When Adience, a specialist B2B market research consultancy, surveyed 350 B2B buyers for its report The B2B Buyer Backlash: How Vendors Can Break Through in 2026, the goal was to understand what buyers valued most heading into the new year.
The findings were published in late 2025, based on fieldwork carried out that July. The report itself offers a single snapshot rather than a tracked trend, but the gaps it identifies between what buyers want and what vendors deliver remain worth examining in detail.
Vendors are still selling what they think matters, not what buyers say matters
The report’s most useful data point for executive leadership is not a frustration statistic. It is a misunderstanding statistic. Asked what vendors most often get wrong about their company or their needs, 35% of buyers pointed to a failure to grasp their actual priorities, whether that meant speed over price, or service over speed. Another 30% said vendors misunderstood their industry-specific pain points, and 28% cited a failure to understand their technical requirements or constraints.
These are not soft complaints about tone or likeability. They describe vendors pitching into a vacuum, building a case for a solution that does not map to the buyer’s real constraints. Decision makers in insurance, manufacturing and automotive were the most likely to say vendors missed their industry-specific pain points entirely. For leadership teams setting commercial strategy for the year ahead, that finding should sit above almost every other metric in the report, because it points to a structural problem in how sales organisations are briefed and trained, not a tactical one that a better script can fix.
Chris Wells, Managing Director at Adience, put it plainly in the report: “Buyers are telling vendors, ‘Don’t tell us what you sell, show us that you understand how our business works.'”
The skills buyers say they will reward next
The report also asked buyers which vendor capabilities would matter most over the following one to two years, a window that now sits squarely in front of any leadership team planning commercial investment for 2027. Staying current with market trends and innovation topped the list at 34%. Close behind, at 33% each, buyers named the ability to interpret and use data to inform decisions, the ability to understand and apply AI tools appropriately, and simply demonstrating deep category knowledge.
That clustering matters more than any single figure. It tells leadership teams that buyers are not asking for one dominant skill. They are asking for a portfolio: market fluency, data fluency, and technological competence, held together by genuine subject-matter depth. Vendors who have invested heavily in one of these at the expense of the others, for instance a sales team that leans hard on AI-generated personalisation without the category expertise to back it up, are likely to be seen as partially capable rather than credible.
Why AI competence has become a filter, not a feature
One of the more forward-looking findings in the report concerns how buyer expectations of AI vary depending on whether the buyer raises the topic themselves. Buyers who explicitly asked vendors about their use of AI placed a markedly higher premium on AI competence, at 40%, and on data fluency, at 45%, than buyers who never raised the subject. Those who did not ask about AI leaned instead toward valuing deep category knowledge, at 36%.
Ant Newman, Director of Content at Spectro Cloud, offered a useful frame for this in the report where he mentioned that AI is genuinely helping sales and marketing teams target outreach and distil large volumes of information, but once a conversation begins, the vendors who win are still the ones building trust and human connection, leading with value rather than features, and offering buyers a genuinely new perspective rather than a repackaged one.
The report’s own data supports that distinction directly: a quarter of buyers surveyed named the misuse of AI, such as a robotic tone, obvious autofill, or factual errors, among their top frustrations with vendors, and buyers in the US and in healthcare and life sciences were the most likely to raise it. A vendor who can show fluency with a buyer’s data and market context is making a different case than one who simply demonstrates that they own the same AI tools as everyone else, and the frustration data suggests buyers notice the difference.
What this means for leadership setting 2027 commercial priorities
For business leaders reviewing go-to-market strategy, the report’s findings suggest a specific set of investments rather than a general call to “listen better.” Sales enablement functions should be measured on whether their teams can articulate a buyer’s industry-specific pain points before the first meeting, not after it. Training budgets earmarked for AI adoption should be paired with equivalent investment in category and market literacy, since the research suggests buyers reward the combination, not either skill in isolation.
The report’s underlying argument, that buying complexity is rising and buyers are narrowing their attention to vendors who reduce friction rather than add to it, is drawn from the full 350-buyer sample rather than any single sector or region within it. Leadership teams that treat this as a minor data point risk missing what it actually describes: a broad, cross-sector account of how trust gets built in B2B markets.
