Buyers are drowning in software options. AI-generated recommendations are everywhere, and most B2B demand generation strategies are still built around speed and conversion rates.
As a result, Adnan Malik, CEO and Co-Founder of Software Finder, finds that up to 70% of B2B buyers end up dissatisfied with their software purchase because they chose the wrong ones to begin with.
In this episode of SaaS Half Full, Adnan joined Lindsey Groepper to discuss the growing trust crisis in B2B software decisions, making a case that runs counter to how most marketing teams operate. The pipeline you’re filling may be full of the wrong buyers, and everyone is paying the price.
The pipeline problem nobody wants to own
The B2B buyer’s journey is set up for failure.
Buyers rely on an AI overview and an LLM search to populate their short list of vendors. A rep, pressured to hit quota, closes a deal. And in six to 12 months, the buyer realizes the tool is the wrong fit. On the vendor side, the customer churns. On the buyer side, they face a costly, sometimes catastrophic mistake.
“I’ve seen companies literally going bankrupt because they chose the wrong software. That’s how big this decision is.” – Adnan Malik
And the license fee, he notes, is the cheapest part of a bad decision.
The real cost is everything that follows: implementation, change management, churn and the organizational drag of the wrong system embedded in your operations.
Who shows up at the top isn’t who fits best.
Adnan doesn’t buy the idea that AI recommendations are more objective than traditional search results. More often, they reflect marketing spend, not fit.
“I say LLMs are glorified SEO, and then sooner or later you will start to see ads there, too. So whoever can pay the most will start appearing, and then you’ll be just going to companies who have the most marketing dollars.” – Adnan Malik
Figuring out who to trust can be overwhelming. According to a PANBlast survey, two-thirds of consumers experience AI credibility fatigue, and 34% choose to instead rely on Google search rankings as a “trust shortcut.” This feeling extends to B2B purchasing decisions.
What LLMs can’t replicate, Adnan argues, is the consultative conversation that surfaces what a buyer actually needs. Buyers need a partner who can evaluate budget constraints, team size or use-case details they’d never think to type into a search bar.
How marketers stop feeding the wrong pipeline
For marketers, Adnan has a few recommendations:
- Tighten your ICP and qualify harder. A closed deal that’s the wrong fit is far more costly than a missed lead.
- Invest in independent reviews and category presence. Buyers are quick to spot vendor-driven content. Third-party validation earns far more trust in the research stage than branded demand gen.
- Plan in months, not quarters. The buyer journey and the AI landscape are both shifting fast enough that quarterly campaign cycles are already outdated by the time they launch.
When buyer trust drives everything you build, and brand and pipeline are treated as the same thing, vendors stop winning deals to hit quotas and start winning buyers before they ever hit the contact form.
Transcript
Generated by YouTube and cleaned up with ChatGPT.
VIDEO INTRO
[0:00] Adnan Malik: I’ve seen companies literally go bankrupt because they chose the wrong software. That’s how big this decision is. That’s the biggest problem that Software Finder resolves, because we are not matchmaking for the buyer’s benefit alone. We are also matchmaking for the vendor’s benefit, because now they’re targeting the right buyers from the start, and their pipeline is filled with buyers they should be selling to.
EPISODE
[0:26] Lindsey Groepper: Hi, and welcome back to SaaS Half Full, the only show serving B2B SaaS marketers. I’m Lindsey Groepper, EVP of PANBlast, and I will be both your host and bartender. Today I had a great conversation with Adnan Malik, who is the CEO and co-founder of Software Finder. His team approached us about a topic that is near and dear to our hearts, because we have been talking about it night and day for the last year: building trust and the importance of trust in B2B selling, specifically in this environment of high, high, high mistrust. If you care to grab a drink and join me as I speak with Adnan. Hi, Adnan, welcome to SaaS Half Full.
[1:10] Adnan Malik: Hi. Thank you for having me on the show.
[1:12] Lindsey Groepper: We’re excited to have you. I was glad that your team approached us about the possibility of you being a guest, and specifically the topic you wanted to talk about, because it is something that has been swirling with our agency and our clients. This idea of trust being the new currency in today’s B2B environment has really resonated. Things are all jacked up over the last couple of years with the introduction of AI, and we are getting back to the basics of what builds trust and credibility and actually wins deals today. As our listeners know, one of the things I do on this show is share a drink with my guests, but when we talked to your team, they said Adnan travels all the time, and we have no clue where he’ll be a month from now. So we did not send you a kit, which is okay. I always stay true to the process, so I will be having a beverage, and I think you were just having a lovely glass of water with me today.
