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Founder @ RevXsell | Fractional CRO | GTM Ambassador @ GTM Partners
You’ve heard of the six go-to-market motions, but there’s a new kid on the block…buyer-led growth.
On this episode of Closing Time, we welcome Sean Piket. Sean is passionate about buyer-first, customer-centric B2B selling, and he coined buyer-led growth to help sellers recognize the way today’s buyer wants to buy.
This isn’t a new motion but rather a driver that influences all six current motions—removing friction, teaching your sellers to be facilitators of the buying process, and redeploying your SDRs are all on the table.
The traditional sales-driven approach is increasingly misaligned with what buyers actually want. With the majority of buyers preferring a self-guided, rep-free experience, it’s clear that a shift toward a more buyer-first, customer-centric strategy is not just beneficial—it’s essential for meeting modern expectations and shortening sales cycles.
As a fractional CRO, Sean has purchased his fair share (over 100!) of SaaS products. He introduced the concept of “buyer-led growth” after experiencing significant frustration with the B2B purchasing process. Sean noticed a glaring issue: very few of his buying experiences were positive. This frustration, he explains, is due to the friction present in the current B2B buying process, where sellers often fail to meet buyers where they are in their journey.
Buyer-led growth, as Sean defines it, is about empowering buyers to take charge of their own discovery, evaluation, and purchasing processes. Instead of adding a new GTM motion, Sean suggests that this approach should influence and refresh existing ones—like inbound, outbound, or partner-led strategies—by putting the buyer’s needs and journey at the center.
He references the 2024 Gartner B2B Buying Report, which highlights that 75% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free sales experience. This statistic underscores the growing disconnect between what buyers want and how sales processes are traditionally structured. Additionally, another study from 6sense shows that B2B buyers avoid engaging with sellers until they are 70% through their buying process, further emphasizing the need for sellers to adapt.
In B2B sales, the SDR/BDR role is pivotal for generating and nurturing leads, serving as the first point of contact between potential buyers and the company. Traditionally focused on outbound prospecting, these roles are evolving to encompass a broader range of responsibilities, including managing inbound leads and leveraging AI-driven insights to create a more personalized and efficient buyer experience.
While some may argue that these roles are becoming obsolete, Sean strongly disagrees. Instead of eliminating them, he advocates for adapting these roles to align better with modern buyer expectations.
Sean also sees the SDR/BDR role as a stepping stone for new employees entering the sales and revenue functions, particularly in B2B SaaS and tech services. However, he believes that the focus on outbound prospecting, which traditionally defines these roles, needs to be broadened. SDRs can do much more than outbound—they can also handle inbound leads, influence partner or channel motions, and leverage executive relationships to build pipelines and facilitate communication.
Sean suggests that SDRs should be trained to utilize AI technologies, such as intent-based and signal-based data, to better meet buyers where they are in their journey. This could involve crafting tailored messaging and processes that cater to buyers at different stages—whether they’re just starting their research, deep into evaluating a few vendors, or ready to make a purchase with a few remaining questions.
By reimagining the SDR role in this way, Sean believes that these professionals can create a more buyer-friendly, customer-centric experience. They can orchestrate the buyer’s journey, ensuring that prospects are met with the right information and support at the right time, ultimately leading to a more efficient and satisfying buying process.
AI is poised to significantly impact both buyer-enablement and sales-enablement in B2B sales.
On the sales side, Sean sees AI as a tool to arm and train sales teams, ensuring they can provide a frictionless and personalized experience for buyers. AI can swiftly compile relevant information about prospects, buyer personas, and industry challenges, allowing sales professionals to tailor their approach and better meet the needs of each customer.
On the buyer enablement side, Sean is developing an AI product called Smooth, which features an AI-powered digital human advisor. This advisor, trained entirely on company data, will greet inbound visitors, answer their questions, and guide them through the discovery, evaluation, and purchasing stages. In more complex cases, it will seamlessly transition the buyer to a human representative or a digital sales room.
Sean envisions AI not only as a tool to meet buyers where they are but also as a resource that can lead them through their journey, making the entire process smoother and more efficient.
Coining a new term is like pioneering a movement. So, who are the pioneers of the GTM buyer-led movement? Sean shares a few key players and companies.
