two weeks.

So we brought that information to the account team before the final presentation. They had already crafted the presentation around project profitability. I’m like, “Why are you on project profitability? He’s on cash flow. What is going on here?”

This was a fast-growing company. They were burning through a lot of cash. We had to make the connection between the real-time profitability view and cash flow, and how their system was able to do that.

A lot of times, buyers aren’t telling you what the real need is because they don’t really understand it. They’re just told to go look for things. Then, when you get down to the key decision maker, he has a very specific thing he’s looking for: how can you get greater visibility into cash flow?

That was picked up through intent signals because they had put that contact in the database. When he hit a form, we could track his activity and bring that information back over.

The unfortunate thing is, when we looked at this, 85% of those buyers in a buying group aren’t in any database.

Brian Carroll: Tell us more about this 85%.

Scott Gillum: It was one of the biggest discoveries. For 20 years, I’ve been working with clients on marketing attribution. Why can’t we connect these assets we’re developing to deals? It was always this big mystery. Maybe the salesperson just didn’t put the information in the system, so we can’t track it back.

Turns out they’re not putting the people in.

We discovered this by reading emails between the reps and the buyers. We did it over five organizations, ten deals, end to end. This was a lot of data, a lot of emails going back and forth.

What we discovered was that 77% of the buyers in the buying group enter late stage. They enter during trial, demo, and final presentation.

The sales rep’s behavior is to get everything set up for the trial, get the paperwork, get the MSA, get the tech team ready. They don’t take time to enter those buyers. They keep their primary contact in the database because they need that person to open the opportunity, but all these other people are showing up and influencing deals.

Clients would give us all their contacts for an opportunity. Let’s say they gave us 100 contacts. Then we read all the emails and found nine people in the buying group. When we cross-referenced that, only two of the 100 were actually in the buying group.

Brian Carroll: What’s getting in the way of people doing this?

Scott Gillum: It wasn’t until we started reading the actual emails between the sales reps and the buying groups that we could see this.

It’s about having access to see where the hidden buyers are. Now we can fix that. We have a lot of different ways to fix that, and they’re sitting there.

Brian Carroll: You called this an emotional gap. What does this gap look like inside of a purchase? With complex sales, buyers still require technical evaluation, procurement, financial approval, and a business case. That all seems rational. Tell me more about this emotional gap.

Scott Gillum: We have a tendency to make purchase decisions emotionally and rationalize them later. That’s been true in B2C for a long period of time, and I was involved in research about ten years ago that showed that’s the case in B2B buying as well.

The reason is the risk equation.

You buy the wrong iPhone version, you’re going to be upset with yourself, but you’re not going to fire yourself. You make a bad decision on a million-dollar SaaS implementation, and there’s high risk involved.

We forget that risk. We also forget this is a person in a role, with a persona in that role, sitting inside a buying group, inside a corporate culture, inside an industry. All those things add pressure to the decision maker.

We know this is true because we sit inside organizations and see how we operate every day when trying to make decisions. But we never consider that equation when selling something.

It all exists. It influences people. People make decisions very selfishly, too. Depending on your personality type, you have different motivations for your behaviors. In the past, we didn’t have the tools to pick up those signals. Now we do.

Brian Carroll: We think our job is to help the buyer have confidence in us, when what we really need to do is help them have confidence in themselves.

Scott Gillum: Yes. It’s the pressure. It’s the risk involved. How do we help an individual or a team of individuals? Typically, what we found is that three or four people drive deals through organizations.

How do you give that small group confidence and trust? How do you convey trust?

When we looked at purchase drivers, buyers identified things like product, reliability, and product utilization. But all of those factors are realized after the decision. So something else is being conveyed before the decision.

That something else is: I feel confident in this provider. I feel like I can trust them. I feel like this person is credible. I feel like this company is credible. I like their reputation.

That’s what drives purchase decisions. It’s not just the feature functionality of the product, because that’s realized after the decision. Most buyers don’t trust your ROI. They don’t trust your case studies. It’s very rare that any vendor can repeat the same results in that company.

There is something else going on. We know that to be true, and I want people to be conscious of it.

Brian Carroll: Why do you think we have that gap around understanding the emotional side of complex sales?

