How Do You Compete in a Deal That Was Decided Before Evaluation?

Before initiating contact, 94 percent of B2B buyers have already ranked their shortlist in order of preference—and the vendor ranked first wins about 80 percent of the time (source: 6Sense).

Your buyers are using AI tools to build requirements, vet vendors, and form strong opinions. By the time they talk to sales, they’re not exploring options—they’re looking for confirmation.

But traditional discovery doesn’t account for that.

Open-ended questions and pain-mapping work when buyers are still researching vendors. But when buyers arrive pre-convinced, the popular approach to discovery feels like a hurdle, rather than help.

So how can your sellers compete when deals get decided before the first call?

In this session with Tim Riesterer, Chief Strategy and Research Officer at Corporate Visions, you’ll learn what discovery looks like when buyers believe they already have the answer. You’ll examine why buyer confidence so often outpaces buyer judgment, and how sellers can challenge flawed assumptions without triggering defensiveness or losing credibility in the process.

You’ll leave with practical, evidence-backed ways to:

• Recognize when you’re in a pre-convinced deal and what changes in how you run the conversation
• Find the gap in what buyers think they already know and use it to reopen the conversation
• Shift from question-asking to assumption-testing when buyers present their requirements
• Identify the winning discovery behaviors that separate sellers who break through from those who get screened out