Buyers Want Trusted Advisors. Most Salespeople Are Still Taking Orders.
AI Summary
B2B buyers increasingly prefer to buy without a salesperson, and the sellers they still let in are the ones they trust to guide a decision. Objective Management Group assessment data shows that the competencies behind that trust are rare: only 11% of salespeople are strong in Consultative Selling, 38% are proficient in Active Listening, and 16% hold supportive beliefs about selling. By contrast, 56% are strong in Relationship Building and 88% handle rejection well, which means most sales teams are full of salespeople buyers like but do not rely on. The difference between a trusted advisor and an order taker shows up in a small set of measurable Tactical and Sales DNA competencies. This article examines which ones separate the two, and what the gap costs organizations that cannot see it.
Buyers are routing around salespeople
Most sales leaders have watched it happen. A prospect downloads the pricing sheet, reads three comparison reviews, asks an AI tool to shortlist vendors, and agrees to a call only after the decision is mostly made. By then, the salesperson’s job is to confirm a price and process the paperwork.
That pattern is accelerating. In a Gartner survey conducted in late 2024, 61% of B2B buyers said they preferred a rep-free buying experience.1 When Gartner surveyed buyers again in late 2025, the figure had climbed to 67%.2
Buyers still want help from salespeople. LinkedIn’s 2020 State of Sales research found that 88% of buyers only purchase from salespeople they consider trusted advisors.3 They have simply become more selective about whose help they accept. The sellers who make it through bring something a website and an AI summary cannot: help making a difficult decision.
How many of today’s salespeople would a buyer call a trusted advisor, and how many would they call an order taker? Objective Management Group‘s assessment data offers an uncomfortable answer.
Likable and trusted are two different things
Order takers are rarely unpleasant. Many are the best-liked people on the team. They return calls quickly, remember the details of a customer’s family, and keep accounts friendly, right up until a competitor with a sharper read on the business takes the account.
OMG data reflects this. Among 9,516 salespeople evaluated in 2025, 56% were strong in Relationship Building4. Rapport is one of the most common strengths in sales.
The competency that turns rapport into influence is far rarer. Only 11% of salespeople are strong in Consultative Selling, and 37% are weak.4
Consultative Selling measures whether a salesperson can uncover the business issues and compelling reasons that cause a prospect to buy. That means asking questions that challenge assumptions, listening for what sits beneath the first answer, and helping the buyer see the cost of leaving a problem unsolved. Buyers say this is the work they want from a seller. Most sellers cannot do it consistently.
A team built on relationships without diagnosis keeps customers comfortable. Comfort rarely survives a competitor who reframes the problem better.
Trusted advisor vs. order taker: where the gap opens
When OMG’s competency data is lined up from most common to least common, a clear drop-off appears between the skills that make a salesperson pleasant to deal with and the skills that make them worth listening to.
Competency | % of salespeople strong or proficient |
Relationship Building | 56% |
Active Listening | 38% |
Supportive Beliefs | 16% |
Consultative Selling | 11% |
Source: Objective Management Group assessment data. Relationship Building reflects 2025 evaluations; Active Listening reflects current salespeople; Supportive Beliefs reflects 2023 to 2025 evaluations; Consultative Selling reflects 2022 to 2025 evaluations.
Active Listening is a useful example. The average score has held between 77% and 78% for six years, which looks healthy. Yet only 38% of current salespeople are proficient.4 LinkedIn’s research found buyers rank active listening as the trait they value most in a salesperson, while only 26% of sales professionals considered it relevant to closing deals.3
Selling Value follows the same pattern. In manufacturing, where buyers now weigh purchases against downtime, throughput, and total cost of ownership, only 35% of salespeople were strong in Selling Value in 20254, and the average score has barely moved since 2022.
When weak listening, shallow discovery, and an inability to quantify value show up together, the salesperson is left with a single lever to pull: price. That is how an order taker is made.
Why capable salespeople default to taking orders
If Consultative Selling were only a matter of technique, years of methodology training would have closed the gap. The more stubborn obstacle sits underneath the skill, in what OMG calls Sales DNA: the beliefs and tendencies that determine whether a salesperson actually uses what they know when a conversation gets uncomfortable.
Supportive beliefs
Only 16% of salespeople hold supportive beliefs about selling. The rest carry assumptions like “asking about budget will feel pushy” or “the prospect will tell me when they’re ready.” Each one quietly hands control of the process to the buyer.
Need for approval
Salespeople who need to be liked avoid the questions that might create tension: challenging an assumption, asking who else is involved, probing why a deal stalled. In expertise-driven sales, OMG has found that the urge to be seen as helpful routinely overrides commercial discipline, producing scope creep and discounting. The encouraging news is that Need for Approval improved 17% after targeted training, and improving it removes one of the biggest blockers to consultative questioning.
