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New B2B Buying Journey & its Implication for Sales

B2b buying process has changed, and your sales strategy must, too, a new understanding of the b2b buying process is needed.

Sales leaders often attribute this lack of customer access to a failure on the part of sellers to deliver enough value as part of a typical sales interaction.

However, in studying ways to address this access challenge‚ Gartner research found a different reality altogether. The problem is rooted far less in reps’ struggles to sell and far more in customers’ struggles to buy.

Learn what sales must do to adapt

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Sellers have little opportunity to influence customer decisions

The ready availability of quality information through digital channels has made it far easier for buyers to gather information independently, meaning sellers have less access and fewer opportunities to influence customer decisions.

In fact‚ Gartner research finds that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase‚ they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers. When buyers are comparing multiple suppliers‚ the amount of time spent with any one sales rep may be only 5% or 6%.

Brent Adamson

The customers buying journey is hard

The typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves six to 10 decision makers‚ each armed with four or five pieces of information they have gathered independently and must de-conflict with the group. At the same time, the set of options and solutions buying groups can consider is expanding as new technologies, products, suppliers and services emerge.

These dynamics make it increasingly difficult for customers to make purchases. In fact, more than three-quarters of the customers Gartner surveyed described their purchase as very complex or difficult.

B2B Buyers complete a set of jobs to make a purchase

To understand how to best help customers advance through a complex purchase, Gartner research identified six B2B buying “jobs” that customers must complete to their satisfaction in order to successfully finalise a purchase:

• Problem identification.  “We need to do something.”
• Solution exploration.  “What’s out there to solve our problem?”
• Requirements building.  “What exactly do we need the purchase to do?”
• Supplier selection.  “Does this do what we want it to do?”
• Validation.  “We think we know the right answer, but we need to be sure.”
• Consensus creation.  “We need to get everyone on board.”

The buying journey is not linear

B2B buying does not play out in any kind of predictable, linear order. Instead, customers engage in what one might call “looping” across a typical B2B purchase, revisiting each of those six buying jobs at least once.

Buying jobs do not happen sequentially, but more or less simultaneously.

Information drives purchase ease and high-quality sales

All of this looping around and bouncing from one job to another means that buyers value suppliers that make it easier for them to navigate the purchase process.

In fact, Gartner research found that customers who perceived the information they received from suppliers to be helpful in advancing across their buying jobs were 2.8 times more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease, and three times more likely to buy a bigger deal with less regret.

Suppliers must enable buyers to complete buying jobs

To win in this B2B buying environment, suppliers should focus on providing customers with information that is specifically designed to help them complete their buying jobs.

We call this “buyer enablement” — the provisioning of information to customers in a way that enables them to complete critical buying jobs.

Implications of today’s B2B buying behaviour

Sales reps are a   channel to customers, not the   channel

Customers are largely channel-agnostic when seeking the information they need to get a job done. 

As a result, sales reps are not the only channel to customers, but simply a channel, and alignment across in-person and digital channels is crucial for supporting customers in the way they actually buy.

Supplier pipelines cannot speak the truth

Most sales organisations organise activity around a linear pipeline, seeking to move opportunities from one stage to the next. For customers, however, purchase progress is far better defined in terms of job completion rather than stage progression.

As a result, while pipeline reviews might indicate a preponderance of opportunities stuck in sales Stage 5, for example, there is no way of knowing through a linear, supplier-centric sales funnel where exactly customers are truly struggling to make progress in any given deal.

Sales and marketing must operate in parallel, not serial, fashion

Most sales and marketing teams are organised in serial fashion: Marketing generates and nurtures demand early through digital channels before handing off the most qualified of opportunities to sales for in-person pursuit. Customers, however, do not buy in a linear fashion. Rather, they use both digital and in-person channels with near-equal frequency to complete each of the buying jobs more or less simultaneously.

As a result, in today’s world of B2B buying, there is no handoff from marketing to sales, or digital to in-person. It’s a parallel process, not a serial one.

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Revisiting the B2B Buying Process

By Jason Mlicki   |   August 9, 2023   |   Culture & Strategy

Some of the best research on B2B buying over the last few years highlights a variety of “new” buying behaviors. Whether all the behaviors are new or not is questionable. But, we would argue that while some of the behaviors have changed, the B2B buying process is largely the same.

The process by which clients hire consulting firms feels messy and chaotic. They struggle through a malaise of identifying and prioritizing their biggest organizational challenges. They form cross-functional buying groups to diagnose those challenges and select potential firms to hire. And, they drag firms through a gauntlet of information requests and interviews to make a decision. Having a model to describe how it all works is critical to 1) prioritizing your firm’s marketing resources and 2) isolating your marketing and business development strategies.

We developed the Rattleback Arc of the Client’s Journey to make sense of it all. This model represents the 4 stages a client goes through on their journey to becoming a client — learning , vetting , discussing and hiring . It provides a clean view of how clients navigate their way of becoming a client. It’s clear and it’s simple. But does it hold up in the face of everything that’s happened over the last 5 years?

The short answer is yes. But, before we get there, let’s look at how client buying behavior has changed or accelerated over the last 5 years. Based on Gartner’s research into B2B buying, I see 5 notable trends:

• Purchases being made by larger groups
• More B2B purchases representing organizational change initiatives
• The B2B buying process becoming even less linear
• Content is confusing clients not illuminating the path forward
• Clients are spending less time with sellers

Note: Any data referenced below, unless specifically stated otherwise, comes from Gartner’s research on the B2B buying journey .

#1 – Purchases Being Made by Larger Groups

Almost all clients are seeking to build internal consensus on a purchase long before they make it. They recognize that the success (or failure) of any endeavor hinges on gaining buy-in from within. This is particularly true of any consulting project. If everyone agrees a project needs to be done and can see a vision of a better reality they’re more likely to be an ally in the journey.

As a result, clients increasingly rely on buying groups to make decisions on which firms to evaluate, short-list, and hire. As of 2019, Gartner estimated the typical buying committee for any B2B purchase had grown from roughly 5 people to nearly 11. In practice, post-COVID, a buying committee can be as large as a client chooses. There are no limitations. How many people can we cram into one Zoom call? There’s your buying group. Clients will involve people both up-and-down the organization. And across it. This is true whether you meet all of them or not.

#2 – More B2B Purchases Represent Organizational Change Initiatives

The purchase of consulting services has always represented a desire for some level of organizational change. But it appears that more B2B purchase decisions are increasingly connected to larger organizational change initiatives. Even that simple salestech integration that seems straightforward might require significant process and behavioral change throughout the organization. In fact, B2B buyers estimate that half of the purchases they make will have some implications on organizational structure.

What does this mean? It means that a client’s decision to hire your firm hinges heavily on the confidence they have in their organization’s ability to change. Even a consulting assignment you see as tactical in nature may represent some meaningful level of organizational change management needed to realize the benefits. You have to account for this in all your marketing and business development activities.

#3 – The Buying Process BECOMING Even Less Linear

Buying and selling models have depicted the process as a simple, linear progression forever. This, of course, has never been true. The Arc of the Client’s Buying Journey was purposely structured as an arc for this reason. It represents all the activities that clients have to accomplish to hire you. To some extent, clients have always bounced back and forth between these different activities rather than exploring them in a sequence. Now, it’s just more visible because so much of the buying process is digital.

Gartner describes this as the “jobs to be done” that a buying group must accomplish to make a purchase decision. They argue that clients essentially loop in and out of the jobs on their journey towards a purchase decision. Also of interest is that they point out that these “jobs” are being done both “digitally” and “with a sales rep” equally and simultaneously.

#4 – Content is Confusing CLIENTS, Not Illuminating THE PATH FORWARD

The content explosion of the last 15 years simply has no bounds. During the pandemic, every firm marketing and editorial leader I spoke with told me the same thing. “We published more in the last 3 months than we did in the last 3 years.” This continues unabated. The number of podcasts have grown exponentially over the last 15 years. The cost of this explosion is now coming to roost. Collectively, we have flooded the zone with content. There’s simply too much for clients to deal with.

The worst part of this is that clients find much of this information to be conflicting. They’re not sure what to believe or what solution to trust. This leaves them confused. And, it exacerbates their very real instinct to … do nothing!

To be clear, this does not mean stop publishing. It does mean, however, establishing strict quality standards for what you publish and when you publish it. And, it also means making sure that everyone in your organization understands it — particularly those that are expected to sell from it and deliver services based on it.

#5 – Clients are Spending Less Time Meeting with Sellers

On average, when making a B2B purchase, clients are only spending 17% of their time meeting with potential suppliers. Obviously, this percentage shrinks when you isolate the time a buyer spends with any one firm. In fact, Gartner estimates that only 5-6% of the total buying time in the B2B buying process might be spent with any one individual firm.

As it relates to hiring a consulting firm this is only true for some firms. For firms that have positioned themselves as a recognized expert or trusted advisor , this percentage almost surely goes up. In fact, I would argue that clients are spending more of their time with firms that occupy that space in their minds. They’re turning to those trusted advisors to help them make sense of the noise in the market.

Where else are they spending their time? Notably, clients are spending 27% of their time “researching independently online.” In fact, it’s the place where clients spend the majority of their time in the purchase process. So, yes, that thought leadership that’s flooding the zone is getting consumed. Predominantly online.

This predilection for an increasingly digital experience extends itself into the discussion, hiring and delivery process as well. Sometimes by request, other times by necessity, clients have become much more comfortable with digital-first or digital-only buying experiences. As an example, one of the research partners we work with has collapsed the entire hiring and delivery process into a “conversation free” digital experience. All information pertaining to a research request can be submitted online. A quote is provided through DocuSign. A survey draft can be written, uploaded, approved, and deployed through their web-based portal. And, survey results are dropped right into our Survey Monkey account.

The Activities are Changing but the B2B Buying Process Remains the Same

In sum, yes, clients are exhibiting new buying behaviors. They’re spending more time online. Less time with your people (unless they see them as a true expert and trusted advisor). Buying more cross-functionally. Involving more people in the buying process. And, are increasingly, concerned about validating that they’re making the right decision. As a result, they’re hyper focused on building internal consensus. When we meld Gartner’s new behaviors and “jobs to be done” with the Rattleback Arc of the Client Journey we get:

The 4 stages — learning , vetting , discussing , and hiring — remain largely unchanged. These 4 stages exist to help clients solve the “jobs to be done” within the buying process. Your job, from now and forever more, is to help clients do each of their buying jobs more easily and effectively.

• Gartner , “5 Ways the Future of B2B Buying Will Rewrite the Rules of Effective Selling” and “Win More B2B Sales Deals.” Both are publicly available on the Gartner B2B Buying Journey Landing Page .

The 4 Universal Stages of B2B Buying

Marketing is change management, rethinking where your website fits in the buying process.

Jason Mlicki is Principal of Rattleback. He helps clients envision their desired future state and aligns our agency resources to enable them to realize it.

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B2B Buying: Wie die besten CSOs und CMOs den Kaufprozess optimieren

Die B2B Buying Journey hat sich verändert. Erfolgreiche Vertriebs- und Marketingunternehmen passen ihre Strategien entsprechend an.

Laden Sie das E-Book zum Stand des B2B Buying herunter

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Erstellen Sie einen B2B-Kaufprozess, der zu profitableren Kaufentscheidungen führt

Unsere Studie zeigt, dass 75 % der B2B-Käufer ein Verkaufserlebnis ohne Vertreter bevorzugen. Bei digitalen Self-Service-Einkäufen ist das Risiko einer Kaufreue jedoch deutlich höher. Vertrieb und Marketing müssen in der Lage sein, die richtige Mischung aus digitaler und menschlicher Interaktion zu identifizieren, um profitable Kaufentscheidungen zu treffen. Dieses E-Book vermittelt:

Warum ein hybrider Ansatz für den Kundenerfolg entscheidend ist

Wo das Beste aus digitalem und menschlichem Verkauf genutzt werden kann

Wie Sie Ihre Strategien anpassen, um hochwertige Geschäfte abzuschließen

Navigieren Sie erfolgreich durch die sich entwickelnde B2B Buying Journey

Komplexe Kaufprozesse, organisatorische Störungen und Ungewissheit können die Fähigkeit der Käufer, Wert zu realisieren, beeinträchtigen. Die besten Vertriebs- und Marketingteams navigieren erfolgreich, indem sie diese entscheidenden Maßnahmen ergreifen.

• Käuferwert unterstreichen
• Verkaufsengagement maßschneidern
• Sicheres Kaufen ermöglichen

Schaffen und bestätigen Sie den Wert der Lösung während der gesamten digitalen Buying Journey

In einer immer komplexeren Customer Journey spielen Marketingteams eine Schlüsselrolle, wenn es darum geht, Käufern Vertrauen und Klarheit zu vermitteln. Erfolgreiche Unternehmen nutzen die digitale Interaktion mit ihren Lieferanten, um über Websites, eigene soziale Medien, E-Mail und andere Kanäle digitalen Mehrwert zu schaffen.

Marketingorganisationen können durch die Integration digitaler Inhalte, die auf Käuferziele ausgerichtet sind, einen Mehrwert für diese schaffen . Digitale Interaktionen, die einen Mehrwert schaffen, enthalten oft diese Art von Elementen:

Texte, die sich an den Bedürfnissen der Kunden orientieren, nicht an den Produktfähigkeiten

Peer-Benchmarking und andere Daten, die das Interesse von Käufern an der Meinung Dritter wecken

Möglichkeiten zur Vertiefung in Bildungsinhalte

• Einfache, intuitive digitale Erlebnisse, die auf den Kanal zugeschnitten sind

Marketingorganisationen können dazu beitragen, den Wert für Käufer zu bestätigen , indem sie interaktive Online-Tools anbieten (z. B. Kostenrechner, Produktauswahltools, Produktvisualisierungen, Bewertungen und Rezensionen). Mit diesen Tools können Käufer mit der Marke interagieren und die zahlreichen Entscheidungen validieren, die sie im Verlauf der gesamten Buying Journey treffen müssen. Wertbestätigende Interaktionen sollten einen oder mehrere der folgenden Zwecke erfüllen:

Signalisieren Sie, dass Ihre Marke die Käuferbedürfnisse genau versteht (z. B. durch die Integration von Menüs, Kategorien und Kriterien, die speziell auf ihr Geschäft zugeschnitten sind).

Helfen Sie Käufern, die Vorteile eines Produkts/einer Dienstleistung für ihr Unternehmen zu quantifizieren (z. B. mit Daten zur Lösungsleistung und anderen Details).

Geben Sie Käufern das Gefühl, die Kaufentscheidung selbst in der Hand zu haben (z. B. durch die Bereitstellung einer Auswahl maßgeschneiderter Empfehlungen basierend auf ihren Angaben und Kriterien).

