B Evidence Grade B Graded accuracy verified by the review judge Safe to Cite Dated

57%

57% -- buying process completion before sales contact for B2B buyers (2011)

Name: Buying Process Completion Before Sales Contact Statistics
Creator: Lighthouse Intelligence
Published: 2026-09-30

2011 · CEB (now Gartner)

On average, the typical B2B buying process is 57% complete before the average customer is ready to talk to a salesperson.

Widely misinterpreted idea; actual figure varies significantly depending on whether the customer is involved in a familiar or unfamiliar purchase

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Attribution: CEB (now Gartner) View source

Lighthouse Research Team

Last verified: 2026-09-30 · How we verify data →

Source verified Evidence graded

Value

57%

Unit

Percentage

Data Vintage

2011

Entity

B2B buyers

Evidence Quality

Strong, reliable evidence

Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.

61/100 confidence

Single source - not yet corroborated

Score breakdown

Extraction

Source Trust

Citation Chain

Independence

Methodology

Freshness

Source

CEB (now Gartner) Primary Tier B

https://anderschristianhjort.com/2020/01/17/a-fresh-perspective-on-the-challenger-sale-research/ ↗

Confidence: 53/100 Vintage: 2011 Channel: Common Crawl

Source Article

A fresh perspective on the Challenger Sale research

Original Research

CEB (now Gartner) · Original study ↗

Methodology

CEB (Challenger Sale) original research, as cited by Bob Apollo

Methodology documented

Segmentation

IndustryB2B RoleAll marketers

Cite this stat

Plain Text

B2B buyers: 57% buying process completion before sales contact. Source: CEB (now Gartner) (2011). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/b2b-buying-process-57-complete-before-salesperson

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<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/b2b-buying-process-57-complete-before-salesperson" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>57%</strong> -- buying process completion before sales contact for B2B buyers<br><small>Source: CEB (now Gartner) (2011) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/b2b-buying-process-57-complete-before-salesperson" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>

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