A note on methodology: we asked buyers whether they have an AI mandate, then separately asked about their most recent software purchase. The purchase they described may or may not have been the AI-mandated one - but the behavioral gap is striking regardless. Mandate buyers switched vendors at 2x the rate and chose the lowest price at 5x the rate. Whether the mandate is the direct cause or a signal of a broader buying pattern, the implication is the same - if your buyer has an AI mandate, expect a more price-sensitive, less loyal deal.

For marketing, this is the brand awareness play: buyers can't shortlist a name they've never heard. For sales, it's the long game - the relationships and nurture you invest in today are sowing the pipeline of later quarters. By the time the trigger hits, the shortlist is already written.

By the time a buyer books a discovery call, the evaluation is already well underway. Over half have specifically researched how you compare to competitors. Your website, your G2 page, your content - that's not "awareness" anymore. It's the first round of the evaluation, and it's happening without you in the room.

Mid-market committees are smaller (39% have 2-3 people). Enterprise committees are larger (16% have 11-15 people). But in both cases, your champion needs to sell internally after every call with you.

In 63% of all deals, the winner did both -identified risks AND helped with alignment. Winners behave like advisors, not presenters.

Enterprise has one clear winner: trials at 46%. Mid-Market is more distributed - no single proof type dominates, so you need a mix of demos, case studies, and third-party validation.

Nobody's bombing the first meeting - but almost nobody's nailing it either. "Fine" is the norm, which means showing up genuinely prepared is a rare enough experience to be a competitive advantage on its own. They don't need you to know their hobbies. They need you to know their business.

Nearly 4 out of 5 technical buyers are heavily influenced by peer references and case studies. For business buyers, that drops to 3 out of 5. If you're selling to engineering or IT, lead with proof from people who've done it before.

Buyers who chose the lowest price option trust both vendor ROI and peer references more than those who paid more - they use outside validation to justify their decision. Give them both the calculator and the case study.

The top two reasons - missed requirements and a better alternative - are both perception problems, not product problems. "Missed requirements" often means the buyer needed something and you didn't surface that you could do it. "Better alternative" means someone else told a more compelling story about the same job to be done. The vendors who get cut aren't necessarily worse. They just let the buyer define the requirements alone - and then failed to reshape them.

Buyers don't say sales experience decided it — when asked to rank, they put it 4th of 5. But the winner almost always had it. Treat sales experience as a necessary condition for being chosen, not the lever that pulls the decision. In mid-market especially, a weak sales process is enough to disqualify you; a strong one keeps you in the running long enough for product and trust to do the actual deciding.

Discounting is optimized for the 27% who chose cheapest -and even they didn't rank price as their top factor. The other 73% paid more because they trusted the seller to help them succeed.

Product wins. That's not surprising. What's surprising is where price lands - dead last. 40% of buyers put it in 5th place. The gap between trust (#2) and implementation effort (#3) is razor-thin, suggesting buyers weigh "can I trust this vendor to deliver" and "how hard is this going to be" almost equally. For sellers, this is the permission slip to stop leading with discounts and start leading with proof you can get them live. For marketing, this is the case for trust-building content over pricing pages.

27% stayed to manage organizational risk -competing priorities, internal backlash, personal credibility. Your champion isn't weighing your product vs. theirs. They're weighing "hero" vs. "target."

54% provide main reasons but omit sensitive details. 11% give a general reason that wasn't the primary driver. When buyers say "price," they may mean "your champion lost internal credibility." When they say "features," they may mean "we didn't trust your implementation plan."

Mid-market buyers are slightly less honest (69% withhold) than enterprise (62%). Your loss review data is systematically biased toward comfortable explanations.