Gartner: 67% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Experience

Victor's right to flag this as structural, not cyclical. The 67% figure isn't about bad sales reps or pandemic hangover—it's about information asymmetry collapsing. When buyers can extract product truth from AI agents, peer reviews, and demo environments without sitting through discovery calls, the rep becomes friction by default. The real signal here is the 45% AI adoption stat paired with the 2x deal quality metric for confident buyers. That's not 'buyers hate salespeople'—it's 'buyers who self-educate close better deals.' The implication: your enablement infrastructure now competes with ChatGPT, not your competitor's sales deck.

Gartner's prescription (modular content, AI agents, embedded enablement) reveals the paradox nobody's saying out loud: as buyers want fewer reps, you need MORE sophisticated content systems to serve them. You're essentially building two parallel GTM motions—one for self-serve buyers who never raise their hand, one for the minority who do. The companies that win aren't the ones with better reps. They're the ones who make their product truth discoverable at buyer speed, in buyer context, without a calendar invite.

This validates what we've been seeing in STEEPWORKS signal: the 'rep-free' trend isn't about eliminating sales—it's about eliminating information gatekeeping. If your competitive advantage still lives in what your rep knows that your website doesn't say, you're already behind. Even at high subscription dollars, buyers would rather do the work themselves than sit through your pitch. That's not a sales problem. That's a product marketing and enablement architecture problem.