Helfen Sie Käufern mit klaren Handlungsaufforderungen, den nächsten Schritt in ihrem Kaufprozess zu machen.

Gestalten Sie eine B2B Buying Journey, die menschliche Verkäufer und digitale Kanäle integriert.

Hybride digitale und menschliche Interaktionen sind kommerziell besonders produktiv. Wenn B2B-Käufer die von Lieferanten bereitgestellten digitalen Tools in Partnerschaft mit einem Vertriebsmitarbeiter nutzen, anstatt sie eigenständig zu beziehen, steigt die Wahrscheinlichkeit, ein hochwertiges Geschäft abzuschließen, um das 1,8-Fache.

Aber der B2B-Kaufprozess läuft nicht in einer vorhersehbaren, linearen Reihenfolge ab. Stattdessen nehmen Kunden an einem typischen B2B-Kaufprozess teil, indem sie jeden dieser sechs Kauf-Jobs mindestens einmal überprüfen. Zu diesen Jobs zählen:

Problemidentifizierung. „Wir müssen etwas tun.“

Lösungsfindung. „Was kann unser Problem lösen?“

Anforderungserstellung. „Was genau soll mit dem Kauf erreicht werden?“

Lieferantenauswahl. „Tut die Lösung das, was wir von ihr wollen?“

Validierung. „Wir glauben, dass wir die richtige Antwort haben, aber wir müssen sicher sein.“

Konsensbildung. „Wir müssen alle an Bord holen.“

Um die Komplexität noch zu erhöhen, suchen Käufer nicht nur nach Käufen, um ein unmittelbares Problem zu lösen. Unsere Studien zeigen, dass 99 % der B2B-Einkäufe durch organisatorische Veränderungen angestoßen werden. Das bedeutet, dass Käufer meist motiviert sind, längerfristige, interne Herausforderungen zu lösen, die mehrere Teile der Käuferorganisation betreffen. Stakeholder greifen zu verschiedenen Zeiten auf Ihre Website zu, schauen sich soziale Medien an, nutzen ein interaktives Tool oder einen anderen digitalen Kanal.

Wenn Kunden nach Informationen suchen, die sie für die Erledigung eines Auftrags benötigen, sind Vertriebsmitarbeiter nicht der einzige Kanal zum Kunden, sondern nur einer von vielen. Die Abstimmung von persönlichen und digitalen Kanälen ist von entscheidender Bedeutung, um die individuelle Kaufweise von Kunden zu unterstützen.

Erfolgreiche Vertriebsorganisationen berücksichtigen die wachsende Zahl von Käufern und deren funktionsübergreifende Vertretung in Kundenunternehmen. Dazu gehört auch die Fähigkeit, potenzielle Probleme zu bewältigen, die von den verschiedenen Mitgliedern der Käufergruppe aufgeworfen werden könnten, da diese bei ihren eigenen Recherchen unterschiedliche Ziele und Bedürfnisse haben können.

Um Kunden bei der Bewältigung der mit einem Kauf verbundenen Herausforderungen zu helfen, konzentrieren sich erfolgreiche CSO auf folgende Punkte:

Sie stellen sicher, dass die Befähigung sich darauf konzentriert, Verkäufer dazu zu bringen, ihr Kundenengagement anzupassen und ihre Angebote besser zu positionieren, indem sie den Kaufansatz des Unternehmens verstehen. 

Sie richten den Verkaufsprozess so aus, dass er Käufer und Käufergruppen dabei unterstützt, die kritischen Kaufaufgaben zu erledigen, die für eine qualitativ hochwertige Kaufentscheidung notwendig sind.

Berücksichtigen Sie die Vertrautheit mit dem Produkt bei der Gestaltung der hochtechnischen B2B Buyer Journey.

Bei Technologiekäufern variiert die erhöhte digitale Präferenz je nach Vertrautheit des Käufers mit dem Produkt oder der Dienstleistung, die er in Betracht zieht. 

Wir befragten 148 Personen, die an technologischen Kaufentscheidungen beteiligt sind, und stellten fest, dass 64 % der Käufer eine 100-prozentige digitale Kauferfahrung bevorzugten, wenn sie mit einem Produkt oder einer Dienstleistung vertraut waren . Ihre Gründe für diese Präferenz waren Schnelligkeit, Bequemlichkeit und Komfort mit dem Produkt aufgrund der Vertrautheit und eine Präferenz für die Online-Selbstrecherche. Weniger als ein Viertel dieser Befragten gab an, dass sie ein digitales Kauferlebnis bevorzugen, um dem Druck von Verkaufsvertretern zu entgehen.

Wenn Technologiekäufer menschliche Interaktionen für vertraute Produkte wünschen, sind die Hauptgründe ein Bedürfnis danach: 

Fragen zu stellen

Zukünftige Richtungen zu verstehen

Immaterielle Werte zu bewerten

Verhandlungsoptionen zu verbessern

Eine geringere Produktvertrautheit bewirkt andere Ergebnisse. In diesen Situationen wünschten Käufer menschliche Hilfe, um:

Ein besseres Verständnis potenzieller Anwendungsfälle zu erhalten

Personalisierte Anleitungen oder Ratschläge zu erhalten

Eine Beziehung zu einem potenziellen neuen Anbieter aufzubauen

Einen Experten zu konsultieren

Zusammenfassend lässt sich sagen, dass das Vertrauen von Technologiekäufern größer ist, wenn sie mit Produkten oder Dienstleistungen vertraut sind. Dies führt dazu, dass sie mehr Kaufaktivitäten ohne Hilfe durchführen möchten.

Die Bedeutung der Digitalisierung nimmt bei zunehmender Wahrscheinlichkeit einer Vertrautheit unter den Zielkunden zu. Wenn diese Wahrscheinlichkeit hoch ist, sollte das Ziel darin bestehen, alle Kaufaktivitäten digital abzuwickeln, von der Recherche bis zum Kauf.

Bei abnehmender Wahrscheinlichkeit der Vertrautheit sind digitale Erlebnisse immer noch wichtig. Produktverantwortliche sollten aber leicht zugängliche Möglichkeiten schaffen, um mit Ihren Vertriebsteams (einschließlich technischer Experten) an den wichtigsten Punkten der Buyer Journey zu interagieren.

Was können Hightech-Produktführungskräfte daraus lernen? 

Schließen Sie die Möglichkeit einer menschlichen Interaktion in keiner Phase des Prozesses völlig aus. Selbst wenn die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Produktvertrautheit hoch ist, sind manche Käufer weniger zuversichtlich und suchen nach Hilfe und Klärung, die nur durch menschliche Interaktion erfolgen kann. Beratung, Unterstützung und hilfreiche Anstöße – sogar Anstöße, die zu zusätzlichen Überlegungen führen, um Kaufteams bei der Vermeidung von Fehlern zu helfen – anzubieten, kann den Kauf vorantreiben und die Wahrscheinlichkeit von Stillstand und Verzögerungen verringern.

Stellen Sie außerdem sicher, dass Ihr digitales Engagement Käufern hilft, gute Entscheidungen zuversichtlich zu treffen. Sie können dies tun, indem Sie Tools anbieten, um Klarheit und Konsens über die Ziele des Kaufs zu erlangen, sowie den Abschluss wichtiger Arbeiten zu leiten und die Bereitstellung so zu planen, dass Käufer Vertrauen in den Weg zur Wertschöpfung gewinnen.

FAQs zur B2B Buying Journey

Was sind die verschiedenen phasen der b2b buying journey.

Die heutige B2B Buying Journey folgt einem nichtlinearen Kaufpfad, der eher einer Reihe von verschiedenen Kauf-Jobs oder Aufgaben ähnelt, die Käufer erledigen müssen, um einen tatsächlichen Kauf abzuschließen. Diese Kauf-Jobs lassen sich generell in vier Kategorien einteilen – Problemidentifizierung, Lösungsfindung, Anforderungserstellung und Lieferantenauswahl – und erfolgen durch eine Kombination aus digitalen und menschlichen Interaktionen. Im Laufe des Kaufprozesses kehren die meisten Käufer mindestens zu einem Kauf-Job zurück.

Was sind einige der Herausforderungen der B2B Buying Journey?

Umweltunsicherheit – in all ihren Formen – beeinflusst die Bereitschaft von B2B-Käufern, bedeutende Käufe zu tätigen. Selbst wenn die Bereitschaft zum Kauf vorhanden ist, können organisatorische Prozesse und die Belange mehrerer Stakeholder den Kaufprozess noch komplexer machen. CMOs und CSOs müssen zusammenarbeiten, um bequeme Kauferlebnisse zu schaffen, die das Vertrauen von Kunden stärken, die sich ändernden Kaufpräferenzen widerspiegeln und die B2B Buying Journey vereinfachen.

Was sind einige der Best Practices der B2B Buying Journey?

Beim B2B Buying arbeiten verschiedene Kaufteams gleichzeitig oder einzeln an mehreren Aufgaben, ohne dass eine einheitliche Reihenfolge oder ein einheitlicher Ablauf besteht. Um das Kundenengagement zu optimieren, verlagern erfolgreiche Unternehmen ihren Fokus von der Customer Journey auf die kollektiven Kaufaufgaben, die Kaufteams zu erledigen haben. Anstatt eine Buyer Journey abzubilden, konzentrieren sich diese Unternehmen auf die Katalogisierung von Kauf-Jobs und die zugrundeliegenden Aufgaben und Aktivitäten zur Unterstützung der Jobabwicklung. Dabei überarbeiten sie herkömmliche Tracking-Metriken, um den Kaufprozess nach dem Prinzip „zu erledigende Jobs“ zu gestalten.

Steigern Sie die Leistung bei den unternehmenskritischen Prioritäten.

Chapter 1: The B2B Customer Journey + Buying Process

Welcome to Chapter 1 of A Master Guide To B2B Content Marketing .

Understanding the B2B customer journey is the first step to building an effective content marketing strategy.

The art of B2B content marketing involves aligning your business goals with your audience's needs. A good B2B content marketing strategy caters to your audiences' personalized interests within specific phases of the buying process and sales funnel.

Let’s run through the top 10 factors that define B2B customer journeys, looking at the buying process in particular.

1. Longer Nurturing Times

B2B sales conversions are not immediate impulse buys. They are highly logical decisions that require multiple data inputs, and will be considered at more than one level of an organization.

• Gartner found that 77% of B2B buyers found purchasing very complex or difficult. The process is not linear, with buyers typically looping back to previous stages. 
• On average, 75% of B2B companies take at least 4 months to win a new customer, but more complex deals can take much longer. 

It takes time to fully define purchasing criteria, explore options, and weigh them up before reaching a final decision. That’s why the B2B customer conversion process is a sustained effort that requires a diversity of content to support effective lead nurturing strategies.

2. Multiple Buyer Roles With Differing Priorities 

Collective purchasing decisions will make or break a business, so of course, it’s not taken lightly. A B2B buying process will potentially involve multiple departments and job roles. 

• Data from 2017 found that an average of 6.8 people were involved in purchasing decision making, up from the previous year. (Of course, this depends on the size of your target customers’ businesses.)
• Today, 73% of people involved in the B2B buying process are millennials, and 81% of non-C-suiters have a say in purchase decisions.

Your content library needs to target decision-makers for conversion, but equally cater to influential researchers and end users as crucial players within the process. If you're only marketing to the highest level, you're overlooking people who need to notice you before things progress to the decision-making stage.

There are typically 4 main buyer roles:

1. Influencer or Initiator - A person close to the process who identifies the need for an outside solution and whose opinion counts in the buying decision. They could be an end user, a team manager, or act in an advisory capacity.

2. Information Gatekeeper - A person who controls the flow of information and communication in the organization, whether a manager or a tasked assistant. They typically control access to decision makers.

3. Decision maker - The person who makes a final call and approves the purchase. They aren’t often an end user, but sit higher up within the managerial hierarchy with priorities that could differ from an end user or manager.

4. End User - The people who will actually use your solution or service in an operational capacity. They might become the main contacts for the relationship on a day-to-day basis after purchase.

3. Online Research Is the Biggest Purchasing Activity

It is vital that your brand shows up during the online research process. In 2019, Gartner found that 27% of the complete B2B buying process is spent on online research. This is the largest portion of time spent on purchasing activities. 

• The amount of time spent on online research increases in line with the value of the purchase, but is 20 hours on average. 
• Your sales reps may get as little as 5% of total buyer time during the whole process. B2B buyers can carry out over half of the buying process through digital touchpoints before they establish contact.
• In terms of making a decision, buyers will progress more than 70% of the way to making a final decision before engaging sales representatives. 
• 62% of B2B buyers say they can make a purchase selection based solely on digital content. 

4. Vendor Websites Is the Favored Research Channel

Most B2B buyers will use your website as their primary research tool.

When it comes to channels for purchase planning specifically, a 2018 Statista survey of global B2B marketing professionals found:

• 88% of buyers most commonly used vendor websites, returning to sites multiple times in their journey. 
• 70% go directly to a known website.
• 67% conduct a general internet search.
• 53% go to social media to find purchasing information. 
• 50% used LinkedIn to research vendor content.

5. Buyers Want Content To Guide Them

When it comes to online research, 32% of buyers said they couldn’t find the information they needed, and 37% said there was not enough information relating directly to purchase. 

Creating clear and streamlined content flows for defined buyer personas according to their interests, roles and needs is a crucial goal to work towards.

• C-level executives ( 60% ) and VPs (82%) report that content-related issues - such as not understanding the content or not being able to share content internally - are the top factors slowing down purchase decisions.
• 45% of buyers said they want a personalized content portal to help them find relevant content. 

Content personalization is a trend that continues to grow as inbound marketing evolves, raising customers’ expectations.

6. Several Pieces of Content Are Required (But Not Too Many) 

Key content touch points must be planned to progress users within a B2B buying process to completion. Expanding your customer touch points while portraying your brand authority consistently at every journey stage is a key part of building brand awareness and then trust. 

More B2B marketing touch points are required than B2C on average. We’re talking around 10 digital touch points before first contact as a general rule of thumb. And most buyers ( 77% ) will consume more than 3 pieces of long-form content before making contact.

However, content provision needs to be strategically considered with relevance prioritized over volume. There is a sweet spot for deeper-funnel content volume in terms of driving conversion. 

• Buyers have been found to consume 13 pieces of purchasing content on average, with 8 being from the leading supplier they are considering.
• 86% of buyers get overwhelmed when there are more than 10 pieces of purchasing content to read from an individual supplier.

7. Trust Is the Most Important Factor

The larger and longer-term investments typically involved in B2B mean that buyers need to build trust before they make any commitments. Relationship building for extracting high lifetime value is a much larger part of the equation. Your leads are evaluating your company for the commitment to serve their best interests and deliver what they expect over time with consistency. 

