What a B2B startup in the traction stage needs to understand before chasing more meetings

13 October 2026 · Iñigo Matesanz

If your B2B startup is in the traction stage, this probably sounds familiar. You have your first clients, the product works and you know you could help many more companies. But new meetings trickle in, almost always through the founder's contacts, and every month you start again from zero.

Value is not what you are missing. What usually fails is our idea of how a company buys. In this article I explain what the data says about how a B2B purchase is decided today and what changes in the way you sell once you take it into account.

81%: of B2B buyers already have a preferred vendor when they first speak to one.; Source: 6sense, 2024 (opens in a new tab)
~70%: of the buying process is done by the time the buyer contacts a vendor.; Source: 6sense, 2024 (opens in a new tab)
95%: of B2B buyers are not looking for a supplier at any given time.; Source: Ehrenberg-Bass, 2021 (opens in a new tab)
95%: of "hidden" decision-makers are more open to outreach when a company publishes strong expert content.; Source: Edelman and LinkedIn, 2025 (opens in a new tab)

How a B2B purchase is decided today

The numbers above tell a very specific story. Buyers do their own research, talk to their colleagues and, by the time they write to a vendor, the decision is well under way. According to Gartner, 61% of B2B buyers prefer to buy without a sales rep involved, and 5 to 16 people from up to four functions take part in the decision.

Put another way, much of the sale happens when you are not there. In internal conversations you are not invited to, in searches you don't see and in the profile someone looks at before replying to you.

Three ideas that change how you see it

When I work with a startup at this stage, we almost always start from the same belief. If I manage to talk to the right person at the right time, the sale will follow. The data paints a different picture. This table shows the three ideas that change the approach the most.

The idea	What usually happens	What changes once you see it
The person who decides knows you before they talk to you	You wait for the client to be ready to buy and arrive when they already have a favourite.	You start the relationship months earlier, when there is nothing to sell yet.
A group of people decides	You win over one person and the proposal gets stuck inside.	You make sure several people at each company know you.
Trust is personal	The company speaks through its logo and the founder is nowhere to be seen.	The founder becomes the face of the company on LinkedIn.

None of the three is new. What is hard is working in line with them when day-to-day pressure pushes you to write to lots of people and see what happens.

Why LinkedIn fits this stage

LinkedIn brings together more than 1 billion professionals, including the people who decide at your ideal clients. In the traction stage it has an advantage few channels have, because it lets you work on all three ideas at once.

You can start relationships long before a purchase is under way.
You can get to know several people at the same company and understand what each of them cares about.
Your profile and your posts speak for you to people who do not know you yet. In the 2025 Edelman and LinkedIn study, 71% of "hidden" decision-makers had little or no contact with salespeople, but they read what companies publish.

What changes in your startup

The first thing that changes is the question. It stops being "how many people can I write to this month?" and becomes "how many people at the companies I care about already know who I am?". It is a slower question to answer, but a far more useful one.

The second is time. Opportunities that start this way take longer to appear and arrive better prepared, because the other person already trusts you when you sit down to talk.

Over time, this is how a B2B startup in the traction stage opens more and better opportunities and stops depending on luck.