5. A dissatisfied buyer is not the same as a ready buyer.

For Marketing & Sales

Not all buying journeys complete.

And the reason a buyer started evaluating tells you more about whether they will finish than almost any other signal.

A buyer who knows something is wrong is not the same as a buyer who knows what they need.

The first is in pain. The second is in market.

Treating them the same way, with the same pitch and the same urgency, produces predictably poor results. Journeys triggered by dissatisfaction fail at twice the rate of those triggered by an identified capability gap.

The same logic extends to signals. A job change signal early in a buying journey is a genuine trigger worth acting on. The same signal, late in a journey where your team is already three conversations deep, can contradict and confuse what is already happening. Acting on signals without context does not just underperform. It damages relationships.

Globally, 91% of buying groups have their shortlist ordered before they engage a seller.

Buyers are deliberate and self-directed long before you know they exist. Premature outreach is not just inefficient. It is increasingly unwelcome.

Our GTM 2027 recommendations

Qualify the trigger before you qualify the account. Understanding what started the evaluation tells you more about likelihood to complete than almost any other data point.
When a prospect is triggered by dissatisfaction, slow down. Help them define what good looks like before positioning your solution. Clarity on the capability gap is what converts a dissatisfied buyer into a purchasing one.
Build governance around your signal-to-action logic. Before any outreach, ask: does this conflict with anything else already running on this account?
For sales teams: treat the first conversation as a confirmation, not a discovery. Your job is to make the buyer confident they are making the right choice, not to introduce information they have not asked for.
Adjust for the experience level of the buying group. Less experienced groups need more help defining what good looks like. That is a different engagement from selling to a team that has done this before.