• Over 90% of decisions to buy from another business depend solely on the trust created.
• 84% of buyers say they would be more likely to purchase from a supplier they had a good relationship with, even if their competitors had better sales terms.
• 75% of B2B marketers found that content marketing was successful for building trust during 2021.

8. Industry Trends and Tech News Is Favored

The B2B customer journey can start long before an active buying process. Building topical authority within your niche helps you reach the relevant people to build brand awareness and credibility. You want your brand to come top of mind when a buying process is activated. 

• Learn more about brand awareness and how to measure it .

Most buyers ( 75% ) say that thought leadership helps them create a vendor shortlist, and 49% of decision-makers say thought leadership has directly led them to do business with a company.

B2B audiences regularly spend time consuming content:

• 88% of B2B professionals consume business-related content online at least once a week and are prepared to spend time consuming content. 
• A 2019 study found that 34% of buyers would invest 30-60 minutes in a content session, and 26% spent as long as it took if the content was great. 
• In 2021 overall B2B content consumption increased by 22% .

In terms of topics, B2B buyers are most interested in industry trends, especially backed up by data and metrics: 

• Clutch found that the leading reasons for consuming content was to stay up to date with industry trends ( 45% ) and industry technology (45%), followed by 24% looking for small business topics. 
• IT and tech buyers are particularly driven to stay up to date with new trends. Isoline’s 2019 survey of IT buyers found that 66% of respondents were aiming to learn about industry developments, and 56% read for purchase planning.
• 66% of surveyed B2B buyers say they want vendors to use more data and research to support their content.

9. Content Must Integrate With Sales Processes

While B2B buyers spend most time researching online, 70% still want contact with a sales rep at some point in the buying process. B2B is significantly more dependent on people relationships for conversion. 

Marketing content should integrate with your sales team’s processes for a smooth wooing and conversion process. Your business's financial success depends on how easy it is for buyers to move through the funnel and convert. Every part needs to function together, with a smooth hand over to sales staff for qualified leads.

Automated marketing tools can really help you with this, but more on that in Chapter 4!

Given the importance of online content marketing for building B2B brand awareness and nurturing the buying process, your business can’t afford not to show up online!

Search engines are particularly important at the starting point of a buying process. However, pre-building brand awareness among your target audience using online thought leadership puts you 10 steps ahead of competitors who don’t do this as well. You want buyers to come directly to your website as the first port of call.

Getting to grips with what your audience are most interested in and providing genuinely helpful content relevant for your offering will make sure they think of you first when a buying process is activated. To achieve this, leverage online channels where your audience spends time consuming business content, such as LinkedIn, online media publications, eNewsletters and Google.

Once a buying process starts, your job is to provide clear content for the consideration + action stages by explaining solutions, the value they deliver and supporting evidence.

• Data visualization is a crucial tool for understanding and optimizing how your marketing content performs.
• Learn how to build your marketing data inputs .

And this concludes our exploration of the B2B buyer customer journey.

Discover more of this four-part series below, designed to help you achieve your content marketing goals. Or why not bookmark them for later?

More In This Series:

• Chapter 2: Building Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy
• Chapter 3: How To Create B2B Marketing Content
• Chapter 4: Distribution Tactics for B2B Marketing Content

Unlock Revenue Growth With Data

Knowing where to invest marketing budget to increase contribution margin and overall revenue growth is the #1 pressing challenge for any marketing or growth leader.

As multichannel complexity and media budgets grow, attribution becomes one of those topics we really can’t ignore.

To truly understand the most valuable customer journey design, relying on default attribution reporting within ad platforms or Google Analytics just doesn’t cut it. In fact, it can even do more harm than good due to misattribution and double attribution - a big problem with these uncensored (and self-serving) tools. 

The trouble with free on-platform attribution reporting (like Facebook or Google Analytics) is that they are siloed walled gardens that work in isolation with their own limited data sets. Your most powerful and valuable attribution analysis needs to cover everything, directly tied back to revenue results. 

Without a proactive attribution strategy that connects all your customer journey and conversion data, optimized customer journey design will remain an elusive mystery. Highly influential channels like dark social or offline interactions are often underestimated or completely missing, while non-profitable campaigns are over-indexed. 

The difference in business results can easily stack up to millions of dollars in wasted budget and lost opportunities - especially where larger paid media budgets are involved. 

 Let’s explore how marketers can master attribution to start hitting revenue targets with much greater confidence and certainty.

The Impact of Not Using Accurate Attribution Reporting

The impact of not using attribution reporting - or using it poorly - is worth understanding. It can have multiple negative impacts on decision-making and overall business performance.

The common consequences are:

Incomplete Customer Insights Cause Poor CX

An incomplete understanding of customer preferences, motivations, and pain points hinders the ability to tailor marketing strategies to effectively engage and convert customers.

This can result in a lack of adequate content personalization and a poorer customer experience (CX), meaning your brand gets overlooked in favor of others by potential customers.

Unprofitable Resource Allocation

Struggling to accurately identify the marketing channels, campaigns, or touchpoints that are driving conversions or desired outcomes results in less effective use of resources.

For example, over-investing in underperforming channels, and underinvesting in high-impact touchpoints, wasting budget in the process.

Poor Revenue Growth and Limited Brand Equity

Incorrect assumptions about the impact of specific touchpoints or channels results in suboptimal marketing performance and missed opportunities.

If marketing efforts fail to engage and convert customers effectively over time, the business can suffer from stunted revenue growth, also putting a cap on brand equity.

Understanding the Challenges for Accurate Attribution

Marketers can’t fully rely on free attribution solutions for the insights they need to drive significant optimizations. Results can be significantly misleading when solely using free on-platform attribution reporting.

On-platform attribution issues:

• ‍ No Cross-Channel Visibility - On-platform attribution doesn't have full visibility into the performance of other channels, or wider customer journey outside of their own ecosystem, acting as walled gardens. This limited view can make it difficult to understand the true impact of each channel on conversions and ROI (or ROAS). 
• Double Attribution - When using multiple platforms, there's a risk of double attribution - where more than one platform takes credit for the same conversion. This overlapping attribution may cause businesses to overestimate the performance of certain channels or campaigns, and consequent overinvestment stunts overall marketing ROI.
• Inconsistent Attribution Methods - Different platforms apply different attribution rules, leading to inconsistencies in how they assign credit to various touchpoints. This inconsistency can make it challenging to accurately compare the performance of different marketing channels or campaigns.
• Tracking Limitations - With increasing data privacy regulations, third-party platforms may face challenges in accurately tracking user behavior across channels. A custom attribution model can help overcome some of these limitations by incorporating first-party data and other tracking methods.
• Lack of Customization - On-platform attribution reporting may not be tailored to your specific needs, goals, and marketing strategy. A custom attribution model, on the other hand, can be designed to accurately reflect a business's unique customer journey, allowing for more precise insights into the performance of each marketing channel and campaign.

There is a compelling case for marketers to invest in their own customized attribution solutions. Especially when paid media investments start becoming more significant.

However, accurate attribution modeling isn’t one of the most straightforward tasks for a marketing department to tackle.

There are several hurdles to overcome to extract and benefit from the most valuable insights:

  1. Tracking Data Across Complete Journeys  

A typical user journey involves multiple devices, channels, platforms, and time breaks between visits, making it difficult to track a complete customer journey path from the first touchpoint to conversion. Cross-device tracking techniques are needed, such as device matching or probabilistic modeling.

  2. Data Privacy  

Tracking restrictions and cookie limitations can limit the ability to track customer interactions across marketing channels, sometimes requiring workarounds. Yet it's essential to adhere to data privacy regulations, maintain transparency and obtain appropriate consent from customers when collecting and utilizing their data.

  3. Offline Data Tracking  

Marketers may need to implement strategies such as unique identifiers, coupon codes, QR codes, or call tracking to link offline interactions to specific customers and attribute them properly. However, implementing and managing these tracking mechanisms may require additional resources and operational adjustments, including manual data entry from both customers and staff.

  4. Data Quality and Completeness  

Ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the data is crucial for building reliable attribution models. Marketers must establish data quality control measures, address data gaps, and perform regular data validation to maintain the integrity of the data.

  5. Data Integration  

Integrating data from various sources, both online and offline, can be complex. Offline data sources such as in-store purchases, call center interactions, or direct responses may not be easily captured and linked to other digital data. Marketers need to develop data integration processes to build a unified view of complete customer journeys.

  6. Attribution Modeling Complexity  

Choosing the best-fit modeling approach for marketing goals, and accounting for multiple touchpoints both online and offline, adds complexity to attribution modeling. Marketers need to understand statistical models that can properly attribute credit to different touchpoints based on their real impact on conversions. This requires analytical expertise, plus the budget for necessary data tools as marketing complexity grows.

Types of Attribution Data

Data attribution models are nothing without the data that you feed into them.

There are 2 main sources of attribution data.

1. Software-based Attribution Data

This utilizes digital tracking tools, such as analytics platforms or marketing automation software, to track and record user interactions and automatically attribute conversion actions to specific marketing touchpoints.

Pros - It provides objective and granular data on user interactions and conversions, and enables real-time tracking and analysis of customer journeys. The reliance on voluntary self-reporting and subjective recall is reduced.

Cons - Aside from missing touchpoints that are not digital or easily trackable by software, it can be complex to implement and require technical expertise. You’ll need the right tracking set up for accurate data and reliable insights, and the analytics tools.

  2. Self-reported Attribution Data

This is data collected directly from your customers and leads, who share information about the touchpoints that influenced their decision-making process. It’s usually collected via an online form or survey but can also be collected in direct conversation with customer-facing staff and then recorded in a CRM.

Pros - It allows for qualitative data collection, using direct insights from the individuals themselves to capture subjective factors and nuances that software-reported attribution may miss, such as offline interactions or word-of-mouth referrals.

Cons - It relies on individuals' willingness to provide information, and their memory and perception which may not always be accurate or complete. This type of data can be more time-consuming and resource-intensive to collect and analyze.

Hybrid Attribution Data

Combining both self-reported and software-based data sources into attribution modeling is what is known as hybrid modeling. It’s the ideal solution to mitigate the drawbacks of each data type, providing the most fully comprehensive understanding of your customers journeys.

Next, depending on your marketing activity and data tracking sophistication, you’re going to have some of the following types of data sets to work with.

The best way to categorize your data inputs is to split it into channel data and event data.

1. Event Data (What Happened?)

Event data typically includes:

• Conversion Data - Conversion data includes information about the desired actions taken by users, such as purchases, form submissions, or sign-ups. Conversion goals need to be set for each journey stage. ‍ ‍
• ‍ Behavioral Data – Any data related to customers' online behavior, such as organic website visits, page views, time spent on site, clicks, search queries, and interactions with specific content or features. ‍
• Clickstream Data – This is a record of each click a consumer makes while browsing online. Tracking all these actions can help brands form an accurate understanding of the most effective consumer journey design. ‍
• Ad Impressions and Clicks - Ad impressions combined with click data provides information on the number of times an ad was displayed to users, and the corresponding clicks made. This data helps gauge the effectiveness of specific ads. ‍
• CRM and First-Party Data - This data provides long-term insights into customer behavior and can include survey responses, purchase history, and any interactions with the brand. CRM data is necessary to link the direct impact on revenue generation and CLV.

Note, there are two common ways to give credit to touchpoints within a conversion sequence: post-click, or post-view.

Post-click Conversion Data - If attribution is done on a post-click (not necessarily last-click) basis, clicked touchpoints will get a part of the conversion credit as long as the action happens within the defined lookback window.

Post-view (or view-through) Conversion Data – Here, the content a user viewed (impressions) within the specified lookback window also gets part credit for a conversion. Most of the advertisers who advertise on multiple channels will have video and social media as part of the conversion journey. These channels usually are not driving clicks, but still contribute to outcomes. This data is more challenging to accurately collect.

The lookback window is how far back a conversion action is included, usually measured in days. So a 7-day lookback window would only include advert impressions or clicks 7 days before the customer converted. In low-cost eCommerce transactions where the selling cycle is short, the most relevant lookback window only might be 7 – 14 days. Whereas for more complex sales like business software, a lookback window of 60 days could be used.

‍ 2. Channel Data (Where Did It Happen?)

Channel source data typically includes:

• Referral Data - This identifies the source that referred users to your website (or app). It can attribute from the high-level referral sources, such as search engines, social media or email, right down to the specific pieces of content.
• Device and Platform Data – This gives information about the devices and platforms used by users during their customer journey. It allows marketers to track cross-device interactions and attribute conversions across different devices. Device data is also helpful for providing location information.
• Offline Data - This gives information about customer interactions outside of digital channels, such as in-store purchases, phone calls, word of mouth, events, direct mail responses, etc. Offline data is typically captured through mechanisms like unique identifiers, coupon codes, or CRM systems.

An attribution model is essentially used to link these two types of data together to show which marketing touchpoints deliver the best results. 

Types of Attribution Models

There are several types of attribution models to feed your data into. Applying the right modeling for the goal or KPI is key.

A model essentially joins up your event data (what happened) to your channel data (where it happened) to show you the most profitable journey connections. 

The difference between attribution models is where they place most credit for achieving a desired conversion goal (like submitting a contact form, generating an MQL or closing a sale). Conversion goals should be set up for each stage of the customer journey to feed attribution analysis.

Multi-touch models attribute results to more than one touchpoint, allowing for the influence of consecutive touchpoints to be considered as part of a process that led to the final conversion.

 A model either uses: 

• Rule-based methodology - Analyzes data in a completely static approach. 
• Data-driven modeling - Typically uses AI and machine learning to help automatically customize multi-touch attribution based on the influence of touchpoints.

Here’s a breakdown of the most common attribution models:

Last Touch (or Last Click) Attribution

This model assigns all the credit for a conversion to the last touchpoint (or channel) that the customer interacted with before making a purchase or completing the desired action.

When to use it? - To understand which touchpoints are most influential for prompting people to take the final step in completing a conversion goal (e.g., submitting a contact form or making a purchase).

Limitations? – Although easy to use and collect data for, it’s not a great stand-alone model for longer and more complex sales cycles where conversion still heavily relies on the preceding touchpoints, particularly in B2B.

First Touch (or First Click) Attribution

The first touchpoint (or channel) the customer engaged with receives 100% of the credit for the conversion.

When to use it? - To understand which early journey touchpoints are best at first reaching new audience members who will eventually convert.

Limitations? – It ignores the influence that mid to late journey touchpoints have for final conversion. Data accuracy can also be more difficult to assure depending on your data tracking methods and lookback window

Linear Attribution

Equal credit is given to each touchpoint in the customer journey, recognizing the role of all channels in driving conversions.

When to use it? – To understand how touchpoints and journey architecture work together to nurture conversions over time, including cross-departmental touchpoints between marketing and sales for B2B.  