He referenced GTM Partners, which originally promoted a “category-led” growth lever, emphasizing the creation of a movement around transformative ideas. Though the category-led motion is no longer in use, Sean believes its core principle—building thought leadership through industry experts, influencers, and happy customers—remains vital to gaining traction for buyer-led growth.
On the sales enablement side, he pointed to Gal Aga, CEO and co-founder of Aligned, who advocates for sellers to become “buying facilitation specialists.” Jake Dunlap, CEO and founder of Skaled, has also made significant contributions with his book The Innovative Seller, which Sean considers a blueprint for creating a frictionless, buyer-focused sales methodology. Additionally, Nate Nasralla, co-founder of Fluint, champions the idea of “selling with your buyers, not to them,” which he explores in his digital book Selling With.
On the buyer enablement side, Sean mentioned emerging companies like Dimmo, which allows buyers to watch SaaS demos without engaging in sales cycles, and Vendr, which offers SaaS software negotiation as a service, helping buyers bypass traditional sales processes. He also praised B2B SaaS companies that provide self-serve, interactive demos directly on their websites, eliminating the need for gated access.
Sean emphasized the importance of educating the market about buyer-led growth through content and healthy debate, fostering a broader understanding and adoption of this approach. He believes that by meeting buyers where they are and guiding them through a seamless, enjoyable buying experience, companies can achieve key metrics such as lower customer acquisition costs, shortened sales cycles, improved retention, and increased customer lifetime value.
New! Keyboard shortcuts … Drive keyboard shortcuts have been updated to give you first-letters navigation There’s a new go to market motion on the scene. Let’s learn about buyer led growth and what it means for you. In this episode of Closing Time, the thanks for tuning in to Closing Time the show for Go to Market Leaders. I’m Val Riley, head of marketing at Insightly and Unbounce. Today, I’m joined by Sean Piket. He is founder of RevXsell and a fractional CRO. Thanks for joining us, Sean. Hi, Val. Great to be here. Awesome. Sean, let’s talk a little bit about your career because you were in the fractional business before it was even called the fractional business.. That’s right. That’s right, Val. Yeah. So I have 27 years of experience in the B2B tech industry. Yeah. Primarily in the IT services and then spanning the B2B SaaS companies and started off as young Sean as a sales rep and evolved up to sales leadership and then ultimately launched my own company called Sales Integrity in 2004. And that’s what you’re referring to as the fractional before fractional was cool, as I like to say, business. Back then in 2004, in the early 2000s, we called it outsourced VP of sales or interim VP of sales. And really I focused on the same target market that I kind of grew up in my career in, which was sub $10 million annual revenue companies. You know, I kind of specialized in helping them, you know, whether sales, sales leadership roles to scale them to 10 million, 20 million, 50 million, and then somewhere along the way to 100 million, their successful mergers, acquisitions and funding milestones there. And so I fell in love with that building process early on in my career, and that’s why I launched Sales Integrity. And then, yeah, we were fractional VP sales for those same types of B2B tech companies. I worked specifically with 107 of those companies over the 14 year time period between 2004 and 2018 that I ran Sales Integrity and helped collectively generate over half a billion in net new sales across all of those 107 companies. So during that time you said you did a ton of SaaS purchasing and it was really general dissatisfaction with the buying process that has led you to coin this term buyer led growth. So you’re saying this is a new addition to the go to market motions that we’re all familiar with, product led, community led, outbound led, etc.? So tell us, what is buyer led growth? Yeah. So, yeah, you bet. You bring up a good point. In the last 22 years, specifically as a pure sales and revenue leader, whether fractional or full time roles. I counted it up before I launched. RevXsell in April here a few months ago and I purchased over 100 B2B software and SaaS products as a buyer. So I have a unique perspective, you know, between the two sides of the coin of being a seller and being a buyer. And that gave me an interesting perspective from the buyer’s vantage point. Right. And I can count, unfortunately on one hand how many positive experiences, buying experiences, I’ve had and that hurts my sales heart because I’m a sales professional at heart. And so, yeah, that’s a real problem. I call that friction in the B2B buying process that leads to buyer frustration, and that’s the problem I want to solve. And so I want to solve that through what I’m calling buyer led growth. I really had a time before launching. RevXsell, I took a little sabbatical. You know, before launching it and kind of thought through this problem that I wanted to solve. And When I think of buyer led growth, you know, the way I define it is enabling buyers to lead themselves through the discovery evaluation and purchase of B2B SaaS products, specifically in this example but it could be any B2B products. And when you look at go to market motions, you mentioned seven of them. I’m a GTM