The buyer decided before you picked up the phone
Sam Senior, CEO of TestBox, a $12M-funded B2B SaaS testing platform, dropped a timeline that should worry every CRO: buyers are making 70-80% of their purchase decision before the first call. And it is accelerating.
The mechanism: LLMs. Buyers are asking ChatGPT and Claude to research vendors, compare features, and build shortlists. By the time they reach out, they have already filtered you in or out.
"The first call is no longer a discovery call," Senior said on the GTMnow Podcast. "It is a validation call. They have already done the discovery with an AI."
What this means for your team
That day-one shortlist has shrunk from 3-4 vendors to 1-2. If you are not on it, you have already lost. Senior's advice: audit what LLMs are saying about you right now. Ask Claude or ChatGPT what your buyers are researching. See how your product shows up in those answers.
He calls it CEO (the AI version of SEO): optimising for how language models represent your product in buyer research.
The mid-funnel is also changing. It is getting longer, not shorter. Buyers come in with high expectations because they have already tested your use case in ChatGPT and got 70-80% of the result in 30 seconds. Bridging that gap to 100% and proving real value takes more time and trust than before.
Agent-to-agent procurement in 3-5 years
Senior laid out a clear progression: LLM research today, AI-assisted trial evaluation in 12-18 months, agent-to-agent demos in 24-36 months, and full AI-led procurement (including negotiation) within 3-5 years.
TestBox is building for this. The platform lets buyers test and compare software side-by-side using AI-generated data and use cases. It hosts environments for HubSpot, MailChimp, and Zendesk. The company runs 15 AI experiments per week across the entire team and ties token usage to performance reviews.
For sales teams, the takeaway is clear: the window to influence buyers is moving earlier. Way earlier. If your GTM strategy assumes buyers need you for discovery, you are already behind.