Limitations? – The data collection process is more intensive and may require cooperation with other departments to capture all touchpoints, taking time to implement fully. This may include qualitative touchpoints through manual data entry. Distributing credit evenly doesn’t account for which touchpoints have most influence.

Time Decay Attribution

More credit goes to touchpoints that occurred closer to the conversion event, with the assumption that recent interactions have a greater impact on the decision-making process.

When to use it? – For longer, more complex customer journeys where later touchpoints are most influential. Equally, it can be useful for very short sales cycles where decisions are made quickly and you want to see which touchpoints have immediate effect for impulse conversion.

Limitations? – The influence of earlier touchpoints for creating brand awareness or intent won’t be accounted for.

U-Shaped (Position-Based) Attribution

A higher percentage of credit goes to the first and last touchpoints in the customer journey, while the remaining credit is distributed evenly among the other touchpoints. It's based on the idea that the first and last interactions play a more significant role to create new leads and drive conversions.

When to use it? – When you want to understand which channels generate most new leads, and which drive most conversions.

Limitations? – Again, the influence of in-between touchpoints will not be fully understood, and it requires data collection to cover all touchpoints within the journey.

W-Shaped Attribution

Equal credit goes to three key touchpoints: the first interaction, the lead creation event (e.g., form submission), and the final conversion event. The remaining credit is divided among the other touchpoints.

When to use it? – To highlight the key journey milestones from early journey, mid journey and late journey.

Limitations? – The influence of intermediary touchpoints is not fully understood

Data-Driven Attribution

Data-driven models use advanced analytics, machine learning, or artificial intelligence to analyze customer journey data and assign credit to various touchpoints based on their estimated influence on conversions. This can be done by off-the-shelf software solutions specifically designed for marketing attribution. There are two widely accepted data-driven models for attribution: Shapley value model, and Markov chain model.

When to use it? – For more accurate full-journey attribution across multiple touchpoints, providing greater flexibility for integrating multichannel data silos and more balanced weighting criteria.

Limitations? - An attribution software subscription is required, some of which can be costly. How the algorithms are coded and applied is sometimes proprietary information that is not made fully clear or adaptable. Data sources still need to be set up and connected, including offline touchpoints. It can take months of work to fully set up and implement a data-driven model covering all marketing channels.

Fully Customized Attribution Modeling

Custom-built models are also data-driven, but can include as much complexity and adaptability as you’d like. They allow for full visibility and control of the combined data sets, rules and weighting in use. It allows the layering of many rules and granular data analysis so you can deeply understand and drive growth to a level that isn’t available any other way.

When to use it? - For larger media budgets where small adjustments see the $ results impacted by millions.

Limitations? - Fully customized attribution requires a specialist to implement because of the complicated algorithms and calculations, along specialized statistical software and coding. Like off-the-shelf data-driven solutions, it can take several months to fully implement.

Choosing Data and Models to Match Goals

For multichannel marketing across the customer lifecycle, marketers will have several different goals and KPIs, so there isn’t a one-size fits all when it comes to using attribution modeling. 

For example, marketing goals will vary by campaign, but also business lifecycle stage. As a business matures and can afford to allocate more budget in demand creation, longer payback periods become feasible in the name of sustainable growth.

For the most accurate results, several rules and weighting criteria may need to be layered together. This requires an understanding of how to choose the most appropriate combination for each goal or data set.

Here are examples of how different goals could affect the overall approach for assessing attribution against KPIs:

Brand Awareness - The main objective is to build familiarity rather than immediate conversions, so attribution models that consider upper-funnel touchpoints using a longer lookback window are most helpful.

‍ Conversion Rate Optimization - Last touch attribution can provide insights into the most influential touchpoints in driving conversions for any journey stage.

Customer Acquisition – With a focus on identifying marketing efforts that drive most new customers, attribution models that emphasize first touch and last touch before sale conversion are a good fit.

Customer Retention and CLV - Attribution models that consider multiple touchpoints over the customer lifecycle are best. Time-based attribution models such as linear or time-decay attribution can help identify touchpoints that contribute to CLV over time.

Cost Efficiency - Attribution modeling using cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) data provides insights into the cost of acquiring customers through different channels.

Channel Optimization - Models like time-decay attribution or position-based attribution can help evaluate the effectiveness of various channels throughout the customer journey.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) - Attribution that uses revenue conversion data along with position-based or data-driven models are most suitable for calculating ROAS. These models can help isolate the impact of an advertising campaign against other touchpoints.

Customer Engagement - Attribution models fed with click data are most valuable. Models like engagement-based attribution or position-based attribution can help attribute credit to touchpoints that generate higher engagement levels.

Campaign or Event Success - Campaign-based attribution or event-based attribution allow marketers to filter conversion data specifically for the corresponding campaign (or event) identifier.

Demographic Targeting - Companies that target audience segments based on demographic data, such as geography, need to be able to filter customer event data for segment-based attribution.

Social Media Influence - Models using multi-touch attribution with social media weighting can help more accurately attribute conversions or engagements specifically to social channels.

Experimentation with attribution models will help you find the most suitable approach for each reporting use case.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Building Custom Attribution Models

A customized approach to attribution modeling allows hybrid data usage to give the most complete and accurate view of your marketing effectiveness. (Reminder - a hybrid approach combines multiple online and offline data sources, reducing the risk of misleading insights).

With customized approaches, you can get journey clarity at the individual level. For example, you could isolate a new customer to see that their first website visit was 9 months ago, and they were exposed to 37 ads across 5 platforms. You can also use heat map tools to confirm how channels work together in order to predict where prospects will go next, targeting content messaging accordingly.

Here are the 6 steps to create custom attribution reporting that will truly allow you to start optimizing your marketing investments:

Step 1 - Clearly Define Your Goals

Identify the specific objectives that your marketing efforts aim to achieve, such as increasing conversions, driving brand awareness, or improving customer retention. They can be different for each channel or audience segment. As discussed, these goals will guide the rule options for your attribution model.

For each goal, decide what you consider to be a conversion for the journey stages, and whether you will need to include post-view data in addition to post-click data. The type of conversion is important, so you’ll want to identify the conversion events to look at for each specific goal, including the lookback window that will be most relevant.

Attributing marketing activity to revenue is the ultimate aim – this will give you the most powerful information to improve ROI and drive growth.

Step 2 - Identify All Your Data Sources

Start with accurately and consistently collecting all the data you possibly can for all customer interactions across all your active channels and platforms. You’ll need to UTM tag every link that matters, and have tracking pixels installed for all active marketing platforms.

Here’s a quick checklist of data sources:

• Social media (organic)
• Paid media campaigns
• Email marketing
• CRM system and revenue data
• Customer feedback
• Call tracking
• Offline touchpoints
• Third-party data providers
• Self-reported attribution is most valuable when free text only.
• B2B buying decisions usually involve multiple people, so it’s better to track the customer journey at the account level instead by combining individual user data.

Step 3 - Bring in the Necessary Data Capabilities

Marketers need to have a deep understanding of marketing concepts and principles to be able to set up effective attribution models and make data-driven decisions.

You will need access to strong data analysis skills to be able to set up, manage and interpret the data for customized attribution models. Some technical knowledge is required to select, set up and configure attribution software tools, integrating them with existing data sources and systems. Knowledge of statistics is also necessary to understand, interpret and communicate the results of attribution models.

If in-house attribution data specialists are not in budget (or available), It can be more economical to use specialized data agencies to support you.

Step 4 - Chose + Activate Your Data Tools

Available resources are a big part of your consideration here. You’ll need to consider what is within means for your company in terms of ease of use, data integration capabilities and subscription cost.

There are 2 options here:

• Off-the-shelf attribution software

There are several software tools available that can help marketers combine marketing attribution data from different sources.

Tools with in-built machine learning and AI are better suited to help you analyze and weigh the contribution of different touchpoints and channels in your custom hybrid attribution model. This will give you more accurate insights.

Google Analytics (or Campaign Manager 360) are the best known off-the-shelf providers. However, data integration from other sources can be much more of a challenge with GA. Some other off-the-shelf options which offer better data integration capabilities include Northbeam, Wisely, Adobe Analytics and Improvado. 

However, the drawbacks are that you’re still handing over power to a platform that uses its own proprietary algorithms, not always allowing complete visibility or flexibility in how rules are applied or data is weighted.

• Build your own custom modeling

Depending on your resources, building custom modeling offers the greatest control and visibility of exactly how data is being weighted and analyzed for each scenario. 

If you’re doing this independently, you’ll need a data connector/warehouse solution to import and store your data from across your multichannel data sources. Custom coding and statistical tools can be utilized for advanced capabilities, allowing for layered algorithms and models tailored to any specific need or data set, including fully customized weighting criteria for data sets such as self-reported attribution.

The benefits over any other solution is the most accurate attribution possible, with completely granular insights depending on any criteria you’d like, allowing complete flexibility as variables such as channels, campaigns and customer or market dynamic shifts, and fully aligned for any goal you set.

With customized approaches, you can get journey clarity at the individual level. For example, you could isolate a new customer to see that their first website visit was 9 months ago, and they were exposed to 37 ads across 5 platforms. You can also use heat map tools to confirm how channels work together in order to predict where prospects will go next, targeting content messaging accordingly. 

Step 5 - Integrate Your Data Sources

Using your selected attribution tools, start collecting and integrating data from your multichannel sources.

This involves setting up data integrations between the attribution software and the data sources, whether through configuring API connections (recommended) or importing data files.

Automate the most relevant model-based analysis into dashboards, reporting on each of your specific marketing goals whether by revenue, channel, journey stage, customer segment, etc.

 Step 6 - Test and Iterate

Continuously test and refine your attribution model, adjusting the weights and methodologies as necessary. Monitor the performance of your model and make data-driven adjustments to improve its accuracy and effectiveness over time.

For example, data capture often relies on UTM tags, which requires links to be clicked before they are reported. This means some early-journey channels that rely on impressions rather than clicks (mainly social media and display advertising) will be underrepresented without qualitative self-reported data and weighting adjustments. Lift tests need to be run to help assess weighting criteria.

To test the influence of unclicked impressions, which is common for early-journey touchpoints and channels, you can use lift tests. Lift tests use test and control groups, only showing adverts to the test group. The difference in conversions between the two groups is known as lift, indicating the channel's real impact, and providing a helpful weighting metric. (Audience sample size and segment characteristics are important for statistically valid comparisons.)

Incrementality is a complementary metric to lift.

The Main Takeaways

Marketing attribution is critical to understand the impact of different touchpoints on customer behavior and conversions. 

While various simplistic attribution models exist, building customized data-driven models provides marketers with the greatest control and insight accuracy for their attribution analysis. This is essential to ramp up marketing spend with certainty of generating the required revenue results.

Custom data-driven attribution models offer several advantages over on-platform and Google Analytics reporting:

1. Report Against Goals - Marketers can tailor custom models to their specific business goals, customer behavior patterns, and available data sources. This level of customization enables a more accurate reflection of the complexities of the customer journey and the unique dynamics of the market.

‍ 2. Understand Touchpoint Influence Across Whole Journeys - Custom data-driven models empower marketers to attribute credit to touchpoints based on their true contribution to conversions, rather than relying on predefined rules or assumptions. And by integrating multiple (hybrid) data sources that include online and offline interactions, marketers can operate with a significant competitive advantage to drive growth forwards.

‍ 3. Allow Flexibility For Refinement - Custom models also provide the flexibility to adapt and refine the attribution process as the business evolves. You can more easily incorporate new data sources, update algorithms, and fine-tune attribution rules to ensure the model remains aligned with changing market dynamics and marketing activities.

Implementing a custom data-driven attribution model requires robust data integration and advanced analytical capabilities. However, the benefits of improved accuracy, granular insights, and informed decision-making make the investment worthwhile, potentially adding millions of dollars of additional annual growth. Particularly where larger advertising budgets are involved. 

By leveraging the power of custom attribution modeling, marketers can achieve industry-leading business outcomes.

If you need any support scoping, setting up or managing your attribution analytics, the team at Half Past Nine are here to help. We live and breathe marketing data! Just reach out.

‍ What To Read Next:

The new era of personalization explained; a guide to building profitable customer journeys with digital intent signals.

• Marketing Data Visualization To Fully Leverage Your Sources of Truth  
• Switching to First-Party Data: It’s Time to Stop ‘Renting’ and Start Owning Customer Data  

The Ultimate Attribution Playbook in 2023

Imagine a future where paid media actually adds real and welcomed value in people’s lives.

Where the information someone needs appears at exactly the right time to help them find what they want. Or while they’re browsing, learn about something that they weren’t aware could solve a pressing need. 

And in the process, brands spend less money putting content in front of people who don’t want or need it, radically driving up the profitability of media spend to deliver maximized revenue growth. 

This future is possible, even without third-party cookies. It will be built on a mindset shift, where the rigid parameters of the sales funnel are no longer paramount, and dynamic customer journeys become the north star. 

Where as marketers, we can cater to real people who don’t behave in linear ways, with empathetic understanding of what their goals might be and providing real value when it’s wanted.

If your goal is to improve customer engagement and fuel new revenue growth, this article is for you. Let’s explore how to build highly profitable customer journeys using digital intent signals.

Building Personalized Customer Journey Architecture

 Our job as marketers is to get the right touchpoints and messaging in the right place to progress our prospects from first introduction to converted and loyal customers.

 The basics of the customer journey remain the same under the tried-and-true framework of Awareness > Interest > Consideration > Decision > Retention > Advocacy.

 The 3 journey stages for customer acquisition are:

• Early Journey (creating awareness)
• Mid Journey (nurturing interest and consideration)
• Late journey (prompting action)

However, customers can move through buying stages in very different timelines. They may regularly loop back to previous stages, with pauses in-between. In our digital era, journeys can be incredibly fragmented across devices and platforms, and many journeys are completely unique. 

The typical customer journey today is actually a 3-dimensional process that can shift in any direction, rather than a straight line from A to B. They can resemble pyramids, diamonds, or even hourglasses, rather than a linear funnel.

A linear sales-funnel philosophy fits with the old approach of the stereotypical sales-led company. It’s not that a sales-led approach isn’t right for any business - but an overemphasis on sales goals can cause counterproductive tactics. For example, immediately jumping to harassing prospects with unwanted phone calls or emails, or running a generic sales ad to the widest audience possible and having to pay above average CPM/CPC due to poor engagement.

That’s why the most successful approach to fueling revenue growth is a dynamic and responsive customer journey framework, rather than a funnel approach. 

It allows for the individual to engage with relevant content while on their own unique path, maximizing the number of conversion routes and potentials at any one point in time. 

Naturally, the simplicity (or complexity) of a typical journey will vary greatly by the value and importance of the purchase being made. 