ambassador for GTM Partners, big believer in their GTM. Made Simple philosophy and they’ve actually taken the seven GTM motions and I think they narrowed it down to six now, you know, they’ll tell you and everyone will tell you that are GTM ambassadors, they’ll say the last thing we need is another GTM motion to throw into the mix. So I don’t really see it as a GTM motion more, more so as it influences all of the current GTM motions, like each one of those, whether inbound, outbound, partner led, on down the line, event led, should have a buyer first customer centric focus to it. And so there’s ways to to weave that into each of those motions. And just kind of take a different look at each one of those motions and update and refresh those in this new buyer led era, as I like to call it, or buyer led growth era. Right. So I think some of the data points that you brought up are super interesting where people just want for a long part of the journey, they want a rep free experience and when they are ready to talk to a rep, they want a very specific experience at that point. That’s right. So what you’re referring to is the Gartner B2B Buying Report that I mentioned when we were prepping for the podcast, and I like to use this one quite a bit because, you know, Gartner’s a reputable research agency. They do the same report year in and year out, and this percentage continues to go up, unfortunately. But what they found in their latest 2024. B2B buying report, as you mentioned, is 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience. And so that’s three out of four buyers don’t want to talk to humans at all. And I know there’s a lot of talk out there that, you know, hey, humans prefer to talk to humans. And, you know, it’s it’s people first and all that, and there is elements of that and I agree with that.. You know, it’s built on relationships. So there’s that’s a whole different discussion. But the stats don’t lie. I mean, they’re asking buyers directly that are B2B buyers about their experience. And they say, hey, it’s so bad now, you know, three out of four of us prefer a rep free sales experience. In addition to that, another study that’s out there from 6sense is that B2B buyers refrain from engaging sellers directly until they’re approximately 70% through their buying process. And notice they said buying process and not our selling process. And that’s really the problem is the mismatch in expectations between what sellers expect and what buyers expect. So, for instance, if I’m evaluating, which I have been since. I’ve launched RevXsell, I’ve been evaluating software and services to purchase to help me grow my business. And you know, there’s countless examples where, Hey,. I’ve already bought this type of software. I mean, I’d purchased over 100 of them, as I mentioned over the last 22 years. I just have three or four qualification questions. Just to clarify, and then I’m ready to purchase. But when I emerge from the darkness of my research to the light of a website to submit an inquiry. All these sales teams, most of them,. I don’t want to say all of them, most of them received that information and say, Hey, we have a universal sales process, one size fits all, we’re not going to meet buyers where they’re at in their journey. We’re just going to start them at step one, phase one of our qualification process and qualify them first. And so I’ve jumped on with an SDR of multiple companies. They’ve qualified me. I didn’t even get a chance to answer my questions in 30 minutes. They’re just peppering me with questions. They hand me off to an AE that I get to meet with maybe a week later, three or four days later if I’m lucky. They ask me all the same questions. It was obvious they didn’t talk to the SDR and then they can’t answer the questions in some cases so they hand me off to a solution consultant or sales engineer. And now I’m like two weeks into this process and that’s the person that can answer the questions and then I’m ready to buy. There’s no sense in elongating sales cycles like that. It’s buyer led growth is about meeting buyers where they’re at in their journey, right. And then taking that from there. And then you do need the humans and humans need to be trained and you know, they need to understand the process and be just facilitators of that buying process and meeting buyers where they’re at. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, we’ve been around long enough to remember the dawn of the SDR or BDR role, depending on what you call it. And it sounds like you’re proposing buyer led growth and it has some implications for that SDR. BDR role. But I don’t think you’re suggesting we eliminate it. Or is it just about changing it a little bit? Yeah, that’s a great question, Val,. And it’s a hot topic, right? You know, you see this all over LinkedIn and a lot of the posts, I’m not a big fan of the insert hot topic is dead now type of content. I know it’s a sensationalized way to get attention and eyeballs and I believe things evolve and they improve if we focus on evolving and improving them. Right? And so same thing with the SDR role. No, it’s not dead.. I think it’s here to stay. It’s a wonderful role to get new employees in the sales and revenue org, sales, marketing, revenue org as a launching point for their career into the business, especially in B2B SaaS, B2B tech services. And I think it just adapts. And how is that? Well, when you look at those go to market motions, we’re only myopically focused on outbound like the SDR role when it comes to outbound, but nobody’s