Yes, with conditions. In prospecting research by RAIN Group, a sales training firm, 82% of buyers say they agree to meet sellers who contact them first.
At the same time, most buyers would rather buy without a sales rep. Gartner found that 61% of 632 B2B buyers surveyed in August and September 2024 prefer an overall rep-free buying experience.
In the next survey, run a year later with 646 buyers, 67% said they prefer a rep-free experience.
The two answers fit together once you see the filter in between. In that 2024 Gartner survey, 73% of buyers said they actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. RAIN reports that 82% look up the provider on LinkedIn before they reply.
Put side by side, the surveys suggest buyers answer outreach that is relevant, arrives while they are looking and comes from someone who survives a quick check.
What B2B buyers say about outreach, source by source
For this table I kept only figures from buyer surveys with a named source I could open and read myself. Each row shows who was asked and when, as far as the source discloses it. All pages were checked in September 2026.
| What buyers said | Figure | Who was asked | Survey window | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agree to meet sellers who contact them first | 82% of buyers | Buyers (see note) | Not stated | RAIN Group |
| Want to hear from sellers when looking for new ideas to get better results | 71% of buyers | Buyers (see note) | Not stated | RAIN Group |
| Want to hear from sellers when actively looking for a solution | 62% of buyers | Buyers (see note) | Not stated | RAIN Group |
| Look up the provider on LinkedIn before replying to outreach | 82% of buyers | Buyers (see note) | Not stated | RAIN Group |
| Share of the meetings they take with sellers that gave them no value | 58% of meetings | Buyers (see note) | Not stated | RAIN Group |
| Prefer an overall rep-free buying experience | 61% of buyers | 632 B2B buyers | Aug to Sep 2024 | Gartner, June 2025 |
| Actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach | 73% of buyers | 632 B2B buyers | Aug to Sep 2024 | Gartner, June 2025 |
| Saw inconsistencies between the seller's website and what sellers told them | 69% of buyers | 632 B2B buyers | Aug to Sep 2024 | Gartner, June 2025 |
| Prefer a rep-free experience | 67% of buyers | 646 B2B buyers | Aug to Sep 2025 | Gartner, March 2026 |
A note on the RAIN rows. Its statistics page, last updated in July 2025, gives no survey year.
It links these figures to RAIN's sales prospecting research, a report described as based on 488 buyers from 25 industries, representing $4.2 billion of purchasing, plus 489 sellers.
The same RAIN page puts the effort behind one buyer meeting at 8 touches on average. That number describes seller effort, so it stays out of a table of buyer answers.
How much weight each number can carry
Gartner is the strongest source here. It describes itself as a business and technology insights company, and both releases state the sample size and the months the survey ran.
RAIN Group is a sales training firm that runs its own research unit, the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research. Read its numbers as coming from a company that sells prospecting training.
RAIN's sample is disclosed on a linked page. The survey year is not, so treat those rows as directional.
You will see RAIN's 82% repeated on other statistics pages. Cirrus Insight, for example, credits it to RAIN Group, so it is the same study quoted again. Count it once.
I also left out a set of buyer-attitude figures from a vendor roundup that ranks for this question. That page credits its data to the vendor's own proprietary research and gives no sample size or survey date for those figures, so there is no way to judge them.
The same caution applies to me. Smirnov Consulting Group is a Prague-based B2B outbound lead generation agency that runs cold email and LinkedIn campaigns for founder-led B2B companies and books qualified sales calls.
I have a stake in buyers answering outreach, which is why every row above names its source and says what that source leaves out.
Are buyers turning away from sales reps?
Gartner has now published two readings on the rep-free question.
| Survey ran | Prefer rep-free | Buyers surveyed | Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug to Sep 2024 | 61% | 632 | June 25, 2025 |
| Aug to Sep 2025 | 67% | 646 | March 9, 2026 |
Two cautions before you call that a trend. The wording moved slightly, from "an overall rep-free buying experience" to "a rep-free experience". And the 2026 release does not compare itself to the 2025 one; that comparison is mine. Treat it as two readings pointing the same way.