For ecommerce brands, a customer could leap from awareness to an impulse purchase in the space of 5 minutes in the right circumstances. Or a B2B sale could take many months from initial touchpoint. (Learn more about the B2B customer journey and buying process .)

 Regardless of journey timeframes, marketers building any type of customer journey architecture will still need to understand:

• What are the common challenges, needs, goals, and desires of each audience segment?
• What channels and platforms have best reach for the target audience at the specific journey stages?
• What corresponding messages will work best for each journey stage and platform?
• How do cross-channel and platform touchpoints work together to facilitate complete journeys for each segment?

Learning to Read Behavioral “Tells”

How can brands really get to grip with personalization across platforms?

Firstly by recognizing that the old way of building a sales funnel - assuming everyone who enters it will behave the same way - doesn’t reflect reality. We can’t assume that all people in a target market will be relevant leads, use the same platforms, automatically be ready to consider buying after showing interest, or that their consideration process will always follow the same path.

It’s the equivalent of walking up to a colleague in the middle of a phone call and expecting them to answer your question immediately. Or approaching someone perusing the vegan section of a store to offer them a promotional ham sample, then continuing to follow them around after they’ve said “No thank you”.

The need for observation, active listening and empathy applies as much to marketing and sales activity as it does anywhere else in life. 

That’s where intent data comes in. Intent data is the marketers means of observing what people are doing, before we “decide” if and how to approach them. 

Using intent data to target users will outperform targeting by demographics alone. Users who show intent are typically closer to making a buying decision, making them high-quality leads. By targeting these users, businesses can increase the likelihood of conversions to generate quicker and higher ROI.

 And the more digital and mobile customers have become, the more helpful intent data they generate for us. Of course, it still depends on a brand’s ability to manage and analyze the data… But with a solid data strategy, brands can tap into intent data to engineer hockey-stick moments of sustainable growth.

Introducing Digital Intent Signals

Just like in life offline, the key is to observe people’s “body language” within their digital world, building a picture of what might be happening for them in the moment. 

We call these digital actions “intent signals”. 

Being able to read them allows us to connect with only the most relevant people, using tailored messages that are most likely to resonate in that particular moment.

The majority of buyer journeys start with some type of intent. Although…, your ideal prospects might not always start out directly looking for your type of solution or product.

For example, a person Googles healthy meal recipes. Their goal is to improve their nutrition and lose weight. They aren’t looking for complete nutrition shakes. But if we were to reach the user with content highlighting the quick and easy benefits of complete nutrition shakes to improve health and lose weight, we’re far more likely to capture their attention and create intent to buy. 

These types of people with relevant but indirect intent may represent a large portion of your serviceable/addressable market.

Demand is much easier to create with the right message that talks to a pressing goal, at the exact time a person has that goal front of mind. It’s always the goal we need to understand and talk to.

And to be clear, intent signals aren’t KPIs or “vanity metrics”. We use intent signals to deduce intent, and then target or exclude people accordingly. Intent signals should actively inform real-time content targeting when used correctly.

Types of Digital Intent Signals 

The intent signals we can gather spans internal and external sources. It crosses organic and paid content, to owned and third-party platforms. ‍

• First-party Data – CRM, website, app and email data (learn more about first-party data )
• Second-party Data – Audience interaction on non-owned channels (E.g. Facebook)
• Third-party Data – Data Companies (E.g. Nielsen)

Some signals can be very overt. Especially at late journey stages, such as filling out a contact form or adding an item to the basket. Whereas other signals are less obvious, like running a Google search to learn about a related topic, or following a competitor’s social media account.

The type of intent signal can give you clues about a person's journey stage to build real-time customer segments. It’s helpful to identify which intent signals feature most prominently at each stage of your brand’s customer journey paths.

Split targeted signals up according to the campaign goals they fit with, whether that's demand capture (late journey) or demand creation (early journey) campaign goals.

For example, if a website visitor is behaving like a user that typically converts after another couple of weeks, you can target them with the right tone of nurturing content accordingly. But if you were targeting someone showing an interest in a competitor that hadn’t been included in your campaigns previously, you could show them content that introduces your brand with the comparative benefits of your brand/product/solution over the competitors. 

Here are the most common intent signals that can be tracked:

Content Engagement:

• Reading or viewing content related to specific products or services.
• Downloading or sharing content.
• Commenting on or liking blog posts or social media content.
• Subscribing to a blog, newsletter, or YouTube channel.

Search Behavior:

• Searching relevant keywords.
• Searching for reviews or comparisons related to a product or service.
• Searching for the brand name or specific products.

Social Media Engagement:

• Following or liking a brand's social media pages.
• Engaging with posts by liking, commenting, or sharing.
• Mentioning the brand in posts or comments.
• Clicking on social media ads or sponsored content

Ad Interaction:

• Clicking on digital ads.
• Video ads watch time.
• Clicking on retargeting ads

Event Participation:

• Registering for webinars or online events.
• Participating in trade shows or conferences.
• Engaging in live Q&A sessions or forums.

Website Interactions:

• Traffic source
• Visiting a website multiple times (yours or competitors).
• Spending a significant amount of time on the site or on specific pages.
• Checking product pages or service descriptions.
• Downloading content such as ebooks, whitepapers, or product brochures.
• Returning to the website after a period of inactivity.
• Using online tools, calculators, or configurators.
• Completing quizzes or self-assessments.

App Interactions:

• App downloads.
• App usage patterns and content engagement.
• Search queries.
• Abandoned carts.
• Registration or subscription.
• User reviews and ratings.

Shopping Behavior:

• Adding items to a shopping cart or wishlist.
• Repeatedly viewing a specific product or service.
• Starting but not completing a purchase process.
• Checking the availability or location of a product.

Email Engagement:

• Opening marketing emails.
• Clicking on email links.
• Responding to surveys or filling out forms.
• Forwarding emails.

Customer Support Interaction:

• Contacting sales.
• Using live chat or chatbots.
• Requesting a demo, quote, or more information.

How to Use Digital Intent Signals to Inform Customer Journey Architecture

The process for incorporating intent signals into real-time, personalized media targeting requires the following steps:

Data Collection and Analysis

The first step is to collect data on your audience’s behavior across your channels, including offline touchpoints where possible.

This data needs to be analyzed to identify patterns and understand what specific actions might indicate a user's intent to purchase or engage further. What are the main actions taken within journeys, and what conversion goals can help you qualify people at each stage?

Data tools such as connectors and warehouses will help you merge data from multichannel sources for more holistic understanding and analytical power, whether historical or predictive.

A note here on data collection. User tracking and targeting across multiple advertising platforms can be achieved through more than one method. This means that what a user does on one platform can be used to target them appropriately with relevant content on another platform via:

• ‍ ‍ First-party Data - Advertisers can import their customer segments into an advertising platform using Customer Match targeting. This matches identifying information that customers have shared with the advertiser, such as an email address, to target specific ads to those customers, and also other people that behave like them (look-alike audiences). This allows advertisers to narrow in on the highest intent/value customers.
• Cross-device Targeting - Also known as people-based marketing, this approach uses Device IDs or User IDs to anonymize user data while still allowing people to be targeted individually (without cookies), so advertisers can track and target a user across multiple devices. Pixels are used for this type of targeting.

A combination of these data collection methods will give brands the most precise targeting power and best results. 

Segmentation ‍

Once you've identified key intent signals and conversion goals, you can segment your audience based on their behavior.

For instance, users who have abandoned their shopping carts might be in one segment, while users who have spent a significant amount of time on product pages might be in another.

Personalization

‍ Each segment will have different needs and will be at different stages of the customer journey.

Create personalized paid and organic content for each segment, addressing their specific goals or challenges, guiding them towards the next step in their journey with defined conversion goals for qualifying. Content that matches keywords and the audience’s language directly performs best.

Leverage Media Technology + Automation Tools ‍

There are a number of built in AI and automation tools within the bigger ad platforms for marketers to take advantage of.

Setting campaign goals and conversion goals allow platforms like Google and Meta to automatically optimize targeting to achieve them. Dynamic ads can use AI and machine learning to improve their targeting and optimize ad copy tailored exactly to user search terms. And machine learning already drives real-time programmatic buying, where advertising inventory is bought and sold via an instantaneous auction.

There are various independent solutions that can be used for paid media targeting, such Blueshift and 6sense, including intent data for account-based marketing (ABM) needs.

Testing and Optimization

‍ It's important to continually split test and optimize your campaign creatives and targeting based on performance.

Look at which intent signals are most predictive of conversion, and which types of content are most effective for each segment. Use this information to refine your targeting and personalization strategies. How you use attribution modeling is also a crucial part of your media optimization process.

Recognizing and leveraging customer intent signals in the creation of personalized customer journeys is not just a valuable strategy - it's a business imperative for advertisers seeking to drive revenue growth. 

As the advertising landscape becomes increasingly digital and competitive, the brands that will rise to the top are those that truly understand their customers, meeting them where they are and providing what they need at every stage of the journey. By harnessing the power of customer intent signals, marketers can enhance customer experiences, build stronger relationships, and ultimately, achieve sustainable revenue growth. 

This shift towards a more customer-centric approach rooted in data insights is not just the future of advertising; it is the present. 

If your team needs support gathering, analyzing and incorporating intent signal data into your media strategy, Half Past Nine would love nothing more than to help you realize their transformative power on your bottom line. It’s what we get out of bed for! Just get in touch.

What to Read Next

• Flipping Your Brand Into a Media Company: Content Marketing That Fuels Growth  
• Upgrade Your Online Advertising Strategy: The Best Advertising Platforms in 2023  
• Does AI Copywriting Work? We Tested ChatGPT Against 6 of The Best AI Writing Softwares So You Don't Have To  

B2B Buying Journey: 5 Challenges & 5 Best Practices in 2024

Cem is the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per Similarweb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work focuses on how enterprises can leverage new technologies in AI, automation, cybersecurity(including network security, application security), data collection including web data collection and process intelligence.

Today, the B2B buying journey is digitized . A McKinsey report indicates that 65% of B2B companies across different industries were transacting online in 2022. 1

Consequently, customers now spend only 5% of their time on sales representatives. 2 So, businesses require newer, creative, effective ways of sales and marketing for adapting to changing customer demands and expectations.

In this article, we will investigate the modern B2B buying journey in its various aspects like stages and challenges. To help businesses in the process, we will list 5 best practices for it.

What is a B2B buying journey?

A B2B buyer journey is a process the prospective buyers goes through before making a purchase, including: 

• researching
• evaluating 
• selecting a product or service

B2B buyers need to be informed about the product in order to understand why it’s a better fit for their needs than any competitor’s offering. Companies must understand how B2B customers research and make decisions, so they can properly direct their marketing and sales efforts to generate more high-value leads and conversions.

B2B marketing teams should gain insights into current market trends as well as customer preferences by understanding their B2B buyers journey. 

What are the stages of a B2B buying journey?

In a traditional buyer’s journey.

The traditional buyer’s journey refers to the linear process of a customer becoming aware of a product or service, evaluating options, and making a purchase. We can list the steps in a traditional buyer’s journey decision-making process as:

1. Identifying the business need or problem

The customer becomes aware of a problem or need that they have and begins to search for information and solutions.

2. Exploring a solution 

The customer conducts research via various ways (online reviews, referrals, websites) to gather information about potential products or services that can meet their needs.

3. Specifying the scope 

The customer evaluates the options they have researched and narrows down their choices. They may compare features and pricing, as well as consider factors such as brand reputation and customer service.

5. Deciding the supplier and finalizing the purchase. 

The customer makes a final decision and purchases the product or service. This can be done online, over the phone, or in person.

6. Evaluating the product/service after the experience. 

After using the product or service, the customer evaluates their satisfaction and may provide feedback or leave a review.

In the modern buyer’s journey

The new buyer’s journey, also known as the modern buyer’s journey, recognizes that the process of making a purchase is no longer linear (see Figure 1). 

Figure 1. The illustration of a modern B2B buying journey

Source: CEB analysis

Customers are more likely to engage with a brand before they have a specific need, and they may research and evaluate options multiple times before making a final decision. Additionally, new technologies and channels have made it easier for customers to research and compare products and services, making the process more complex.

How is B2B buying journey different from B2C buying journey?

The biggest difference between these two buying journeys is their decision makers. Decision makers in B2C buying journey are generally individual customers while it is entire teams or departments of a business in B2B. Typically, a B2B buying group consists of 6-10 decision makers who need an agreement. 3

This fundamental difference leads to others such as:

• Buying criteria : B2B buying decisions often involve a larger number of criteria such as technical specifications, scalability, and integration with existing systems. B2C buying decisions are more likely to be based on personal preferences and emotions.
• Longer sales cycles : B2B sales cycles are often longer and involve multiple meetings and presentations. B2C sales cycles are shorter, and the purchase decision is often made quickly.
• Sales teams : B2B sales teams often include specialists such as engineers or product managers, who can provide technical support and advice. B2C sales teams are more likely to be focused on customer service and building relationships.
• Marketing and sales approaches : B2B companies often use account-based marketing (ABM) and sales strategies, targeting specific accounts and decision-makers. B2C companies typically use mass-marketing and sales strategies, targeting a broader audience.
• Distribution channels : B2B products and services are often sold through intermediaries such as wholesalers or distributors, while B2C products and services are sold directly to consumers through retail outlets or e-commerce platforms.
• Budget and contract : B2B transactions often involve larger budgets and longer-term contracts. B2C transactions are usually smaller and involve shorter-term or one-time agreements.

Top 5 challenges in the B2B buying journey

1. complexity of the journey.

As we mentioned, B2B buying decisions often involve multiple decision-makers from different departments and levels of the organization. Also, as emerging technologies, products, and services enter the market, buying groups now have a greater variety of solutions to choose from.

These circumstances make it harder for customers to complete their purchases easily. The Gartner report revealed that 77% of consumers found their most recent purchase to be intricate and overwhelming. 4

2. Non-linearity of the journey

The non-linearity in a B2B buying process refers to the fact that the process of making a purchase is highly unpredictable.

As we discussed, traditional B2B buying journeys were more predictable and linear, with a clear set of stages that a customer would go through before making a purchase. However, now with the rise of digital channels and technologies, customers have more access to information and can research and evaluate options multiple times before making a final decision (see Figure 1 again). 

On the other hand, the rise of digital channels and technologies also enables other vendors to get in touch with the same customer. This can lead to indecisiveness about the final decision and render the process non-linear.