Comfort discussing money
Advisors raise budget early because they see it as part of helping the buyer make a good decision. The revenue difference is measurable: salespeople in the highest tier of Comfort Discussing Money showed roughly $90K higher median revenue than those in the bottom quartile.5
Supportive buy cycle
Only 19% of salespeople have a supportive buy cycle. The rest project their own slow, research-heavy buying habits onto prospects and accept “let me think about it” as a reasonable next step.
Stays in the moment
Advisors stay present when a buyer pushes back, listening to what was said instead of rehearsing their next point. 38% of current salespeople are proficient in staying in the moment during a sale.
Sales leaders who look only at activity and pipeline will see the symptoms of these gaps, such as stalled deals, late-stage price objections, and thin discovery notes, without ever seeing the cause.
Handling rejection is rarely the constraint
Many sales development programs still invest heavily in resilience and motivation. OMG data suggests those investments target strengths most teams already have. 88% of salespeople handle rejection well, and 86% demonstrate strong Desire.
Most order takers want to succeed and can absorb a no. What holds them back happens earlier, in conversations they never steer toward a real decision. Training that concentrates on competencies the team already has leaves the rarer Sales DNA gaps undiagnosed and untouched.
Trusted advisors ask for decisions
Order takers wait to be told what the buyer wants. Advisors guide the buyer toward a decision, and that guidance carries weight on both sides of the table.
Gartner found that 80% of sellers using a “sense-making” approach, helping buyers work through conflicting information instead of adding more of it, closed high-quality, low-regret deals.6 Its more recent research adds that confident buyers are twice as likely to report a high-quality deal as buyers with low decision confidence.2
OMG’s data points to the role of the sales manager. Managers who are effective at coaching salespeople to get a prospect’s commitment to a decision have 40% more top performers on their teams. Yet only 9% of sales managers are strong at coaching commitments, improving beliefs, and coaching with passion combined. Salespeople rarely learn to ask for decisions from managers who cannot coach it.
What high-performing organizations are doing differently
The organizations building advisor-level teams treat “consultative” as a measurable competency rather than a style description. They assess for it before hiring, because the Sales DNA underneath it, such as Need for Approval and supportive beliefs, is far harder to change than a talk track. Those weaknesses surface in an assessment months before they surface in lost deals.
They also coach the belief behind the behavior. When a salesperson skips the budget conversation, the manager asks what the salesperson expected would happen if they raised it. That answer points to the real development need, and OMG’s training data shows these competencies respond to targeted work: after training, salespeople improved 28% in Consultative Selling, 24% in Selling Value, and 55% in Closing.
Finally, they invest in managers. A team’s ability to win commitments rarely exceeds its manager’s ability to coach them.
Final Thoughts
Buyers are deciding, earlier than ever, which salespeople deserve a seat at the table. The ones who earn it diagnose problems, quantify value, and guide decisions. The ones who don’t are left to quote prices for deals that were decided without them.
OMG’s data shows that most sales teams are built from salespeople buyers like, and only a small fraction that buyers will follow. Every quarter that gap goes unmeasured, organizations give up margin to discounting, deals to indecision, and accounts to competitors who showed up with a sharper point of view. The competencies that separate advisors from order takers can be measured and developed. The cost of waiting is already showing up in the pipeline.
References
- Gartner, Inc. (2025, June 25). Gartner sales survey finds 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-sales-survey-finds-61-percent-of-b2b-buyers-prefer-a-rep-free-buying-experience
- Gartner, Inc. (2026, March 9). Gartner sales survey finds 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-03-09-gartner-sales-survey-finds-67-percent-of-b2b-buyers-prefer-a-rep-free-experience
- Demand Gen Report. (2020). New research: Sales teams turn to data, tech & buyer trust to overcome challenges of COVID-19 [Reporting findings from LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report 2020]. https://www.demandgenreport.com/industry-news/new-research-sales-teams-turn-to-data-tech-buyer-trust-to-overcome-challenges-of-covid-19/6320/
- Objective Management Group. Finding Statistics Tool. Percentage of salespeople strong on competency and average competency score for current salespeople, 1/1/2025–12/31/2025. Internal dataset.
- Objective Management Group. Salesperson Evaluations & Checkpoints conducted January 1, 2023–December 31, 2025. Initial evaluation to Checkpoint score changes in relation to revenue. Internal dataset.
- Gartner, Inc. (2019, July 29). Gartner reveals new B2B sales approach to win in today’s information age [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-07-29-gartner-reveals-new-b2b-sales-approach-to-win-in-toda