Scott Gillum: It’s difficult to manage. How do you teach a rep to manage someone’s emotional decision-making? It’s hard.

That’s one reason I try to make this easy to understand through personality types.

At the industry level, there’s the two-thirds rule. People flock together in industries and roles. They have similarities. How you choose a degree in university is often driven by your personality type. That degree takes you into a role where you find similar personalities. That role puts you in a company or industry where certain personalities flock together.

One example is the airline industry. Half the people working in the airline industry are in operations. This is an industry where planes can’t drop out of the sky. It has to be data-driven, analytical, and detail-oriented.

There is a personality type that matches that: the Conscientious personality type in DISC. As a result, you find that 65% of people in those roles skew toward Conscientious.

Depending on the company and how much efficiency matters to the business model, you will find more Conscientious types. There’s a certain logic to it.

That’s often the feedback I get when people read the book: it’s perfectly logical. Why aren’t we doing anything about this?

At the industry level, company level, and group level, I’m trying to make it easier to incorporate this into everyday activities.

Brian Carroll: You just talked about the two-thirds rule. What does that change in practice, and how did you come up with it?

Scott Gillum: That took seven years to figure out across the fifteen industries.

When we started doing this, we started at the persona level. A client came to us and said product marketing had handed the go-to-market team 17 personas. How do we action that? It was impossible. What it really was, was 17 different selling scenarios.

We said, let’s look at your audience and profile them.

We took an AI personality profiling tool that was built for recruiting and used it to understand the personality types of buyers. We started seeing similarities at the role level.

The first thing we looked at was data scientists. Two personality types made up 90% of that role. If you know that, you can customize language for those buyers.

Most of the research showed that one personality type will be at least 50% of the audience. That’s true at the role level, account level, and industry level. So you can aim personalized content at half of your audience, and I mean deep personalization.

You can take the insights around DISC and train AI content generators to write in the language of those buyers. We have built custom GPTs to do this.

You can take one email and make it truly personalized by putting it in the language of those buyers.

In the book, I give an example where I take an old IBM Selectric ad, adapt it for today, and then change it by personality type. You can see how the language changes based on buyer preferences.

We now have the ability to do highly customized outreach.

Brian Carroll: What difference can it make? Why should people invest in this? What have you found when you’ve run campaigns or outreach using this?

Scott Gillum: It impacts every level: response level, engagement level, conversations.

There are examples in the book of companies that used this to set up weekly conversations and to build personas in ways that helped with client retention.

Role-based personas give you the professional view of a person in a role: title, responsibilities, and the typical things. But if you add the personal side, you get something more useful.

One example is CISOs, chief information security officers, in cybersecurity. These people are highly technical, but we forget they’re also highly emotional. The amount of risk they manage is enormous. I don’t know how they sleep at night.

We told a company selling cybersecurity solutions that they were not addressing the raw emotions of this buyer and the pressure they face every day inside the organization.

If you combine the business language with the personal language, you have an opportunity to separate yourself from the crowd. You can change your language and messaging to be more empathetic, build credibility, and build trust because you understand their situation.

It makes a huge difference.

Brian Carroll: Some people think empathy is not something we need to focus on. They see it as a soft skill that doesn’t necessarily have a place in business. What do you say to that?

Scott Gillum: I say BS.

When we were reading emails, we were watching seller behavior. I saw two dominant personalities, two Northeast dominant sellers, selling to a Midwest Conscientious buyer, and it was not going well.

I also watched a female seller from the South selling into a West Coast company. Her tone and empathy stood out. One of the buyers she was dealing with had been out for surgery, and she opened by talking about the recovery and hoping she was doing well.

This is a small sample size, but there was much greater success and a shorter sales cycle with the person who showed empathy and understood the buyer’s situation inside the organization.

The other sellers were just driving the deal. They were nonstop driving. You could see the buyer on the other end starting to tune out. The communication started to gap. They weren’t responding.

Watching that play out in real life, you could see that this buyer didn’t really want to engage with that kind of seller.

Brian Carroll: From the perspective of a leader listening right now, what should they have their team do differently on their next five accounts?

Scott Gillum: First, go get an AI personality profiling tool. They’re not expensive. They’re effective for BDRs and SDRs, the people who initially have contact with customers. They’re also helpful when closing the deal.