This nonlinearity can make it difficult for B2B companies to predict when a customer is ready to make a purchase, and which stage of the buying journey they are in. This can make it challenging to:

• develop an effective marketing and sales strategy
• measure the success of these efforts
• identify the decision-makers and influencers within a buying organization and to engage with them effectively

3. Need for personalized and authentic service due to excessive access to information

More than a quarter of the customers in the B2B market conduct independent research online. 5 Although it increases buyer awareness, buyers’ excessive independent access to information can challenge the B2B buying journey for both companies and buyers:

• For companies, it can make it more difficult for sales teams to differentiate their products or services and to effectively communicate their value proposition to potential customers. Customers may already have a good understanding of the market and may be less likely to engage with sales representatives.
• For buyers, it can lead to information overload and make it more difficult to compare and evaluate different options. With so much information available, it can be challenging to determine which sources are credible and reliable.
• For both, it can lead to increased pressure on price as buyers may have more knowledge about the market and be better equipped to negotiate. Additionally, it can also lead to an increase in the number of stakeholders involved in the buying process, making it harder to reach a consensus on purchase decisions.

Excessive information also leads to less personalized and authentic content from the customer’s perspective. Besides the availability of vast amounts of knowledge about their needs, customers desire adjustments that address the complexity of B2B buying, like obtaining a personalized account with modified catalogs and exclusive pricing along with consideration to product availability.

E-commerce is on the rise in the B2B market. 6 Therefore, businesses must embrace an intelligent search-driven experience for their customers if they wish to be successful.

As customers become more informed, they have higher expectations for the level of service they receive. There is a need for companies to stand out by providing a more tailored and customer-centric experience.

Also, personalization and authenticity are required to build trust and credibility with customers, which is particularly important in the B2B space where the buying process is complex.

4. Lack of personal interaction due to the decreasing in-person sales process

According to research, when B2B buyers are considering a purchase, they spend only 17% of that time interacting with potential suppliers. 7 If multiple vendors are being evaluated for the same product or service, then each sales rep can expect to get no more than 5-6% of the buyer’s attention during this process.

This means that sales reps have less influential effect on the customers and new digital channels are required for attracting potential buyers.

5. Involvement of many stakeholders

The stakeholders in a buying journey can be:

• Recommenders/influencers
• Decision makers
• Financial representatives

With such complexity, it’s essential to stay organized and manage the back office with precision.

Top 5 B2B buying journey best practices for vendors

1. simplify the buying process.

There are several ways that companies can simplify the complex buying process for customers in the B2B market:

• Define value proposition of the products : Define and communicate the value proposition of your products or services clearly and concisely. This will help customers understand the benefits of the products or services and make it easier to compare different options.
• Streamline the buying process : This can be achieved by automating certain tasks, such as order processing and tracking, and by providing customers with clear and easy-to-use online portals for making purchases.
• Offer helpful information : Provide customers with easy access to relevant and accurate information about products or services. This can include detailed product specifications, case studies, and testimonials.
• Enable multiple options for purchase : Provide customers with multiple options for making a purchase, such as online, phone, or in-person. This will help to accommodate the different preferences and needs of customers.
• Leverage new technology : Use technology such as AI-powered chatbot to provide customers with instant access to information and assistance during the buying process. Although 87% of consumers prefer human interaction, chatbots increase sales by 67%.

2. Adopt a customer-centric marketing strategy

To overcome the nonlinearity challenge, B2B companies can adopt a more customer-centric approach that focuses on understanding the customer’s needs and goals, as well as their buying journey. 

• By using digital tools such as marketing automation and analytics, B2B companies can track and measure the customer’s interactions with the brand and adapt their messaging and engagement strategy accordingly. 
• B2B companies can use account-based marketing (ABM) strategies to target specific accounts and decision-makers, and personalize their messaging and offers.

3. Provide useful & specific information for buyer enablement

For an effective buyer enablement, the buying process should be:

• Relevant to the customer’s specific problems in the journey 
• Easy for the customer to understand and engage with quickly and effectively
• Useful for the customer in accomplishing the intended purchase process
• Credible and backed up by data and facts 

To ensure the best customer experience, buyer enablement should be socially and emotionally resonant while exuding confidence in your brand’s distinctiveness. Doing this will guarantee a positive outcome for both customers and suppliers alike. 

To increase buyer enablement, companies can:

• Conduct customer research : Understand the specific needs and pain points of the target audience by conducting surveys, focus groups, and interviews with current and potential customers.
• Create buyer personas : Use the information gathered from customer research and data analysis to create detailed buyer personas that represent the target audience. These personas can be used to guide the creation of content and resources that meet the specific needs of different segments of the target audience.
• Use customer testimonials : Include customer testimonials and case studies in the content and resources, as they provide valuable insight into how the products or services have helped other customers solve specific problems.

4. Provide engaging and helpful digital information channels for your product

According to research, during the later stages of their purchasing journey, 83% of consumers access one or more digital information channels after the initial contact with sales (see Figure 3). 8 As buyers are increasingly leaning on digital information platforms in their buying journeys, companies should catch up with this need.

Figure 2. Buyer use of digital channels throughout buying process

Source: CEB 2017 Digital B2B Buyer Survey

Companies can provide engaging and helpful digital information channels for their products to attract buyers by implementing these strategies:

• Use a variety of digital channels : Create a presence on multiple digital channels, such as a company website, social media, and email marketing, to reach a wider audience. This can also help to improve visibility and increase the chances of attracting new customers.
• Create a user-friendly website : Make the company website easy to navigate, with clear calls-to-action and well-organized product pages. Use visuals, such as images and videos, to showcase the products and their features.
• Create engaging and informative content : Use a variety of content formats, such as blog posts, videos, and infographics, to provide valuable information about the products and their features.
• Make use of social media : Use social media to engage with potential customers, share content and updates, and build brand awareness.

5. Centralize information exchange with the stakeholders

• Providing self-service options can help ensure buyers acquire the information they seek quickly and easily
• Enabling easy access to key lead and customer-related data can help your sales and marketing teams work more consistently.

If you have questions or need help regarding B2B buying journey, feel free to reach out:

External Links

• 1. “Busting the five biggest B2B e-commerce myths.” McKinsey , 26 January 2022, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/busting-the-five-biggest-b2b-e-commerce-myths. Accessed 13 January 2023.
• 2. “The B2B Buying Journey | Sales Insights.” Gartner , https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey. Accessed 13 January 2023.
• 3. “Win More B2B Sales Deals.” Gartner , https://www.gartner.com/en/confirmation/publications/win-more-b2b-sales-deals. Accessed 13 January 2023.
• 4. Supra note 2.
• 5. Supra note 2.
• 6. “B2B E-Commerce.” Statista , https://www.statista.com/markets/413/topic/458/b2b-e-commerce/#statistic1. Accessed 13 January 2023.
• 7. Supra note 2.
• 8. “CEB Digital B2B Survey.” CEBglobal , https://www.cebglobal.com/content/dam/cebglobal/us/EN/best-practices-decision-support/marketing-communications/pdfs/mlc-infographic-b2b-digital-journey.pdf. Accessed 13 January 2023.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Cem's hands-on enterprise software experience contributes to the insights that he generates. He oversees AIMultiple benchmarks in dynamic application security testing (DAST), data loss prevention (DLP), email marketing and web data collection. Other AIMultiple industry analysts and tech team support Cem in designing, running and evaluating benchmarks.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

AIMultiple.com Traffic Analytics, Ranking & Audience , Similarweb. Why Microsoft, IBM, and Google Are Ramping up Efforts on AI Ethics , Business Insider. Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI to pursue artificial intelligence that’s smarter than we are , Washington Post. Data management barriers to AI success , Deloitte. Empowering AI Leadership: AI C-Suite Toolkit , World Economic Forum. Science, Research and Innovation Performance of the EU , European Commission. Public-sector digitization: The trillion-dollar challenge , McKinsey & Company. Hypatos gets $11.8M for a deep learning approach to document processing , TechCrunch. We got an exclusive look at the pitch deck AI startup Hypatos used to raise $11 million , Business Insider.

To stay up-to-date on B2B tech & accelerate your enterprise:

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Building a Better B2B Buyer’s Journey

Four key takeaways from Sean Murray’s interview with Crownpeak CMO at the 2021 Gartner® Marketing Symposium/Xpo™

At the recent Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo™ , Crownpeak CMO Lacey Ford interviewed Sean Murray, Chief Revenue Officer for Greenhouse, a recruiting software company to learn about the evolving role of the salesperson, and what CMOs need to learn from sales to succeed in new buy cycles. This lively discussion hit on several key points that are highly relevant for any B2B marketing organization that desires to remain agile, respond quickly to changing customer demands and win against the competition.

According to the Gartner for Sales eBook, The Future of Sales: Transformational Strategies for B2B Sales Organizations [1]:

• “33% of all buyers desire a seller-free experience.
• Gartner expects that by 2025 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.”

“The biggest change is buyer enablement,” said Murray. “Buyers today are more informed than they ever have been, and the information they’re absorbing is really good information.”

He says that CMOs are supplying buyers with good information. Yet having all of this great information at their fingertips is resulting in buyers spending a lot less time interacting with B2B sellers.

When asked for an example of this, Murray shared a recent experience from Greenhouse’s own B2B sales.

“This was a several hundred-thousand-dollar opportunity,” he explained. “The buyer contacted us and said ‘I have these five questions for you. I don’t need a demo, I need answers to those five questions, and I’ll let you know if we want to move forward.’”

Despite attempts to bring the buyer around to talking more, the buyer insisted on receiving answers to those five questions before they would even consider interacting with sales. Murray said this is the sense they’re feeling from other sales leaders all over the world – B2B buyers are not engaging with sales like they used to.

According to the Gartner for Sales report, 5 Ways the Future of B2B Buying Will Rewrite the Rules of Effective Selling [2]:

“Relatedly, B2B buyers report spending exceedingly little time with sales reps. Only 17% of the total purchase journey is spent in such interactions (see Figure 2). Considering the average deal involves multiple suppliers, any given sales rep has roughly 5% of a customer’s total purchase time. Sales leaders lament decreased customer access, but it should come as little surprise considering the improved quality (not to mention quantity) of information available through more objective digital channels. Customers perceive little distinct value (beyond their own learning) from sales rep interactions, resulting in only necessary access being granted.”

“Perhaps most troubling is a pronounced generational shift in skepticism of sales reps. Our research finds millennial business customers over twice as skeptical as baby boomers (see Figure 3), with 44% of millennials preferring no sales rep interaction in a B2B purchase setting.”

What can be done?

Some fundamental shifts need to happen in order for marketing and sales to align and make the most of the trend toward digital B2B selling.

Forge tighter bonds between sales and marketing . For sales pros, that means the first meeting each week should be with the CMO to align on priorities for the week. Strategically, heads of sales need to think like marketers and heads of marketing need to think like sales.

Sales and marketing must continue to engage throughout the entire customer journey . Sales has always needed traditional branding and demand generation support from marketing. What’s different now is it’s no longer just a handoff from marketing to sales. When buyers go around sales people, seeking their information digitally, marketers need to follow the customer deeper into the funnel, providing engaging content that drives them toward the sale.

Follow the digital breadcrumbs . A silver lining: as buyers are shopping more online, they leave trails of digital data that helps organizations understand where and how they are shopping. This information can be crucial both in designing better buyer’s journeys and in helping sales to tee-up the right engagement at the right time.

“I need marketing to be deeper into the sales process,” said Murray. “If buyers are 70% through their own sales cycle before they engage a potential partner, as sales I need more help to engage.”

Four tips for CMOs to succeed in new buy cycles

Murray shared his top four tips to help B2B marketing organizations develop engaging digital experiences from a sales perspective.

• 1. Personalize the buyer’s journey . This will help you differentiate from competitors who have a one-size-fits-all marketing approach.
• 2. Create urgency at all times . Sometimes your biggest competitor is change management.
• 3. Reframe the problem . Buyers may think they know what they’re looking for, but you always have an opportunity to reframe the problem the buyer needs to solve.
• 4. Always be closing . Here’s where marketing needs to think like a sales pro – constantly re-evaluating how they can best support the digital buyer’s journey using data-driven personalization across multiple channels and leaning in when customers need additional support for making their case to their IT or legal departments.

“When we typically get toward the end of the sales process, marketers can lean in,” said Murray. “Messaging for those other parties can help close the deal.”

The digital buyer’s journey requires a multichannel approach, and sellers need to be where the buyers are, digitally speaking. That means looking at their digital experiences not only through the website, but also through social media, third party analysts like Gartner and online customer reviews.

What’s one thing CMOs should go and do today?

Murray’s advice: Put more money behind marketing.

According to Gartner in The State of Marketing Budgets 2021: Insights From Gartner’s Annual CMO Spend Survey [3]

“Marketing budgets as a proportion of company revenue have fallen from 11% in 2020 to 6.4% in 2021, their lowest point in the history of Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey.”

Yet, enterprises need marketers now more than ever, because the digital buyer experience is more important than ever.

“We need the right people, the right platforms, and the right content for creating digital experiences,” said Murray. "If 80% are digital by 2025, we need more money for marketing, because buyer experience and enablement will win today and in the long term.”

Watch the full interview →

GARTNER is registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

[1] Gartner, The Future of Sales: Transformational Strategies for B2B Sales Organizations, Gartner for Sales, Published 2020.[https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/trends/future-of-sales].

[2] Gartner, 5 Ways the Future of B2B Buying Will Rewrite the Rules of Effective Selling, Brent Adamson and Nick Toman, Published 04 August 2020.

[3] Gartner, The State of Marketing Budgets 2021: Insights From Gartner’s Annual CMO Spend Survey, Gartner for Marketers, Published 2021. [https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/research/annual-cmo-spend-survey-research-sem-cmomarketing].

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What Is the Buyer’s Journey? (And Why It Matters)

• July 7, 2021

The buyer’s journey seems simple: awareness, consideration, decision.

But implementing these steps requires a lot of planning and coordination. We’re diving into how and where to get started by sharing a few different frameworks so you can map your buyer journey to your sales process.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s journey is an engagement model that takes a customer through three stages of evaluation before making a purchase. This framework asks sales and marketing to work together to provide buyers with the content they need at the right time in the sales process.

What are the three stages of the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s journey typically includes three stages that a buyer cycles through before making a purchase: awareness, consideration, and decision. Let’s talk about each in more detail to understand their purpose in the buyer’s journey.

The first stage aligns with the top of the sales funnel. The buyer knows they have a pain, but they aren’t sure what solutions are out there. The awareness stage is when your marketers should introduce your product, service, or company.

The content they see must help them understand what you do and how you can help them with their problem. Avoid talking about your brand or your products at this stage.

Consideration

The buyer has done research to figure out what solutions are available for their pain and goals. They have narrowed down a list of vendors that should fit their needs and are ready to engage with a sales rep.

This is the middle of the sales funnel, and your content needs to focus on persuasion and a commitment from your buyer to pursue a full evaluation. The type of content you provide can be much more product-based, but with a focus on the ROI and how your product can increase revenue.

