What B2B buyers look at before they talk to you

Most B2B buyers do their research alone, and they want to see the product while they do it. So your site's screenshots do a salesperson's job before any salesperson is involved. Here is what the surveys and usability studies say, how much weight each one can bear, and what to do about it.

Buyers research alone

Five surveys agree on the direction. Read each with its year and its method, because they ask different questions of different people.

Survey	Finding	Sample	Evidence
Gartner, June 2025	61% of B2B buyers prefer an overall rep-free buying experience. 73% actively avoid suppliers who send irrelevant outreach.	632 B2B buyers, August to September 2024	Analyst survey
Gartner, March 2026	67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience. 45% used AI during a recent purchase.	646 B2B buyers, August to September 2025	Analyst survey
6sense, October 2024	Buyers are "nearly 70%" through their purchasing process before engaging sellers, and make first contact more than 80% of the time. 81% already have a preferred vendor at first contact.	Not stated in the release	Vendor survey
6sense, November 2025	The split between independent research and seller engagement moved from 70/30 to 60/40. 94% of buying groups ranked preferred vendors before first contact.	More than 4,000 buyers in North America, EMEA and APAC	Vendor survey
G2, June 2024	Asked when contact from sales is most useful, the most common answer was the research stage (34%). Only 3% never want to talk with sales.	More than 1,900 B2B software buyers	Vendor survey

Don't read the two Gartner numbers as a trend from 61% to 67%. They come from different samples, a year apart, and the question is worded differently ("an overall rep-free buying experience" in one, "a rep-free experience" in the other). Each is a snapshot.

The G2 result is a useful counterweight. Buyers still want to talk to sales, just later and on their terms. Until then, the site has to answer their questions.

They want to see the product

Baymard Institute's SaaS benchmark found that 35% of SaaS sales sites fail to highlight the service's UI enough. In its usability testing, images mattered most of the media it looked at, and GIFs did as well as images and sometimes better. Video was used by only a handful of participants, and interactive demos by few. Baymard doesn't publish a sample size for these findings, so treat them as strong direction rather than a measured rate.

Nielsen Norman Group's guidance for B2B sites says the same thing in three parts: show the product in action, offer as much information as you can without requiring contact with sales, and show the price. Its older study of 179 B2B sites with 79 participants found users succeeded at 58% of tasks, against 66% on mainstream sites, and called a complete lack of pricing the most user-hostile element. That study is from 2006, so the number is dated. The advice has held up.

People look at images that carry information and skip decorative ones. In NN/g's eyetracking of one Amazon category page, 18% of viewing time went to the product photos and 82% to the text. That was product photos, not software, and no sample size is given. The point that carries over: a real screenshot is information, and a stock illustration is decoration.

A screenshot is a claim

In Gartner's 2025 survey, 69% of B2B buyers reported inconsistencies between information on the sales organization's website and what its sellers told them. The release doesn't say what the inconsistencies were. A screenshot of a screen that has since changed is one obvious source: the site shows one product, and the demo shows another.

Apple makes the same point a rule for its store. Its review guidelines say screenshots, along with the rest of an app's metadata, should accurately reflect the app's core experience, and that screenshots should show the app in use (guidelines 2.3 and 2.3.3).

Looks affect trust

In a 2002 Consumer WebWatch study, 2,684 people judged the credibility of real websites and explained why. The site's "design look" was the most mentioned factor, in 46.1% of the comments. Two cautions: that is a share of comments, not of people, and it is 24 years old. It says appearance shapes trust. It doesn't say anything about screenshots in particular.

What we don't know

No study we found measures how much a stale screenshot costs in conversions or support tickets. We don't estimate it.
No survey we found separates screenshots from demos, reviews and trials, so nobody knows what share of buyers rely on screenshots specifically.

What to do

Show the real UI near the top of the page. Not an illustration of it. That is the 35% Baymard flagged.
Lead with images and GIFs. They are what buyers use. Keep video and demos as extras.
Show the screens buyers ask about. Pricing, settings and the parts a sales call would cover, so the site answers before a seller has to.
Keep every screenshot matching the product. A picture of last year's app is the kind of inconsistency buyers already report.

The last one is where Screenery fits. Pheidi's homepage used to show a PNG exported in May 2026 and a calendar drawn by hand in HTML and CSS. Both drifted from the app. Now its tests capture 15 screens on every merge, and the homepage and 13 doc pages show them by name at @latest. How Pheidi replaced its mockups.

Sources

Every page below was opened on 13 November 2026, and each number on this page was checked against it.