really clarifying that SDRs can handle inbound, they can influence channel or partner motions as well. They can leverage relationships. So if you have executives that are really busy but have just a wealth and just depth of relationships out there, they can they can leverage that as warm up touchpoints to reach out and start facilitating and building some pipeline, facilitating communication there. So you can go on down the line for all of the motions, driving attendance to events, accepting inbound from all of those different motions. So that’s one part of it. So no, it’s not dead, you need someone to do that and they’re wonderfully positioned to do that, if architected right, the role. The other part of it is making sense of A.I.. There’s a lot of AI technology out there that filters, there’s signal based and intent based, you know, data that’s out there. So they could be an orchestrator of intent based and signal based, you know, data in leads that are coming in and reaching out to really meet these buyers, again, buyer led growth where they’re at in their journey. So they should be trained with different messaging, talk tracks in a process, a buyer friendly, customer centric process that says, when you have inbound leads here, you meet them here, and here’s the motion for that. When they’re farther down the pipeline, you know, and they’re now evaluating us and some competitors. Here’s how you meet them there. And then if they’re ready to buy and just have a few qualification questions on us. Let’s answer these questions and then guide them to purchase. Right. So really, when you look at buyers, when they enter the scene, it’s really one of three major, you know, phases that they’re in, they’re either just getting started with research, right? And they’re not even ready for demo. So don’t qualify me and enter me in a sales cycle, I’m just doing research. Or they’re deep into research and now they’ve narrowed it down to three or four vendors. You’re one of them. And so, yeah, that’s the classic sales cycle we’re accustomed to. And then there’s a healthy amount of them because buyers are more savvy and sophisticated these days. And they have access to communities to ask peers questions behind the scenes. You know, they’re researching because of the Internet and all the tools that are available. They may have three or four questions and then they’re ready to buy. Right? So I think the SDR role could be orchestrated to catch all of that inbound intent based, signal based leads and then meet them where they’re at in their journey and just be an orchestrator and then hand them off to the right people or enablement technologies. You know, should they need that to guide them through the process and create a delightful buying experience, really. I know here at Insightly we struggle with that a little bit too, like which leads do we want to bypass SDRs and send straight to AEs and which leads to we feel need the SDR touch. So I think it’s it’s something that a lot of businesses grapple with. So it’s an interesting way to look at it. You touched on AI and I want to get back to that. Can you talk about the ways where AI really is going to impact this buyer led growth? Yeah, absolutely. AI, it’s kind of this gold rush, you know, early gold rush movement or pioneer movement to get after AI and make sense of it for all sorts of different motions and market segments. Right. And so I think AI when it comes to buyer led growth, could be applicable in the sales enablement side of things and the buyer enabled side of things. So I think that’s when you look at buyer led growth, there’s a sales enablement side of that coin and there’s a buyer enablement side of that coin. And when you look at sales enablement, it’s equipping, teaching, arming, training, sales professionals and teams and organizations with really a frictionless selling process, and how to meet buyers where they’re at in their journey, and in making sure that you’re well-researched and prepared before jumping on a call, I gave you the example of my experience. That was just one of many. Right? But if SDRs and AEs and solution consultants on down the line, sales engineers are trained right? And they could do that research. They come more informed on a call to personalize it for that individual, to customize it for that company, we’re going to be better off. And AI, you know, especially generative. AI, has a way to quickly pull together discovery and research information on our prospects, on those buyer personas, on those industries and the problems that they’re facing and how we can solve it. So using AI to really quickly generate content for us to be better equipped to serve customers better is one aspect of that. I’m also building an AI product called Smooth, and the name is No Secret Behind it. I want to smooth out the friction associated with B2B buying and it’s really features an AI powered digital human that I call an advisor that will greet inbound website visitors or landing page visitors. It’ll answer their questions, is trained and grounded completely on the company data, and it’ll help guide them through the discovery, evaluation, and even purchase of the product if that’s applicable, or it’ll hand off to humans to get them into a digital sales room or to just guide them through the enterprise, more complex selling process for instance. So there’s software out there that’s being built for A.I. that’s going to meet buyers where they’re at and help guide them through that process and even be their voice in some cases. Right?. So those are