The buyer has reached the bottom of the sales funnel and has chosen a vendor based on features, pricing, set up costs, and customer support. But the journey doesn’t end here. You still need to demonstrate competence and help them give you the formal “yes.” Your content should help them feel ready to deploy and includes case studies, product webinars, and technical guides.

Why is mapping a buyer journey important?

Buyers are not conducting evaluations in face-to-face meetings anymore. The content that you have available needs to capture the attention of digital buyers in every stage of the journey.

Since 72% of buyers will turn to google to search for solutions during the awareness stage, it’s important to have thought leadership and product content ready. Vendor comparison sites like G2 allow buyers to see how your product compares to your competitors; they’ll know if your company starts dropping the ball in features, support, or implementation.

Today’s decision-makers prefer to research and make the decision to purchase remotely . In fact, 99% of B2B buyers claim they would make a purchase entirely through a digital self-service model and are comfortable spending $50K or more.

The buyer’s journey also helps sales reps be more prepared, confident, and successful. Reps can expect higher quality engagement from their prospects and faster deal cycles. By providing customers with a better prospecting experience, reps can build trust with their knowledge and insights.

Are there buyer journey models?

There are a number of models out there so we’ve recommended three that are the best fit for B2B SaaS sales. These models will give you a framework to start mapping your customer journey to your sales process.

• Inbound Buyer’s Journey Model: Suitable for companies with straightforward product evaluations and a bigger focus on new business, rather than growing existing customer spend.
• Circular Model: Appropriate for companies with account-based sales and subscription models that must nurture a customer through their renewal date and beyond.
• Gartner’s B2B Buying Journey Model: Applicable for companies that have complex, big ticket evaluations with multiple decision-makers and long sales cycles.

Inbound Buyer’s Journey Model

HubSpot and IMPACT teamed up to create the inbound buyer’s journey that relies on the three stages of awareness, consideration, and decision. This model is a very straightforward approach to managing content in the buyer journey, especially if your business is focused primarily on acquiring new customers.

Your inbound sales reps need awareness content that helps establish them as trusted advisors without just promoting your brand. Your consideration and decision content then gives reps the tools to showcase their technical competence and their ability to understand their customers needs.

The types of content for each stage include:

• Thought leadership articles
• Educational blog posts
• Whitepapers, infographics, and ebooks
• Guides and checklists
• Explainer videos
• Industry reports

Consideration:

• Technical articles
• Competitor comparisons
• Live and recorded how-to webinars
• Product feature videos
• Success stories, case studies, testimonials
• Product and pricing comparison documents
• Live, personalized demos
• Free trials

Circular model

Anthony Christie created the circular model that can work particularly well for B2B SaaS companies with high-value products or a subscription model. If your company has an account-based selling and marketing plan, the circular model can create consistency in your interactions – even if you have decision-makers who are in different stages of the evaluation.

The six stages of a buyer’s journey can be revisited when your customer wants to purchase additional products or increase your solution’s footprint in their organization.

Most importantly, the model makes it clear what matters the most: that the customer should expect empathy, accountability, and proactive support from your whole revenue team including sales, marketing, client support, and even finance.

Gartner’s B2B Buying Journey Model

Gartner’s buyer journey involves a lot of looping back to earlier stages or content. This is a realistic map for high-value, complex products – especially if you have an enterprise customer. There is no linear path if you have a lot of decision-makers at a target account with shifting priorities, leadership changes, and unexpected changes to requirements.

There are four stages in the Gartner model:

• Problem identification. The buyer(s) know they need to do something about their problem
• Solution exploration. The buyers put out feelers to see what kind of solutions are available in the market
• Requirements building. the buyers works with internal end-users to make sure that the strategic requirements are aligned with tactical needs
• Supplier selection. The buyers validate that the vendor they choose can provide what they need

How to tie your sales process to buyer journey

Once you have decided which model works best for your business, it’s time to map the sales process to the buyer journey. The sales funnel, marketing funnel, and your buyer journey are intertwined. The content you deliver to customers needs to provide value for marketers filling the funnel, and sales reps closing deals and expanding their accounts.

ICPs and personas

Before you can deploy the perfect buyer journey, you need to identify your ideal customer profile. Your ICP is the dream customer for your product and services and has the potential to consistently increase spend over time. So if you’re creating a lot of content but aren’t receiving quality leads, you’ve targeted the wrong people and are spinning your wheels.

The ICP helps you define and drive the right strategy at the start of your buyer journey. This is the company that will most likely purchase your product. To determine who your ICP is, use these key attributes :

• Annual revenue
• Employee size
• Current subscriptions

The next step on your way to deploying a successful buyer journey is to identify buyer personas. These are the individuals at your ICP accounts that will be doing the buying. Creating these quasi-fictional characters helps sales reps relate to their buyers as real humans and informs your content creation strategy.

Your personas showcase the details about your potential client’s business interest, demographics, and even likes or dislikes. To determine which personas your reps and marketers need to target, use market research relevant to your industry – or even better – analyze the data you’ve collected about your existing customer base to identify why they were such a great fit.

Content creation

Now that you have your ICP and your buyer personas ready, you can start mapping your content to the buyer journey. When building your content strategy, use the data and tribal knowledge collected by sales and marketing to create content that resonates with your buyer.

Our webinar on How to Connect Your Sales Process and Buyer’s Journey provides five steps to get started:

• Determine what awareness, consideration, and decision mean for your sales funnel. Use your buyer personas to flesh out your answers.
• Identify where your product can add value. Again, use your personas to create content that is helpful for all of your key decision-makers.
• Create content and resources for awareness, consideration, and decision stages. Remember you need to deliver educational content, technical how-tos, and social proof, respectively.
• Validate that your content is hitting the mark by testing and modifying your content. Your high-performing reps can give you insight into the success of each piece of content.
• Don’t just give reps dozens or hundreds of content pieces and hope it works out. Train them on which content is most effective in each stage.

Measure your success

Don’t forget to measure the success of your buyer journey. These stats can help you tweak content if or when it isn’t working anymore. Key metrics to track the effectiveness of your content strategy include:

• Number of demos held
• Opportunity age (how long it takes to close a deal)
• Account revenue and retention
• Lifetime value of customer

Creating a smooth experience for your buyer is a perfect opportunity to use empathy, build trust, and show value. Learn more about creating an effective content strategy by aligning your personas and utilizing all marketing channels.

Colin Campbell

More like this..., the stories behind how startup co-founders met, gtm 95: going to market in a single platform ecosystem (hubspot): insights from arrows’ journey with daniel zarick, how to handle an unexpected growth explosion in saas, join us today, insider access to the gtm network and the best minds in tech., you may also like....

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The Ultimate Guide to the B2B Buyer’s Journey

What's on this page:.

The B2B buyer’s journey has changed.

Gone are the days of traditional sales tactics; buyers are more clued-up on products and services than ever before.

This presents a challenge to B2B salespeople and marketers. How can they guide prospects from awareness to purchase when so much information is freely available and influences decision-making?

In this blog, we’ll decode the modern B2B buying journey and show you how to redefine your sales and marketing strategies for this new era.

Scroll 👇 for the ultimate guide to the B2B buyer’s journey.

What is the B2B buyer’s journey?

HubSpot de fines it a s:

"The process buyers go through to become aware of, evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service."

In a nutshell, it’s a series of steps a buyer takes from first recognising they have a problem to ultimately selecting a solution that best solves that problem.

We’ll explore the different stages of the buyer’s journey later, but first...

Why is the buyer’s journey important in B2B?

When a buyer turns up for a product demo, they already know lots about it. They’ve already done their research, Googling your brand and comparing it to the competition.

This is backed up by the statistics. According to Sirius Decisions , 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally!

What does this plethora of online info mean for sales?

It means that it’s very easy for buyers to collect information independently. And that means your outbound sales reps have fewer opportunities to influence their decisions.

In fact, Gartner research finds that when B2B buyers are considering a purchase‚ they spend only 17% of that time meeting with potential suppliers.

And if you consider that they compare multiple suppliers, the amount of time they spend with your sales rep may only be 5-6%.

SaaS sales leaders often attribute this lack of customer access to a failure on the part of sellers to deliver enough value in their outreach and demos.

However, the problem is rooted far less in reps’ struggles to sell and far more in customers’ struggles to buy.

The typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves 6-10 decision-makers; each armed with 4-5 pieces of information they’ve gathered independently.

At the same time, there are more options and solutions for buying groups to consider; new B2B technologies , products and services emerge every year.

These factors make it increasingly difficult for customers to make purchases. In fact, more than three-quarters of the customers Gartner surveyed described their purchase as very complex or difficult.

Understanding the B2B buyer’s journey is crucial to solving this problem and making your B2B sales process smoother.

Once your reps know who your buyers are, what they’re looking for and where they’re looking, they’ll be able to...

• Improve the buyer experience.
• Build value for your product or service.
• Increase their win rates.
• Move prospects quickly through the sales funnel .

How does the B2B buyer’s journey differ from B2C?

1. you sell to teams, not individuals.

A B2B buyer’s journey is unique in that, a B2B customer is often more than a single customer.

In B2B, you’re selling to an entire team or group of people, all of whom might have input in the purchase decision.

According to a study, 79% of B2B buyers said there are 1-6 people involved in the purchase process. Hence, the decision-making process is longer and more tedious.

This is a clear contrast with the B2C buyer’s journey, where the buyer is often an individual and the purchase decision is faster.

2. The deal sizes are bigger

B2B transactions are typically larger, both in terms of deal/order size and total revenue per customer.

These deals can take a lot longer to develop. But when they do, you often make a lot more money on each sale.

This also means that, as compared to B2C companies, you can be more choosy and afford to pay more to acquire each B2B lead . You want to make sure they’ll be the right fit for your business.

3. The sales cycles are longer

Most B2C purchases throughout the course of a year fall in the ~$100 range. And these can often be made on impulse without too much thought, research, or in-depth analysis.

It’s the complete opposite in B2B.

When you sell a large deal to a big team of decision-makers , the inevitable result is longer sales cycles. The average B2B buying cycle is 6-12 months; this is much longer than B2C.

That means you need a much slower ramp from attention to interest to purchase. You have to break down your B2B marketing and sales strategy into bite-sized chunks that can be consumed over the course of a few months.

The trick is to provide upfront education and value that convinces all the decision-makers to get on board. In other words, you need a logical progression of micro-conversions to seamlessly lead people from one step to another.

4. B2B is more emotional

On the surface, it seems like B2B decision-making would be more logical, while B2C is more emotional. However, that’s not the case.

According to this study conducted by Google, Gartner and Motista , on average, B2B customers are significantly more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers than B2C customers.

And according to Bain, B2B offerings provide their customers with 40 distinct kinds of value . Some of these revolve around logical decisions (does it offer the features I need? Do I have the budget for it?).

But after that, it becomes more about who’s a better ‘fit’ than which one provides the lowest price. This represents an emotional decision on the part of the B2B buyer.

What are the stages of the B2B buyer’s journey?

From a high-level perspective, the B2B buyer’s journey consists of a three-step process:

• Awareness Stage: the buyer realises they have a problem.
• Consideration Stage: the buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it.
• Decision Stage: the buyer chooses a solution.

When we compare the buyer’s journey vs the traditional sales process, it’s easy to spot where many sales teams fall down.

Too many reps focus on automation and delivering generic, product-based messaging. Instead, they should learn how to guide buyers through their journey.

To improve your sales effectiveness , you have to invest time in your process. Good product knowledge is important, but more so is knowing which stage in the journey your buyers are at and how you can move them onto the next stage.

Now, let’s deep dive into each stage and see what you can do to align your sales process to the buyer’s journey 👇

Aligning the sales process to the buyer’s journey – in 6 easy steps

1. create an awareness of need.

At this early stage, the buyer recognises they have a problem. They identify a challenge they want to solve or an opportunity they want to pursue.

They also ask themselves if the need is significant enough to warrant action.

An example could be: “I need to improve the quality of my sales data .”

Marketing’s job is to create awareness of your product, service, or company. They must educate buyers about their product and how it helps.

To do this, they should create content focused on your buyer’s pain points - not on your own product or brand.

The best sales professionals don’t wait for the buyer’s journey to start — they start it themselves!

For instance, in order to enter the discussion in this early part of the journey, you can take cues from issues affecting your industry.

Post your thoughts about them on social media; this will build up awareness of your product and make potential clients trust you as a source of information.

2. Educate your buyers

Once your buyers acknowledge they have a pain point, then the research begins.

The first stage of research begins with general, broad search terms as buyers explore their options. At this stage, they typically look for educational material, customer reviews, online courses and testimonials.

As they do some research, they’ll begin to understand what does and doesn’t meet their needs. At this point, they might eliminate some of the vendors who don’t provide the functionality or service they’re looking for. Eventually, they’ll narrow their focus to just a few competing companies.

In this stage, they also define...

• The desired outcomes they want from a new vendor or provider.
• Which stakeholders will be involved in the buying decision.
• How they’ll measure success in the short and long-term.

They often use this information to draft an RFP and establish a budget.

Educational content like whitepapers, reports and surveys are critical at this stage. Make sure you have these types of resources on your website.

Use a marketing automation tool and build lead nurturing campaigns to gradually deliver this content to your prospects.

Sales professionals must engage with B2B prospects at this point.

Because this is the stage where buyers evaluate options and draw up shortlists.

Approach likely prospects with the educational content developed by marketing. Demonstrate how your product/service delivers results that exceed the competition. Case studies and other social proof are very useful here.

How has the B2B buyer’s journey changed? Watch this discussion from Cognism’s marketing leaders to find out 🎬

3. Qualify your buyers

At this stage, buyers have clearly defined their goal or challenge and have committed to addressing it.

Once they’ve narrowed down their choices to just a few companies, they’ll return to the research stage. This time, they’ll dive even deeper into each company’s offerings, reviewing how they address their pain points.

In this buying journey stage, they’ll reach out to sales reps for further inquiries or to sit in on personalised product demos . Your buyers will want to really drill down into the features that matter to their teams.

At this point, more stakeholders will likely enter the picture. This brings more biases and diverging opinions into the mix.

As a result, priorities might change along with decision criteria and requirements. ROI usually enters the discussion at this stage.

As your buyers continue their research, you should update their lead scores in your marketing automation tool.

Your goal is to qualify them and keep track of their growing interest.

Sales reps have to help the buyer see the benefits of making a change.

To do this, they should act like trusted advisors, solving objections and providing as much information as the buyer wants.

Don’t be afraid to let a buyer go if your solution really can’t help them.

4. Prove your product’s ROI

In this stage of the journey, B2B buyers (who aren’t always the ultimate decision-makers) often have to secure buy-in from their managers.

To get sign-off from their C-suite colleagues, your buyers will want to see content that addresses things like pricing and ROI. They’ll want to justify spending money on your brand.