[2:11] Adnan Malik: That is right. I’ll enjoy my water, and because of the travel plans it was hard to coordinate where I’d be. No worries. I’m happy to be here.
[2:21] Lindsey Groepper: Cool. Well, I’m going to crack open a Maita, which is a canned tequila and lime, and it’s noon Eastern time, so it’s a respectable enough hour on a Thursday. Cheers. Nice to meet you.
[2:36] Adnan Malik: Cheers. Nice to meet you too.
[2:39] Lindsey Groepper: Before we dive into our topic of the day, Adnan, I want to give our listeners an understanding of who you are, a little bit on your background, and then certainly what you do at Software Finder and why Software Finder exists, just to give our listeners context. Dive in, give us a little bit about you.
[2:56] Adnan Malik: Software Finder started back in 2019, so it’s almost seven years now. Let me tell you how the whole concept came about and what we do. Before Software Finder, I worked for multiple different SaaS companies, and toward the tail end of my career as an employee, I was helping companies with their marketing and sales pipeline building. At that point, we realized and identified that there are not many marketplaces out there truly helping buyers find the right software. What that means is: if I’m a company looking for a particular software, whether it’s HR, CRM, project management or whatever the need, there are not many places where I can go, or a company that can really help me shortlist, without any bias, the top three or top five software I should be looking at in a very crowded space. That’s when the idea clicked, and we started working on it in 2019. Here we are, seven years later, almost 350 employees, and growing at a 100% rate year over year for the last five years. In a nutshell, Software Finder helps buyers shortlist the top three to five software companies they should be evaluating. The service is absolutely free for the buyer, and we charge vendors for the service. For buyers, it typically takes anywhere from six to eight weeks to shortlist and set up demos when doing this research on their own. With only a 10-minute phone call to Software Finder, we cut down their two-to-three-month research time to just 10 minutes. That’s a huge value to the buyer. And it’s a great service for vendors as well, because through us, they get the right buyers they should be selling to from the start. We spend about 10 to 15 minutes on the phone identifying the buyer’s needs and then connect them to the right vendor, one that fits the features they’re looking for, the size of the company, the industry they operate in, and most importantly, the budget they have. Considering all of their requirements, we connect them with the vendors, the vendors take over, and we are normally not part of the sales process.
[5:30] Lindsey Groepper: That makes sense. So I think when most people think about vetting software companies in a certain category, they automatically think of review sites: the G2s, the Capterras, the TrustRadiuses. This is different from that in that you’re getting a human being who is consulting you based on your needs and coming up with real human recommendations. It’s not necessarily based on reviews; it’s more based on need. Is that correct?
[5:56] Adnan Malik: That is correct. Having said that, we also have a review platform. Software Finder is a review platform as well, so buyers leave reviews on our platform, which really helps other buyers. But we are not a review-only platform like G2 or Capterra. Primarily, G2 is more review-driven. We do a lot more than reviews. We help buyers compare different software. We help them with pricing. We help them look at demos. And there’s a lot of other buyer sentiment that we collect and share on our website, so there’s a lot of content that brings buyers to Software Finder. But it’s not only review-based. There’s a lot more going on. And then there’s the human approach, which no other marketplace offers. Our advisors speak to buyers, spend time with them and really help narrow down the decision. That’s the absolute differentiator between us and other marketplaces, and it was missing when we started Software Finder.
[7:02] Lindsey Groepper: Absolutely. And it’s not lost on me that you are helping people find software with humans, because that is not the conversation at all today. It is quite the opposite: leveraging AI and building agents to do those things for you. So let’s talk about this current environment and building trust and credibility. As someone who has led a PR agency for my entire career, I do laugh a little at this sort of renaissance of storytelling, trust and credibility, because we’ve been standing on a mountaintop shouting this since the beginning of our industry. But it’s definitely back in a big way. And if you talk to any company leader, they’re all going to say that trust matters, and no one’s going to disagree with that. However, most growth strategies are still really centered on speed, scale and conversion rates. That’s what teams get rewarded for. So, where do you think B2B companies are really fooling themselves when they say they’re all about buyer trust?
