Buyers need human salespeople as guides in complex B2B environments to escape preconceptions

29th September 2025 |   Journal Of Sales Transformation

Tim Riesterer
Tim Riesterer: humans sellers remain the decisive factor.

In today’s B2B landscape, buyers conduct significant research and vendor comparisons prior to ever contacting a salesperson. At the same time, vendors assume that buyers are likely to be confident in understanding the problems they are trying to solve, which can lead to sellers failing to conduct a robust discovery process once they do get involved.

More paradoxically, however, buyers become less confident about their decisions the more information they are presented with – that’s according to consultancy Corporate Visions.

The consultants say a phenomenon called “Escalation of Commitment” (a term originally coined by Berkeley professor Barry M Staw) comes into play, whereby individuals and organizations continue to commit resources to a failing course of action. This can lead to the wrong decisions being made by buyers as they double down on their preconceptions.

Resistance to emerging options

When buyers conduct a significant amount of self-directed research, they can get locked into their assumptions and resist changing course — even when better options emerge, Corporate Vision’s Chief Strategy Officer Tim Riesterer argues. This is particularly challenging for sales organisations for two reasons:

  • Buyer are heavily invested in their research prior to engaging with vendors – the so-called “sunk cost fallacy” – and are loath to abandon their initial conclusions.
  • Cognitive dissonance is also a factor with buyers actively dismissing information that challenges their technologyguided assumptions.

“Human sellers remain the decisive factor in winning complex deals, despite AI’s promise to automate everything from prospecting to pricing,” Riesterer tells the Journal.

In this complex deal environment, human sellers remain the decisive factor in winning complex deals despite AI’s promise to automate everything from prospecting to pricing, Riesterer suggests. Indeed, he contends that AI increases buyers’ need for skilled human sellers who can challenge their assumptions and guide such complex decisions