When creating content for this stage, remember to speak the language of the C-suite.

Drop the jargon and keep it real - focus on numbers, statistics and testimonials that prove ROI and value for money.

You’ll find more top tips on Cognism’s ultimate guide to C-suite marketing .

At this stage, your sales reps must act like consultants. They have to help the buyer convince internal stakeholders.

Proving your solution’s value is critical. You have to convince the buyer that your solution is better than the rest.

5. Guide the buyer to a decision

Once your buyers have sign-off from the C-suite, they’re ready to select a vendor and make a purchase.

At this point, they’ll start thinking about preparation, implementation, quick start costs, and customer support - the things that determine which solution best fits their needs and budget.

At this point, the customer gets serious about costs. They’ll consider the risks of doing nothing and the risks of choosing the wrong solution. Customers need assurance that implementation will be fast and pain-free.

It’s time to get brand-specific with your content.

Have a number of case studies and customer testimonials on hand. Show your buyers what other companies have achieved in choosing you, and how positive their experience has been.

Your role at this stage of the B2B buyer’s journey is to keep up the momentum!

There will be lots of stakeholders involved and lots of questions to answer. Make sure you’re available and ready to deal with sales objections .

A good way to create urgency is to show the buyer the rewards of choosing your product vs what will happen if they stick with the status quo.

6. Ensure a smooth implementation

Finally, after all these months, your buyers have chosen your product and are ready to purchase. It’s time for paperwork, setup and implementation.

At this stage, pricing and terms enter the discussion. Negotiations will occur; customers will often seek a lower price to reduce risk and financial exposure. While procurement , finance, and other stakeholders compare the implicit and explicit costs associated with your solution, your buyer will continue to research best practices, implementation guides, and more; they’ll want to hit the ground running with their new solution.

Create a drip nurturing program containing helpful content; this will move your customers through the B2B marketing funnel . You can also supply tips for using your product more effectively and efficiently.

If you can help them see more value in your product, they’re far more likely to remain your customer when renewal time comes around.

In this last phase of the B2B buyer’s journey, the sales rep is like the glue holding the deal together!

Liaise with your product and CS teams to ensure the implementation process goes smoothly. When the deal is done, hand your new customer over to CS; make sure you manage the handoff process correctly , or it’ll leave a bad taste in the customer’s mouth.

What is the future of the B2B buyer’s journey?

Where is the B2B buyer’s journey headed?

Our take is this:

It’ll be shaped by three things: technological advancements, changing customer behaviours and evolving market dynamics.

Here are some trends and possibilities 👇

Digital transformation

The B2B buying process will be heavily influenced by digital channels.

Buyers will increasingly rely on online research, social media, and virtual interactions to gather information, evaluate options, and communicate with vendors.

Personalisation and AI

Artificial intelligence and machine learning will enable more personalised experiences for B2B buyers.

AI-driven analytics will provide insights into individual buyer preferences, allowing businesses to deliver targeted content and recommendations.

This trend is already coming to pass with the rise of ChatGPT for sales .

Virtual selling

The rise of remote work and virtual interactions may lead to a more prominent role for virtual selling techniques.

Video prospecting , virtual product demonstrations, and online collaboration tools will become even more critical in engaging buyers.

Emphasis on customer experience

The focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences will intensify.

B2B buyers will demand seamless interactions, efficient communication, and responsive support throughout their journey.

Account-based marketing (ABM)

ABM strategies will gain prominence, allowing businesses to target accounts with personalised messaging and solutions tailored to their needs.

Content evolution

B2B buyers will seek more interactive and engaging content to aid their decision-making.

Videos, virtual reality experiences, and interactive product demonstrations will become key parts of the B2B buyer’s journey.

Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics will play a role in helping businesses anticipate buyer behaviour and preferences.

The future of the B2B buying journey will be proactive, not reactive; salespeople and marketers will be able to address buyer needs in advance.

Post-purchase engagement

The buyer’s journey will extend beyond the purchase.

Post-purchase engagement, customer support, and ongoing relationship-building will be crucial to retaining customers and fostering brand loyalty.

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Technology and telecommunications B2B customer buying trends: Bright horizons with some warning signs

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology and telecommunications, business-to-business (B2B) customers displayed a positive investment outlook for the upcoming year, according to our latest Pulse survey. And, these customers’ needs are clear: from a product perspective, first-class cybersecurity, product features, and integrations are top of mind; and from a vendor perspective, brand and reputation as well as competent sales representatives are central. These findings signal a meaningful shift from historic spending priorities and provider preferences, with the potential to reshape the markets over the coming year. In particular, the market outlook could be viewed as a wake-up call for telecommunications companies, which need to accelerate their efforts to find a compelling value proposition that allows them to play a greater role in the “beyond the core” space. On the other hand, channel partners, tech players and cloud providers especially seem to be well positioned to gain traction and boost their shares in the market.

To gain a deeper understanding of technology and telecommunications market drivers and opportunities, McKinsey regularly conducts a comprehensive survey of a diverse set of business decision makers among enterprises that purchase telecom and technology equipment and services. The latest edition of the Global Technology and Telecommunications B2B Pulse Survey is based on an extensive analysis of more than 3,000 responses from enterprises of all sizes, spanning 11 industries and 15 countries. It serves as a valuable resource for businesses seeking to navigate and grow in the converging technology and telecommunications B2B landscape.

Positive investment outlook

Even as companies devote more resources to their digital transformations, the pace of innovation in tech and telecommunications may be difficult for them to keep up with. That is just one possible conclusion from the broadly bullish perspective revealed in this year’s customer buying survey. With more than half of all enterprises planning to grow their tech and telecommunications spending, the 2024 market outlook represents a healthy three percentage point overall increase from last year, even after inflation.

While spending on virtually all product categories looks poised for growth according to our survey results, a select group is the driving force behind this positive trend. The largest shares of decision makers intend to increase their spending on  security, cloud, and Internet of Things (IoT), which all look set to capture at least 8 percent more in total spending than the year before. As for connectivity offerings, fast-growing companies are placing increasing emphasis on next-generation solutions, with investments in 5G technology becoming a prerequisite for success, and the adoption of private networks gaining traction.

The growth in enterprise budgets signifies a recognition of the importance of being at the forefront of technology to drive innovation. Being agile and adaptable is critical, but the vast majority of organizations now also seem to indicate they believe that truly investing in the digital future requires increasing the size of their portfolio year by year.

Large enterprises are leading the way

The fact that all enterprises on average have generally ambitious tech and telecommunications spending plans for this year doesn’t mean they share an equally bullish view. On the contrary, large enterprises are much more likely than their small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) peers to grow investment across product categories. More than two-thirds are planning budget expansions, compared to about half of small enterprises, across industries. While SMEs remain largely focused on fixing the basics, larger, more established organizations are moving beyond core tech expansion with close to three-quarters planning a higher degree of investments in more advanced categories such as IoT, cloud, and next-gen connectivity. Increased spending on IoT is understandable; our research shows enterprises must adopt a trial-and-error strategy to unlock its full potential. Notably, however, almost two-thirds of large enterprises plan to increase their spending even further on more traditional fixed and mobile connectivity services, proof that they believe no aspect of tech or telecommunications can be taken for granted.

Africa and Asia–Pacific display strongest upside

From a global perspective, different regions do not necessarily share the same upbeat view in their spending projections. Companies in Africa especially, and Asia–Pacific to a slightly lesser extent, hold a much more optimistic outlook compared to their European counterparts. Just half of European enterprises surveyed plan to grow their budgets, compared with two—thirds of respondents in Asia–Pacific, and three–quarters of respondents in Africa. These two regions’ heightened optimism reflects growing recognition of the untapped market potential. By contrast, survey findings suggest the general macroeconomic challenges Europe is experiencing are directly affecting the spending appetites of companies. For its part, the Americas are not too far behind Asia–Pacific in investment outlook.

A clear shift in vendor preferences

While the overall outlook for rising customer spending budgets in the tech and telecommunications space appears promising, our survey results show some signals that telecom operators may not have as much to celebrate. Across all product categories, many enterprise customers expressed a clear preference for shifting a sizeable portion of their business to other vendor types, especially channel partners, specialists, and tech manufacturers. In particular, the biggest potential shift away from the telcos looks like it could be in their core fixed and mobile connectivity business.

The degree of desire among respondents to look elsewhere than telcos isn’t universal, however. SMEs, for instance, displayed a roughly 35 percent lower intent to switch away from telecom operators than larger enterprises did. In addition, the trend was strongest in Asia–Pacific and the Americas, and less pronounced in the more conservative European market. Plus there are selected countries such as Nigeria where telecommunications providers are still able to make significant gains beyond connectivity, although the global trend of planning to move away from telcos is similar in Africa overall to the rest of the world.

Of course, intentions don’t always translate into action, and that may well be the case here as well. To date, other types of vendors in most geographies have provided few suitable alternatives to the connectivity offerings from telcos. At the same time, switching providers for even smaller organizations can require a good amount of effort and, at least initially, can be costly. It is no wonder, then, that only about 20 percent of the stated intent to switch vendors that was expressed in last year’s survey actually took place over the past 12 months.

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Tech categories are leading growth.

The generally optimistic spending outlook of enterprises appears set to translate to solid growth for the tech and telecommunications B2B market this year. In total, we project an increase of roughly $150 billion, or about 8.5 percent, in the 15 geographies covered by the survey, reaching $1.9 trillion in annual revenue. Cloud, business applications, and communication and collaboration, are expected to be the most dynamic product categories, with growth rates higher than 10 percent. As an emerging subsector, communication and collaboration is still starting from a relatively small base, but the other two soaring categories—cloud and business applications—each now represent roughly 22 percent of the total market. They are fast approaching the biggest revenue generator—end user devices and services—which, at almost $600 billion, makes up around 26 percent of the total market but is expected to grow only 3 to 4 percent.

While connectivity categories are also expected to continue growing, the rates are projected to be slightly lower, around the mid-single digits, except for fixed connectivity, which is expected to be close to flat year-over-year. The more restrained growth in the overall category, coupled with the upswing in spending on tech products, further reinforces the need for vendors with a traditional stronghold in the area, telcos, to refocus on expanding the appeal of their tech offerings.

From a regional perspective, the Asia–Pacific region is projected to grow the fastest and continue catching up to the Americas in total market volume. In Europe, where the overall economic outlook remains challenging, all providers will have to compete for the lowest incremental spending.

Changing landscape for telecom providers

Unsurprisingly, not all providers will benefit equally from the upward trend in the tech and telecommunications market. The stated intent of many enterprises across geographies to move away from telecommunications providers for certain products and services, not to mention the slowing growth in core connectivity categories, poses yet another challenge for the already challenged sector. While the overall market is projected to grow around 9 percent this year, telecommunications providers could only reach half that rate, at an estimated 4 to 7 percent clip. That means the biggest absolute category player in the market, which still accounts for more than a third of total revenue, could now find itself claiming far below its normal “fair share” of market growth. In sharp contrast, cloud providers, channel partners/specialists, and tech manufacturers are well-positioned to capture a higher share of the market growth, with expected growth rates of up to 13 percent in the upcoming year. Cloud providers in particular stand to reap the biggest rewards, potentially grabbing as much as half of all market growth even though it makes up roughly one-quarter to one-third of the total market on an annual basis.

Cybersecurity—the most pressing need

There is little doubt about enterprise buyers’ biggest tech concern these days; cybersecurity was the clear, top-ranked need, cited by close to 20 percent of all respondents, up 50 percent from the prior year. It also outpaced the closest competing concerns (e-commerce and next-gen connectivity) by a similarly large margin. Given the vast amount and sensitivity of data that companies of all sizes now handle, along with greater regulatory oversight and rising geopolitical tensions worldwide, the importance of cybersecurity is only set to increase. If providers want to maintain a distinctive value proposition in the tech and telecommunications market, regardless of their area of specialization, they will need to develop a solid capability in cybersecurity, through partnerships with recognized experts if necessary. If cyber offerings or expertise were still viewed as a nice-to-have by any providers, it is increasingly evident that they are now table stakes in the market.

Cybersecurity—a global priority

While the choice of cybersecurity as the top tech priority was unanimous across the globe, the distance between it and other perceived needs was not uniform from region to region. Cybersecurity was put at the top of the list by a greater share of buyers in the Americas and Europe, reflecting the usually more stringent regulatory requirements and higher levels of maturity and awareness of enterprises in these geographies. And while Asia–Pacific and Africa matched the Americas and Europe in ranking e-commerce and next-gen connectivity as high priorities, they both exhibited a wider range of interests or concerns. Organizations in Africa, for instance, put strong emphasis on enabling flexible or digital working and improving operations, while Asia–Pacific companies were alone in reporting that switching to cloud was their second-ranked tech need.

What separates B2B GTM outperformers in tech and telecom

Cybersecurity—also the reason to switch providers.

Enterprises across the globe overwhelmingly cite cybersecurity combined with privacy as their top tech and telecommunications need, and their main reason for changing their tech or telecommunications provider for a range of different product categories. Vendors with solid cyber capabilities now have the chance to capitalize on this trend by leveraging cross-selling and upselling potential, reshaping product offerings to include premium products with security add-ons, adapting product naming, and upskilling the salesforce. At the same time, product innovation and vendor reputation are emerging as significant drivers of provider switching. And if vendors needed any more evidence that they cannot afford to rest on their laurels, an existing relationship with a provider was not among the top three reasons for switching in any single category.

Interestingly, mobile connectivity was the only category where price was considered a primary reason for vendor switching. Even then, the category was much more relevant in the Americas, where respondents cited it twice as often as survey takers in other regions. Additionally, next-gen connectivity was the only category where cybersecurity was not among the top three reasons for switching providers.

Convenience vs best-in-class

As enterprises navigate the complex landscape of technology and telecommunications, they face a critical decision: whether to opt for best-in-class products in every category or to choose an integrated offering for greater convenience. More often than not, companies choose the ease and simplicity of a bundle from one provider over the absolute highest-quality products from a number of different vendors. Security is the only category where more decision makers prioritize the highest-quality product over convenience, which makes sense in that the biggest tech priority for enterprises would also be the one for which they are most reluctant to compromise on quality. On the other hand, mobile connectivity is the product category that consistently draws the strongest preference for integration. Approximately two-thirds of enterprises in all regions prefer to purchase mobile connectivity together with other tech or telecommunications products, highlighting the importance of seamless integration and ease of use in this category above all others.

Thomas Fink is a consultant in McKinsey’s Vienna office; Luca Furlani is an associate partner in the Milan office; Naveed Niwaz is a partner in the Copenhagen office; and Karolina Sauer-Sidor is a partner in the Madrid office.

The authors wish to thank Florianne Courtin and Bulat Gaifeev for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Daniel Eisenberg, an executive editor in the New York office.

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