The Wolf Pack Power Brief ·
The Vendor Shortlist gets made when nobody is selling
B2B buyers rank vendors before the first sales call, and 71% change their minds between cycles. How to get on the list, and what to point GTM engineers at.
- By Paulo Veloso
- 6 min read
The Vendor Shortlist gets made when nobody is selling
Ninety-six percent.
That's the share of B2B buyers who keep tabs on vendors between buying cycles. It comes from a preview 6sense shared last week from its 2026 Buyer Experience research: 4,600+ buyers across North America, EMEA and APAC. The full report lands November 3.
The number next to it is the one I keep thinking about. 71% say their opinion of which vendors are worth considering changes during that time.
So buyers are making up their minds while nobody is selling to them. By the time someone calls, the list is mostly set.
Past edition I promised to get into what the SDR seat is for now. This is a big part of that answer.
Key takeaways
B2B buyers rank their shortlist before talking to sales, and the vendor ranked first usually wins.
More cold outbound volume is getting fewer replies, not more pipeline.
GTM engineers are the hire of the year. Point them at getting on the list, not at sending more.
How do B2B buyers build a shortlist before talking to sales?
Quick recap of 6sense's 2025 study, published last November:
Buyers make first contact about two-thirds of the way through, after roughly eight months of research.
94% ranked their shortlist before talking to any seller.
The vendor ranked first before any seller conversation wins more than 80% of the time.
Buyers start that first conversation more than 80% of the time.
Put those together and it's simple. If you're not on the list before the call, the call rarely saves you.
Why isn't more outbound volume fixing it?
Most teams I talk to answered this with volume. More contacts, more sequences, an AI SDR on top.
Sales.co, which sends cold email for its clients, rebuilt its reply-rate data this month from 1.28 million contacts. The human reply rate was 1.15% from April to December 2025 and 0.67% from January to late September 2026. Interested replies went from 0.31% to 0.22%. That's about 455 contacts for every interested reply, up from 323.
A fair warning on that data: it's one vendor's own campaigns, and the latest month was still filling in. Instantly reports a 3.43% average for 2025, but it counts replies per email sent rather than per contact, so the two can't be compared. What I trust is the direction.
Even Salesforce's numbers make the point. Its AI SDR, Piper, went generally available at Dreamforce, and Salesforce says it converts at 6% and books 60+ meetings a week internally. But Piper works inbound. It talks to buyers who already came to the website. The agent that works is the one talking to people who have already put you on the list.
Why is everyone hiring GTM engineers?
GTM engineer postings grew 205% from 2024 to 2025, with more than 3,000 roles open this March, according to the State of GTM Engineering Report 2026 (3,342 job posts, 228 GTM engineers surveyed). Growth Unhinged and Sumble found GTM engineering headcount doubled at US digital-native companies while SDR postings fell 21%.
I like this bet. A good GTM engineer does things I used to need a whole team for.
But a GTM engineer pointed at volume just automates showing up late. Point them at the list:
Find the accounts where opinion is moving, not only the ones that fit the ICP.
Put customer stories and real use cases in front of buyers between cycles.
Get a real buying signal to a human the same day.
The other side, argued fairly
The strongest case against me: outbound still builds pipeline at plenty of companies, especially in new categories where buyers don't know their problem has a solution yet. If nobody is searching, there's no list to be on, and someone has to start the conversation. Also, the 6sense data is self-reported. A buyer may remember starting the conversation when a rep's email planted the name months earlier.
Both points are fair. In a new category I'd still run outbound. But I'd run it to get on the list for next time, not as a meeting machine. Teach something. Leave a name they'll remember when the cycle starts.
What would change my mind: November 3 data showing sellers starting more first conversations, or outbound-sourced vendors getting ranked first more often. I'll read it and tell you.
The Wolf Pack Power GTM framework: 5 questions for getting on the list
When I was leading sales, I committed to talking to at least 100 customers a year myself, and I cascaded the same commitment to my regional VPs and directors. We called it the 100-Customer Journey. I didn't think of it as pipeline at the time. Looking back, it's how we stayed on lists we didn't know existed yet.
Five questions I'd ask any team this quarter:
How did your last 10 wins first hear about you? Ask the customers, not the CRM. The source field is usually wrong.
Who on your leadership team talked to five customers this month? If the answer is nobody, start there.
What does a buyer find about you when they're not buying? Use cases and customer stories, not feature pages.
What is your GTM engineer building? Write down the outcome it's supposed to move. If the answer is "more sends," change it.
Do you track "came in already knowing us"? Put it next to meetings booked in your pipeline review.
What does this mean for your 2027 plan?
CROs: split pipeline targets into "started by us" and "started by the buyer," and give each its own conversion assumptions. They don't close the same way.
Founders: before you buy another outbound tool, fund one GTM engineer against one outcome: more first calls where the buyer already knows you.
The SDR seat: this is where it's heading. Less cold dialing, more working signals alongside a GTM engineer, and fast human follow-up the moment a buyer moves.
Next edition
The 6sense 2026 Buyer Experience report comes out November 3. I'll break down what changed from last year, and whether I was right.
Subscribe so it reaches you. Tell me in the comments how your last big win first heard about you. And if you want a second set of eyes on your 2027 pipeline plan, that's the work I do at The Wolf Pack Power. My DMs are open.
Let's go build something that sells.
📬 FOUND THIS USEFUL?
Subscribe to The Wolf Pack Power Brief— weekly intelligence for executives who refuse to be caught off guard. No jargon. No vendor pitches. No wasted minutes.
Hit the 🔔 Subcribe on this page to get each issue delivered directly to your e-mail feed.
Join the WAITLIST to our community [HERE]
Listen to our latest PODCAST episode [HERE]
Share this with a founder, board member, or executive who needs to see it. You might save them an incredibly expensive mistake.
Sources: 6sense, Buyer Experience Report 2025 (November 12, 2025) and 2026 preview (October 8, 2026, 4,600+ buyers); Sales.co, Cold Email Reply Rates (rebuilt October 6, 2026, 1,279,153 contacts); Instantly, Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026 (January 12, 2026); Salesforce, Dreamforce 2026 recap (September 28, 2026) and Piper customer story (July 2026); State of GTM Engineering Report 2026 via GTME Pulse (March 2026); Growth Unhinged with Sumble, "Who's actually hiring in GTM right now" (May 20, 2026).
Also published on LinkedIn .