just a couple of examples. Yeah. I like how you provided examples from the buyer’s side and the seller side. We hear so much about the seller side, so the buyer side is super interesting. So one last question for you. Coining a new term is a lot like starting a movement. How are you and perhaps others in the market really trying to get traction behind the term buyer led growth? That’s a great question. So I mentioned GTM Partners, right? And they had seven motions before and it’s narrowed down to six. Well, one of them, one of the previous motions they had was called category led. And just kind of reading off the growth lever for category led is create a movement around a transformative idea, create a movement around a transformative idea. The execution of that is thought leadership driven by industry experts, influencers and happy customers. So I love that one. I know they don’t have that out there anymore, but that really answers your question. There are just like there were multiple pioneers in America that were going west, right? And being early pioneers for this country. There could be multiple pioneers for the buyer led era, buyer led growth. And some of them I wanted to point out, took some notes on this. I’m going to come at it again from sales enablement and buyer enablement, right? So sales enablement side, the CEO and co-founder of Aligned, Gal Alga is his name. They have digital sales room software, but he’s a great follow on LinkedIn because he talks all about sellers, you know, the sales side of it, sellers being buying facilitation specialists like you got to be buyer facilitation process specialist. So I really enjoy his content and that’s inspiring for me. Jake Dunlap, who’s here in Austin where I’m based, Austin, Texas, CEO and founder of Skaled and they’re a Rev ops and sales performance consultancy. He basically wrote the blueprint. I’ll give him some credit. And again,. I don’t get endorsed for this. I’m just full disclosure,. I just really enjoy Jake’s point of view. But The Innovative Seller is a book that he just, just wrote. And to me this is the blueprint for sales organizations and individual sellers that want to learn how to be more buyer focused and meeting buyers where they’re at. So this is like the closest thing to frictionless selling methodology that I’ve seen out there, and it’s relevant. He just published that. And then Nate Nasralla, the co-founder of Fluint, and hopefully I didn’t butcher your name,. Nate, your last name, but he’s the co-founder of Fluint and he has Business Case Software, and he authored a book and it’s digital, so I can’t hold it up, but it’s called Selling With. And really his whole premise is selling with your buyers and not to them. So Nate, Jake and Gal come at it from the seller side and the sales enablement side, and they publish a ton of great content on LinkedIn. So that’s one part. The buyer enablement side, there’s a new startup out there called Dimmo and it’s kind of a play on the word demo and I’m just going to read their tagline,. Watch SaaS demos without jumping into sales cycles, so again, from the buyer’s side, you can jump in and see these demos. That’s one thing buyers complain about. Why do I have to jump on with a human to see a demo? Well, they they’ve removed that friction there. There’s another company called Vendr, SaaS software negotiations as a service, essentially. And their tagline is buy software, bypass sales. Right? You go to them and they’ll take on all of that negotiation for you. So you don’t have to get into that process and lead that evaluation process for you. Any self-serve demo software that’s out there, You know, again, another thing buyers complain about, why do I have to jump on to see a demo? There’s those that are experiential, that are interactive demos that I give a lot of credit to B2B SaaS companies that are putting it on their website, allowing them access without being gated. So that’s good as well. And so those are those are some examples. But all of these companies and these individuals post content on LinkedIn, I think you just first got to educate, All right? You’ve got to educate the market on what is buyer led growth and what is this buyer led era that’s upon us and how do you meet buyers where they’re at? And there’s different unique points of view. I’ve got one and they all have one as well, but they’re all related. It’s similar. So I think you go out and you you first you publish a lot of content, educate the marketplace that starts to create a healthy debate and discussion for some people who disagree with it, which is okay. And that’s good too. And then I think everyone could get an agreement with the premise of meeting buyers where they’re at in their journey, guiding them through a delightful buying experience. I think we’re all trying to do that and that can produce the results that we’re looking for in the long term, right, in terms of lower customer acquisition cost, reduced and shorten sales cycles, improved retention, and increasing the lifetime value of the customer for sure. If you’re looking at hardcore metrics for instance. Sean, Those are amazing resources. And so many of them for our viewers to check out. So thank you so much. Yeah, it was a pleasure being on the show. Thanks for having me, Val.. I really enjoyed it. Thanks. Thanks for your time. And thanks to all of you out there for tuning in to closing time. Remember, you want to like the video, subscribe to the channel, click the bell for notifications so you don’t miss an episode and we’ll see you next week.
