What a decade in B2B software sales taught me about earning attention, giving buyers more control and understanding interest before someone is ready for Sales.

AI has made it easier than ever to create more B2B noise. It has not made buyers more interested in receiving it.

That is one of several observations that eventually led me to build Qualvey.

Learning to earn attention

I started my B2B software career as a BDR at BlackLine. I knew I wanted to get into sales, but I had to earn my stripes first.

After a few weeks of cold calls and emails, I was hooked. To me, prospecting felt like a game. There were all these accounting and finance leaders who I genuinely believed could benefit from the product, but getting their attention was difficult.

Every cold call that lasted longer than a minute, every thoughtful reply and every meeting booked gave me enough momentum to keep going. I became pretty good at doing the research, writing a relevant email and finding ways to cut through the noise.

But one thing stood out early: buyers wanted to see the product.

Buyers wanted to see the product

On a surprising number of introductory calls, the prospect simply wanted to see the product. They did not always want another discovery call or a long conversation about their current process. They wanted a quick look.

What does it do? What does it look like? Could I actually see myself using it?

As a BDR, I loved hearing that because it usually meant I had a qualified opportunity. Looking back, it was also my first exposure to the tension between how buyers want to learn and how B2B software companies prefer to sell.

Most companies want to understand the prospect, uncover the business problem and control the product experience.

The buyer often just wants to see it.

As I moved from BDR to AE, I kept the same mentality. You could take me off the BDR team, but you could not really take the BDR out of me.

I continued prospecting heavily and looked for different ways to earn attention. At one point, I read How to Get a Meeting with Anyone by Stu Heinecke and borrowed his idea of using personalized cartoons to reach executives.

I sent accounting leaders a cartoon about a spreadsheet and Sudoku mix-up. It worked, not because it was a magical tactic, but because it was different from everything else competing for their attention.

Over time, being different became harder.

AI changed the outbound equation

When ChatGPT arrived, it suddenly became much easier to research a company, personalize a message and produce something that looked thoughtful. It also became possible to do it with a lot more velocity.

The kind of research and personalization that once gave a scrappy rep an advantage became available to almost everyone. Cold-call connect rates went down, and email replies became harder to earn. My peers felt it, and I felt it too.

But most companies responded by asking Sales to do more of the same: more calls, more emails, more touches and more sequences.

AI made personalized outreach easier to produce. It did not make genuine attention easier to earn.

At the same time, buyers were becoming more self-directed. Prospects increasingly asked for sandboxes, pilots and ways to explore the product without having someone guide every click. They wanted to spend more time seeing and feeling the solution before committing to a formal evaluation.

Those experiences can be difficult for software companies to provide. Sandboxes can be expensive to maintain, hard to configure and challenging to control. But the request itself said something important: buyers wanted more room to form an opinion before moving further into the sales process.

Software research still feels like a scavenger hunt

More recently, I spoke with several VP Controllers about what they do before raising their hand to a software company. A common answer was YouTube.

Sometimes they visited the company’s YouTube channel. Sometimes they watched an old webinar. Sometimes they found an unofficial third-party demo that someone had uploaded.

A few of those videos were not particularly polished, but that was not really the point. Buyers could watch on their own time, pause, skip around and form an opinion without feeling like every question was moving them further into a sales process.

That stuck with me because researching B2B software is still much harder than it should be. You visit several websites and everyone says some version of the same thing: faster, smarter, AI-powered and built for modern teams.

Then you search YouTube, browse review sites, ask an LLM, check Reddit or reach out to someone you trust. It can feel like a scavenger hunt just to understand what the products actually do and how they are different.

A lot of this research happens before someone is actively in market. They may be curious about a category, trying to understand what has changed or thinking about a problem that is not urgent yet. At that stage, many buyers are not ready to fill out a form and announce that they are researching.

Most software companies learn very little from that activity. They may know that someone visited the website. They may see that an account is showing intent. They know when someone fills out a form.

But they usually do not know what the buyer watched, what caught their attention, what confused them, which use cases felt relevant or what questions they still have.

Curiosity does not always mean someone is ready to buy

There is a strange dynamic in B2B where showing interest often creates an immediate sales response.

Imagine casually looking at a house on Zillow and receiving a phone call five minutes later asking when you want to tour it. You would probably find that annoying. Yet some version of that still happens every day in B2B software.

A buyer visits a page, downloads a guide or attends a webinar. Suddenly, they are placed into a sequence and contacted by multiple people.

But showing curiosity is not the same as being ready to buy.

Sometimes the buyer is trying to understand the category. Sometimes they are comparing different approaches. Sometimes they simply want to know what is possible before the problem becomes urgent.

That early curiosity still matters. The challenge is learning from it without turning every interaction into an immediate sales event.

The hypothesis behind Qualvey

All of this led me to a question: What would it look like to give buyers a lower-pressure way to explore relevant software before they are actively in market or ready to speak with Sales?

And could that experience help software companies understand what is resonating with the right buyers earlier in their journey?

That is the hypothesis behind Qualvey: give buyers more room to explore software on their own terms, help Marketing understand what is creating genuine curiosity and which product experiences are resonating, and give Sales better context when the timing is actually right.

I am building Qualvey around this idea and continuing to shape it through conversations with software buyers, marketers and sales leaders.

AI will continue to make outreach easier to produce and harder to stand out with. The bigger opportunity may be creating a better experience before another email, cold call or demo request is necessary.

If you have experienced this from either side of the software-buying journey, I would genuinely value your perspective on what feels right, wrong or missing.