The SES San Jose forum last year had many lessons but one of the sessions that stood out was the “The Buyer Sphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patterns“. The learning from these sessions were key in understanding the influences that affect B2B buyer decisions.Background of the research : Enquiro – with input from the companies represented in the session panel (Google, Business.com, Covario, Marketo and DemandBase) – sought to examine B2B buying behavior patterns .
The takeaways were as follows :
The B2B buying decision making funnel is all about managing risk. In this case, there are two risks to manage: organizational risks and personal risks.
- Organization risks involve quality, reliability, commitment and execution.
- Personal risk is about management, decision making and good judgment.
Greater risk interns of project size, purchase value, perceived benefits usually involves the buyer having more resources from the business and other functional areas available to aid with the buying decision process.
The big problem with risk however, is that it creates fear and emotion which turns the process into a non-rational process. It’s important to understand how the B2B marketer can mitigate this. Some risk mitigation thinking for a B2B buyer involves working with an established B2B brand.
Brand building suddenly become a key factor in the decision making process as some firms might be inclined to work with a certain supplier but require the pedigree and successes to rationalize it.
B2B buying criteria also varies because the core product tends to be very different from a mass marketed product:
- Price fluctuations are few. Unless pricing for raw materials changes drastically, most B2B pricing stays the same.
- It goes without saying that most B2B products are “technical” products that are either used as part of the manufacturing process or used to help another organization build its capabilities.
- Need less to say, B2B products have shorter distribution channels.
- In this channel, services are more important than the actual product even though product spec is key in the initial supplier vetting process.
- B2B products are very very utility based. The possibility of obsolescence arises if the utility is diminished in certain ways. Style has little to do with a B2B product.
Another big piece was having better integration between online and offline marketing. In many organizations, traditional marketing functions are yet to collaborate effectively with digital marketing to determine a unified campaign strategy to engage the customer.
Both channels work with each other to deliver a unified message to drive sales. Also, it’s critical that any marketing campaign have complete lead attribution so that it’s possible to identify actual leads from specific sources. this helps to close the loop on all marketing efforts. Things like a unique url on print to calculate how much traffic was generated as a result of print, a unique 1-800 phone number to know how many people called you as a result of your direct marketing, a google utm tracking code on urls to power your google analytics to give you metrics at a ‘campaign’ level.
