The modern B2B buyer has gone quiet.
They're asking AI about your product, reading reviews on G2, watching your competitors' demos, and forming opinions long before your sales team ever enters the picture. By the time they request a meeting, they're already halfway to a decision.
This isn't a trend. It's the new baseline.
In a recent ExitFive webinar, Dave Gerardt ran a session on exactly this shift, and what demand gen looks like when buyers are already in motion before you even know they exist.
The room was fired up. Because this isn't theoretical.
Leads have been down across the board in 2026. Buyers are harder to reach. And the old playbook…gate your content, capture a lead, hand it to sales…is losing to a buyer who refuses to play along.
Here's what's actually happening: buyers research independently. They ask AI to summarize your product. They check what peers are saying. They watch your demo without you in the room. And by the time they request a conversation, they've already made up most of their mind.
Gartner research consistently shows that B2B buyers complete up to 80% of the decision-making process before they ever speak to a sales rep. In 2026, with AI doing the heavy lifting on research, that number is only going higher.
The question isn't whether this is happening. It's whether you're showing up in the right places when it does, and whether your product can sell itself when you're not in the room.
Three patterns emerged from the session that every GTM team should understand right now.
1. They want to explore on their own terms.
Ungating content is not a feel-good move, but a strategic one. When buyers can't access your thinking without filling out a form, they go somewhere else. Your competitors. Reddit. An AI that's been trained on everything you've published.
Ungating removes friction from the early stages of the buying journey. It lets buyers build familiarity and trust before they ever raise their hand. And it creates the kind of content experience that gets shared, not just consumed once and forgotten.
Think about it from the buyer's perspective. They're trying to build internal consensus. They need to send colleagues something worth reading. A gated whitepaper doesn't get forwarded. A sharp, ungated article does. A self-guided product tour does. An interactive demo that answers questions without a sales pitch does.
The barrier to sharing is always friction. Remove the friction, and your content does the distribution for you.
2. They want to find you in AI answers.
The share of voice in AI-generated answers is quickly becoming more important than last-touch attribution.
When a buyer asks Claude or ChatGPT about your category, what does the answer say about you? Are you named at all? Are you described accurately? Does the AI position you the way you'd position yourself?
This is the new SEO. Namely, AEO. Being cited by LLMs requires the same fundamentals as traditional search: authoritative content, clear positioning, and strong signals of expertise. But the end goal is different. You're not optimizing for a click. You're optimizing to be the answer.
And it's not just about being mentioned. It's about being described accurately. If an AI tells a buyer you're "an enterprise tool" when you serve mid-market, or "a video platform" when you're a full buying experience platform, you've lost the deal before it started. Content strategy now has to account for how AI interprets and summarizes what you do, not just how humans find it.
3. They want content worth spending time on.
During the Exit5 webinar, Mason Crosby from Scrappy ABM shared a metric that reframes how most teams think about content performance: hours watched.
His team targets seven hours of content consumed per account. Not leads generated. Not form fills. Hours watched.
That number is striking and intentional. Seven hours isn't a vanity metric. It's a proxy for genuine buyer education. An account that has consumed seven hours of your content has built a point of view. They've developed internal champions. They've done the internal selling for you.
That shift in thinking changes everything downstream. It means investing in content depth, not just content volume. It means building a video series, not one-off webinars. It means creating product experiences buyers want to return to, not just content they scan once and forget. And it means measuring what actually predicts pipeline, not what's easy to count.
Here's what didn't change: buyers still want to see your product.
They just don't want to wait three to five days for a sales call to do it.
When a buyer is ready to explore, they want to do it now. On their schedule. Without a guided tour from someone who may not even know what problem they're trying to solve yet.
That's why the demo has to work harder than it used to.
A static PDF or a gated video isn't enough. Buyers expect interactive product experiences they can navigate on their own. Experiences that answer their questions, speak to their use case, and give them the confidence to move forward.
And when they do engage, every click, every chapter watched, every feature explored is a signal? Who's involved in the decision? What do they actually care about? How serious are they?
The best part: When a buyer has already self-qualified through a great product experience, your sales team doesn't have to start from zero. They enter the conversation knowing what the buyer cares about, who else is involved, and where the deal stands. The demo doesn't just create interest. It creates intelligence.
The teams winning deals in this environment aren't chasing leads. They're building buying experiences that do the qualifying for them.
The antisocial buyer isn't a problem to solve. It's a reality to build for.
That means five concrete shifts.
The funnel used to start when a buyer raised their hand.
Now it starts when they open a new tab.
The teams that adapt — who show up in the research phase, who make their product easy to explore, who turn buyer engagement into deal intelligence — are the ones who will win.
Everyone else is waiting for a phone call that's never coming.
This post is based on insights from the Exit Five live session: "The Antisocial Buyer: Demand Gen Plays for 2026," featuring Dave Gerard, Judy Kimball, Hunter (TechMetrix), and Mason Crosby (Scrappy ABM).