[8:15] Adnan Malik: Buyer trust is really important for any B2B company, especially after AI, where trust is becoming a big question around humans versus AI and how much we can trust each of them. But on a B2B scale, the intensity of a buying decision is so high. Forget B2B companies for a second — even when you’re doing online shopping and spending $50 or $100, everyone reads reviews. But on a B2B scale, it matters so much more. Let’s say you’re a 30-employee company trying to implement a new marketing automation tool. It will probably take you two to three months to choose the tool, then a few more months to implement and train your users. Any B2B SaaS purchase you make, you’re probably going live in three to six months, and you truly start using the tool the way it should be used, maybe in six to nine months. There’s a lot of learning curve. And if you chose the wrong tool and realize it nine months later, by that point, the license cost is actually the cheapest part of the decision. Most of the cost goes toward change management and training. The license might be $400 a user per month, but you’ve spent maybe $2,000 per user just making sure people are using it the right way. There’s a lot of hidden costs. And what we see is that 70% of buyers are dissatisfied with their software purchase. 70%. It’s such a big number. Why? Because they were shortlisting the wrong tools to start with, and because they shortlisted the wrong tools, they ended up making the wrong purchase. There’s always pressure to make a purchase. So the whole B2B buying journey is not set up the way it should be from the start. That’s where Software Finder plays a big role: we want to present the right companies in front of the right audience. And because of our human-driven approach, trust becomes the most important factor automatically. Now there’s a human who they’ve spoken to for 15 minutes who’s told them why they should be looking at those three to five companies. Once a vendor enters the sales cycle with these buyers, the buyers trust them more because they came in through a recommendation from an independent advisor who didn’t charge them anything and explained the reasoning on the call. Everyone knows these days that if you Google “top three HR software companies,” whoever is paying the most will show up first. They trust Google, but not fully, because they know those companies have the bigger marketing budgets. Is it the right company for what I’m trying to purchase? That’s the big question mark. And that’s the gap we’re filling.
[11:54] Lindsey Groepper: And we’re also seeing in the data that one in three people will trust the AI overview at face value and use that as a trust shortcut. I was just on the phone with a prospect yesterday. I asked how they found us, and they said, “Oh, we just asked Claude, and you all came up,” which is great. But they said they just used that list as their list. In my head, I’m thinking, I’m glad we surfaced, but on the other hand, you shouldn’t just take that at face value. Those who surfaced may not be the right fit.
[12:27] Adnan Malik: Yeah, exactly.
[12:27] Lindsey Groepper: So there are all these trust shortcuts being taken. And I think specifically when it comes to a crowded SaaS market, when you’re looking at vendors in a specific category, say HR tech and specifically an applicant tracking system, a lot of these vendors sound identical. So what are the things that build trust for a brand early on in that buyer research cycle? And conversely, what are things that will instantly undermine it?
[13:05] Adnan Malik: ATS is a good example. If you’re on a talent acquisition team looking for new ATS software, most buyers will start with Google, an AI overview, ChatGPT or Claude. That’s where everyone in today’s world starts their search. The good thing is that Software Finder is cited in most of these LLMs and AI overviews, so we get a lot of traffic from there as well. But as your example illustrates, buyers can easily just find an ATS and reach out to them directly. In the research phase, LLMs and search results play a big role, and people trust blindly in the top three or five they see on those lists. I’d call LLMs glorified SEO at this point, and sooner or later, you’ll start seeing ads there too, so whoever can pay the most will start appearing, and you’re back to just going to the companies with the biggest marketing dollars. Are those the right companies? Big question mark. Just imagine the impact of implementing the wrong ATS. It hits your talent acquisition pipeline, you may not be hiring the right people because the tool isn’t helping, and there could be multiple other downstream issues. In the initial research phase, I’d say: use marketplaces, read reviews, don’t blindly trust the top three on a list. Do a deeper search on LLMs backed by user review sentiment. And speak to an advisor before reaching out to companies. Whether it’s Software Finder, a hired consultant, or just doing more thorough due diligence, that time invested will pay off enormously, because as a human, you’re realistically not going to reach out to more than three to five companies. It’s not humanly possible to evaluate 20. So spend more time in the research phase, and once you have that trust, then reach out to the top three or five after going through a real process rather than just taking the Google or Claude list at face value.