Start by assessing yourself. That’s the most important thing. Then assess the people you’re going to talk to. Some tools show your attributes versus the attributes of the people you’re talking with, so you can adjust your style.

One of the chapters is called “The Sales Chameleon.” We give an example of Ben, someone we found in the research. He is something different in each company, but he knows where his value is.

Understanding your value and being able to adapt to the buyer, the situation, and the organization makes a world of difference.

That’s the future of a salesperson: someone who understands how to convey value, but do it in different ways.

Brian Carroll: How do we get people to start acting this way? People are nodding and saying, “This sounds great, but I need to make my number.” What do you suggest they do?

Scott Gillum: There are no other technologies that are going to fix us from a scale-volume perspective. They’re beyond the top of the yield curve. They’re declining. You’re starting to see consolidation in the tools.

This is no longer about throwing a wide net and seeing what you can drag back. This is about how I do better with what I have. This is about conversion now.

Every deal is precious.

Your buyers do a lot of research on a solution. How much research are you doing on your buyer?

Opportunities are going to be smaller, precious, and fewer. How do I convert them at a higher rate? You do that by understanding the person on the other side of the deal as a person, not as a title or role.

Titles and roles don’t make decisions. People do.

You have to understand that person, their situation, their role, and their organization. You have tools to do that, but you also have to put in the time and do your homework.

Either you use the tools to enable you to become a better seller, or you use the tool to replace you. That’s where the investment is going. There is far more investment going into sales technology than sales training.

Brian Carroll: Right now, AI gives us the ability to scale outreach. But unless we really understand our buyer, all we’re doing is hurting ourselves.

Scott Gillum: We chose scale because we weren’t good at conversion.

We train on tools. We don’t train on buyers. Those days are over.

Most of your market is not in-market. If you are lucky enough to capture someone who is in-market, you better do a really good job with them. You better get to a close.

It’s time to invest in people learning how to be better with people.

Brian Carroll: What can we do right now so that we’re using AI in a way that moves us toward the customer? You’ve already talked about using tools that help us analyze personality. How else?

Scott Gillum: This is what I call a hack. It’s so simple, and we should be doing it.

You can understand corporate culture and decision-making without ever talking to anyone. Before you even approach them, you can understand how they make decisions and how fast they make decisions by understanding the corporate culture.

Take the senior management team. Culture rolls down from the top. Profile that senior management team, and you will learn their priorities and how they make decisions.

One company we profiled was a construction company, a top 50 Fortune 500 company. Twenty-one out of 22 executives we profiled on their website had the same personality type. They had different backgrounds and experiences, but the same personality.

You knew immediately this was a dominant organization. It was a driven organization.

Once you understand that, you can align your messaging. Dominant personalities want to see use cases and case studies that are as similar as possible to their organization. They want to see the outcome. They want to see return on effort.

That is how you approach them with your messaging and value proposition. It is sitting right there. All we need to do is harvest it.

Brian Carroll: What are the nuances?

Scott Gillum: Education is fascinating. You can go into LinkedIn, go into the company section, look at people, and then look at the education of the people who work in those companies. You can see the top degrees.

If a company has a certain personality, say Conscientious, you’re going to find engineering degrees and science backgrounds. It makes sense. If you’re dealing with a company that has a lot of scientists, like R&D, you’re going to have a distinct personality type.

What we learned is that the more advanced degrees you have, the more likely you are who you are as a person. If you’re happy in your role and your job, there’s a reason for it. Your background and personality have led you down that path.

If you’re fortunate enough to match that, you’re probably happy. If you’re not happy in your current position or job, there’s probably a mismatch between who you are as a person and either the organization or the role you’re in.

Brian Carroll: Scott, this has been a fascinating conversation. I’ve learned so much talking with you, and I know our listeners have as well.

This has been Scott Gillum, founder and CEO of Carbon Design and author of The Hidden Buyer Journey.

Our systems can tell us what the buyer did, but they don’t often explain what the buyer feared, what they trusted, or what they needed from the people selling to them.

Scott, people can find you on LinkedIn. We’ll put the link to your book, The Hidden Buyer Journey, in the show notes.

Thanks so much for sharing your insights with us. I really appreciate you being here today.

Scott Gillum: Thank you, Brian. I really appreciate it.

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