B2B salespeople used to own the whole conversation. Not anymore.
“Everyone today knows what they want to buy and why they want to buy it before they even talk to a salesperson,” says Nick Turner, CEO of B2B marketing attribution platform Dreamdata. “Salespeople are in the ‘how’ business now.”
Nick has spent more than two decades in B2B SaaS, leading go-to-market and revenue operations at companies including Botify, where he helped scale revenue 8x and grow the US team from two to ninety people, and MikMak, where he oversaw the full GTM and post-sales operation following its Series A.
He joined Dreamdata as CRO in April 2024 before stepping up as CEO in May 2025. Based in Copenhagen and New York, Dreamdata is a B2B marketing attribution platform that consolidates GTM data from CRMs, marketing automation platforms, ad channels, and website tracking into a single location, giving revenue teams a complete picture of the buyer journey to help them build more pipeline and lower acquisition costs.
Speaking with ContentGrip, Nick shares why fighting buyer autonomy is a losing game, what companies keep getting wrong about friction, and how trust has become the new gatekeeper in a self-serve world.
Table of contents
- How the buyer journey has flipped
- The friction companies keep creating
- Trust as the real unlock
- Marketing’s expanded role
- What sales-led companies should do today
How the buyer journey has flipped
The shift Nick describes is not gradual drift. It’s structural. Buyers arrive at vendor conversations having already formed strong opinions, often with a clear shortlist already in place.
“You see buyers coming into a call with their mind made up, at least for the top two or three vendors they want to work with, if not with a strong opinion on the one vendor they want to work with,” he says.
Several forces have accelerated this. The volume of information available to buyers has grown substantially, not just through web content, but through global online communities where practitioners compare tools and share experiences. Interactive demos and free trials have lowered the barrier to product evaluation before any sales interaction. According to Dreamdata’s own LinkedIn Ads B2B Benchmarks Report, the average B2B buyer journey now spans 272 days, touches 88 separate interactions, and involves 10 stakeholders.
Enricko Lukman
The friction companies keep creating
Despite all of this, many B2B companies continue to design their buying experience around what’s convenient for their sales team rather than what’s natural for their buyer. Nick is direct about why this is a strategic mistake.
“Making something easier on your company than on your customer is a good place for your competitor to look for a moat,” he says.
The most common offender is the SDR qualification call. Requiring a buyer to speak with an SDR before learning anything meaningful about a product is a company making the entire process about itself. “You should be able to filter them in or out in an automated fashion these days. Not through yet another call that your buyer is not in the mood to take,” Nick says.
The ‘Request a Demo’ button is another flashpoint. If clicking it does not lead to a demo on the first call, something is broken. The fix is simple, if uncomfortable: keep asking how to make every touchpoint more aligned with what an ideal customer profile account actually needs, not what the internal team finds convenient.
Trust as the real unlock
Self-service adoption has accelerated even for data-sensitive products. Dreamdata customers now regularly connect their CRM, marketing automation platform, ad channels, and website tracking in under thirty minutes. Nick tracks every integration through a dedicated Slack channel and has watched companies complete the full data connection in as little as thirteen minutes.
That speed requires trust, and Nick breaks it down into three components. First, open APIs and data portability have made it technically feasible for buyers to connect sensitive data to a new product without a lengthy implementation project. Second, security certifications matter: SOC 2 and ISO compliance give buyers a framework-backed signal that their data will be handled responsibly. These are table stakes for any product that wants CRM access.
Third, and hardest to manufacture: brand trust. “That means consistency in who you are, who you serve, and what you provide,” Nick says. “You can make mistakes, but acknowledge them and course correct.” Without it, even the best technical integration story will stall.
Marketing’s expanded role
Nick is careful not to overstate marketing’s share of the journey, pushing back on narratives that assign it a tidy percentage. What he does believe is that attribution tools have finally made visible something that was always true.
“It may be that we are finally able to see just how much of the buying journey marketing is responsible for, with access to data we never had until recently,” he says.
What has genuinely changed is the content burden. Salespeople used to relay critical product and capability information directly in calls. That information now has to live online, available before any sales interaction happens. “Having that information behind a sales gatekeeper is no longer an option if you want your company to survive,” Nick says.
The shift matters equally for sales teams. Assuming buyers need educating from scratch is a fast way to lose the deal.
Kai Indra
What sales-led companies should do today
Nick’s most practical recommendation is also the simplest: go back and listen to your recorded sales calls.
“Listen to your recorded sales calls from today compared to a year ago and listen to the first questions your buyers ask,” he says. “You will see a difference in how educated they are, and there will be hints that someone else has already planted their world view before you had the chance to plant yours.”
That gap between what a company thinks it’s communicating and what buyers already know is the clearest signal that the journey has moved. Companies educating prospects before the sales call are building advantage. Companies that are not are starting every conversation behind.
The second structural fix is getting marketing data out of the CRM’s blind spot. The CRM has always been a sales platform, with marketing relegated to controlling one or two fields at most. That limitation forces marketers into single-touch attribution that doesn’t explain how a buyer arrived, only who was last to claim credit. By surfacing the buyer journey happening outside the CRM, teams can make better decisions about where budget should go and how to get sales in front of the right people at the right time.
On a side note, asked what keeps him grounded outside work, Nick points to his two sons, Jack (5) and Conlin (8). “They keep me humble and honest and remind me not to take myself too seriously,” he says.
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