[15:53] Lindsey Groepper: It makes me wonder where we’re going to end up in terms of trusting LLMs as this evolves. In that same conversation I mentioned, the person said, “Well, Claude told me that I should ask…” and I thought: what? You don’t have to tell me that Claude told you to ask that. Just ask. But that’s where we are. It’s so common now that, of course, the bot told them what questions to ask, so they’re asking them. It just makes me wonder where we’re headed. And to your point, it’s a bit of a black box right now in terms of how you’re actually supposed to optimize for LLMs and what sources they’re pulling from. But what the research does show is that people trust brands they’ve heard of. It doesn’t necessarily mean you are a trustworthy brand, but if they see your name pop up in an AI overview, then see you organically, see your thought leader on LinkedIn, and maybe see you at events or in display ads, it doesn’t mean they fully trust your brand, but they know your name. And that familiarity is one of those trust shortcuts: “There’s a lot of information out there, I see a lot of companies, but I’ve heard of these guys, so I’m going to include them on my list.” Which makes it challenging for marketers, right? Because you do have to be everywhere. Do you feel like the overly optimized B2B demand gen engine is fundamentally misaligned with building trust? Because they’re optimizing for leads versus buyer confidence. How do you see modern marketing struggling with or playing into this era of mistrust — are they feeding it or doing themselves any favors?
[18:04] Adnan Malik: For marketers, it’s mostly about lead generation, as you rightly pointed out, because that’s where ROI starts to show. But modern marketers, and I’ve started seeing this shift, there was a study I came across where CMOs cut their lead volume by 20% and started spending more on content and appearing in more places. That branding helped them close more deals overall, so they were generating fewer leads but closing more of them. It’s changing. It’s not only about lead gen anymore. Buyer trust matters, and a lot of how you build it is through what buyers read and see. A lot of this is shifting toward branding and having the right content in place, giving buyers what they actually need, which is knowledge and advice at the point in their research when they need it most. And it needs to be unbiased and not ad-driven. Buyers are very knowledgeable these days. If you go to a website, you can quickly tell if the content is biased, if it’s an independent review or if there’s another agenda. Fifty to 60% of the time, people can identify this, and it’s been happening for 15 or 40 years. This isn’t new. So it’s important for vendors to focus more on writing genuine content, helping buyers, listing themselves on marketplaces and building reviews. Think about what Amazon has done on the B2C level. Vendors shouldn’t just focus on lead gen in today’s market, and I’ve already seen this starting to happen. Get yourself into top-of-category spots. The “best of” articles should be mentioning you and explaining why you’re one of the best vendors and for which ICP your software is best suited. Those are the signals that can really help you not only generate the right pipeline, but close more deals, because now you’re targeting buyers you should actually be selling to, and they’re coming through a proper process.
[20:39] Lindsey Groepper: I agree. I want to switch gears and talk a little about consultative selling, because you’ve built your business on it. Can you define consultative selling for us, and then I have some follow-up questions.
[20:55] Adnan Malik: Most B2B buying and selling happens online. People read content, try to figure out the top three to seven software options and then start reaching out to vendors. That’s where the biggest gap is: they’re relying too much on online content and not speaking to a human who has gone through the top 100 software options, done the research, knows which features map to which company type, and understands that for a 100-employee company, there are better tools than what’s right for a 500 or 5,000-employee company. Budget also varies. Not every buyer has the same budget, so you might be wasting a lot of time reaching out to companies that aren’t a fit for your situation. That’s where consultative selling plays a massive role. Our advisors go through a lot of training: vendor demos, pricing comparisons, and all of that information drives their phone calls with buyers. When they’re on that call, they enter the buyer’s requirements into our internally built system. And we’re not relying on advisors to remember 200 vendors off the top of their heads. All of that information goes into the system, and alongside their own experience, the system guides them on the top five or 10 software options for that buyer’s specific needs, and why. Depending on budget, features, whether they’re switching tools or implementing for the first time, every small detail matters. The other critical piece is asking the right questions, because buyers at times don’t fully know what their requirements are. You need to ask the right questions to draw out more and more information. Information they would never type into an AI prompt or a Google search. That’s why it matters so much to have a human having a consultative conversation with them, asking the right questions, better understanding their needs, and then telling them the top five they should be looking at.
