Milena Traikovich is a powerhouse in the demand generation space, known for her sharp focus on analytics and performance optimization to drive high-quality leads. As an expert who bridges the gap between marketing technology and tangible sales outcomes, she has a front-row seat to the evolving B2B landscape where digital speed often hits the wall of corporate bureaucracy. Her experience navigating complex funnels allows her to see exactly where deals lose momentum, making her a vital voice for companies trying to harmonize their tech stack with the realities of modern buyer behavior.
Our conversation delves into the friction points of the modern B2B journey, specifically focusing on how AI accelerates early-stage research while traditional sales cycles struggle to keep pace. We examine the increasing dominance of finance in the buying committee, the massive untapped potential of high-value self-service checkouts, and why the routine sales transaction is becoming an expensive and unnecessary relic of the past. By paraphrasing the shift from discovery-led bottlenecks to evaluation-led delays, we uncover a roadmap for sellers to get out of their own way and let buyers purchase on their own terms.
Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed how buyers approach the initial stages of a purchase, yet we are seeing a strange paradox where the overall journey is actually slowing down. Why is the evaluation phase becoming such a massive bottleneck even as research tools get faster?
It is a fascinating contradiction because AI is essentially moving the bottleneck rather than eliminating it. In the past two years, more than 80% of buyers have turned to AI chatbots for software recommendations, which allows them to generate a shortlist in mere seconds rather than the days or weeks it used to take through manual searching. However, while discovery is now lightning-fast, the evaluation phase has stretched out, with 40% of buyers citing it as the longest part of their journey, an increase from 36% just a year ago. This happens because while a bot can tell you which tools are popular, it can’t navigate the internal political and technical minefield that follows. Buyers are hitting a wall of 39% of delays coming from security reviews and 32% from budget approvals, creating a sensory overload where the excitement of finding a solution quickly evaporates into a haze of spreadsheets and waiting.
With the rise of the “cautious buyer,” we are seeing finance departments take a much more aggressive role in the procurement process. How is this shift in committee power affecting the way vendors need to present their value propositions?
The shift is dramatic and, frankly, quite daunting for sellers who aren’t prepared for the level of scrutiny now coming from the C-suite. Finance participation in software buying committees has surged from 31% to 46% in just a single year, which means nearly half of all deals are being audited by someone whose primary goal is risk mitigation and cost control. We are seeing a “reversal culture” where 49% of buyers report that their CFO has stepped in to kill a purchase that the original buying team had already fully approved. This has forced vendors to move their ROI calculators, security documentation, and implementation plans much earlier in the cycle. If you can’t prove a positive ROI within six months of signing—which is now the expectation for three-quarters of buyers—you are essentially dead on arrival.
There is a glaring discrepancy between how buyers want to pay and how vendors are set up to receive money, especially for routine purchases. What is stopping companies from embracing the self-service digital path that the vast majority of buyers clearly crave?
The data reveals a massive missed opportunity: 84% of buyers prefer a self-service digital path, yet only 17% of sellers have one operational. It is a classic case of legacy thinking where sellers believe that a human touch adds value to every transaction, but for routine renewals or seats, that “touch” feels more like a “tangle” to the customer. When you consider that 93% of buyers would use a digital checkout if their company policy allowed it, the resistance from vendors looks increasingly out of touch. We aren’t just talking about small $50 monthly subscriptions either; more than half of buyers are comfortable spending $25,000 or more via self-service, and nearly a fifth would go as high as $100,000. Sellers are essentially forcing buyers into a “sales-led” cage that 36% of them hate because of the wait for quotes and the 30% who get frustrated by the back-and-forth over basic terms.
If routine transactions are moving toward automation, what does that mean for the actual human beings on the sales team, and where should they be focusing their energy to remain relevant?
The role of the salesperson is becoming hyper-specialized rather than disappearing, moving away from being a glorified order-taker to becoming a strategic navigator. Buyers are very clear that they only want human intervention when the situation is genuinely complex—more than half want help with large multi-year agreements, custom pricing, or navigating procurement exceptions and security reviews. There is no reason for a human to spend six hours or more processing a routine transaction, which is what a third of vendors currently do, especially when it costs the company at least $1,000 internally to process that single deal. By automating the routine stuff, sales teams can stop being a bottleneck for the 45% of buyers who just want to finish a purchase in three days and instead focus on the high-stakes negotiations where their expertise actually justifies the friction.
When a buyer is convinced by the product but abandons the purchase because the transaction process is too difficult, who is ultimately responsible, and how does marketing play a role in fixing this “last mile” problem?
This is a structural crisis that often falls into a no-man’s-land between marketing and sales, but it is increasingly becoming a marketing problem. If demand generation has successfully convinced the buyer, yet three-quarters of purchases are delayed or abandoned due to internal vendor friction, the entire ROI of the marketing spend is vaporized at the finish line. Marketers have to look beyond just “the lead” and start auditing the transaction infrastructure to see where buyers are encountering friction after they’ve already said yes. If the company’s buying process requires a week-long wait for a quote while the buyer is ready to swipe a card for a $25,000 expansion, that is a failure of customer experience. We have to stop thinking of “conversion” as a marketing click and start thinking of it as the moment the buyer successfully completes the transaction without feeling like they had to fight the vendor to give them money.
What is your forecast for the B2B sales landscape over the next two years as these digital-first trends continue to mature?
I anticipate we will see a “great bifurcation” where the mid-market and routine enterprise transactions become almost entirely autonomous, leaving human sales teams to operate more like consulting firms. By late 2027, the companies that thrive will be those that have integrated their pricing logic directly into their AI-driven discovery tools, allowing a buyer to go from “I have a problem” to “I have a receipt” in under an hour. We will likely see the CFO’s influence peak, leading to a standard where software is “sold” through automated business case builders that justify the purchase in real-time. Those 17% of sellers who currently offer self-service will likely triple in number, and those who remain stuck in the “call for a quote” era will find themselves excluded from the 80% of shortlists that are now being generated by bots that prioritize transparent, accessible vendors.