The 2025 release also shows where sellers still matter. Buyers preferred self-service for general information and learning. For tasks that need context, like judging whether an offer suits their business, they preferred input from a seller.
The same release counts buying activities, the tasks a buyer completes across the stages of a purchase. The average buyer in that survey preferred to do 2.3 of them with supplier reps, 1.8 through digital self-service tools and 3.0 both ways.
So buyers still want sellers, mainly for the fit questions.
Why buyers say yes, yet most cold emails get no reply
A survey answer and a sender's reply rate measure different things, and reading one as a test of the other gives the wrong answer.
The survey asks a buyer once, about their behavior in general. A reply rate is counted per email sent, across everyone on a list, over one stretch of sending.
For scale on the sender side, Instantly, a sales engagement platform, reported a 3.43% average reply rate across billions of cold email interactions in thousands of its users' workspaces in 2025. That rate is all replies, follow-ups included, divided by every email sent, which puts it at the high end of published reply benchmarks.
Both numbers can be true together. A buyer who accepts the occasional meeting from a seller can honestly say yes to a question like RAIN's, even if they ignored most of the other emails that reached them that year.
Timing explains part of the gap. The 71% and 62% rows describe two moments: exploring new ideas and actively shopping. A cold email reaches everyone on a list, whichever of those moments they are in, or neither.
The other part is the filter. Irrelevant outreach gets avoided, and 8 in 10 buyers check the sender on LinkedIn before they write back. A cold email meets a buyer who is willing in principle and still screening.
What moves a buyer from willing to replying
This is the part the surveys only hint at, and it is the part I see every week in outbound. I wrote about it in the post on why an identical cold email can earn 2% or 7.5% replies depending on the sender: "They are auditing you. Reading comes later, if at all."
Nobody signs because an email was good. They sign after they have checked who sent it, and when that check fails, what comes back is silence.
RAIN's 82% LinkedIn lookup is the survey version of that check. Gartner's 69% suggests the check does not stop at the profile: buyers notice when the website and the seller tell different stories.
Read together, the figures in the tables point to five things to settle before you send anything:
- Relevance. With 73% avoiding suppliers who send irrelevant outreach, the fix starts with who is on the list, down to which job title gets the email. I went through that in how I pull apart a lead list before anyone writes a word.
- A sender who survives the lookup. If 82% check LinkedIn first, the profile is part of the message.
- One story everywhere. The email, the profile and the website should say the same thing, or you hand buyers the kind of mismatch 69% of them already report.
- Enough touches. RAIN's average of 8 touches per meeting means one email is rarely a fair test. Here is the follow-up sequence my team runs.
- A meeting worth taking. By buyers' own count, 58% of the meetings they have with sellers bring them nothing of value. The reason to meet has to be specific to them.
Short answers on buyers and cold outreach
Is cold outreach dead for B2B buyers? No. In RAIN Group's research, 82% of buyers say they agree to meet sellers who contact them first. But 73% of buyers in Gartner's 2024 survey actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach, so outreach without a clear reason is what many buyers screen out.
Do executives read cold emails? None of the figures in the tables is broken down by job title or seniority, so they cannot answer that directly. The closest figure is RAIN's: 82% of buyers say they look up the provider on LinkedIn before replying to outreach, so the reply depends on the sender's profile as well as the email.
Is the rep-free preference growing? Gartner reported 61% for a survey run in August and September 2024 and 67% for the same months in 2025. The wording changed slightly and Gartner did not present the two as a trend, so read it as a direction, with the size of the shift still uncertain.
What makes a B2B buyer actually respond? Relevance, timing and a sender who holds up to a check. In Gartner's 2024 survey, 73% avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach. In RAIN's research, 71% want to hear from sellers while exploring ideas, 62% while actively looking for a solution, and 82% look the sender up on LinkedIn before replying.