[23:36] Lindsey Groepper: I can relate to that. As a professional services company, we’re not a one-click purchase. We have to have the conversation. I think about the sales conversations I’ve been in when software vendors are pitching to our agency. Some of the best ones, or even the ones that end in a no-sale, are where the rep says, “Based on what you’ve told me, we’re not the right fit.” I love that. The brand strength for me goes up significantly when that’s the outcome of the call. I’ve sort of expressed that I’m not sure we’d get value out of the product, and they’ll say, “You wouldn’t. I don’t think we’re the right fit.” To me, that’s great. Those are the best types of conversations, because it is true consultative selling, even if it doesn’t ultimately end in a sale. The affinity someone’s going to have for your brand is pretty high when that happens. Hopefully you’ve all experienced that, because it’s always super refreshing when it does. What can marketers do? You mentioned there’s a lot of wasted conversations and leads that just aren’t a fit. Should marketers be challenging leads more, qualifying them harder before they get into sales conversations? What can marketing do to help that?
[25:08] Adnan Malik: That’s a good question, but I think you’re missing an important point. It’s great that you had the experience where the salesperson said we’re not the right fit, but that only happens 20 to 30% of the time. 70% of the time, sales have targets and a thin pipeline to hit those targets from, so 70% of the time, they will end up selling you something knowing you’re not a direct fit, and just hoping you become the right fit in the long run.
[25:44] Lindsey Groepper: And by then it’s not their problem anymore, right?
[25:45] Adnan Malik: Exactly. It’s someone else’s success problem. What ends up happening is the company spends all their money acquiring a customer and then sees a huge amount of churn for that reason. The company is not happy after selling to the wrong buyer. And on the buyer end, it’s a nightmare, because they’ll realize six to 12 months into the journey that they made the wrong decision, and by then it’s too late. I’ve seen companies literally go bankrupt because they chose the wrong software. That’s how big this decision is. That’s the biggest problem Software Finder resolves, because we are not matchmaking only for the buyer’s benefit. We are also matchmaking for the vendor’s benefit, because now they’re targeting the right buyers from the start, and their pipeline is filled with buyers they should be selling to. To answer the second part of your question: marketers shouldn’t just be filling up the pipeline. They should be filling up the right pipeline for sales. The ICP needs to be well-defined. They should not be marketing everything and taking any lead they can get. They should be asking the right qualifying questions before handing off to sales. And they should be using services like Software Finder that can find bottom-of-funnel, sales-ready leads through a consultative approach their own team doesn’t have to run. If a buyer is coming in through that consultative process, conversion rates are higher because you’re pitching to the right buyers.
[27:39] Lindsey Groepper: What haven’t we tackled about this topic that you want to make sure we cover today?
[27:47] Adnan Malik: This is a really good topic, and I love it because it’s changing so fast. With AI, the whole market is shifting very quickly, and it’s hard to keep up. You build for something, and three months later, something new has emerged. Back in the day, you had years to plan. Now it feels like you have months, because it moves that fast. And in the marketing world, things don’t traditionally happen fast. You need to analyze, create your campaign, design it the right way, and by the time you’ve made something really solid, there’s already a new shift happening. Marketers need to change the way they operate. Speed matters. Plan for smaller things, execute quickly, test them out and build on that. Always have someone on your team researching how the buyer journey is shifting from one tool to another. It used to just be Google. For 15 years, it was basically just Google. Now there are so many LLMs, each doing things in their own way. And the way LLMs will present information is going to keep shifting. Sooner or later, ads will start appearing there, which will be a totally new thing marketers need to plan for. Plan in a monthly fashion rather than quarterly. Execute and keep buyer trust at the center of everything you’re building. Because it’s not only about lead generation. Think about branding and how your brand shows up out there, because that will play a big role in improving your conversion rates from lead to sale.
[29:57] Lindsey Groepper: Absolutely. And I would take it a step further. You said it’s not easy to be a marketer right now. It’s brutal. It is a whole new frontier, and everything we have traditionally known, optimized for and relied on has been turned on its head. The ship will right itself. There will be a point where this all evens out and starts to make sense to everyone and is less black-boxy. But right now it’s pretty insane, and everyone out there is just doing the best they can. Thanks again for listening to SaaS Half Full. That was a great conversation with Adnan. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe took one or two things away that you can apply right away. We always appreciate the listen. Until next time, bottoms up.